Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 25: Back to Center

I did not go directly home, but rode to center. I couldn’t not. When one seeks calm, when one needs context, when one needs to strip away everything but the essential, one goes to center. And I… I was now osulkedi, and owed my first impressions to Thirukedi, the first impressions that were bubbling and roiling in me like a brook interrupted by stones. I took the few roads allowed to beasts in my urgency, and now that I was home all the alien things felt too harsh to be kept, like splinters. Kherishdar’s night enfolded me, perfumed by the sweetness of late-blooming flowers, and it was an embrace: welcome home. But all I could hear was the jingle of my beast’s harness, and the strangeness of the ideas in my head.

Maybe I should have thought better of my plan. Do your gods sleep? I had never wondered if Thirukedi did, though Civilization lived in the body of a man, or what good was it for Him to rule us? When I presented myself at the palace and saw the low lamps burning, I nearly checked my stride, but the Guardians waiting at the steps did not seem surprised by my arrival… so I continued, and began on the course that would change—continue changing? Finish changing?—my life, at last.

Thirukedi received me in a windowed chamber with a two-step floor. Do you have those? I didn’t notice any on the Gateworld. We call them kinejzeni funi, which… Maiden, how do I translate it… You’re aware from discussions with Farren that we observe a Wall of Birth, and above it we set our administrators and below, everyone else. That Wall is called the nejzeni, and in the ancient times, when we were savages, the people above the Wall received the people below it in rooms where half the floor was raised, the better to look down on their postulants. These days, any house might have a floor with various elevations, because we think it makes for a more elegant use of the space, but we still call those floors kinejzeni funi, “miniature Wall floors.”

Or at least, we used to. More and more, they’re gorini funi, “cliff floors.”

But the floors in Thirukedi’s temple are definitely not cliff floors. They’re Wall floors, and though the step up is modest, accessible even to a toddler, they still have the meaning they once had. We’re not savages anymore, so it’s a gentler remove, but it’s still a remove.

I am sweating just talking about this, knowing the things I do now.

But back to that first meeting. Thirukedi was disposed on the chaise by the window, up on the dais, with a book alongside Him and a bowl of tea, swaddled in such robes as to make one wonder how He moved. Farren would have been moved to transports: he looked like a beautiful painting that way… “Civilization at Rest.” Not being an artist, this tableau of tranquility made me want to pace, but pacing would have been rude. I prostrated myself instead and awaited His leave to speak.

“Osulkedi,” He said, gentle. “Take off your boots.”