The Gardener of Nahi

Chapter 23

Cassidian

Myria was pressed close to me in the bluish-lit hallway, her slender fingers brushing my face as if she had just unearthed a relic buried deep in the sand.  Her eyes gazed deep into mine questioningly, but there was some sadness there as well as they narrowed.

     “You don’t know me,” she said quietly, although we were speaking in Nahese.

     I answered carefully.  “This is the first time we have spoken,” I admitted.

     She shook her head stubbornly.  “It is not.”  Then after she kissed me softly she added, “Yet you return my affection so easily.”

I was about to answer her when she raised a finger to my lips and added, “Do not say that it is because of my beauty.”

“Would the Anon you knew have said that?”

“Yes, I believe so, but he would have followed up with something deeper.”

I exhaled then as I searched for an answer, not because I could not honestly come up with one, but simply because I had trouble putting my thoughts into words.  “It’s because I’ve been looking for you,” I finally said.  “Ever since-”  I shut my eyes against the complexities of my feelings.

“Ever since what?”

     Opening them again, I parted her straight brown hair, breathing deeply before I started. 

I told her what happened then, the entire story, which lasted many minutes, starting with my dead body on the beach.  How her footprints in the sand eventually led me to Torso.  I finally said that I was drawn to her because she was somehow the key to my next life.  My next me.  I couldn’t explain it, but I felt it.  How could I not be enraptured by someone who was part of something so crucial?  Were my thoughts ultimately selfish, the way they eventually meandered back to me?  Perhaps so, and I admitted this to her.

     I also admitted that it didn’t hurt that she was beyond beautiful.

     “You know, this is payback,” she said with a smile.

     I asked her how.

     “When we were on Nahi, we met.  You and me.  Very similarly to how we are meeting now.  Except then I didn’t know you.”  She clenched my hands in hers.  “Don’t you see?  Our experiences are opposites but meant for each other, like the game of antitwin.  And when you approached me back then on Nahi, I could tell you wanted to wrap me up in your arms just like I am doing with you now.  And after a while part of me wanted to let you do it even though I never met you, because in some way I sympathized with your madness.  Somehow I believed in it in some strange way.  I fell into those waters head first.  You convinced me of that in the end.”

     I was shaking my head.  “I’ve never been to Nahi.  I’ve never even heard of-”