Page 22 of Awariye

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

AWARIYE

My bladder woke me, but after I returned to the bed I tossed and turned, my thoughts whirring like a windup doll on the loose. I had too much on my mind. With my mental clarity returning, and the combination of strong medicine with deep exhaustion no longer sapping my energy in favor of restoring my health, I had a lot to process. Igor slept peacefully, the blanket rising and falling with his breaths. For a long moment I sat and watched him, wishing I could switch my brain off and get back in there and cuddle with him. But I knew from my long years of training that if I put off dealing with my thoughts, they would only pile up until they seeped into my everyday life, a sprung leak at every opportunity.

I suspected these thoughts were due to the baggage I could now see I'd been carrying around with me until I fell ill. In survival mode, I had pushed everything else aside, just trying to get to my next meal. But now I needed to address those shadows if I could.

I wanted to kiss Igor on the cheek and tell him where I was going, but I didn't want to startle him, and although he had never given me any evidence to prove it, waking a warrior unexpectedly might trigger his defense impulse. I left him be, wrapped myself in Wren’s quilted coat, donned my thicker pants and shoes, and quietly closed the door behind me. I knew where to go.

The sanctuary that held the seven lantern gods was quiet in the predawn, no guard dog out front since no human was inside. I dipped in, closing the door, and immediately the sheer presence of the large bronze bowls and the flames within froze me in my tracks. Their force was so strong I could have sworn a human was standing in front of me, pushing a palm to my chest. I breathed deeply, nice and slow, giving my solar plexus time to adjust to the change in power. This was no regular room.

A stone basin off to the side had the faucet with running water, so I washed my hands and face. The cold water chilled me. The closer to freezing it was, the more the water could absorb icky muck from the etheric plane and cleanse me of it. I dealt with my shivers by moving closer to the stone table holding the lanterns.

In the custom of the ancient pagans, I kissed my right palm and held it out to them, greeting these gods. "Guten Morgen."

Immediately, I wanted to do my morning spiritual routine. Over the decade since I'd begun practicing magic, my spirit sensed when it was time to move into ritual and began to rise in the astral plane of its own accord. Having mostly only performed prayer these last two weeks as I was bedridden and in and out of consciousness, the desire to get back into my magical practices and move myself closer to the gods was fierce.

Wren had told me about the space behind the table where he performed rituals to his gods, integrating his practice with the lanterns so he could get to know them better. Wren and I worshipped the old Continental Celtic gods that had thrived here before the Romans came. With their permission, at each gate in his ritual he also invoked one of the seven lanterns.

"May I perform this same ritual here?" I asked, imagining as clearly as I could in my mind's eye what Wren must look like while performing the ritual and showing that mental image to the lanterns. "I know Wren's gods and began magical devotions to them at the monastery."

This was tricky. The sanctuary was meant for the seven lantern gods, to honor them and bring them into this world as much as they allowed. This space was theirs. And yet Wren and I, as monks and mages, had our own pantheons that guided our spiritual development. Saying other names in their presence could trigger their jealousy and ruin everything. Especially if they pulled away from Ulbrecht and no longer protected the Danubian king. We could lose this hard-won peace that had been so brutally fought for, and in no time whatsoever, become overrun.

I circled the table, checking to see that the lanterns didn't need anything. Then I found Wren's oracle cards and asked if I could invoke my gods in the sanctuary. The cards seemed to think I was worrying too much. No surprise there.

Lifting my arms over my head, I pulled in breath for the invocation and banishing ritual I'd performed every day for thousands of days and began to sing.

* * *

I tried to meditate after the ritual, which was always good protocol since the magic of the ritual was designed to clear one's mind from mental chatter. The lanterns, however, were such a strong presence in the room that I kept finding myself fixated on their dancing flames rather than sorting myself out. Not knowing what to do, a memory of the alpine forests surrounding Diana Monastery popped into my mind, and I laughed.

I stood and addressed the lanterns. "I'll return. I need a bit of nature to reconnect."

The guard at the door leading outside was reluctant to let me out, cautioning that it was quite cold and wasn't I the one who had been ill? I explained I would just circle the castle. He let me go on the condition that a guard dog follow me, presumably the animal being capable of letting someone know if I fainted. I relented and set out.

Indeed, the cold wind sent a bitter chill running through me and I immediately revised my plans. The area surrounding the castle was the town and some gardens, but I could see the forest in the distance, and just being outside in the elements for a bit was enough to jolt my connection to my inner thoughts and get things flowing again. Having learned magic and spirituality in deep nature, I could count on it to do the trick.

Back in the sanctuary, I circled the table, pacing to let my energy course through, and told the gods what I had been struggling with.

"I had gotten very stuck, and due to traveling alone, I did not realize how stuck I was. This continued for a long time and got worse. Not having a partner or friend to echo these things back to me and notice, I was not there for myself and instead dug the hole deeper. I let myself down. But I can't heap guilt on myself about it or I'll just get more negative. I've got to return to being on my own side."

I paced around the table, circling it once more, and felt a combination of the etheric force from the lantern fires and my own connection to my gods opening up. This was working. I kept going.

"I'd become fatalistic, thinking that I would never find a patron. I’d be stuck entertaining crowds and trying to sing over them just to scrape by. I began to despair and internalize that rejection as inadequacy. As I strained my vocal cords further, I began to lose hope that I would find a way to dig myself out of that hole. Then as hunger took over, I lost the ability to think clearly and troubleshoot my situation. My health began failing, and then it was just a struggle to stay alive."

Getting that out, I'd finally expelled enough energy that I could sit down and hold my situation in my mind's eye and let thoughts come to me around the edges. As they did, I voiced them. "Things got so bad I had trouble seeing the way forward and was in the process of convincing myself I didn't have a future. There was a lot of shame built up around leaving the monastery. I didn't want to leave; it was the only place I'd known as home since my mother left me there. I felt safe; I knew I'd have meals and a secure room to sleep in. But the monastery rarely keeps monks forever and I'd specifically trained to be a bard, which meant I had to go out and seek my fortune. Doing it alone, without any of my friends and already having no family, was hard."

I held still for several minutes, really listening to see what other thoughts would come. One's guide in life, their higher soul, speaks only softly, and is especially difficult to hear when other mental chatter is going on. But I had trained for over a decade to purify the mental space around my subtle bodies, which made it easier to listen. If my tummy growled as it presently did, I acknowledged that I'd go to breakfast soon, and then gently set the thought aside for now.

Before I even recognized what I was doing, I hummed through some lower notes and up a bit higher, then back down. It felt so good to sing. Then I glanced at the lanterns and wondered if that inspiration had been given to me, and if so, if that meant they wanted me to sing for them.

I tried to still my mind once more so I could listen, and while that worked, the stronger urge was to keep humming.

I danced around on some notes, lingering whenever one felt more inspired. This reminded me of one of my early connections to the magic of the earth. As a young monk, I'd gotten caught out in the rain while wandering the forest. Deciding to accept it, I had circled the area around the monastery and let the rain fall on me, singing to the clouds, the puddles, and the sky that had opened up. It had been a late summer rain, and so it was warm enough that I remembered not feeling chilly, so rare in the Alps.

Afterward I had gone inside, the temperature finally driving me indoors to dry off and get warm, when something incredible happened. In the stone stairwell leading up to the monastery living quarters, I'd kept singing the little tune I'd sung to the rain, enjoying how it echoed and bounced around. But then I'd hit a pitch that set the whole stairwell ringing.

Stunned, I'd frozen on the spot, so thrown at the lasting tones, as if the chamber had sung along with me and was just finishing up. Later my instructors would show me how certain materials have resonant frequencies, much like the way a cello player must skate across certain notes carefully in order to not set the whole instrument vibrating. But in that moment, the surprise of such a discovery had set the world alight and convinced me utterly that with each breath we breathed in magic.