At this point, Tamar’s pretty sure: she’s not who any of her friends think she is.
That’s why she’s out here, miles downriver from the city. She hadn’t planned it this way, but today’s the first day all fall that there’s a breeze. Though a breeze isn’t much compared to the movement of air Tamar feels just from being on her motorcycle, rushing almost silently across the desert. She’s just far enough away from the river to not deal with the sand, but still close enough to hear the water, even though the river’s wide and the water moves slow.
She’d hoped her hair would be short enough not to get horribly messed up by the moving air, but of course the two-inch strands are finding ways to tangle anyway; nothing ever seems to stop them. It’d be better if she had a helmet, maybe. But that wasn’t at the front of her mind or the top of her list when she left the house this morning and decided to come here.
The city of Ēnnuh’s already far enough behind her that she can’t see it anymore. That means she’s getting close to where she’s going. Oh God, she’s getting close.
Her goal is Erezel Plateau. Well, that’s not her goal exactly—just the physical location she thinks would be a good place to enact her actual goal.
Safirah—not one of Tamar’s older friends but probably the one who knows her best by now, though not well enough to predict she’d do this—said it hadn’t been that hard for them to become one of the Holy. All you really have to do, they told Tamar some days ago, is tell God you want it.
Tamar grins just to think of it. Because she does want it. And she’s been praying lately, and every time she’s felt God near her, They are fire, They are a burning light, They are a thousand voices in unison. Tamar definitely gets along with Them.
Probably because she sometimes feels a little like fire herself.
She glances around her a little, though she’s still trying to mostly focus ahead of her—she’d been thrown off a moving motorcycle once before, and it wasn’t fun. And that was on a day she remembered a helmet. But today’s a very different day than that. The river to her right’s even wider than it was in the city, and to her left is stone and stone and stone, rising and falling in short plateaus and hoodoos all the way to the horizon.
The sun’s shining brightly, always a good thing for traveling. She’s brought plenty of charged batteries for her motorcycle, but still it’s reassuring to know that the solar panels on it are charging as well. It’s always safer to travel when it’s sunny. She’s heard stories of the danger of traveling long distances on overcast days, especially when far from a source of water. But this place, this day, is safe.
Which is good, as almost no one knows where she is. The only one who might is Safirah—as an afterthought right before leaving the house, Tamar called and left a message on their phone. It went something like, “I’m going to become a Holy. Headed to Erezel Plateau. Might have trouble getting back, given, you know. Anyway, see ya!”
But everything in Tamar is charged and excited and alive and ready. Sure, she knows it’s probably questionable to make this decision as quickly as she did. She just doesn’t care. At all.
She can already see Erezel, just a little to her side. The plateau connects to a gentle slope on the left, and Tamar knows from experience that it’s possible to outright drive up it. She’s been out this way before, once, on a day trip one weekend with Yenatru; Elīya, as usual, didn’t come with, if Tamar remembers right. She didn’t want to get potentially horribly lost; and, in typical Elīya fashion, she told Tamar that quite directly, in words just that blunt. It’s something Tamar both likes and dislikes about her.
Those two really have no idea she’s here. Tamar's barely even told them about Safirah.
But it’s because she’s been up Erezel Plateau once before that every single time she’s thought about becoming one of the Holy, she’s thought about it happening here. And this morning she woke up and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So she’s here, living her dreams. Just like those counselors in secondary school tell people to.
She turns left, toward Erezel, and her heart starts pounding. She tries to take in the textures and colors of the ground and the various outcroppings of stone, but she’s already almost screaming and crying with excitement. Both the sun and moving air feel so strong on her skin that she can’t tell if she’s hot or cold—she’s both, she’s neither.
She should be looking at the subtle slope of the plateau, the way the red fades to orange, the bright blue of the sky. After all, she knows flaming well there’ll be a price for her becoming Holy, and she’s pretty sure she knows what she’ll pay.
But there’s no fear anywhere in her. She’s looked. She’s said to herself so many times today: if I have any hesitation, I’ll stop, I won’t do it. But she has none. And maybe that’s what should scare her.
It doesn’t, though.
Besides, she only just a month back graduated secondary school, was officially declared an adult. This is exactly the right time to decide to become something, not for any reason she can quite name, but because everything in her says yes and nothing in her says no, and what kind of person would she be if she didn’t listen to that?
So she navigates to the slope that leads up to Erezel, and begins to ascend. It really is gentle, easy to handle on the motorcycle. And flames, this is so the right place, it is so right to get a little closer to the sun, to get a little higher than everything around her, to get somewhere still and bright where no one else is, somewhere few even know about.
The breeze becomes more of a wind as she moves up the slope. It makes her smile. Most intense things will do that.
Beneath her, the hard stone begins disintegrating into pebbles, which would be a problem except that she’s already almost at the top of the plateau. So she shuts off the power to her motorcycle and disembarks it. She walks the few extra paces to the middle of the plateau, where everything feels open and covered in sun and heat. Which is absolutely appropriate for what she’s doing. She has to do this as right as she can. And she’ll throw caution to the fire.
Even if there wasn’t wind now, she’d be grinning. God, she almost runs to the center of the plateau. And, though she makes no outward sign, she starts to pray.
It’s a simple thing, a “So, hey, I’m doing this,” that she lets echo through her mind. And somewhere in the back of her she can almost hear a thousand wings rustling, she can almost imagine a thousand voices strung into those wings give something like a laugh. Oh yeah, They’re listening.
Tamar skids to a stop on her last step to the center, childishly excited. She listens for a moment to what she’s feeling, tries to decide whether to sit or stand for this. And all the images that come to mind say stand, say that’s what she’d find the best. So she stands, her feet firmly planted, her eyes glistening with excitement and her grin spreading larger than she knew it could be.
And she’s not quite sure exactly what to do next. Other than to stay praying, direct every flaming thought she has to God, and—make herself clear, she figures.
If she does this—and she will, she still so wants to—there will be a price. That’s how it works. To touch something of God, to feel Them directly, is to be burned. That’s not so much because of God’s importance—it’s more because Their very nature is fire and intensity, and it wouldn’t be much like Them to hold back. Nor would Tamar want Them to; after all, she wouldn’t.
In Safirah’s case, Tamar knows, the price was that their entire left arm got completely scorched in still-swirling burn marks, was made entirely unusable; but, in that arm, they still, to this day, can feel God’s soul. And they once read Tamar’s mind outright by touching her with that arm. So, prices, and also things gained.
And, eyes open, Tamar looks into the sky, clear and bright, and thinks of and to God.
But at some level, there’s not much more to think than that she likes Them, that every communication they’ve had has left her smiling. And at that thought, she can almost feel the turning of a thousand flames, a thousand eyes looking to her, and she knows, she knows, that God feels the same way about her.
Well, of course They do. She is, after all, pretty great.
Again Tamar can halfway hear a laugh of bells and wings, the imagined sound bright enough to almost sting her eyes.
And she thinks: I want to see You.
Of course, that’s not really how it works. God’s a bit of a contradiction—one of two people in the entirety of Šehhinah without a body, and yet, They created the world to be much more physical than They ever are. Tamar’s asked why, but all she’s ever gotten is a sense of wing movements and flickering flames that she figures roughly equates to a shrug.
But Their soul, many of the Holy can attest, is brighter than anything, anything at all.
Tamar repeats, mentally: she wants to see it. Their soul. All of it.
Again a sense of heat and power and pressure around her asks for verification that this is what she wants. And it is.
Please, she thinks.
And suddenly, surrounding her in this plateau in the middle of the desert, is light. No, not light. More than light. It’s a brightness less like the sun and more like certainty, it’s an I am, I am, I am echoing and rippling and forming waves of light that should be far too intense to see, and yet Tamar almost can, surrounded by and in it. She’d thought it would be white, but it’s not—it’s far more similar to black, but made brilliant somehow. Made brilliant and perfectly bright. It feels like singing in her eyes, it feels like voices and voices. And it hurts, it’s heat and yet it’s both comforting and exhilarating, it’s a good pain somehow against her eyelids, and it constantly seems to trace something against her vision in the way it moves—it, the sensation of pain and the brightness and the singing, moves in patterns.
Tamar takes another breath, and oh flames, was all that in the space of one breath?
And it’s there, so there, the heat and the rippling, it’s there, and it looks incredible, like if she was staring into the sky and the sky was just stars. No, not it, but God, Them, actually literally God, Their soul, inside her eyes. They are with her, and They are so much, and this is why They don’t hold back, this is why They will not be seen without burning the one who sees Them, because how could it possibly be right to hold all this back?
This time, Tamar gasps, and her eyes are full of tears—well, no, they aren’t, because they’ve completely burned away.
She’s almost too stunned to smile, but she does anyway. She blinks her eyes and nothing changes, except in the patterns and ripples she’s already started to notice.
Oh God, oh flames—and she understands now more than ever why people swear by fire—she’s one of the Holy now.
She will never, ever, see anything other than this again, nor will she ever stop seeing this.
Tamar outright grins. It’s so, so, so worth it.