The Central Library is gaining ground on us with their recent invited guests. I fear that in order for us to outpace their visitors this quarter, we must double down on our invitation efforts. Are there any angels we haven’t reached out to in the past few years? Perhaps Samael is free…
—inter-department missive at the bookstore Ancient Regent
Lucifer’d suggested, sometime earlier in the night, that everyone stay up until dawn. Neither Yenatru nor Tamar managed, eventually curling up in the grass near the suspended tarp Lucifer’s set up to provide shade in the daytime.
But Elīya’s sure as flames still up.
She’s sitting and leaning back on the dirt, arms behind her, bracing her. God knows how long she’s been up, or how long until sunrise, or where Lucifer is; the only sign at all that there’s anything other than her in between all this grass and sky is the quiet breathing of her friends sleeping a ways over.
And she has a problem to fix: herself. She has to put all the pieces together and solve whoever the fuck she is.
After all, that’s what everyone’s been telling her, from Lucifer to Tamar to Hannuša to even, very quietly, very subtly, Yenatru. And they’re probably all flaming right.
As Tamar said, nothing’s stopping her.
Who are you? Lucifer’d asked when she first met them. She responded with her name. But that wasn’t what they meant; she knows that now, she’s finally seeing the scope of what that question was intended to be. But she doesn’t have an answer. Yet.
Her arms are getting tired from leaning against them, but she doesn’t care. She clutches a bit of loose stone under one of her hands; that doesn’t help any of her problems. She looks right into the stars, so many stars. And that doesn’t help much either, though at least it looks nice.
Why did she never choose to diverge from this path? She stagnated as a constant whirlwind of ethics, ethics, ethics, doing almost nothing day and night but consider ethical problems, or help others consider them, but only ever those problems, the ones centered around right and wrong and action. Other things, possibly important things, like being, and understanding, things that neither help nor harm others—she just didn’t care.
Perhaps because it was easier not to.
But, to paraphrase Hannuša, she could apply her usual sort of reasoning to other things, Theurgically relevant things. If she had a starting point. Instead of just a field of confusion as far as she can feel.
Well, maybe the starting point is this: why is this so hard for her, to begin with?
And there it is, that feeling of her mind threatening to just stop, her body threatening to just fall over, maybe under the pretense of stargazing. She clutches the rock harder, and scrambles with her left hand to find something to hold with it too. She looks through a small gap in the mountains around her: there’s the western horizon, absolutely dark, the origin of the river that flows through the city somewhere back there. And if she glanced to her left, she’d see the lights of Ēnnuh itself. But for now, she’ll look into darkness and imagine a wind rushing through it all, through the absolute openness of the desert.
It keeps coming back to wind.
That would be another good question, Elīya thinks. Why wind?
Her eye twitches; it’s such a hard thing to answer. Much easier is her avoidance itself, which even as she switches the subject of her thoughts over to it, she begins to understand the shape of. She, flame her, likes what is easy.
She asks herself: who doesn’t? Answers herself: Tamar, has she seen Tamar? Ease barely even seems to factor into what she does.
But she, Elīya, she is weak, perhaps, weak and failed and unwilling to do what needs to be done. Except, no, that can’t be true, she did everything to make this meeting with Tamar happen, did things other people raised their eyebrows at her for. Repeatedly.
She sighs. So, it’s not that, and yet she undoubtedly chose the path of least resistance with philosophy. Why?
And is there ever any morality to the path of least resistance? She bites her lip; she wants to say yes, but why? Under what circumstances is it moral to choose what is easy? Well, the first answer to that is obvious: sometimes that option happens to be more ethical for other reasons. But that’s not what’s happening in Elīya’s life here, not specifically. So why is she doing it, just continuing along the easiest path for her? The thought strikes her that maybe she’s saving energy for something else this way, but she’s not sure there’s any evidence for that.
Think about openness—
She shakes her head. That particular thought, or memory, isn’t quite relevant right now. She bites back a groan; this is not going smoothly. But she has to do this, she has to fix this, she has to become able to do Theurgy to retroactively earn this meeting with Tamar—but oddly, that’s not the most important reason she has to do this. Not anymore.
Is it because Tamar essentially told her to?
Because Hannuša did?
No and no; Elīya discards both ideas immediately. This is, strangely, not about other people. It’s certainly not about what they think of her; she’s never been the type to care about others’ opinions of her. But what she does usually care about is what they do in their own lives, what they think overall, how they’re affected.
Except, right now, for this, she doesn’t care about that.
She flaming doesn’t.
That’s strange and mysterious and about as weird as the morning star getting mixed in with all the real stars.
It also implies the existence of her as someone or something outside of the context of decisions around other people. Which, okay, logically, she is.
But yet she’s hardly ever thought of that before.
Who she is, rather than what she does.
There really is nothing to hold onto here, no square one, no ground, no floorplan, no support beams, no railing, no stone, no map, no footsteps of where she’s gone before. She has next to nothing, the question itself in a void. Who the fuck is she? And how the fuck can she answer that questions without the presence of other people, without comparisons, without anything that can touch her and reveal her outline?
But she can answer. Because she’s got the right questions by now, maybe. She’s got some of the things Lucifer’s asked her, and even better, she’s got the knowledge that asking who she is at all is relevant, that it’s something she can do.
And she will flaming stay up all night to do it, if that’s what it takes.
After all, once she decides on a path, she doesn’t leave it—maybe that’s part of the answer to that other question, why go the easy route. Because it’s her route and she carved it, maybe. Though that can’t be the entire answer, because that doesn’t address how she chose it to begin with. She can tell there’s another answer here, she can almost feel it, but she doesn’t know what it is.
And another question, oh flames they keep coming: why does Lucifer use the tactics they do? They ask her to think about concepts, to decide what she wants to feel against her skin. They care about the direction she looks, the way she sits. So, assuming they know what they’re doing, why is all that helpful for Theurgy, which requires understanding who she is?
Wait. They’ve already told her.
It wouldn’t be so hard, Elīya, for you to be the openness of the sky, the clarity of it.
She blinks, clenching her hands, remembering; she couldn’t sort out that sentence then and she barely can now. Apparently, people can “be” things like that.
And now she looks to the sky, to the horizon, and something in her is neither scared or excited, but determined.
And she’s not rejecting the idea. Of being something like that. She tilts her head; that’s really strange.
She wonders what her eyes look like right now. Could one almost see fire in them? That could be a clue, of sorts. Are they narrow, sharp, focused? Focused on what?
And why in all the flames was it wind and metal that she wanted to touch?
And why does she tend to look to the sky, to the horizon?
And why did it take her this long to notice that she always, always looks there?
She takes a deep breath. At least that last question she can half-answer, she knows it ties back to ease and the way she tends to choose whatever path she’s chosen before, which still tells her next to nothing, but flame it, she has to start somewhere.
A thought: it would not surprise her if someone like Lucifer or Yenatru would answer those questions by saying that she is the wind, she is metal, she is the sky, she is the horizon, she is ease, she is openness.
She is openness, she is openness, she is openness.
Maybe.
It’s something she doesn’t understand: how she could be anything like that, what being even really is, if there’s maybe a reason for it.
She is the unobstructed wind rushing across the desert, she is unimpeded, she carves landscapes, she—
She doesn’t know why she’s thinking these things.
After all, she sees people in terms of their interactions, as a set of actions and decisions and relationships, which she’s tried very hard to be good at. She’s tried so flaming hard to have good actions, good decisions, good relationships. But that’s not what anything about Theurgy seems to say a soul is.
Your soul’s what makes you identifiable to you. That’s how Lucifer described it, early on, when she couldn’t understand the more classic descriptions.
But there’s the thing: she isn’t identifiable to herself.
Yet.
She feels her eyes tighten, something almost like a smile on her face. Because there it is, there’s the starting point: to find what’s identifiable about her, to herself. How can she tell that she’s her? Other than just that she’s the one thinking her thoughts. Other than just that it makes sense for her to be the same person from day to day.
And it’s not her name, either, not her body. It might be her way of handling things, though, the way she acts. Or— Flames, what does it feel like, to be her? Well, she does act, she does move.
Elīya stands, wishing the air wasn’t so still.
Flames, she’s close, and she’s pretty sure there’s light seeping into the sky behind her, in the east. Half of her wants to dare the dawn to come but the other half would really rather it never be day.
She turns to the light though, seeing the slight glow of blue through the mountains. The stars are fading a little already. Flames, how long has she been awake?
And God, she doesn’t want to sleep, not when she thinks she almost knows something. The current question: is she only herself in action and in movement? Or is that just her not really understanding what a soul is?
The wind, unimpeded—
Of course she understands, theoretically, that it’s a lot to try to sort out her entire existence and nature in one night. And yet, and yet, and yet. Maybe it’s part of who she is to try; that’s certainly a possibility.
And horribly contradictory, that she wants to solve everything in one night, but goes the easiest route when possible.
Unless something about this is easy. Somehow. Not in an obvious sense. But this and sticking with philosophy, and wanting things to work smoothly, maybe that’s all the same.
Elīya finds herself pacing, though she tries to be quiet on the dusty ground, so as not to wake anyone. She glances again into the sky, each star bright and sharp and losing the battle with coming daylight, the sky fading from black into something else entirely.
She’s repeating the same questions to herself, again and again, and maybe she understands, sort of, that she needs to sleep, eventually.
The wind, unimpeded. The wind, unimpeded. The wind, unimpeded.
She needs to stop thinking that.
But this is her battle now and she will not let up on it, she will find out who she is. She flaming wants to. Which is itself an interesting revelation, that she wants this—for herself.
Because she can imagine, once she’s figured it out, how much she could—not accomplish, exactly. Not be, exactly. But something in between those. Something that qualifies as both. And as a lot.
And she—exists? Something like that.
And once she’s got a handle on why she wants even half of what she does or why these words keep coming to her, the wind and ease and openness, once she even half understands that, nothing will ever be able to flaming stop her.
She makes an expression she isn’t used to: she grins.