“Do not worry,” he said softly. “Whatever you see, we will face together.”
I looked up into his eyes in surprise. He too understood the gravity of my mission and had the same fear I did—that I would be forever altered by what I saw. I kissed him again, and steeled my courage.
***
When I entered the cave, the darkness greeted me with heavy silence.
I took off my sandals and walked forward, feeling answers waiting for me beneath the sleeping stones. I spread out my pallet, lit a candle, and settled in to dream.
As I lay there, never had I been more aware of time and all its trappings. Every small working of my body—thirst, hunger, physical discomfort—railed against me. Dreaming with purpose meant leaving the briars of daily life and entering the fallow lands of the mind. Dream questing is a Herculean task.
My time in the cave was the most difficult of my life.
For the first day I thought only of water, swallowing the dry air until my throat ached. By the second day my stomach clenched and clawed for food, and by the third my skin itched everywhere as my limbs twitched from their desire to move. I was hot and cold all at once; my body had become a stranger. I wanted nothing more than to end my suffering as I drifted in and out of consciousness. But I could not.
To divine is to imagine the world rightly, to see past the illusion that we are separate from the entire fabric of reality. Here I was attempting to have a waking dream of the future—all because an ancient oracle had seen me do so. The only problem was I had no idea how to accomplish such a feat. In all my research, I had read how to quiet the mind, to still the body, and to banish all doubt so the dream would come. But beyond that was a mystery. Waking dreams are not the usual dreams of sleep, but something far more potent.
I floated in a temporal realm for days, until the silence, the waiting, no longer existed. Then, without warning, the string of my thoughts snapped like a severed thread and my mind opened.
With incredible clarity, I saw the Oracle’s symbols pass from hand to hand as they traveled through the future, and I saw those hands as one unbroken chain: those hands became my own, those stories became my story, and it is this tale that I will share with you now.
As you read my account of the future, you will ask how I came to know it. The best explanation I can offer is that time and memory go hand in hand. Without our memories, time would not exist. What we perceive as the world is really memory in motion. The visions I had in the cave were memories yet to happen. And any memory that has yet to happen is a prophecy.
But prophecies can be dangerous. The greatest prophecies have been hunted by kings and coveted for their power to bestow knowledge that does not yet exist. I won’t deny I feared what would happen if I were to commit my vision to paper, and I did not do so after we returned home. Instead, I waited.
When I emerged from the cave after seven days, Ariston rose to his feet, visibly relieved. He could tell I was altered, but he did not ask what I had seen. There was so much I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t yet. The knowledge I now possessed was too great. In that moment I didn’t know if I could ever share what I had seen. So we simply embraced and he took me home.
For several days I lived in a daze; everyone thought I was fatigued from our travels. Aella came to our home to care for me and ordered me to rest, barely letting me out of bed.
One day, after I’d begun to recover, I took out my father’s parchment and reed pen from Alexandria. I now understood why I had brought them with me. The time had come to use them.
I began to write with the greatest speed, committing my words to paper as though my pen were flying on the wings of Nike, for I have foreseen that I will not survive my child’s birth.
King of Cups
Semele clicked back to the previous page and double-checked the time line. On one page Ionna made a shocking revelation, that she would die in childbirth, and on the next she wrote of a couple journeying through the Zagros Mountains to Gundeshapur, a city founded several hundred years after Ionna’s lifetime.
Semele frowned. She must have made a mistake when she was photographing the manuscript—or worse, several pages were missing.
“Hey, you’re up early,” Bren said from the doorway.
Ignoring the crisis on her computer screen, she turned to him and tried not to look as frustrated as she felt. She didn’t want to deal with reality right now.
He leaned over and gave her a lingering kiss. “Working?”
“Yeah, sorry.” She gently pulled away. “I’ve got to have this finished before…” She trailed off.
Before what? As of yesterday she wasn’t even handling the Bossard Collection. So why did this matter? Technically it shouldn’t, but she wanted to know the rest of Ionna’s story—she needed to know why her name was in the manuscript. Deep down she knew this wasn’t a coincidence. And that was what bothered her the most.
Bren sat next to her on the couch wearing only his jeans. “Sem, last night was wicked.” He took her hand.
Semele avoided his eyes. Last night had been wicked. She had been the one at the cauldron and she had conjured up an image she wished she hadn’t seen.
She woke early that morning to find Bren asleep beside her, his leg and arm across her body like a barricade—as if even in sleep he knew the realization she had come to. The clarity of her vision last night had stunned her by showing her what was already in her heart. It felt like turning around and looking into a mirror, already knowing what she would see.
She had lain there in bed, trying to figure out what the hell to do, until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
Without waking Bren, she’d grabbed her robe, tiptoed from the room, and quietly shut the door behind her. After a double espresso, she returned to translating. Even after everything that had happened last night, Ionna still had her undivided attention.
