The Fivefold Mountain
He does not mean to wander this far. The procession moves between the sacred points in the order it has always moved, every person veiled in white as tradition demands, adults and children alike brought to the same anonymous presence by the fabric. On this mountain everyone is equal before Divara. Somewhere in the waiting he had simply walked away from it, and no one stopped him because no one could tell him apart from anyone else.
The sound of water reaches him before he sees it and he follows it because there is nothing else pulling him anywhere.
The spring is small, tucked between two rocks, clear enough to see the bottom. No one here. Almost no one.
She is sitting at the edge of it with her knees pulled up, her white veil identical to his own, so still he nearly takes her for part of the landscape. Then she shifts and drops a stone into the water and watches the place where it disappears with the patience of someone who has been here long enough to have already made a small world of it.
He should go back.
She looks up before he decides. Two veiled children at the edge of a spring that belongs to neither of them. He cannot see her face. She cannot see his. They are simply two figures in white, which is perhaps why neither of them leaves.
"You're lost," she says.
"I'm not lost. I just didn't want to be where I was."
She considers this carefully, the way someone does when they take words seriously. Then she nods, as though he has said something reasonable, and looks back at the water.
He comes a little closer and sits above her. The silence between them is not uncomfortable, which is already unusual. Most people fill silence around him. They perform, or they are afraid, or they want something. She simply exists beside him as though his presence requires nothing from her and hers requires nothing from him.
He does not know what to do with that, so he just sits in it.
They are still sitting there when she arrives.
He feels her before he sees her, a change in the air that is not wind, the particular pressure of something ancient moving through the mountain toward them with the unhurried certainty of something that does not need to rush. The spring goes quiet. Even the light shifts.
Divara of the Five Mountains comes through the trees slowly, her eyes clouded white, her attention moving between them in a way that suggests she sees something other than two veiled children sitting beside a spring. She stops in front of them.
"Hold out your palms," she says.
They do, without speaking, without looking at each other.
Divara studies what she finds there for a long moment. Something moves through her expression.
"Ah," she says softly. "Light and dark." She looks between their open hands. "You have mirrored souls."
Then she turns to him, and her clouded eyes hold his through the veil in a way that should not be possible and is.
"In a future that is dark, she will bring you both light," Divara says. “Keep it, even if there is a cost.”
Then she turns and walks back into the trees and is gone, as quietly as she came, and the air returns to something ordinary and the spring begins to move again and neither of them speaks for a long time.
He finds a rock and presses it into her hand eventually. She throws it. They watch the water close over it.
"We have only spoken a short while," she says, and her voice is quiet and entirely honest. "But conversations with people whounderstand me and still want my company are rare." A pause, and something in it that costs her something. "In fact, they never happen."
He looks at her through the white veil and feels something he does not have a name for yet.
"They don't happen for me either," he says.
She turns toward him and he can feel the quality of her attention even through the fabric, the way she is truly listening.
"That sounds lonely," she says.
He opens his mouth to say that it isn't, because that is what he always says. But she has said it so plainly, without pity and without trying to fix anything, and he finds he cannot produce the usual answer.
"Yes," he says instead.
