After that night, Simon did his best to do what the oracle told him, but he didn’t see much in the way of results. He tried to study the invisible currents of the water with his eyes, but he couldn’t see them. He even meditated for hours at a time, staring at candle flames until his eyes were dry and bloodshot, without any apparent result.
Some of the other acolytes talked about being able to see the currents sometimes. Simon listened to their experiences but found that it eluded him entirely. As Simon complained one night to his friends, Kristos countered, “What do you mean? It’s so simple an animal can do it,” over a bottle of wine.
“What animals use magic exactly?” Simon asked, baffled by the man's confidence. By his own admission, Kristos had never even seriously tried to see the currents. He was here because he’d seen himself being here when he’d come here to ask the Oracle advice on an unrelated question, but that was it. As far as he was concerned, he was here to break rocks until he died at this point.
“Well, I don’t know about magic,” Kristos said, pointing to a bird that was soaring on the currents at the edge of the caldera, “But hawks see the updrafts as easily fish see the currents. If you ask me, it's not that we’re too stupid to figure out how they do it; it's that we’re too smart. Maybe you just gotta dumb yourself down a bit more.”
Simon laughed at that, and whether it was wisdom or not, he couldn’t say, but he sometimes thought the man did have a point. “How do the birds know where the wind currents will take them next?” he wondered aloud sometimes as he watched them soar through the sky.
He’d spent a lot of time as a flock of birds, but it just wasn’t the same. He’d always had a destination in mind from a very human… well, at least a very monstrous perspective. He’d been focused on the next kill and the next target, but he didn’t think that true animals thought like that.
They had control over their path with their feathers, of course, but the way they moved implied they knew what sort of air they were approaching, even before they got there. Can birds actually see the air? He wondered, trying to remember if that was something he’d ever learned about in science class. He was pretty sure they migrated by following magnetic fields, but on normal flights, he didn’t think they had anything beyond eyes and the feeling of the wind on their feathers. He wasn’t even sure if birds had a sense of smell.
Even though Simon knew that Kristos had no special insight, in time this became his fixation. With a distinct lack of fish in this lake, he couldn’t study the way they reacted to currents. So, instead, he lay around and watched the birds soar through the sky instead. This high in the mountains, they weren’t common during the day, but at night, some of the birds would fly up from where they hunted in the meadows below the treeline and nest in the relative warmth of the caldera rim, so that always gave him something to study at sunset.
Eventually, Simon decided that the birds probably couldn’t see the air like it was a physical cloud of glowing currents, no matter how much he wanted to believe they could. A bird alone seemed to show no special insight into the currents. When there were several together, though, they would all become much more graceful. The answer to that, at least, was obvious. They might not be able to see the air the other hawks and condors soared in, but they could see how the bird moved and make any number of instinctual assessments.
It wasn’t magic, exactly, but it was a certain awareness of flocking behavior, and for someone who had never been a social butterfly, it sometimes felt that way. That was doubly true at dinner when he started to figure out who was going to pair off with who when they’d had enough to drink and slunk off someplace more private. If this is what the normal kids at school felt, then I was definitely missing out, he realized. Still, he wasn’t entirely sure that it was normal. It was just different. Simon tried to explain it to a couple of his friends, but they didn’t really get why it was profound to him.
“That’s just you getting out of your own way,” Iros answered with a toast.
“Hey, don’t dismiss that,” Kristos interjected, “Forty-four years I’ve been in this world, and I still ain’t figured out how to do that!”
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The whole group laughed at that. Still, Simon wasn’t dissuaded. Getting out of his own way wasn’t a bad way to put it. So, he spent a few more months trying to get even further out of his way. He didn’t feel more enlightened when he did it, but he did feel more connected to those around him. He got to where he could pull loaves from the oven without even checking to see if they were done, and he knew who he’d be working with that day before anyone told him.
Of course, as he felt the connections between himself and everyone else grow, he also felt their desires as well, as well as his desires toward them, occasionally. It was unavoidable. He swam naked with women every morning and heard the sounds of drunken debauchery most nights.
Women had flirted with Simon during his time here. At first, it was sheer decadence as drinking and song seemed to be the only form of entertainment here, and those two things often led to sex.
Simon had eschewed that as a distraction. After that had come the attempts by some to understand his secrets. That had happened on several occasions in his second year, and while scantily clad women fawning all over you and telling you how wise you were was certainly tempting, Simon had avoided any entanglements that would prove distractions for the true reason he was here in this strange place.
It wasn’t until his newfound holistic connection with those around him pointed out that Zoa was more than a little attracted to him that he finally gave in and decided that perhaps he shouldn’t wall off his heart forever. He couldn’t say what it was about her compared to any of the other women that he worked with that made her stand out, but she did.
While he only worked with the thirty-something woman occasionally, and there was no pattern to the tasks that they were assigned together, Simon steadily got to know her over weeks and months and felt drawn to her. Sometimes, he worked with her to make cheese and butter. Other times, they cooked a meal for everyone in the kitchen or sheared sheep. Eventually, those tasks led to more casual conversations, and eventually, he was talking to her almost as much as Kristos during breakfast and dinner.
She was kind and plain, if a bit bustier than average, with dark hair and bottomless eyes. Her robes were three shades darker than his and trended toward true gray. Although she’d never made a move on him before, the more aware he became of the world around him, the more it became clear that she wanted to. He didn’t even really need to look past the way she smiled at him to see the truth.
What was more of a surprise was that Simon wanted her, too. She was just nice to be around and reminded him more of the Baker he’d never gotten with than either of the women that he did. While he didn’t work with her often, when he did, she always brought a smile to his face. That was why he’d kissed her one day after they’d finished milking the goats; it was hardly a romantic location, but it had just felt right.
Things accelerated quickly after that. They didn’t sleep together right away, of course; neither of them was wired that way. Still, Simon’s friends noticed how much time the two of them spent together almost immediately. “Careful,” Kristos admonished him one day while they were watching the birds fly. “A loner like you starts to show interest in women, and you’re going to have a whole harem before you know it. They can smell blood in the water.”
“No thanks,” Simon answered, not even bothering to look at the man. “One woman at a time is almost too much for me. I wouldn’t know what to do with two or three.”
“Well, if you need pointers, I’m sure I could show you!” Kristos laughed, but Simon ignored him. For a few weeks there, he ignored almost everything as his delicate courtship with Zoa intensified. The two of them stole more and more time away to share a quiet moment together, and paradoxically, the white-robed men and women who would show up each morning to assign them tasks began to pair them up more and more as a result.
Maybe they really can see the way that all things are connected when they reach a certain level of clarity, Simon told himself. He could feel their connection growing, too, of course, but they were an awkward couple. Somewhere between hopelessly inexperienced and a little too old for this, he eventually took her one night in her cell after a walk along the lake that night.
The sex was so intense that it bordered on violent as each of them sought to devour the other, and after they were done, and they lay there chatting quietly, he could feel the affection radiating off her almost as clearly as he could feel his own demons coming out to play.
Simon had expected to feel some guilt from sleeping with someone new after going years and decades without a lover. What he hadn’t expected was to be hounded by guilt for all the things he'd done as well as all of the things he hadn’t done in his other lives.
He felt Freya and Elthna weighing on him as if their ghosts were in the room with him, and despite how comfortable it felt to lay there with Zoa, he got almost no sleep that night as he tried to process the poison that was leaking from his heart.
It wasn’t exactly profound or anything, but by morning, he recognized the problem. With every life, my intellect and knowledge grows, but emotionally, I’m accumulating scars instead of learning lessons. Even if ignoring them is faster than coming to terms with them, it's far less healthy.
That wasn’t a new realization for him. It was, however, a call to action. Simon recalled what the oracle had said about him being blinded by a funeral shroud. His experience totals were steadily improving, so if she’d been referring to a karmic issue, then he was on his way to fixing that. If, on the other hand, she’d been trying to tell him that he still mourned the death of decades-old relationships, well, there was a lot more he could do on that front.