07. Jasmine and Petrichor (Vaye)¶
Vaye’s eyes adjusted as she headed down the dark passage to the stairwell. Shallow puddles reflected the daylight emanating from small discs in the ceiling. The lights were actually the ends of long witchglass cables threaded through the rock to the streets above, one of the few genuine contributions the Sarmalans had made to the city. They had stolen the power of the storm from the Anashim and taken Thelenza itself from the Cantereians, but the trick of bending and refracting light with witchglass was their own.
As she moved through patches of shadow, ethereal white lines flickered across her peripheral vision. The Anashi word for the phenomenon was viriyeshet, which translated to “spiderwebs”. The insubstantial filaments, which passed straight through the rock, were only visible in dim light, typically in the tunnels of the sobração. It was impossible to focus on them directly, and Vaye’s mother hadn’t been able to see them at all. Although Nashara’s knowledge of Anashic culture was exhaustive, even she hadn’t had an explanation for them—only that they had something to do with sorcery.
Emerging above ground, Vaye stopped at a cart and splurged on some fried squash blossoms stuffed with pine nuts and raisins. She even bought a small bottle of goldenwine to wash it down. The vendor’s scowl turned to a smile when he saw the glimmer of her aurei, and they both pretended he’d been happy to serve her.
As she made her way back to the temple, an unfamiliar happiness kept resurfacing like a dumpling in a pot of boiling soup. With the money and the nownow, she’d finally be able to focus on the Tashiya instead of spending all her time and energy scraping out a living. Had she remained in Belosveka’s care, she might once have been afforded the same luxury, but at a cost she wasn’t willing to pay.
Although the temple’s door had survived the fire, the lock had not, and the only thing keeping someone from barging in was a heavy rock that she slid into place as she entered. That, and their superstitions. She sat in her alcove and lit two tapers, then opened the bag of nownow, savoring the smell of jasmine and petrichor as she pinched a wad of crumbling fibers off the ball. She’d once heard that the drug was actually made from the excrement of glassworms, the tiny creatures that were farmed to produce witchglass. Trying hard not to think about that idea, she scraped the sticky substance into the wilted bowl of her pipe. She’d been using the same pipe for months, and the raw witchglass she’d made it with could barely withstand a flame. Inhaling particles of decaying witchglass probably wasn’t doing her lungs any favors, but then again, neither was the worm shit.
Standing in the center of the dais, she closed her eyes and touched the pipe to each of her Sacred Points as she moved through the blessing over the drug. (Technically, it was supposed to be a blessing over “bread and sustenance”, but whatever.) According to Vaye’s mother, the ritual movements helped attune the mind, pointing one’s consciousness toward the ineffable Balance Point. Getting close enough to that mystical state would theoretically allow Vaye to return from her visions with perfect clarity and recall. As it was, her memories of the conversations were fleeting and dreamlike, sizzling away like drops of water in a hot pan.
It hadn’t always been so difficult to communicate with Grandmother. As a girl, Vaye had frequently received divine messages in dreams and daydreams, indistinguishable from other childish flights of fancy except that some turned out to be true. Once, she’d been granted a vision of a sudden hailstorm; another time, a swarm of iridescent scarabs. But her connection to the divine had disappeared into the swirling water along with her mother’s life. That loss had persisted until the day she had, out of boredom and curiosity, decided to try nownow and accidentally stumbled upon a shortcut to transcendence.
That had been a weird day.
Nownow was a cheap, popular street drug, particularly among Cantereians, and it had been trivial to acquire some. After an initial rush of euphoria, the drug caused a dramatic narrowing of focus, slicing away all but the sensations of the moment. Somehow, this peculiar sharpening of time had served to reopen that divine channel, or perhaps it had simply revealed a passage that was usually hidden by the distractions of thought.
The trouble with this shortcut, though, was that the drug also caused a pronounced confusion. The lower the quality, the more intense the side effects. Vaye’s “impure” state seemed to annoy the goddess, sometimes so much that she refused to speak to Vaye at all. Nothing made Vaye feel more like a disappointment to her mother’s memory than being ignored by her own deity.
With this top-quality nownow, hopefully it would be different. Returning to the alcove, she sat in moth pose, the soles of her feet pressed together, her back straight and head lifted. She closed her eyes and held the pipe to the crown of her forehead with both hands, inhaling deeply. With each exhalation, she cycled through the Six Names of Grandmother, bringing the pipe to touch her Six Sacred Points: her crown, her brows, her chin, her breastbone, her navel, and her loins. Each cycle pulled her further inward toward the Balance Point.
She put the pipe to her lips and touched the taper to the bowl. The flame pooled across the surface of the drug before seeping into its mass. Each of the tiny fibers flared and curled up, transforming into threads of ash as she slowly drew the smoke into her lungs and held it like a lover.
And oh, how it loved her back.
The smoke unspooled from her lips, carrying away everything but the present moment. Her desperate past and shadowy future fell away like spent petals, leaving only her senses and the weight of her body. A delicious icy tingle crawled across her scalp in waves, synchronized with the swirls of color that blossomed behind her eyelids: coruscating sheets of yellow and blue and red, spirals of iridescent blocks breaking apart and re-forming into fantastic landscapes. And the drug’s purity meant no lingering guilt to pull her away from the sheer, staggering beauty of it.
The edges of the room pulsed and swayed. Her hands felt huge and clunky, like she was wearing padded gloves. As she lay back and closed her eyes, a point of white light, penetrating and diamond-sharp, blossomed in the center of her vision. She exhaled and the light spread, melting the waking world away.
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