The Seer

When she is almost to the door, she tells them clearly and with an air of special authority: :quot;The child is healthy; the mother is healthy; it is a girl."

She goes back inside and the crowd around the door eventually goes away as the villagers return to their own little lives. The little baby is strong, and wailing, with a little bit of black fuzzy hair on her head. Her parents name her Miryra.

The men who climb my tower are the most impatient of men, because they seek to know right away that which they all will learn eventually, anyway. They will ask me for secrets that will not aid them, and knowledge that will not save them. They hope that by knowing, they can stand a better chance against Destiny.

They all blend into one another; the strong men, the brave men, the brilliant men, until the names overpower my mind and they are all left as one creature-a horrible, wretched beast that climbs up my tower every night and begs me to tell it soothing lies. Instead, I hide my face in the shadows.

The village has one book, an old thing as dry as the air outside, that no one but the oldest man knows how to read. When little Miryra comes to bring him water from the well, he is almost blind but for the sparkle in her face. He reads to her the tales of sorcery and adventure that live beyond the desert and the village, tales of princes and cities, of great towers and oracles. Every night while the smoke from the sooty fire clogs his ancient eyes, he reads, until she knows each story in the marks on her hands and the veins in her heart.

He will die while she is still young, and no one in the village will mourn overmuch for the old man far past his prime. Life there will be normal, as it always is. Only the little black-haired girl will be left to clutch his weathered book in her little hands, and cry into the sand as the pyre consumes his thin and empty face.

It is common wisdom in the kingdom beyond the tower-the kingdom you never heard of, nor ever will again-that my truths are too strong for mortal men to bear. They warn all travelers heading in my direction of the horrible powers I can wield. They say I can hurl great bolts of lightning from the sky, and crack the bones of the earth with a lift of my finger, that I drink the blood of infants under the full moon to gain my powers of insight.

In truth, I cannot remember how I came to know all that I know now. I am sure it must have begun sometime, for all things have a beginning, but after all these eons the other lives in my head have almost drowned out my own, so that the more I knew, the less I became.

It is common wisdom that mortal men cannot bear the truths I hold, and so it seems to me.

The words on the page aren't enough to hold her for long. Out into the square she walks, late at night, when no one is watching. She never sleeps long and she never gets tired; her mind refuses to sit still for a moment longer than it has to. There are always a thousand different stories in her head, and the only way to keep them is to finish the thoughts that she can never stop.