Chapter 2: The Desire of Something Left in a Storeroom

Our story, like all stories, needs a hero. I am not that hero. Though her story began not far from my own, I did not know her at the beginning. She once told me all that I am telling you, but she cannot be here to tell you of these things now. So, the responsibility falls to me to give you this piece of your own story. I will do the very best that I can to make her words come alive in the way that she might. Vekaya was her name, and at the start of what we know – of what she knew – she was more confused than I hope you shall ever be.

The very beginning was when three things happened all at once. Air filled her lungs as though for the first time. Breath came in gasps and gulps. Vekaya breathed as if it might be taken away from her. Her eyes opened, unbidden, and flooded her mind with unfamiliar surroundings - there were things in the dim light. She knew what they were. But where was she? Lastly, confusion and fear swept over her like the frigid air. The place was dark, and she did not know where she was.

When Vekaya told me this, I can remember thinking that I would have wanted to cry out, to ask for help. But, when you don’t know for what or to whom you should be calling out, it is difficult to have an instinct for it. And, Vekaya was not one to beg or even to ask for help. As frightened as she was, the dark was the dark, and she was herself.

The dimly lit things around her, they were barrels and boxes. The light was coming from a single point in the darkness. It looked like a star, floating by itself. Vekaya exhaled. “Vekaya,” she thought the word for a moment. It was her name. She knew that. What else did she know? Like the breaths she had taken, the knowledge filled her only enough to realize that she needed more. What was the enormity of this small room? Why was she here? What was this place? Her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she saw that the small light was a single… a single… a single, lonely candle. “Candle” was the word for the tiny little star in the darkness. It was sitting on a small round table a short distance from the straw cot where she was sitting up.

Crates stretched off into the darkness around her. Barrels. Innumerable sacks. Sacks everywhere. A few had dark markings on them. Many did not. This place. This was not for things that were being used. They were being stored. A storeroom. It’s a place for storing things that are extra, things that are unnecessary. She knew that, like how she knew that her name was Vekaya. Like how she knew how to breath. Like how she knew that the thing with light was a candle. And even though all she could see was the dimness of the storeroom, Vekaya knew that there was a world outside of this.

The words and ideas poured in. She had fingers. Hands. Toes. Feet. She was wearing a dress that came down to her upper shins. It was coarse fabric and too thin. It was white and had two golden emblems on it. What were they? She knew them. It didn’t matter right then. The air around her crackled with fear. Why was she here? Who was she? What was happening? She was cold. She had hair that went down to a little below her chin. It was difficult to see what color it was in the darkness, but she estimated that it was brown.

Vekaya saw what she could see in what light there was. Her hands travelled to every surface that they could find. All of it was new but not surprising. Vekaya found that the feel of a sheet was the feel of a sheet and nothing at all new. But for some reason, this was the first sheet. It was new. She needed to know all of it, to see it, to feel it, to hear it. And there was so much more of it out there. That was where Vekaya needed to go. The newness beckoned her, and she stood.

Then, a noise came from that world. A noise like another person talking. It caused her to stop. Why? Of course, there was another person. Just like the whole world couldn’t be a storeroom, she couldn’t be the only person anywhere. Why did the very idea of another person make her hesitate? What part of her desired to avoid the source of that voice?

Before she could even look for an escape, before she could hide, before she could even think, the door opened. In walked a figure whose robes and skin were so white that they glowed in the darkness. Vekaya stared. Like her name, the feeling of the sheet, or the word, “storeroom,” Vekaya recognized the figure. She struggled to conjure its name. As the word escaped her grasp, the memory felt more like the chill of the dim air than the familiarity of the sheet. Whoever this was, they were not… warm?

“Who are you?” asked Vekaya. The sound of her own voice frightened her for a moment with its unfamiliarity, with its authority, with its fear.

“Hello, Little Girl,” responded the figure. The voice echoed. It hummed and throbbed and pushed back into Vekaya’s head.

And suddenly, Vekaya was in the storeroom of her mind. The view from her eyes was distant. She was unnecessary. The voice of the figure was all. It was comforting. It was easy. It was so easy to hear, to follow, to let. Just… Let…

Vekaya could see very clearly that this was a woman. A woman in glowing white robes. Very tall. She smiled a smile that was not at all a smile, but rather, it was a command.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked.

“No,” said Vekaya before she could quite stop herself. The woman’s voice pulled the sound out of her. The answer came like water drawn from a well – no, like a fish, drawn from a pond… on a hook. In the storeroom of her mind, Vekaya watched herself answer. She felt nothing. The numbness was cold but the same sort of cold as one of the crates across the room. It didn’t matter. Everything was perfectly fine, though. There was no reason to be upset. There was no reason to not answer. There was no reason to… There was just no… There just wasn’t... In the storeroom of her own head, Vekaya could feel the voice smothering her under a soft, fluffy, feather pillow. It was so warm.

Her pulse quickened.

No.

No, she thought.

Vekaya strained against the voice. She wanted to take any action that she could. She wanted to do something: flip over the straw bed where she had been sleeping, kick over the storeroom’s crates and barrels, punch the woman in her smiling white teeth, anything. She fought and fought. What could she do?

The woman’s smile did not so much as shudder.

“Little Girl?” she said. “Are you quite all right?”

The words gave her brain a bath and pushed her head under the water. It was so easy, though. The voice just stole away the definition of the world around her. Everything was soft. Everything was so easy again. She didn’t have to think. She didn’t have to do. Vekaya could just… She could just…

“Are…” started Vekaya, “are you…” she paused again, “Are you alive?”

The sentence took lifetimes to say. Everything was slow. The smile’s lip shivered for just a moment. Just a moment. Was she offended, or was it something much worse? Everything felt like it was straining, fighting, strangling.

“Am I alive? Why, yes, of course,” said the woman. Every time she spoke, the cloud descended. Calm like death. She tried to run, but all she could do was turn. The turn went too far. She turned all the way around and looked at the woman again. The woman - she was… What? What?

...a shamasson!

“I am a-”

“Shamasson!” said Vekaya.

The smile returned. The teeth were perfectly shaped, perfectly white. What was a shamasson? Why did she know that?

“Very good, Little One,” droned the shamasson, “Civius smile on you.”

“Who…” started Vekaya.

The shamasson’s smile ebbed for just a moment. There was a second of something - it was not an emotion. Not love or fear or hope or even excitement. Was it expectation?

“Who is Civius?” stammered Vekaya.

“Civius is… Well, my child, he loves you,” said the shamasson, “and you’re going to love him, too.”

Still in her trance, Vekaya was led up out of the storeroom. The air was cool and the stones underfoot were very smooth and cold. The walls were bare brick the color of a raincloud. She walked down hallways and found a group of children. She wanted to stop them. Vekaya wanted to ask them if they knew who she was, but her body wouldn’t listen. She couldn’t stop. So, she watched them go by. The group became something larger as the hallways teemed with children. Some were younger than her. Some were older. They walked, almost marching, across the impossibly shiny stone floor. The basement’s bare walls gave way to bright red cloths and shiny metals objects decorating the walls in loud bursts of color. And though they weren’t dusty - there was no dust anywhere - she could tell that the many girls and boys around did not so much as touch them. Ahead, some children were mopping up, and they stared at Vekaya for a long moment before averting their eyes and mopping for all they were worth. Other shamassons, indistinguishable from the one she had met in the storeroom, monitored the progress of the children through the hallways. Light flickered out from the dozens of pairs of eyes in the hallway as she bid them, “Go to class.” A few normal adults passed. The hallway ended at a staircase. Following that same figure clad in white, Vekaya ascended stair after stair. Eventually, she arrived at another hallway. At the end of this one, there was a modest looking door, behind which, a woman sat at a table. She was saying something to a person on her right, but when Vekaya tried to get a sense of them, her uncooperative focus kept pulling back to the woman at the desk. Seeing Vekaya, she waved the other person away, saying, “...put the enterprise in jeopardy. Preposterous! This city likes us best when our children do not make a sound. You know as well as I do that my records are the only ones that exist in this place.”

Vekaya’s eyes didn’t follow whoever it was that left, but when the woman’s head turned toward her, the gaze that fixed on the two figures arriving at her door consumed the rest of the hallway with the indifference of bottomless pit. It washed over her. She was a chair, a crate, a stone.

“Ah, our little follower of Terre is washed clean, I see,” she said, grinning in a way that was not unlike the shamasson. Vekaya’s brain was trying to tell her something. There was something important. Something dangerous. Who was this woman?

“She knew what I am called,” said the shamasson.

“Shamasson?” said the woman, “The girl must have some words, musn’t she? Here, we’ll see.”

Vekaya looked at the woman behind the table. She was not dressed in the glowing, spectral color of the shamassons, but her robe was white and bore the same scales.

“Vekine?” said the woman.

Vekaya stared at her for a moment.

“Yes?” she replied.

Who was Vekine? The name meant something. But, fighting to stay in control of her own brain was like trying to bend iron with her hands. She placed the name on a box in the storeroom of her mind. Vekine. Vekine. The woman and the Shamasson were exchanging looks that meant nothing to Vekaya, but they were still worrisome.

“Hm. Your voice isn’t working on her like it should,” said the woman.

“As I said-” started the shamasson.

“Vekaya, do you know where you are?” asked the woman.

“I’m- I’m-” Vekaya started.

The woman and the shamasson exchanged looks. Vekaya’s very short memory played back everything that it knew: storeroom, shamasson, barrels, sacks, crates, bed, straw, smile, pale, skin, Civius… It snapped into her head like a joint popping back into place. They were in the House of Civius!

But, Vekaya still did not know who that was or what that meant. She remembered, and thought important, the look she had gotten from the children who were mopping. There was something there. She needed to be very careful.

“My child, do you know where you are?” repeated the woman.

She was unsure of what to do. Something in her brain told her not to say anything. The woman was someone she did feel she should trust, and at that moment, her feeling, deep, deep down, was all that she could use to make decisions. Then, a decision was made for her because she had hesitated too long.

“You see? She’s as blank as a clean piece of parchment,” said the woman.

“Yes, I see,” said the shamasson.

“Take Vekaya downstairs,” said the woman. “She’s probably hungry. I think that she could also probably use a nice cup of tea.”

Vekaya wasn’t, but she thanked the woman.

The woman smiled so broadly that it looked like her mouth was trying to contain something behind her face. As Vekaya turned around, the woman said, “You’re welcome dear. You are to address me as Mrs. Praner. Icthis.”

“Icthis,” Vekaya repeated, not knowing why.

“Follow me,” the shamasson commanded.

Vekaya was led – she did not make the decision to follow – down more hallways and staircases until she arrived in a kitchen. A man and a woman were there, looking at her. Or rather, they were pointedly not looking at her. The way that they turned their heads and spoke, almost whispering, it seemed like they might throw themselves to Vekaya’s feet and beg for forgiveness for some unremembered crime. She wanted to rage and scream and shout and strike at the people around her. What was going on? What was happening? What was the House of Civius? Why was she here, and why did she feel nervous about every single thing going on around her?

There was one clear thing: Mrs. Praner had some sort of authority and treated Vekaya’s loss of memory like a thing that came as a matter of course. It was completely expected. The only conclusion Vekaya could make, from the storeroom of her own mind, was that this Mrs. Praner, whoever she was, knew more about Vekaya’s past than she did. And that was not right.

“Drink this,” said the shamasson as she handed Vekaya a cup of tea. It was pink and smelled very faintly like metal.

As Vekaya obeyed, her head swam. She screamed out from the storeroom of her mind. She willed herself to put down the tea. Concentrating with all of her mind, she could just barely feel the muscles of her arm lifting the cup. She tried. She forced herself. Her fingertips faltered. The tea cup tipped ever so slightly, and some of the hot liquid inside came close to its edge. But no, her fingers brought the drink to her lips, taste of water left inside a pipe too long invaded her mouth, and she swallowed it.

The tranquility of the void came down like a curtain. Like the interior of a grave. The more tea her mouth consumed, the heavier the curtain was. It was like being blind and deaf. It was like being nothing. It was, she sensed - for she could not really think clearly - the same as death. She stood, looking at the floor of the kitchen, and did exactly all that she could: nothing.