Welcome to Gaia! ::

Zekiel’s mind was not made for books.

He tried, of course, and the wealth of information they contained fascinated him—their raw, effectively endless capacity for describing the world about them mind boggling to grapple with—but yet, no matter how he tried, they still gave him struggles. He did learn to read, and to write. Slower than his peers, undoubtedly, but he had learned, and he did love the words on the page, his eyes often pausing on and dallying to flick back repeatedly over a given one here or there which stood out to him.

But the going was always slow. While he recognized each word individually and its stand-alone meaning, the strings of words in text did not always connect one to the next naturally in his mind as they would were they spoken, and his attention span made the disconnect all the more difficult to grapple with. One moment, he would be focusing — or attempting to — pouring his attention onto the parchment—

And then he would catch himself with his eyes fully detached from the page, thoughts wandering rampant and loose between his ears. He didn’t suppose he especially minded it.

But it did make his classes difficult.

And it did frustrate some of the Sanctum tutors.

One such instructor enough so that she assigned him someone to collaborate with him on his next assignment and help him through his ‘issue.’ As Zekiel progressed down the winding hall of the Sanctum and across the threshold of the east library, where the room smelled pleasantly of still space, ink, and parchment, he hoped he would not be a burden to his peer-tutor.

Zekiel hadn’t been sure whether to expect his company there already when he arrived or not. He’d intended to be timely, of course, but time was such a fluid and relative thing. It had a way of getting away from him. Thus, when he made it into the library and saw only one of the nearby reading tables occupied, he assumed he was second to arrive after all and approached.

“Your eyes are especially bright,” he greeted, smiling, forgetting for a moment that libraries were quiet spaces and using his general, open conversational tone. When it earned him an immediate, sharp shhhhhhhhht! from the front counter, he blinked, gaze flitting that way before he offered an apologetic, “I am sorry, I forgot…” just as loudly, unfortunately, as his first words. This garnered a flurry of shushing hands from the scolding librarian—but Zekiel’s eyes were already back on his company, smile still in place as he settled to take a sit beside her.

“I am Zekiel,” he began. “Sister Barmellan said it might improve my assignments if I worked with one of her brighter students, and you do glow quite wondrously. Are you here for that? I hope it doesn’t displease you to be if you are. We could do something else if that would please you better.”

Encouraged, Zekiel brightened and set out the tome and journal he’d brought with him.

“If it pleases you to help, I do hope that you can, then. Sister Bramellan thinks sometimes that I am hopeless, but this cannot be so since I am very hopeful about many thinks. Unless perhaps she means that she has no hope that my talents in her class will improve and I think perhaps that is so, except that if you would be more pleased if they do with your help then I will do my best to make it so.”

There was a specific assignment. He knew it in a sense, but had forgotten what precisely it was, and in light of company and other things to talk about, it didn’t seem immediately necessary to bring up, so he carried on instead.

“What else do you enjoy besides helping?”

Zekiel perched upward in his seat, encouraged the other’s engagement. “The greenhouses are lovely,” he agreed. “I love the mornings, when they are freshly watered and it glistens on them like small stars and all of the space smells of earth and green. It is wondrously beautiful. But I also enjoy so many things I fear I wouldn’t have the time to list them all,” he answered.

He took a moment to consider, though, before beginning to list.

“Like when the sun wakes and sleeps and paints the earth, and the smell of freshly cleaned sheets, new bread, animals that enjoy to be stroked, paths that I haven’t had a chance to walk yet, smooth stones, the scent of the ocean when it breaks against the shore and the air is filled with its scattered pieces…I also enjoy warm sand and speaking with people, and walking without shoes, but sometimes I enjoy having shoes, also. I love morning mass, and afternoon mass, and evening mass, and the sound of bells, and words. I especially love words. We could move to the greenhouse if you like it especially much there. One of the wondrous things about books is that the letters are all the same no matter where you open them.”

Zekiel hastened to nod. “Never slacking before the gods,” he agreed.

These tasks, though, were not given to him by the gods, but by a Sister of the church, and while generally that was more than enough, he was not even certain that it pleased Sister Bramellan when he did do the assignments. If anything, she often seemed displeased, and though he didn’t doubt that all the assignments had purpose and benefit, he did wonder, when he struggled especially hard with some with no signs of progression, if perhaps there were assignments that suited some students more so than others, and he was deficient in this particular type, making it less appropriate for him.

His peer, however, seemed to want to do the assignment, and had said that helping him would please her at least, so for the time being, that would suffice as incentive for him. “Would you tell me your name?” he asked as he opened his text, trying to recall which portion had actually been assigned — a task which resulted in him flipping idly through several pages, looking for familiar pictures. “I should like to know it.”

“Fallon.” Ze smiled, rolling the name on his tongue and repeating it several times softer. “Fallon fall…like fall…on, fall autumn, umn, tumn…like leaves.” He glanced to her. “I think it’s a wondrous name.”

His fingers paused on a page.

This at least looked familiar. To the side of the paper was an ornate, inked in recreation of an early church with accompanying illustrations below it, detailing the interior. The chapter spoke of the early history of the church on Yael, the Sanctum’s roots, and the structure within, not simply of the buildings themselves, but the tiers of those that worked its halls and the separation of duties and responsibility. Ze lifted his writing utensil, eyes skimming over the sea of words and watching them roll, and then to the assignment sheet.

1. When was the first church constructed on Yaeli soil?

Zekiel rolled the pen between his fingers before beginning to write, ‘Both in the morning and in the evening and at night, because it could not all be built at one time.’

“Fah-lone,” he repeated, lip quirking up at the edge. “If I said it otherwise it would not be your name, so it must be said as it is.”

His attention moved down when Fallon redirected it back to the book, and he turned his pen again in his fingers, eyeing the text and then Fallon’s finger where she pointed. So indeed there was a year. But the number meant so little to him, it was hard to concentrate. What was a ‘year’ in the grand tapestry of all things that had once been, were now, and would ever be in the future? A number assigned arbitrarily to a concept which couldn’t really be contained or conceptualized by numbers at all. Four books he could understand. Or a hundred books. Or a hundred shoes. One sun in the sky that moved by the will of the gods, and a hundred thousand stars. All of these were appropriate places for numbers.

But a ‘year’ to denote a time so many days past long before his parents or their parents before them were a concept on the minds of anyone who might sire them, before the city of Pajore was what it was, and when all the world was different—it was a difficult and strange association to make. Just the same, since Fallon had found it and Sister Bramellan apparently ‘wanted’ it, Ze took his pen and traced the shape of the number, copying it carefully. He wondered as he did, on the moment that ‘year’ came to be, what was on the mind of the man who would lay the first brick to build the first church? What troubled him and what had he fed himself with that morning? And what were the first words spoken by the first priest on the first sermon.

“Do you ever muse,” he said, “on times past in books written and think that in those times, when they were ‘now’ as this moment is now to us, everything then was as alive and full of as many wants in each person’s mind then as there is in every now that we breathe in?” And it wasn’t that he had ever concerned himself with wanting to be remembered or tethered to a concept in any permanent form such as ink on parchment—he wasn’t sure he did at all—but just the same, the next question came: “Do you think what it might be, to be only that to someone else far from now in a different ‘now’, with your name penned on a book where they must find it to copy on some parchment…what if they say your name wrong? It won’t be your name if they sound it wrong, and no one could correct them.”

Zekiel tipped his head. ‘Preserve the facts’ seemed like such an odd concept. If they were what they were, then so still would they be regardless of what was done now. Events which had already passed would always be what they were and could not be changed. To him, that was what separated the past from the future—and made the future distinctly more interesting.

But. Fallon thought it was important, and at her suggestion of a different teacher, his attention did perk in full, eyes widening a fraction with surprise. “You think so? I have not met Brother Alez. I did not know we could be switched—” The moment the words left his mouth, though, he realized his mistake, because in fact he had been switched before, more than once. Simply never at his own request. He assumed it was a decision made by those with a better understanding of things than he. Still, he flushed and corrected himself. “That is that I never requested a different teacher…I am sure they all know their jobs well. My mind is only a strange vessel which loads and carries its cargo differently than others, I think.”

He glanced to the single answer that had been written in, and then back up to Fallon.

“We’ve answered one. Would it please you now to walk among the hanging green? Or would you prefer I do another.”