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leohtttbriar · 3 months ago

Text

the brain is just the weight of god—

She stood in the snow, in a clearing made up of boulders and mountain-shrubs, and glanced down at a stone that sat atop the snow rather than covered by it. It had a swirl, a pattern, of alternating red and gold colors, though the overall shape was lumpy and unattractive. She picked it up and it was as cold as ice, cool in a way a rock normally wouldn’t be, so she held it tight in her palm and let that iciness wipe away the heat of her burns. And then it spoke. “We match,” said the voice.

Winn Adami finally meets a Prophet.

Written for trektober 2024 Day 4: 'Hey cool rock'/First Contact

The snow in the mountains fell like thick drops yet made no noise as it hit the earth. The spiny trees with their ombre leaves and curling roots collected the snow on their lines until the whole of the world was traced with white. Adami stood among it, thought of the lines that made her, of the lines of red and black and gold that wove across her damaged skin, and she considered that it might be too cold for this, standing in the snow, that she might be too hungry to stand much longer in the freezing day, but she was comfortable with it; she was comfortable with the denial.

It was a quiet cloister she’d been dropped off at, after the war, after she had nearly been burned alive by the only divine creature she’d ever known. The Emissary had recommended a quiet one when she lay in the hospital and the doctors tried to figure out what sort of graft would work best with the radiation burns on her skin.

“You’ve given much, Kai Winn,” he said, with that same diplomatic bend to his tone that obscured what he meant and made every talk with him as thrilling as it was. “You should rest.”

Adami could no longer play that game, as much as she appreciated it. “I’ll not bother you again, Benjamin. Breathe easy.”

And then she’d been wheeled into a surgery in which she felt nothing as they wove boron filaments and granite plates over the patches of her skin which would no longer heal.

The muted study of the people in the mountain school of Bajor meant that at the very least everyone around her had to pretend to be above their repulsion of her appearance (which was, undeniably, a horror). And the cool and icy world at so high an elevation relieved the irritated itch between her skin and boron or granite grafts. Many in the government or working in supplementary institutions sent her messages and requests, commissioned articles from her, asked for her thoughts in one way or another, so she didn’t have to leave the world she most understood, she just never had to be seen in it.

She was, as always, in that dark room, where Opaka had suggested she be, doubting the existence of her people’s gods. But now, at least, the scenery had improved.

It became a habit, when the snow was most wet and heavy, to step out onto one of the meditative paths around the temple and walk in the solitude with barely enough protection from a chill breeze. The radiation burn from the Pah-wraith still hurt like the edge of a hot pan and only when she was as icy as an icy world could she forget about the other ways her body had been violated before she’d been nearly put down like a wayward once-loyal dog. She imagined sometimes if she stood still enough in the snow, amidst only the trees, the grafts of stone and metal in her skin would creep across the rest of it and make her into a silent and revered object, capable of being admired and feared and loved. Maybe, in some way, she would become something of a divine story for the faithful, another falsity to cling to, which turned little girls who denied themselves into women who believed with dangerous fervor.

Now, on one of those solitary walks in the winter woods, Winn Adami met a god.

And then it spoke.

“We match,” said the voice.

She dropped the rock in the snow but it did not sink down. It almost seemed to glow, but that could’ve been a trick of the light.

“What,” she gasped, heart racing.

The rock seemed to almost warp before her eyes, like a thing melting, though it did not melt or change shape.

“Your body and mine,” the voice echoed. “Layers of stone.”

Adami looked around the clearing, trying to find a person or creature who was capable of speech, not a ridiculous magical rock.

She was, as ever, alone.

“I was told,” said the voice, and now Adami was convinced it was not coming from the rock, but the rock was making itself heard, in some way or another, in her head. “That this was the most stable form to take in a universe of causality. It has taken me very many years to learn the language of this place. One thing after another. It’s complicated. Time should be here and there, not now and then. But I try not to judge.”

“Who are you?” asked Adami, feeling weak in the knees all of a sudden.

“You have names, I noticed,” said the rock, in its particular way. “We don’t have names. We are all as one, you see. And can take many forms. They said when—a strange word, when—I reached the place of places, outside the bounds of our world, I would be one thing. I haven’t come up with a name yet, though. I’ve only been here a short time, I think.”

Adami shifted. “How long have you been here?”

“Thousand or so years. It was difficult to calculate at first because I had to learn what a day is, and a cycle and another cycle beyond that. The people at the Temple aren’t very talkative either. As soon as I spoke to any of them, they would just fold their hands and look up. They rarely, rarely is a recent word I've learned, respond. Strange.”

“Strange,” Adami repeated, choking on something in her throat. She looked around again, now wondering if she’d gone insane, but there were no other signs of her waning mind other than the rock before her.

She collapsed to her knees, helpless, in the snow. A Prophet. A rock. A prophet from beyond the line of light.

“You are made of many things,” said the rock. “Did you grow that way?”

The stone in her skin, holding her together—that is what it meant.

“I was punished,” said Adami, numbly.

Now, in her most powerless and pathetic shape, now a prophet spoke. She might laugh.

“Strange,” said the rock, again.

The snow continued to fall and gather, melting along the lines of metal on Adami’s arms.

“You are weary.”

“I wish to rest,” said Adami. “But I do not deserve it.”

“Why not?”

Adami had a simple answer to this, and an even simpler one. She ignored both and provided the answer most would find acceptable, that most repeated of her in the political halls she used to roam.

“I let myself be taken by one of your kind, an evil one. I am faithless.”

The rock morphed-and-did-not-morph. Looking at it made Adami feel dizzy.

“That is a funny thing,” said the rock. “You seem wholly one collection right now; untaken.”

Adami looked at her deformed arms. The granite in her skin sparkled as she twisted them in her lap.

When Adami had first entered the School, eyes set on becoming a Vedek, Opaka Setha, a young but rising star, had given her a copy of the Rirpe text, with Setha's annotations, and said to her: Add on to it, if you like. You have to write yourself down somwhere, Adami. Adami did not know what she meant or what possible response she could have given. She ended up annotating on those margins like a child might, full of I thinks and I feels and a thousand other judgments that should could never show another soul. Setha asked to see what she had written and Adami had said she preferred to read a text without marginalia, a lie which would forever color the way Setha looked at her, thought of her, even as Adami's own dire devotion to Opaka grew.

“I am pieces,” she said, because she was and because there was a certain satisfaction to saying the words with the image of Opaka Setha's stern face in her mind's eye. “Ruins. The leftovers of a silly girl who thought she could ever believe enough." She swallowed down a mouthful of cold air. She felt briefly as if she were caught in one of the city forums, having been approached by a citizen who wanted to hear her speak, and all she could give were her own words—none belonging to who the people really wanted to hear. With practice, she had become very good at extemporaneous speeches. "I have been in cells I chose and cells I did not. I have given myself darkness and been given darkness. And still, only the evil found me." She nearly laughed. "Because, perhaps, that’s the only thing I believed in.”

There was a pause.

“Why do you not look like other people?”

The rock had little tact.

Adami sighed and glanced up at the snowing sky, letting the droplet flakes fall upon her mottled cheeks.

��I was burned and would have kept burning if they did not implant certain materials on my skin.” She brushed her left fingers over the line of boron on her left arm. “These materials worked best with my body—they came from Bajor.”

“Strange.”

“Yes.”

“What other strange things have you done? Tell me.”

Adami closed her eyes. Focused on the snow. Heavy on her skin. She was beginning to consider she might no longer be real.

“I locked myself in a room without light,” she ended up saying. A confession was being born, being made, unlike anything she’d ever witnessed within herself or without. A confession that was honest, even in the face Opaka’s eyes and rough fingers on her ear. The ghost of that touch screeched. The confession bloomed like blood. “I locked myself in the dark because I didn’t believe the Prophets were what they were. I'd done it many times before...The Emissary. And many times since. There is nothing like the dark."

"That is strange, indeed. I don't understand it even a little bit."

Adami laughed. "Nor I, and I still returned to it." She opened her eyes to the bright, bright snow, gathering light even in the shadow of the snow-shower. "In a dark room there is no light. There is no food. Or clothes. Or people. It's just the walls. And it makes so much sense, when you're there, for days on end. It starts to be the only thing in the world that makes sense. You start to think nothing is written anywhere, nothing is written down, and what is written down is as graspable as the dark. And the dark isn't graspable at all. It's just dark. It's only dark. It teaches you nothing. You can only accept."

She watched as a large snowflake slowly melted on her freezing skin. She was surely in pain but she didn't want it to stop.

"They beat us in the cells," she said softly, still staring at the drop that was once a snowflake. "During the occupation. I held her, I held Opaka, after she had insisted on praying in front of a particularly vicious guard. She was defiant and she got hurt. I prayed when it was dark and she prayed at the bars on the cell, for all to see. We were all beaten, either way. But I still held her. That is also strange, yes?"

"No, that is rational, I think. What else does one do? In a life of places or a life of time, what else does one do?"

Adami covered her eyes and told herself not to weep.

"Strangest of all," she said into her palm. "I believed The Prophets might speak to me. If I stayed in the dark. If I prayed. But I only ever heard Opaka." And then the confessional reached it's pathetic conclusion. "And I think she despised me."

Winn Adami was not blessed with being loved in return, spoken to in return, or held. Kira Nerys had once looked at her with a conflicting admiration that slowly and slowly faded until Adami had proved herself most faithless of all--she treated The Prophets like aliens, when she should've treated them like God. It was the narrative of Adami's life and she could not help it. What was divine, she maintained with a hard heart and a harder tongue, was not something that could be seen, or met, or listened to. It was beyond the comprehension of all who lived in this universe of one-thing-after-another, this place of places, this causal fabric. But no, she was not so high-minded to think that her resistance to The Prophets' dictates was solely derived from some new doctrine she was writing, though she was writing it. She knew she was rejected, she knew she was misformed, she knew she was not what The Prophets wanted as either ear or voice.

Adami, young and hopeful, had watched the frown form on the face of the woman she loved, and she had listened to the hesitating tone of Opaka Setha as she touched her ear and said, Adami. I cannot feel your pagh. You may need a second touch.

She often wondered what Benjamin Sisko would think if he touched her ear. She had imagined it once, early on in their association. She had imagined his fingers coming away burned. It did not take long for the predictable idea to set into her imaginings, though. Benjamin would touch her ear and say I feel nothing and Adami would know with certainty that what is divine had never made it's way into her. She could exact her policies, rebuild all that was lost when the invaders and occupiers and oppressors came to raze and to steal and to own, and her power would yet be nothing but the ephemeral, nothing but the dead fields upon which so much green used to grow. Perhaps when the Cardassians had come they had poisoned the water and some unlucky Bajorans were born without spiritual souls.

You are too fixed on the material, Setha would say.

You deserve to rest, Benjamin had said, ironically.

And what use trying to make sense of either of them.

"But I did not despise her," she said. Or him.

The rock did not speak again for a while. Adami let herself grow more and more cold.

Then:

“We created our world from another,” said the rock. “We do not remember it but we know it. It is happening, though from here, in the place of places, I see that it was long ago. We were caused. There was a first mover, who moved us there. We moved us there. We move us there, and will. It is strange. It was a planet. It broke apart as we moved into the time of times and three pieces were given. Two in places of place, and one that is us.”

Adami frowned. She tried to pick through the pieces of the rock's logic.

“Are you saying…that you are us?”

“We match,” said the rock. “I said that already. But I might be mistaken. I am still working on the word ‘already.’”

“Oh,” said Adami.

“You match your place of places. You match your planet. The belief you must have in it—for your body does not burn now even as it burns. I do find places confusing, but you are a place and you are confused so perhaps I am finally learning.”

“Yes,” said Adami, though she had no idea what she was agreeing to.

“Time and place,” said the rock. “That is me and you."

Adami would have burned. She would have burned and burned and burned into nothing, consumed and consumed and consumed. Benjamin saved her, though she does not remember how and did not try to find out. If they ever talked about it, she is sure something in both of them would break.

As it was, Adami might be preemptively broken and yet a stone from the place of gods was telling her she was smashed into her world and had turned as ubiquitous and varied as the earth. She would have burned for Bajor, which she knew because she had been starved and beaten and kept in the dark for Bajor, for the thing of all things: the world that was chosen by the gods. You are too fixed on the material. Adami might laugh. To think that she had become the walking, talking emblem of everything she had failed to set aside in her pursuit of the divine. A body layered with stone and metal sourced from the mines of the planet she had sought to hold for as long as she could. You are too fixed on the material, Opaka would say to Adami, never seeing how entrenched in her faith was the irony of a very real divine mind. Material indeed.

"I do not know 'love' or 'despise,' though," continued the rock. "Love. Love. Is that time or place?"

"Beyond both," answered Adami easily.

"Another first mover, then," said the rock. "More first than us. What word is more-first?"

"Before. Or beginning. Originary."

"Do you do 'in love'?"

Peculiar little thing, this god.

"Yes," said Adami, thinking of Setha's soft hand on her ear, her soft breath on her face as she leaned close to break Adami's heart.

The rock seemed to shuffle in the sparkling snow.

“I think I will go back to the Temple to think about that.”

Adami raised an eyebrow.

“Can you get there on your own?”

“Oh, yes, I’m already there,” said the rock. "Already."

“Right,” said Adami rising to her feet.

“Let us talk more tomorrow. 'Tomorrow' is so strange.”

Adami brushed the snow off her arms and legs and shoulders. She breathed a breath that filled her to her stomach and made the snow shower within her chest. The world of lined things, traced with white ink, was clearer for that breath, for the way the flakes had slowed and made the air clearer, for the way she felt her eyes wiped clean of something—perhaps an eyelash. She let the quiet fill the quiet, watching intently. Listening to nothing at all.

Then she said, “Yes.”

#trektober 2024 #star trek #kai winn #winn adami #ds9 #kai opaka #my fic

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