related by Lora of Many Generations

 

“Accept the sorrow. In all times and all places life endures. It endures to spring up, unfazed after drought, slavery, cruelty, excess, mass murder or imbalance. It matters not. Life endures. The only rational foundation for our minds is acceptance of this knowledge,” Shelan soothed.

“Grief is so physical with her,” Rall commented.

“It has robbed her of volition,” Shelan agreed.

“Listen to us,” Rall instructed. “You fight what has happened, as though you could bring the dead back to life or alter events long past. But you cannot. Pon is gone. Zygon is gone. Many, many more than you are aware of are gone. Our history is what it was. None of us can go back and alter it!”

I wondered if I should mention the power of the Portal. I decided there was no point. I did not presently have access to that power. I wondered if I did, if I could go back in Iglenda time and stop the birth of the Harmonizers – heal all this misery before it ever began.

“It is alright,” Rall continued. “Everyone who has died here has died for the right reasons.”

I wondered if the Purics would agree with that statement. Probably they would, but for entirely different reasons.

“All we can do is live and hope to give our lives back to the Universe in the service of something larger than our lonely, individual selves,” Rall finished.

I tried to listen to his reasoning, to detach from my own internal struggle, comprehend what he was saying. All the strength had indeed left not only my limbs, but my will, as Shelan had noted. I lay in her arms like a limp doll. She carried me down to the roots of the world of the Iglendas, to the Place of Fire and their healers. Was I angry about the way things had gone in my crazy adventures? Did I have a messiah complex? Was I an intemperate adventurer, an adrenaline junkie? I felt dizzy. My limbs ached. Did I have a fever? My heart clunked in my chest unevenly, like a broken clock, a machine with rocks in its gears. Tight bands gripped my chest. Breathing was a conscious moment by moment effort.

Was I dying?

“You wish,” my hindbrain laughed, taunting me still.

“You will have to understand your way out of this one,” my inner father counseled.

“You will have to forgive,” my inner mother commanded.

“Yes, but who?” I wondered.

With that I surrendered myself completely to the Iglenda healers. They spoke to me in the language of dreams of the wisdom of hope and the strength of love. Caught on the hard horn of reality where life and death clash irrevocably, I had forgotten all three: dreams, hope, love.

I was cradled in warm, fragrant waters. My body was massaged with strong hands. I was sung to in soft voices. I slept off and on for what seemed like weeks. In that time, I found the will to look at everything that had happened since I left the Bush with my father, was dragged through space and time by he and Zygon, all I had seen and done since I was taken by Pon.

I had completely denied the idea I loved Pon the entire time I was with him, and even after his sacrifice. But, what else could explain how losing him had made me prostrate with grief? That was what I was going through: absolute grief. How else could I explain my irrational urge for violent vengeance against his killers even though the people of this world were all equally guilty where acts of incomparable violence were concerned? Finally, how could I have loved an alien kidnapper from another world? Was it because I really was stockholmed?

No.

It was because I really am an intemperate adventurer and worse yet, an inveterate believer in one person’s ability to affect the destiny of many. Pon didn’t suck me in, he gave me an outlet, as had Zygon. I had jumped at the chance to go off and shape the destiny of a world with them.

In Xexra’s eyes that was okay.

Would it have been okay in my mother’s eyes, my father’s? No, probably not. My father was a idealist who became a cynic. My mother was a down to earth pragmatist who had no use for any idea “too far out there,” as she would say. That was why I had played coy with myself about my real motivations. I wanted to be myself and please them at the same time….…an impossibility because I am not either of them.

Yes, I am a lover of ideals, they are my passion, as they were my father’s. Yes, I want down to earth results for those ideals, just like my mother. But, somehow through the marriage of my father’s and mothers’ DNA and influences, I had become an inflamed pursuer of ideas that could change everything here and now.

In Rall and Shelan’s eyes that was okay.

I had ended up on Rathe because whatever nature and nurture had created in me found a home here on an alien world where intemperate idealism had been the order of the day for 10,000 long years. Yes, I was definitely here for a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with my own nature. Having accepted that, I finally knew what I had to do because it was in me to do it!

When I surrendered to myself, my strength began to return, slowly at first, but steadily. I requested physical training and received it. The Iglendas assumed I was training for battle.

I let them.

I was in a way. Battle was certainly something that might be required of me, but I had other ideas in store.

Ideas were the name of my game. I just needed the power to execute them. The power Pon had handed me by essentially making me his proxy was one source, and I finally turned it consciously to my advantage. I chatted up every Iglenda that came my way. If they made assumptions about my specialness, I let them. I figured I’d need all the influence I could get when the time was right for each phase of my plan.

Then, just as I was beginning to set things into motion, the Universe in its inimitable way, provided me with an immeasurable source of power: Adana suddenly appeared in the Place of Fire bearing access to the Portal and the sentient computer, Raynah, as well as a wish to help me come what may.

I couldn’t have planned it better if Zygon and Pon both had been helping me! I might, in my intemperate sense of destiny, have assumed the Universe Itself was on my side – if I were intemperate in these matters.

to be continued...
 
 

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The Dark Side of Love series ©2006-2008 by TDunyati-Long (TDHawkes)