Some Star Fragments [part 2 CONTINUES ]
Ah, how she remembered.
“ There is a fond tale amongst travelers of the sky – that when it is night and right time, when the wheels of fate has just attuned to rhythm of the sky, when two realms overlap – they synergize, they marvel and open up a space of their own, a space so volatile, so turbulent that no one dreams of staying longer than needed; but still a marvelous invention of nature, a play of rules and heaven’s grace, if luck accords one a chance to travel in there, you must beware of its enchantments, its ensnares – but also, stop a while, settle down and glimpse. Here the marvels of nature collude a mystery, and here it sings a melody of order, primeval order and of life itself. If you capture that – you will be born anew.”
Ages ago, she had forgotten most of the struggle of her life, but not the little pleasures she stole in her father’s library. It was in one of its oddest-looking books she had found that passage. At that time, she had still to travel up in space, still had time before her ordination into a being, much, much different from a human, from herself of past - a true blooded member of the blood-clan. She forgot its title, but it was tucked in her memories as fresh as rain of yesterday. Because it talked of strange lands and strange events – for years, it was no more than fantasy. But no, look! Here she was in that fantastical notion of her childhood!
Yes, a fleeting dream, OR fantasies should be transient. Washed off by the next wave of the ocean. And her mind had never ebbed to set or froth at edges. It had always maligned her self to grapple with the deepest, darkest secrets all at once. Her blood had always had its own thoughts, and it liked to resonate with things and people around her. Since she shed off her human layer, it was more overwhelming than ever. She was never given a chance to study restraint, chance to grow up and bottle up the excess thoughts that were eating her up. It was always the hope of others, the dragging force in her life that had defined her sole purpose that never gave her a moment to breath – let alone the pleasure to quiet down and learn a skill to tame her wild thoughts and spirits!
So, her dead clansmen, her revenge, her bloodline became her sole concern. Nothing should have mattered anymore, now that she was dead. The moment she ceased to be something she was, she lost the remaining reason to pursue the past. She knew she wasn’t eternal and she knew that for a fact. She had seen death, played with it, felt its fangs and brittle wounds. So many days she had woken up to attempts at assassination rather than to a birdsong, or a mother’s sweet chidings. So many hours she had spent arranging the little games of revenge between her elders. She played well – in that game of power, of control, but she lost too, many a times. Each time was more humiliating than other, each loss more dangerous than the previous. Not being a human was no longer a statement of pride but rather, she was turned into a pariah, the other to their altruistic selves! Sacrificing her pleasures was called a duty. She was sanctified, going against her was sacrilegious - yet, only she knew she was there to bear the assigned, dignified role, and to swallow all pains and harm, because she was not one of them.
She played their games. She wasn’t petty and returned what was due at right time and in right amount. What came to them was only a matter of time. But in all this, she had never imagined her own death. In a world where her wishes were fully realized, she would have been wandering in the space, like many of her ancestors, with no abode, no destination in sight – eternal as time. But she was chained and drowned, and drowned so well that her plans couldn’t catch up with those people’s cold hearts and malice!
She had forgotten how close it was – that fang named death, how closely it had always placed its forefingers over her jugular veins. She had died so inconspicuously that it was ironic.
Some of the threads of her past had been severed, cruelly cut off by an invisible hand, and she now lay gasping for breath like a drowning man, with only a shred of will remaining. The storm she had seen coming was come and gone long ago, but her battered self, it had no respite. She wanted to ask someone, was this the end? Was this the honor she was promised? How could she dare take a deep breath of ease when she didn’t get any closure? What about her dreams? What about that ‘hope’ that had defined the majority of her life – why couldn’t her blood save her in the last moment, when so many people had placed their endless hope and faith in it?
“Look, father. This was your dream. Not mine, but haven’t I accepted it as if it were mine? But, here I am. Dead and alive. Your blood, your hope, my blood and everyone’s hope, like dust has settled in past. Somewhere so strange…”
The song continued.
She could try. Try to sleep off the past tiredness. Try to forget, a life spent on knives edge, with lingering fear of being pushed down the cliff at any moment by her own ignorance. She could try to forget, all the malice her blood had churned, and crystallized into her blackened heart. Forget the pain, the agonies…
Forget the nervousness, the powerlessness of watching her clansmen die one after another, butchered in cold-blood. Forget that piece of earth washed red, with her soles drenched in innocent blood as she screamed and begged an unknown god for help. Forget the shame, forget the pain and innocuous laughter of her enemies – those burning forts and those wailing of her infant cousins, the wailing of that infant’s mother and the lamenting silence of that aftermath – her demon, her nightmare. Just because they were now some tales of a past life, must she forget? Shouldn’t it be high time to let it all rest? Her past life.
‘Should she forget?’ A tiredness flickered on her face, muted in anger. She closed her eyes as her heart opened to that ancient rhythm, burning it in her soul, in her human blood. “Why? Why must I forget that shame? Though my revenge is already exacted and made into a thing of past– but does that wash away the pain left in the aftermath?” What a joke!
She was no more the Crown princess of her dynasty, the last of her lineage. But here, she was Wei Zhiruo. But she was a Wei Zhiruo who hadn’t forgotten her past. This life could only carry that extra burden of a past life’s memories and hatred!
She didn’t know why she came to this world. There were some suspicions, and she did feel it floating in the air, lingering in the wind and the petals of the flower, in the cold walls of her new chambers, surrounding her, the strange vehement emotion that were not her own. Or in the mystery of that malicious thought. Every karma has its bearer. If the fate has brought her here, then she must be needed here. Or had intercepted someone’s fate who was needed here. A fate, like spider webs weaving invisibly. The rotten stench surrounded the air as if blurring her figure out from the heavens eye, telling her, she had stolen someone else’s fate. This was not a life of her own keeping; someone’s fate was left unfulfilled to awaken her own. She wasn't Wei Zhiruo who should have lived.
But she was Wei Zhiruo who survived! If there was any stealing, it was a matter of chance. Her intentions were never included in any event – as far as she was concerned, that made her innocent of charges of theft! She had no qualms in occupying a body that was not done with her own initiative. And who could surely tell that she wasn’t Wei Zhiruo born in this soil, just that her soul was an alien brought from another world? She had seen the workings of her own mind in this – a strange set of enchantments had sealed her memories. She was sure, only she could have done that! Only, now she had completely forgotten when she sealed up her own memories and what conditions awakened them once more.
The song came upon a turn. It swelled like in the breast of a swallow, awakened at dawns-break. It was ready to prance, to emerge and spring forth the most luscious bushes and amongst the greenest boughs. Suddenly the canoe jerked to a stop, awakening Wei Zhiruo from her stupor. Wei Zhiruo’ s eyes turned round in surprise.
All around her, wherever her eyes could reach, she saw an expanse of surface covered in more and more fragments of shining crystal-like stars or was it ice, she wondered. Burning against the murky darkness, emanating the softest, mildest of milky white, as if dripping with grace and purity, floating around in a strange pattern. Wei Zhiruo, although a bit distracted by her own musings, didn’t forget to seal all the images in her mind and burn them into its deepest recesses. These were all virgin rules, so primitive and violently chaotic that there was nothing on par with them. If she lost this chance to capture their essence, she will get no other chance like this again!
She was swift in her actions. She opened up all the apertures of her mind, and unsealed the highest level of sense perception that a human could allow in her own apparatus. But what she didn’t know, was that, unknown to her, her blood had been boiling and burning all that it could find in the patterns in the sky, in the waters and the clouds independent of her consciousness. It worked like a thinking being, merging the highest rules and mysteries in itself – as if sealing a memory.
There were several of them, uncountable patterns to observe – like firmament on an autumn’s clear night, these fragments danced, swirled and floated over the water like the clearest, the brightest and resonant pieces of stars. She exerted the highest limit of her consciousness, reaching as far as her limits could allow her to, taking in all that she could. But her blood was faster than her, quicker at perceiving than her and more far reaching than her. While Wei Zhiruo had seen and captured but a small encirclement of those rules, her blood was already touching the edges of the ocean, the horizons where the purple firmament and the black sea merged into one.
Unconsciously, Wei Zhiruo’s blood had escaped its bounds and overreached human conception. It was like a hungry and thirsty beast, crawling on all fours, struggling to reinvigorate itself-! Pushing boundaries after boundaries as if it were its last struggle and after which, if it failed to succeed in it, it will be a lost existence with no remaining value. The blood sang along the ancient rhythm, merging its music in itself – becoming one with that ancient behemoth. Soon it was all rules and runes, Wei Zhiruo blood unknowingly recaptured those traces of patterns and etched it in itself, preserving the spectacular phenomena in itself, the mysteries of time and space, the rhythm of the dawn of time, the marvelous infant runes with no parallel in the world! Everything, while she remained blissfully unaware of the ongoing changes.
The heavenly song erupted once more, swelling sweeter and sweeter, with a heady affect over its listener. Its rhythm got mixed up in the waves, in the lolling of the canoe adrift a humongous ocean, and those unknown fragments emanating light. The star light though all this time, reached her strikingly. She comfortably smelled of home, of belongingness in the mellow whiteness of the star like ice fragments, contrasted brightly with black water current. If she spent the rest of her time wandering in space, would it be as blissful as this moment? So fulfilling?
“Plop!”
Another sound jerked Wei Zhiruo up, awakening her from her delirium. Something else had fallen into the pond – the actual pond.
She didn’t know what it was, but couldn’t help feeling frustrated at being disturbed at such an amazing time. Was this the magic of fate, that the space travelers often talked off? The space and time of entrance into that space was fixed, perhaps even a rule, longer than which she could not stay? Was staying longer beneficial for her if she could, or was this sudden interruption her fortune or loss? She dwelled on these random thoughts for a while before fully awakening to the coldness of midnight.
The song died down abruptly, yet with no sign of awakening again. Wei Zhiruo couldn’t help feel a little disappointed and at loss of words. Her connection to the mellow power of those stars– was still there!
“What…” She felt a strange connection between herself on the earth, and the stars above in the sky. As if she was drawing their light into her body, melting them into herself.
Her connection with the outside heaven, with the stars and skies…
She jerked back to attention. ‘Yes,’ clear headed now, Wei Zhiruo stiffly closed her eyes, as if the mountain had descended over her shoulders, pushing her downwards. ‘My affinity with the stars…is still there. The bloodline!’
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