Spirit of the Lonely Places

IX: Recovery

Exciting.

Something was exciting, wasn't it? The voice said so; it ceaselessly resonated the same words with each echo.

Exciting. How exciting.

How exciting.

It did not take long for the words to become an incomprehensible din, static in the background of a noiseless world. The syllables blurred together until they no longer sounded like language—instead, they carried across like nonsense, tones without meaning. Devoid of purpose. They were a woeful reprise that sung of naught but loneliness, for no other voice would make itself known.

Isolated. How exciting.

Somewhere, a door swung open—whether it was real, tangible or not, none could guess. Consciousness flooded in like a rising tide, sweeping away the tangles of cobwebs that had long since spun themselves into the dark crevices of a dormant mind. In the murk, a name rose. The thrashing, oncoming waves whispered it softly—a murmur above the roar:

Akseli.

This time, the word—the name—did not fall in with the static. It stood alone, revolving in the awakening mind with an unshakable gravity.

Nerves fired in the mind like a fire struck on dry wheat. What had once been dark suddenly flared to life, pockets of memory and realization opening like flowerbuds in the dawn. New webs began to form, snaking from memory to memory in an ever-strengthening chain until at last the ends cohered. Missing links found themselves irrelevant, a drop in the bucket compared to the massive significance that was the web.

Akseli. That was a person. And the mind—the web, the tides, the static—that was a person too. Or rather, it belonged to one.

It belongs to me.

It was hers; hers! She was the mind. She was Akseli, the girl who had grown up by the river with parents she'd rarely seen and a grandmother that taught her all she knew. She was the girl who spoke to spirits, who used to chase the clouds and smell flowers and begrudgingly accompany her mother for lessons on herbal healing. She was Akseli. The shaman. The speaker for the spiritual realm.

The one who'd allowed the most feared spirit in the history of her people to exist again.

How exciting.