User:Yuanchosaan/A Life of Contemplation\Reflection/One

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Beginnings
The world was still in shadows when Noa Lentic stopped to break his fast.

In the outside world, those sheltered, distant lands that lie below everything Noa knows, the sun is already partway through its journey. He imagines there are fields glowing golden in the morning light, desert sands ablaze, people at work in farms and towns, perhaps even churches with sunlight streaming through coloured windows. These are the images that Cleric Stern and the occasional travelling merchant have left him. To Noa, they are like illustrations in a picture book, or the etchings in the manuscripts of the books the priest treasured.

In Noa’s world, the walls of mountains rise up to shelter their valleys from the sun.

Here, the crispness of winter never quite leaves the spring air. When he rests his hand against a rock momentarily to clamber over it, the cold bites at his fingers, threatens to seep through the thick gloves that cover his palm. Every breath feels sharp, fresh in a way that promises a newness to the day, despite the age of everything else around him. The trees are old, the rocks older, the mountains ancient, and yet, and yet-

Like a promise from God, eternal and forever youthful. Every day a new possibility.

He chooses for his resting place a boulder that juts over a trickling stream, moss over grey above water. Noa perches on the edge of it, chewing a strip of dried meat meditatively as he stares into the water. In its swift flow, he can just make out the reflection of his bright blue eyes, drifting amidst the browns and forest-green.

He knows that he can hardly rest for long – he left early today, but there is still so much ground for him to cover, peaks towering above him that he has to scale – but yet he cannot help but linger by the side of the stream. It is a little weakness of his that he often asks God to forgive, and yet can never quite bring himself to overcome. Though he is supposed to adore every part of God’s creation equally, it is water that he loves the most.

A flicker passes through the water, disrupting the reflection of his eyes. Reflexively, Noa looks up, but all he sees is a sliver of blue between greenery and the stone walls – the sky, a glimpse through a crack in the grotto’s ceiling, so pale it looks like white. It is unblemished by any living thing.

Noa smiles and shoulders his pack. Today, he does not pause to ask for forgiveness, or even to give thanks for the beauty around him. It is not even that he still has peaks to climb, though that is true, or even that he cannot spare the time to stop to pray.

Today, he intends to live his life as a prayer. {|width="45%" align="right"
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Meditation
Sonthi Mahidol’s life was nothing like he remembered.

A fragment of him clung to that thought, holding onto it as the rest dissipated, reformed, becoming…something else. Someone else. Someone he did not understand. He did not think Se’ze understood anymore than he did, even though the Rorqual was the one that was dissecting him. Perhaps they would, together. But it would not be Sonthi.

The part of Sonthi that could still think sat apart from his thoughts and memories. It was like a meditation, that part thought distantly. Watching the flow of his thoughtstream, all those worries and anxieties, flurry past in an ever-tumultuous mind, whilst he kept a part of him separated, detached, nothing but a disconnected observer. In this state, emotions that should have shaken him with fear became nothing but conjecture: what if this was simply what Se’ze was doing to him to keep him happy as it picked him apart? What if this was only a way for him to cope with the process without going insane? What if he was supposed to do this to Se’ze at the same time, and the merging would fail because of it? Or what if he was not supposed to, this was not a merging, but simply a takeover, and this was nothing at all like meditation, but he would never know…

What if?

He felt fear as a far-off vibration, a thrumming from a distant string in the depths. None of it mattered. The thought vanished, his mind too uncaring to hold onto it.

Another shred fluttered into his grasp momentarily, and Sonthi caught a glimpse of the throne room. Just a sliver of a view, a scene captured in the gap between two panels, but one his recognised instantly. It was his place, standing behind the walls, seeing only the elaborate back of the throne that hid his father, and the straight, militaristic stance of his brother standing beside him. Then the image was gone again, falling from his nerveless fingers.

But more and more, the visions he saw were ones he did not remember. Did he really spend so many hours dressed in stiff uniforms, exchanging distant pleasantries with people in endless identical golden halls? A red feather, the dark kohl around a woman’s eye as she batted it closed, the gleam of candles on a gold hairpiece as another (the same one?) bowed, a dark arm, straight backs, medals, whispers, fans, tea cups offered, more whispers…

Memories, but ones not attached to him. He felt no connection to them, even though through them strode the shadow of his father, his brothers, even his mother when she chose to make an imperious appearance. They were like so many pieces of data to Se’ze.

Data. He understood data. Se’ze selected, examined and carefully discarded a vision of that in the echo of Sonthi’s thoughts: Sonthi at the computer, reading, studying, curating, relentlessly processing, processing, processing data. The light from the screen reflected on his face. This, at least, felt real to him. He remembered spending his time doing this, chasing phantoms of meaning across strings of number.

And here he was now, Se’ze doing the chasing for him, not really a meditation after all, not at all, this life splintered into data that neither understood. And perhaps there wasn’t even a meaning to find.
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