#maynia Day 22 – Before the Council of the Ancient

Previously in our story...
The new inquisitor – formerly the doctor – upended the friar on the Clayton ranch so that Cork McGraw would burn the Clayton barn down. It had realized that the corner room in the barn was an aberration known as a receiver. It acted as an individual, in opposition to the inquisitors’ collective will, so it was imprisoned.

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In the inquisitors’ vast cave, a smooth path ran forward in a darkness lit only by scattered points of light. The lights emanated from jumbles of boulder on the cave floor, which arched upward on both sides of the path, and the multitude of lights scattered through the cave appeared to rival the stars in a night sky.

A grouping of four inquisitors walked on the path, though above them in the darkness, prisoners and jailers were moved through the air by an unseen force, each prisoner with their jailers on the way to stand before an inquisitor that presided from a boulder amid the jumble at each point of light.

The grouping walked with a captive inquisitor leading the way while the other three trailed behind it in a triangle formation, to make sure there was no funny business. The captive inquisitor’s hands were bound in front of it with a band of energy that glowed green in the shape of an infinity symbol. The captive inquisitor had been a doctor in its former life, but its former self had dissipated – it no longer remembered its former identity.

Though it could no longer remember itself as the doctor, it did retain the knowledge it had possessed in life, and that knowledge was slowly being added to the inquisitors’ collective pool of knowledge, as it shared consciousness in each new grouping it telepathically synced with. The grouping of four it had participated with in the tower – when it had reacted from its former self to upend the friar – had gained its knowledge; the grouping that moved it from the tower to the prison had gained; and now the three that walked behind it possessed the knowledge.

The path split; a track led off to the right, curving upward with the cave floor, till it leveled off in a jumble of boulder. The grouping followed the track and wound through the boulders until they reached two tall boulders that, leaning together, formed an archway. They passed through this into a chamber lit with ambient green, where they faced a dais in the shape of a semicircle. On the dais boulders were arranged to form chairs; each arrangement was unique, and there were twelve seats in all with an inquisitor on each one.

This was the Council of the Ancient, the repository of all knowledge possessed by the inquisitors. They had called the captive inquisitor before it, not as a punitive measure – and its imprisonment was also not punitive; they recognized the new inquisitor simply needed to be sequestered for a time to rid itself of its old identity – calling it before the council was a means of acquiring and investigating its knowing.

The Council of the Ancient was composed of inquisitors so old that their albinolike skin had faded to complete translucence; the ambient green light passed through them and became a slightly darker green, which marked their form outside of the mauve-colored robes. Their eyes remained pink, and appeared to float inside drawn hoods on the dais.

A shudder passed through the inquisitors as the grouping of four synced with the grouping of twelve. “We are,” the grouping of sixteen said in unison. “We see,” the grouping said as the new inquisitor’s knowledge was added. “We understand,” the grouping echoed, as it understood the fear of the receiver that eroded the boundaries between worlds, and the destabilizing threat to order in the worlds it received from.

The captive inquisitor also understood anew – the bounty of addition to the Realm, the entities that had arrived and the interactions that sprang from their arrival, the learning opportunities for denizens of the Realm, and the Clayton’s purposeful role in provisioning new technology.

But the grouping recognized, for the first time, that the receiver grew in strength, and much like Charles Renault, it inferred the threat that growing strength posed to the integrity of other worlds and its own Realm. “It must end,” the grouping knew aloud. “We choose not to annhilate others,” the grouping understood. “Cork is the agent,” the grouping echoed.

The captive inquisitor stood in perfect agreement with the grouping, and it realized that in its passage from the tower to the prison and to the chamber before the Council of the Ancient, Cork had still not burned the Clayton’s barn down. The grouping recognized the captive’s agreement – and its lack of personal identity – and the green band around its wrists faded away into the green ambience, and it was free.

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Start with Chapter 1

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Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/