Pieces of a world that once made sense to her. Parts of puzzle she struggled to see the whole of. Memories of home.
She stared at the door and its familiar, intricate engravings. She couldn’t deny it, the way she felt in this place. Prison or not, this tower had been her home. “Welcome home, Dnara,” she said quietly to herself. A loud click echoed and the door swung silently inward.
The darkness waiting beyond lasted only a few seconds before a series of soft pale lights began glowing around the perimeter, filling the room with over a dozen small stars. Different than the everbright lamp in her hand, but done with similar magic, she guessed. She’d never been allowed beyond the first wood door, always told to wait while Keeper Ishkar retrieved one book or a dozen, setting them into her arms before expecting her to carry their weight up five flights of winding stairs out of the basement and up to his office. She could feel the weight of those thick leather bound tomes in her arms now, and she could smell their musty ancient paper.
She expected that same scent to assault her now, but the lights illuminated an alarming sight. Not a single tome nor scroll awaited her. There were no full bookshelves from which Keeper Ishkar would have plucked his books of knowledge. There weren’t even any shelves! Stepping into the barren stone room, Dnara stood in abject silence, wondering where all the answers she’d hoped to find had gone.
As her eyes adjusted, a small singular object set on the stone floor’s center caught her attention, its light, off-white color juxtaposed against dark grey. With slow footsteps, she made her way across the smooth undecorated stone, and found a square piece of parchment with slightly curled corners, no bigger than her palm. On it, in handwriting she could mistake for no one else’s but Keeper Ishkar’s, read a riddle.
‘I am what is waiting at the end of all things.’
And much like the state of the tower ruins over her head, the untouched metal door and the barren room waiting beyond it, she was surprised to already know the answer to this riddle written by her keeper’s hand. It was an answer she’d only recently learned for herself while floating on the dark sea of shadows and staring out to a distant barren shore where one life had been sacrificed to save another. At the end of all things awaits, “A beginning.”
The parchment caught fire in her palm but did not burn her hand, and from its flames arose an undulating blue smoke. The wind pushed the smoke from her palm, leaving a tiny mound of ash behind. She fisted the ash and watched as the windblown smoke drew a line from the center of the room to the far wall. She followed the trail to its end, to the place on the wall at chest height where the blue smoke had painted the stone with a singular rune outlined by a tilted square. An unexplored place within her mind immediately deciphered the rune’s meaning: the end. Opening her hand, she found another rune painted onto her palm by the ash: the beginning.
Could this room, its riddle and these runes have been meant for her after all? Could she have been someone’s dearest child? Before the shadows of doubt could creep in to curl her fingers closed around the rune in her palm, she took in a breath and pressed her palm to the rune within the diamond. Meant for her or not, she’d come too far to fall back into shadow.
From where her flesh met stone came a glittering light. It warmed her hand, but she kept it intently pressed to the stone, even as the heat became uncomfortable and the stone began to glow a molten reddish orange. She had endured more than this heat, faced more than the fear of being burned. She had come so far for answers, helped by so many kind souls and fought through the unknown world of blight and shadow, all for this. This moment was meant for her! Without fear, she would seek the answer to who she could become at the beginning of this new journey, even if it meant the end of all she had once been.
The light outlined her hand then radiated outwards like sunbeams, forming a square no wider than her shoulders. The brilliant light etched itself around the sides of the square, became blinding for a split second then went dark, abruptly casting the room into the void as the perimeter lights extinguished with it. Almost forgotten, the everbright lantern in her other hand renewed its glow, filling the space with not a dozen stars but a soft and gentle moon.
Holding the moon up, she couldn’t help but gasp at what she saw. The square of stone carved out by the light had disappeared, and in its place existed a hidden alcove. Within this alcove waited a single, plainly bound book. She reached for it but stopped as the lantern light illuminated her other hand. Her palm, still warm, bore a new white scar forming a perfect circle with a dot to show where the line had begun and where it had ended. Not the end nor the beginning, this rune combined the two.
“The infinite,” she said aloud, her whisper echoing within the room. But, the word felt incorrect. Closing her eyes, she focused on the rune, trying to recall how she knew its name. A page turned within her mind, a gentle voice spoke, a lullaby could be heard carried on the wind and a smile welcomed her home. “Iru.”
A warmth filled her heart and she shared a smile with the
