A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (27 page)

everal days after T’Qinna’s visit, Tiva hunched over the reading table in her tree house’s observatory room high in the forest’s upper terrace. Green-filtered sunlight illuminated a copy of Q’Enukki’s Fifth Scroll that Khumi had brought with him when he had left Q’Enukki’s Retreat. It was probably the first time the ancient text had been unrolled since he had moved in with her. She smiled at the irony that she should be the one to open it.

Pahn’s inner voice
vanished after Tiva and T’Qinna’s forest walk. It would not return no matter how many mushrooms Tiva ate. Soon she stopped trying to call him. Fortunately, Sutara had found other matters to attend to at the last minute, which had left Tiva and T’Qinna free to talk. Rarely had their conversation strayed onto herb lore, though Tiva never quite felt comfortable enough to share her secret either. She had dropped several hints, which T’Qinna readily seemed to pick-up on. If there ever could be a person who would understand about Yargat, T’Qinna might.

“Who’m I fooling?” Tiva said to herself—Khumi was at work
, so she was alone as usual. “T’Qinna’s a Lit convert! That means she’s a fervent, even if she shows it differently! Yargat’s still an acolyte! It would look to her almost as though I’d seduced a seer, or something!”

One other thing had
also changed since T’Qinna’s visit. Tiva no longer felt much like going to Grove Hollow. She needed space to think.

Q’Enukki’s Fifth had not been one of the sacred texts her father had made her memorize as a child. In fact, he had hardly mentioned it except to say that it was, “difficult, and easy to misinterpret without special training.” Tiva found it straightforward
and interesting reading, unlike much of the stuff her father had made her memorize. If nothing else, it addressed a topic that now began to trouble her.

“Maybe T’Qinna’s right about the sprites, and maybe not,” she told herself as she spooled through the scroll. “The Hollow’s like my own Aeden—but Aeden without Khumi is a broken paradise. Kernui’s nice, but it wouldn’t be fair
of me to make him into some kind of Khumi-substitute. Go to—he mightn’t even care, as long as I went to the moss! Guys’r dumb that way!”

She read on in silenc
e for a space, only half taking-in the text. “No,” Tiva whispered, “Aeden has to come with Khumi himself—only free and gentle—like he used to be. None of my friends get that. If Pahn’s harmless, then he won’t begrudge me asking my questions—if he ever returns. Maybe T’Qinna offended him…”

“Hello!” called a familiar voice from the base of the tree house.

Tiva trotted down the spiral stairwell helix to open the door.

Moon-chaser, Sariya, and Farsa came in, and plopped down on the floor cushions in the lower social room.

Farsa said, “Where ya been? Don’t tell me you’re gonna start playing scarce on us like Khumi. Tell him we really miss his dancing. The bonfire’s just not the same without him.”

“No, I’m not playing scarce,” Tiva replied, “just been busy.”

Moon-chaser’s eyes jerked around the room, bright with the same kind of pent-up energy, as when he had first introduced Tiva and Khumi to the seers’ buttons. “We’ve got something to show you,” he said.

Sariya scowled, rolling her eyes. “Blunt as a mortar,
as always!”

“What? It’s about her too, isn’t it?

“What is?” Tiva asked, trying to muster a properly enthusiastic face.

“The Wisdom Tree,” Moon-chaser whispered. His eyes glinted with something from the borderlands between excitement and terror. He leaned forward, as if to shelter his voice from unfriendly ears.

Tiva lost her phony smile. “Is that like Aeden’s Knowing-Tree of Good and Evil? ‘Cause if so, I’ve got curses enough hanging over me, ‘kay?”

Tiva’s friends laughed at what they must have
thought her joke.

Farsa smirked.
“No, dung-head, it’s just a place we go! There’s no fruit on it or anything. We just meet somebody amazing there.”

“Who?”

Sariya said, “You have to come and find out.”

Tiva’s heart started to race. T’Qinna’s words rang in her ears.

Her friends blinked up at her from their throw cushions, awaiting her reply.
My friends—people I’ve known and trusted for years—people who went out of their way to help me out of the impossible wreck my life was!

Tiva almost believed for a second that T’Qinna had cleverly duped her, but she rejected that idea also.
I’m no easy mark when it comes to Lit fakery! T’Qinna honestly believes what she says even if it turns out she’s wrong. My friends aren’t the dragon-worshipers the Lits make them out to be! Maybe the truth about the sprites is somewhere in between—somewhere I need to chart out for myself.

Tiva said, “Let’s go.
”

They led her first up
onto the forest trail, then past the clearing from where, tradition said, the divine chariot had taken Q’Enukki into the heavens over seven centuries ago. From there, they went up into a gorge that cut between the ridges of N’Zar’s crest line and the rest of the mountain chain, northeastward. A stream curled along the base of the ravine, which they followed upward for nearly two hours. Finally, they came to a box canyon with a large bubbling pool in its midst, the brook’s source.

On a tiny islet in the middle of the pond grew a gigantic oak, so tall that it reached almost above the cliffs of the surrounding gulch. Soft moss carpeted the island beneath the tree—comfortable seating all around. Tiva followed, as Moon-chaser, Sariya, and Farsa waded out to the islet, and then reclined under the oak’s branches. The bubbles tickled her feet
; warm but not too hot from the earth’s hidden furnaces.

Tiva laughed at her earlier anxiety.
“This place is another Aeden! Why haven’t we ever come up here to festival?”

Moon-chaser turned, his wild eyes flashed with… was it exhilaration or dread? “Shhh! He won’t come if we chatter like a bunch of school girls.”

“I wasn’t chattering, I simply asked a question!”

Farsa gazed at her with a sympathetic sigh. “He used a poor choice of words, Tiva. Please try to understand, and just relax. We don’t want to break the spirit of the place. It’s no good if he doesn’t come.”

“If who doesn’t come?”

“Wait and see.”

Tiva propped her back up against the trunk, and waited.

Nobody could help but feel restful in such a place. The soft fizz of the spring sent the gurgling brook on its long journey to some river, and then eventually out to sea. It carried Tiva away to a state of awareness not unlike her best seers’ button experiences. The others almost faded away, as strange light refractions seemed to flit behind a tuft of clouds.

“Is T’Qinna’s really the only explanation for who I am?”
Pahn’s plaintive inner voice whined.
“Am I to be denied a chance to tell my side?”

“No,” Tiva whispered, “but I did call you, and you never came.”

“I can’t come if you stop believing in me. You doubted me. I can’t help you if you doubt me. It is your faith that makes me real.”

“
Must I simply take your word for everything, then? Are you, little sprite, so hidden from my sight, so far beyond us in wisdom that we cannot question you? If you speak truly, you will not shrink from my small askings. What are they to you?”

Silence.

“Little sprite?”

The strange lights in the mist above began to coalesce.
“Where do you get the idea that I am so little?”

Tiva froze.

“Don’t be frightened. I only meant that you assume I am little because you only hear my whisper in your head. But you have never seen me. You have never had access to the knowledge I have access to.”

“What knowledge is that?”

“Wait and watch with the others.”

Tiva scowled, and focused on the water, which captured the odd sky lights and made them dance. She felt as though she had eaten a button.

It came like a pouncing sphinx.

The thrill rushed over her mind and body in golden waves. Reality folded sideways, and the tree above her became the axis around which the entire universe spun—the Life-tree! Aeden’s Life-tree!
Perhaps this is what I’ve been missing all along! What’s Aeden without a Life-tree?

Pipe music began to float around the tiny pond. Tiva was delighted and surprised to see Kernui dancing and piping on the opposite bank.
Is he the one we’re here to meet?

The music grew wilder, more feral, and intense. Living energy pulsated inside the tree trunk, and radiated into Tiva’s back in soothing, vibrant cycles.
How could I have ever doubted you, Pahn?

Tiva squirmed higher, and arched her back against the bole to get the rejuvenating energy all the way down into her toes. Light filled the ravine as if the sun itself had descended to kiss the mountains. Then she understood;
I’m here! I’m really here! I’ve reached the upper realms without a button!

She thought she saw Kernui hop and twirl
up into the hovering brightness, where he vanished. Mist began to fill the ravine, while roaring lights and shadows surrounded the islet.

A small figure approached over the water. Tiva at first thought it was Kernui
, wading across to join them. Instead, a phosphorescent little gray man with a large head and wise dark eyes climbed up onto the tiny island under the oak. He seemed to move among them with a tender childlike ease that touched Tiva with an affection beyond words. The little man made his way around the tree to stand before each of the visitors from Grove Hollow, one at a time. Starting with Moon-chaser, he bent to touch them on their foreheads with the tip of his finger. He came to Tiva last.

Wonder filled her as the end of his finger pressed in, warm and soft, as though it actually passed through her forehead into her mind. His touch charged her with a wild energy that caused her to feel connected with the tree, the moss, and the water. Then she heard the little creature speak.

His mouth never moved, but she could see his thoughts as he projected them—not in words, but images—visions of beauty, and a form of wisdom that came from feeling rather than thinking. The music of waters—the curl of fern—Tiva sensed the vibrations of life down to its most primal levels, and beyond. She almost became lost in the kaleidoscope pictures from the little gray man. When she reached her own mind out to ask of him what it meant, however, a chill shoved her back into the Life-tree’s
warmth.

For a moment
, she had gotten past the flow of wordless wonder, and captured a glimpse of an intellect, vast and cold. The whole scene began to seem as though it had happened to her before. Something about the little glowing man became strangely familiar and unsettling. She couldn’t place it, but somehow she had been here, and seen him, at some time in the past—or at least seen this place and its strange inhabitant through the eyes of another.

The thoughts of the fragile-looking stranger then became more coherent—almost like the voice of Pahn, but from a different entity.

“I come that you may know the Divine Name. For the Divine Name
is All, and is in All. Your people lost knowledge of this when they left Aeden. We are here to restore you.”

Aeden!
Tiva reeled with a manic energy.
I’m going back to Aeden!

“The Divine Name is in each of you, and each is a part of the Divine
Name. Once you truly believe this, the powers of godhood shall be yours again, for that which is part of the whole shares the strength of the whole.”

A warning bell chimed in the back of Tiva’s mind
; something she had read that day…

“The wise person never searches for the wisdom of A’Nu in words. The wise know that El-N’Lil is inside their heart. Picture it in your thoughts—you are E’Yahavah, and E’Yahavah is you!”

Tiva mentally tried to race ahead of the unraveling of her own mind.
Something here… Something familiar in this, I’ve read this before… It said the same thing, only with different words... and a warning. Where?

The creature turned, and rested his
whiteless black eyes now upon her alone. For another split second, she saw the icy intellect there. Then the reek of horrible red flowers invaded her nostrils, sickly-sweet, hypnogogic, smothering to what little coherent thought she had left.
Red and pink flowers—exploding red and pink flowers like festering open sores…

Everything went black.