Chapter Five

The air inside the temple was thick, laden with the pungent aroma of burning incense and spices. A hazy layer of smoke blanketed the ground, wisps of vapor curling and twisting along the cool surface of the smooth, stone floor. In the darkness, long shadows stretched across the room like fingers spreading. Reaching. Their spectral forms dancing along pillars and walls to the flickering flames of a few, dimly lit candles.

A hush had fallen over the temple that evening. A melancholy silence that was disrupted intermittently by the slow, rhythmic booms of a drum in the far corner, it's low rumbles rolling gently through the air like distant thunder.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Tizrah's body throbbed with each beat of the drum, its somber vibrations resonating deeply throughout her entire being, each beat an agonizing reminder of the reason she was here. She gulped down a shaky breath of the potent air, the powerful concoction of scents and spices burning her throat and stinging the inside of her lungs.

The ceremony was beginning, but Tizrah was finding it difficult to stay focused. She always hated this ritual.

The cleansing of a Soul-less body.

It was a somber affair. A grim reminder of her people's bleak situation.

The temple priestesses were gathering around her now. Gauzy layers of silken gowns and vivid scarfs of red and gold fluttered silently through the hazy dark as the girls floated gracefully past and came together to form two orderly lines that trailed behind her.

Ahead of her, another priestess glided silently into view. Lailah, the most graceful in the group. Atop the girl's head was perched an ornate jug of clay, its curved body tapering upward to form a long, narrow neck. Tizrah knew it to be filled with ceremonial cleansing water, the purified liquid that had been painstakingly crafted with an exact blend of essential oils and spices.

Tizrah's auburn eyes slid across the room, her gaze following Lailah's fluid, elegant movements. But the knot that had been forming in the pit of her stomach began to settle inside of her like a ball of red-hot coal, making it difficult for her to focus her vision.

I can do this, she told herself over and over. I've seen my mother preform this ritual hundreds of times. I can do this.

But the words rang hollow in her heart.

Ahead of her, the tall ceremonial jug had remained perfectly balanced while Lailah floated gracefully across the floor like she was on a cloud. As she drew near, she bowed her head forward, finally coming to kneel before Tizrah, presenting her with the precious, cleansing water.

The water that was meant to purify the body of a Soul-less; a human turned shell, to purge it of any trace of darkness that may still linger after the attack.

Tizrah pushed a steady breath of air through her nostrils, releasing some of the anxiety that was squeezing ever tighter around her chest. After all these years, after having taken part in at least a hundred of these rituals, she was well aware of the fact that her heart may never grow completely numb to these wretched ceremonies. To these dreadful events. But she was Tizrah Pias, daughter of Azrah Pias the High Priestess of Valhil. She still had an image to uphold.

Slowly with as much composure as she could manage, Tizrah stretched her arms out toward the offering, taking the jug up into her grasp, relieving the other priestess of the burden. Then, as Tizrah lifted the ceremonial jug onto her own head, the other girl slipped silently away, disappearing once more into the shadows of Tizrah's peripheral, leaving Tizrah alone to lead the ceremonial procession.

On her own.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The slow, repetitious beating of the ceremonial drum continued in the foreground of Tizrah's mind. Endlessly. Unrelenting. Hammering incessantly against her brain like the agonizing throbs of a migraine.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Tizrah tried to focus her eyes straight ahead, working to still her torrential thoughts and steady the heavy pounding of her own restless heart. She began to wonder if the priestess behind her could sense her mounting anxiety in the same way she could sense theirs. But, of course, she knew that they couldn't. Not in that way.

Soon the procession took off. Moving in unison, the priestesses drifted gracefully through a dark, narrow hall of pillars. Water jug perched on her head, Tizrah pushed through a gauzy curtain of purple and gold, and stepped over the threshold into the main sanctuary of the temple, where rows of much taller pillars stretched up to the top of the high ceiling above. In the large, open room, a hush had fallen over the mourning onlookers as Tizrah's eyes shifted to her mother sitting on the High Priestess's seat overlooking the procession. Azrah's eyes flickered back at her, reflecting in the light of a few burning candles, her expression betraying no emotion, but she could feel her mother's demand. 'Don't mess this up'. So Tizrah tried to harden her face to stone, trying to simulate her mother's own hardened expression. But Tizrha's ability to hide her emotions had always been a weakness, and even in this moment, as she approached Musa's body laying on a stone alter in the middle of the room, it was all she could do not to visibly recoil, or to buckle to her knees in hopelessness. But under the burning gaze of her mother, Tizrah somehow managed to make it to the foot of the alter without wavering.

And there he was. The familiar thin form of Musa, the baker's kid, not many days beyond his sixteenth birthday, laying on his back across the length of the alter in his pure, white ceremonial robe. But the face... It was certainly the face of Musa in every way, except that it wasn't. It wasn't him at all. Tizrah reached out to his heart with her senses, but nothing was there. Just the empty shell of a person. The chest rose and fell so slowly it was barely detectable with the naked eye, and the eyes were flared wide open, staring unblinking at the ceiling, but there was no longer any spark of life left in them. Musa's body was here, but he was gone. Devoured by... by things that Tizrah really didn't want to think about right now. The soul-less boy laying before her now was already enough to take in as it was.

Hunched next to the boy was Matta, his mother, sobbing and wailing into a handkerchief, calling her son's name and begging him with all her strength to return to her. But that, of course, was impossible. Yet Tizrah's chest began to ache with the the overwhelming, indescribable pain that she could feel pouring out of Matta's heart. So excruciating was the mother's agony that Tizrah nearly collapsed over the alter on top of Musa's body herself, wailing and crying her eyes out uncontrollably for his loss. But Tizrah had spent her entire life with this affliction- this power to feel what people feel- this 'blessing' as some called it though Tizrah thought of it more and more like a curse with each passing day, so thankfully she had learned how to control her outward appearance no matter how strong the emotion that was being projected.

Gingerly, and with care, she dipped a white towel into the purified water and began dabbing it along Musa's fingertips, around the nail beds and cuticles, supposedly chasing away any residual evil that might have been left on his body, although she already knew there was none. There was nothing there, neither him nor anything else. But thanks to wide-spread superstition among the people of the desert, she had been forced to preform this pointless ritual time and again. And she resented every second of it. But as usual, she was just doing what she was told, because there was nothing else she could do. No where else to go. Nothing to run away to. Nothing beyond the city walls but a desert wilderness and those horrible creatures that... that did THIS to Musa. As much as she wished it wasn't true, Tizrah knew was stranded in the desert of Nur, trapped within the walls of Valhil with no hope for anything more. At least that was the bleak message written about in the Holy Scriptures.

Tizrah's eyes become un-focused, her mind already wandering to some far off fantasy world where she had found civilization or some other world beyond this desert. Muscle memory took over as she inched up Musa's lifeless hand with the cleansing water to begin work on the arms, when suddenly, Musa's arm shot up from the alter with lighting speed, latching onto her wrist so tightly she thought he'd snap the bone. Surprised and horrified all at once, her mouth opened to let out a yelp, but no sound came out. In a panic, she tried to wrench her wrist free from his grasp, but the grip was unimaginably strong. Then, slowly, as if something straight out of a nightmare, Musa's body began to rise, stiffly, unnaturally, sitting up on the alter when he shouldn't have been able to do so at all. And slowly, unnaturally, his head turned around at a angle that should have broken his neck until his eyes met hers. Except there were no eyes. Where Musa's eyes should have been were now only two hollow holes. Two voids of darkness, staring at her with such intensity she thought she might be sucked into them.

Tizrah looked on in abject horror as he leaned forward, bent down toward her, bringing those empty eye-sockets closer and closer until his nose was almost touching hers. She wanted to jerk her self away from him, but somehow she couldn't. She had found her body had been paralyzed to the spot, either by fear or perhaps by forces beyond her control. She was forced to look into the black abyss that was his eyes. Forced to watch his expressionless mouth twitch and stretch across the length of his jaw, splitting his face into a twisted, unnatural smile that chilled her to the bone.

Then, Musa... no... not Musa but something else... whispered in a chilling voice that was not altogether human, "He is coming. HE is coming. Look toward the skies. He is coming."

Then, without warning, a sequence of images flashed through Tizrah's mind, images of the desert and of millions of stars racing through the sky, of a massive tree, absolutely enormous, the like and size of which she had never seen nor fathomed before. She saw visions of a green, fertile land and... and the figure of a man, tall and thin but stately and elegant. His outline silhouetted against a star-blanketed sky with ice-blue eyes that pierced through her soul. For just a moment, all these images flooded her mind at once in the blink of an eye. But just as soon as they had come, they were gone leaving Tizrah's brain on overlad. The next thing she knew, Tizrah was sitting sitting on the cold tiled floor at bottom of the alter step in the middle a puddle of water... the cleansing water that seemed to have been spilled at some point during the ordeal, though she couldn't remember exactly when.

"Tizrah!" The stern voice of her mother called just then, its sharpness echoing off the chamber walls. "Tizrah, what on earth are you doing, child? I told you not to mess this up!"

Tizrah found that she could move again. Chest heaving, heart throbbing against her rib cage as though it might burst, Tizrah's head whirled in the direction of her mother's voice, first observing the fiery rage burning in her eyes, and then her hands gripping the arms of her chair so tightly that the knuckles had blanched white. And Tizrah wondered why on earth her mother was angry and not scared out of her whits by the absolute horror that had just taken place in the very epicenter of the sanctuary. But when Tizrah turned her attention back to Musa's body, he was just laying with his back on the alter just as he had been before. His two empty eye-sockets were no longer empty and there was no longer a hand gripping her wrist. The ache of Musa's hand around her wrist still lingered, but there was no mark indicating that anything had ever bruised it. It was like nothing had even happened. In fact, no one else seemed to have seen it either. There was nothing like fear coming from the hearts of the onlooker's gathered around the chamber, only concern, disgust and even pity directed toward Tizrah herself.

Had they not seen what she had just seen? Had Tizrah been the only one to witness it? Had she just hallucinated the whole thing? But no, it felt too real. Too palpable. It wasn't a hallucination, but rather a message. A vision. Someone or something was trying to reach out to her... to tell her something. Was it truly a message about the coming of the Prophet? Tizrah didn't want to believe it, but it was almost too obvious. This was the second time that something in a dream or a vision had told her that "he was coming." What else could it mean?