Shai awoke in a cold
sweat, fear caught in her throat like the silent scream she could not
sound. Standing on shaky legs she
wobbled over to the small porcelain wash basin in the corner of her tiny
room. The cool water still smelled fresh
enough to use. Shai’s sleeves fell into the bowl as she splashed her face. Sighing, she methodically re-rolled them and
wiped the water from her face with a worn, fraying towel. Shai shivered, goosepimples spread across her
skin. The thin, woven rug beneath her
bare feet did little to block the chill of the stone floor beneath. She leapt onto the thick bearskin beside her
bed, catapulted into the pile of heavy quilts and burrowed into their warmth,
careful to hold her damp sleeves away from her body.
Small, even among the priestesses, Shai’s
robes had to be shortened, bound, or rolled in every capacity. Utility pins dug into her shoulders but did
their part to compensate the wide neckline. A seamstress in town donated the
white cotton A-line shifts in lieu of her yearly tithe and she only made one
size for them. In truth, the garments
were only ill-fitted for Shai who aspired to be waifish in build who could
easily pass for a young child. No matter how heartily she ate and in spite of
the extra vitamins after prayer, Shai could not make gains in height or breadth,
just one of many oddities setting her apart from the others. Blowing a tuft of
unruly silver hair from her face, Shai hugged her knees in tight. She would give almost anything to be just a
little less skeletal and a few inches taller.
Asa and Kriya constantly reprimanded her vanity but that was not quite
right, she simply wanted to be an equal instead of an oddity. Too small to draw water from the well or work
the laundry press, Shai even struggled to clear dishes at meal time.
Pulling the blankets
even tighter the tiny priestess wondered how much time had passed. Reflection time in Moon Temple tended to
drive Shai to the brink of madness so she often napped to pass the two hour
block of solitude. Without a timepiece in her room, Shai relied on the other
priestesses or the great timepiece to notify her of the end of Reflection. Unfortunately, the great timepiece only
chimed on the hour and she did not hear the soft tinkling radiating through the
winding corridors from the Temple’s center.
Shai frowned and stretched her mind to the Priestesses rooming around
her but found them happily occupied, their minds locked in meditation.
Shai looked around
her room, bare even by the Moon Temple’s standards. Her three-shelved, borrowed bookcase stood
nearly empty. She knew most priestesses
had pictures of their families, reminders of who they were before they entered
the Temple in service of Moon Mother.
Not Shai, her semi-warped and faded shelves held a few shabby prayer
books and a small etched map of Isthile, all gifts from her surrogate
sisters. Shai had no family, no past, no
memories of a time before. Nobody could
tell how old she was, how many annuals had passed since her transition, or if
she had transitioned at all. Even Elder
Priestess Kriya with her exceptional gift of Sight remained flummoxed.
Shaking her head
clear, Shai began wording her prayers for the evening session, hopeful as ever
that the right phrasing would catch Moon Mother’s ear. Shai always prayed for the same two things,
her transition and her past, though the words did not come as readily when
requesting the return of her memories. This often struck her as odd but a small
voice in the back of her mind suggested there could be a reason she forgot in
the first place. To not know where one comes from is a greater burden than to
be uneasy in one’s own skin. Shai found
herself afflicted in both matters.
Still, she counted herself lucky because of Kriya’s kindness. The Elder
Priestess saved her from being shunned and cast into the Fog. A shiver ran down Shai’s spine. The Fog.
Everything about it screamed danger, or so the other priestesses told
her. They explained it as a vast
mystical entity encircling all of Isthile.
The memories they flashed in Shai’s mind were frightening and
captivating. The Fog appeared to be a
dense mist as high as the eye could see and filled with crackling blue lights.
Some of the priestesses swore they could hear voices of the lost if you
wandered too close. Only Shai wondered
what lay beyond the Fog and the thought nagged at her often.
Shai’s mind wandered
back to the dream, grasping at the threads she could recall, pushing the edges
of her mind, trying to see something new in it. She stared at the tile work
around her altar, purples of every shade, some bearing the mark of Moon Mother,
and surrounding the small statuette she offered thrice daily prayers to. Shai marveled at the beauty of the Moon
Mother’s visage in the flickering firelight from her jasmine candles. The small idol’s porcelain eyes frozen in an
upward fashion, her delicate lips curved in a knowing smile, warm and soft as a
mother’s should be. And then it came,
hard and fast, Shai tried to react to the aura, to control the vision, but then
she was falling – again.
