Pythia - Oracle of the grain

This is all rough draft material. But I think it’s important to share now even in the current state for the people who want to get deeper into the INQUE album which is based on 19 interconnected stories like this one. To see the full timeline click the button below.

BOOK 12

She eats her dinner and works on a rock carving she has been producing over the month she has lived here. The carving depicts a geometric scene of a circle surrounded by nineteen faces. She has been called hysterical all her life, but she holds on to hope that these faces she sees in her visions will one day begin to mean something to her. As she scratches the shape of an eye into the stone, she hears a hissing noise. At first she thinks it is another snake, and when she goes to investigate she realizes the sound is emanating from a crack in the rocks where there is no way for her to reach what is on the other side.

On the rug to the left of the woman sits a boiling sack made of ibex hide, and to her right a pile of hot stones sitting above the fire. The woman drops the stones into the sack one by one. After each stone is dropped a white plume of steam puffs out. After dropping three stones into the bag, the specter finally breaks the silence.

“So, who are you? What has brought you here?”

Pythia explains how she followed the smoke and the leopard from her temporary home in the peaks of the Shada Mountains. She tells the woman about her visions and her pilgrimage. The woman pours an elixir made of myrrh resin and acacia bark from the ibex hide sack into two copper chalices adorned with opals. The amber elixir sparkles and swirls in the cup, mirroring the sands that continue to circle around them, though the storm has quieted significantly and now seems more beautiful than harsh from within its calm center. They drink together, and the woman asks Pythia to what ends she is willing to go to in order to understand her visions.

Chapter #1 - Vapor

A 26 year old woman sits under an overhang created by a large granite boulder in the Shada Mountains of present day Saudi Arabia. She left her life as a priestess in Greece three years prior after visions began to drive her away from reality and the people around her. Seeking refuge in solitude, she became a nomad and left on a spiritual pilgrimage.

As she watches the peach colored sunset from atop a large granite slab, she sees an Arabian cobra slipping between the crags below. Hungry and without much choice, she kills the cobra and brings it back to her dwelling set within the negative space of the massive stones. Under starlight she begins to prepare the snake. She chops off its head, filets the body, and rests it on a flat rock above her fire. While it cooks, she carefully extracts the venom from the snake and attempts to store it in a small clay vial. During the process she does not realize a small amount of the venom has dripped across a scrape on her hand.

Suddenly a vapor begins to emerge from the crevice. It winds and curves in hypnotizing patterns, and as she follows it, it leads her higher up the jagged hillside. Clamoring up the rocks, she follows it until it begins to spiral atop a flat granite shelf at the peak of the mountain, where she sees the silhouette of an Arabian leopard sitting as if it is waiting for her. Weary, she locks eyes with the cat and realizes it is much darker than the other leopards she has seen in this area. The same smoky vapor she followed up here seems to seep out of its fur ever so slightly. Around the cat's two front paws rest ornate cuffs, one made of gold and the other of stone.

She feels a type of fear she has never felt in her life, both excited and horrified at the possibilities brought about by this glaring omen. It turns its back and begins walking down the northeast face of the mountain, continuing to lead her where the smoke left off. She has been searching for divine intervention for as long as she can remember, and now that this creature has presented itself she cannot help but follow it until she finds some kind of answer.

Determined, she follows the leopard for days through the desert. After days of walking and eating the last of the dates and nuts she had, she sees a small encampment of people in the distance. Unsure of how they will react to the leopard, she attempts to get it to stay hidden. As she approaches a group of children playing a game in the sand, the leopard ignores her directions and walks up behind the children. Startled, she puts herself between the cat and the children, telling it to stay back, but the children look at her, confused. She realizes they cannot see it.

Relieved but disheartened, she spends the night among the nomads and exchanges some gold and lapis jewelry she has made for fresh food, water, and a camel. After another day of travel she is hot and exhausted. As the sun sets and the heavens turn peach, she eagerly anticipates the cool embrace of dusk. The hot winds have been humming throughout the day, but as the sun falls to rest they begin to vibrate faster and louder. She has encountered the hot Shamal winds further north in the past, but this storm she feels in her bones. Her head fills with the low hum of the sands colliding in the vortex. She struggles to see and pushes forward, as the leopard is not fazed and does not stop for her. She cannot afford to lose track of it now.

After about twenty minutes inside the storm, she sees the flames of a fire dancing through the chaos. As she trudges toward the faint glow, the storm begins to open up around her. She finds herself in the eye of the massive swirling sands, and in the center rests a red rug with strange and intricate patterns. A spectral figure kneels on the rug, head hanging down in a state of mindfulness. As the girl approaches the specter, the leopard walks ahead and is greeted by the hand of the figure. The leopard nestles into the side of the figure and she lifts her head. Her skin sparkles, marbled with opal-like patterns. The same vapor that led Pythia from the stone to this point rises off this strange woman.

Pythia tells her that it is all she lives to do. There is nothing else she seeks besides understanding.

The woman asks, “And what of peace?”

Pythia responds, “The only peace I have felt is in understanding, and I have not felt that since I was a child.”

The spectral woman replies, “In this world, true understanding can only come with sacrifice, for we were designed to learn, not to understand. I see for you that you will one day understand your visions, but you would be foolish to believe that is all you do not know. Learning to find joy in the absurdity of this world of misunderstanding will always lead to a better life than one spent searching for something that cannot exist for you. The mist led you to me, but there are times when mist is just mist, something you can see but cannot hold, and you would be silly to try and grab it. Understanding is in the wind, and it can be seen for brief moments before dissipating like clouds in the afternoon heat. You are born in the morning under a blanket of clouds, and one day you will find yourself wrapped in them again. But for now you are seen by the sun and touched by its light, forced to learn to drink from streams of consciousness to quench a thirst that teaches you to survive and learn from your mistakes.”

After some time talking, the woman tells Pythia it was nice to meet her but it is time for her to go, and just like that she turns to sand in the wind and is carried into the swirling storm.

Pythia remains on the red rug and drinks more of the elixir. Its color is truly beautiful, the reddish gold resin glimmering like a desert sunset, and the tannins from the acacia bark causing the inside of Pythia’s cheeks to tighten in a pleasant way. She enjoys this moment of calm but remains confused about the purpose of this mystical encounter. It felt like a nice and enlightening conversation, but the leopard remained with her, and she could not shake the feeling that there was more to come.

Chapter #2 - Shifting Sands

She lies on her back and looks up at the stars. Only a small portion of the sky is visible through the spiral of sand, but she notices the star Sirius is unexplainably red. It seems to flicker, then begins to move through the sky independently of the stars around it. As it shifts, so does the eye of the storm, almost as if it is being guided by the red star. Forced to leave the comfort of the rug, Pythia and the leopard move in tandem with the storm until the sand beneath her feet begins to liquify, forming a whirlpool that slowly pulls her under.

She is dropped into a deep chamber beneath the desert, into a temple lined with sandstone columns and inscriptions she cannot decipher. There are paintings of figures wearing masks with two circular eye holes and a straight crack down the middle resembling a nose. From atop the masks extend three long peacock feathers. The figures also wear baggy frilled pants that look like they are made of dried reeds or some kind of plant. They are depicted performing a ritualistic dance.

As Pythia navigates the temple's caverns and long corridors, she marvels at the art on the walls and sees a red glowing light emanating from the end of one corridor. The hallway opens into a large square chamber, and in the center rests a glowing red orb. Is this the same red light imitating Sirius? To the left of the orb rests an oblong polished obsidian disk displaying Pythia’s reflection. She cannot look away. As she is hypnotized by the black disk, the red light in the room begins to pulse, and her reflection becomes hazy. A strange mask appears in the reflection overlaying her face.

Her back suddenly snaps straight and her head falls back as the mask materializes on her face. She runs her fingers across it and enters a trance. The mask is made of a translucent crystalline material, composed of four winding chambers each containing a different colored liquid. Losing control of her own movement, Pythia’s head tilts left, and the liquid within the mask moves throughout the chambers, settling in a way that paints an angry face. Her head tilts right and the liquid shifts into a smile. Her head centers and the mask looks indifferent, contemplative. Then her neck snaps backward; her head hangs so far back that it is upside down. The liquid inside the mask drips into a crazed expression and her mind floods with thoughts that do not feel like her own.

Images flicker of faces, the same faces that haunted her now appearing in a moment of clarity. This moment could be what tethers her to these strangers. An elderly Japanese man writing in a decorated cave, the mask hanging on his wall. A man wearing a polar bear hide speaking to a crowd before a fjord, the mask clipped to his waist. A young girl struggling to swim as waves push her into rocky cliffs while the mask floats beside her. Various scenes throughout history flash through her mind. She feels her body sweating yet also feels outside of it, hovering just above her own head.

She sees unfamiliar faces, half human and otherworldly. A pale figure in a striped robe pouring blood from a bowl above his head into another at his feet. Groups of the figures she saw on the temple walls dancing on the banks of a burning river. Everything she sees she understands, but she does not know how. It is as if somebody else's memories are being singed into the her mind.

When she comes to, she is kneeling in the middle of a sea of desert sands. The mask falls off her face into her hands. She stares at it in bewilderment for some time, feeling an overwhelming sense of calm given what she has just experienced. The people she has seen in her visions for years are somehow connected to the spirit in the desert, the temple, and now the mask resting in her hands.

She rises to her feet, her knees cracking loudly as they straighten. The leopard curls up beside her in the sand. She wonders if there is more to these intense visions or if life will return to how it was before she followed the smoke from that rock. She continues northeast toward the city of Nippur, where she knows at least one friend, a scribe named Buriaš, with whom she can confide.

After a few more days trekking through the desert, Pythia encounters a group of Egyptian traders heading to Nippur. She joins them along their route, and they share stories of their travels along the Ways of Horus, deserts crossed, and deals brokered between Egyptians, Kassites, and nearby lands.

When she finally arrives in Nippur, she walks along streets lined with mud brick buildings made from alluvial clay and reeds. Lotus flowers bloom on the surface of irrigation channels dug alongside the pathways. She finds Buriaš in his small shop, bent over a cylindrical piece of agate, his bow drill etching intricate designs into the stone. He looks up, smiles, and greets her with a warm hug. “Come, sit,” he says, gesturing to a small wooden table. He pours two clay cups of pale, slightly sour barley beer. Pythia settles in, finally able to relax in a quiet sanctuary after her harsh two month desert journey. Buriaš insists that she stay with him in Nippur before eventually returning home to Greece.

That night, as she closes her eyes to rest, something strange happens. Laying on her side with her eyes closed, she sees the room around her. She opens her eyes, but nothing changes. Startled and confused, she blinks rapidly, but her vision remains the same. With no difference between open and closed eyes, she decides to keep them open for a while. She sits up and takes the mask from her bag on the floor. Tilting and turning it in her hands, she watches the liquid shifts into various expressions. The craftsmanship, the material, the energy it radiates all tell Pythia that this mask was made with a purpose.

She ponders what it could possibly mean. Tired, she slips into a meditative state, lost in thought about the mask and the spirits she encountered in the desert. She sees a fragmented flashing vision of scales moving within her eyelids. A large serpentine creature slithering up a torchlit cavern. She cannot make out its face beneath the burning light of fire emanating from its eyes.

She watches as the being snaps stalactites off the ceiling and breaches the moonlit opening of the cave. The creature straightens its massive body, wings splaying out from its sides as its fiery eyes light up the mountainside and creatures pour out from the cavern behind him. The creatures are the same shadow dancers she had seen in the visions granted by the mask. She recognizes this place as the Corycian Cave in her hometown of Pytho.

As she slips out of her trance she knows she must return home quickly to understand the meaning of all this.

Chapter #3 - Smoke Signals

We now see Pythia in her hometown of Pytho, sitting beneath a mountain spring speaking to a small group of children and an elderly woman. Goat bells and scattered voices echo down the face of the mountain littered with olive trees. The people are happy to have Pythia home as she is the most recent descendant in a line of priestesses who have guided the town for centuries, interpreting the will of the mountain, spring, and serpentine spirits that sustain the people of Pytho.

As a baby Pythia was found at the mouth of the Corycian Cave by her aunt Nysa. Her mother had vanished and her father’s name was never revealed. Nysa raised Pythia as her own, hoping one day her parents would return, but they never did. With Pythia now home, she continues her work as a priestess alongside Nysa.

It is time for Pythia to speak as a priestess for the first time since returning from her pilgrimage.

As she kneels at the edge of the sacred spring, the water clear and cold, its surface bathed in newborn light, the air smells of wet stone, resin, and the faint tang of herbs she has crushed for a ritual, myrrh and laurel steeped in clay bowls, their smoke curling in soft, hypnotic spirals. A small group of devoted villagers gathers at the lip of the cliff, a handful of elders and shepherds. They have come seeking her voice, though none truly know what form it will take.

Pythia inhales the fragrant smoke, letting it fill her lungs, letting the mountain hum through her chest. The surface of the spring ripples as though responding, faint vibrations run from the soles of her feet to her temples. She closes her eyes and the world behind them falls away. Her eyes and hooked scar begin to glow a faint purplish blue.

Then she speaks. Her voice is quiet at first, almost hesitant, but it carries across the spring like a breeze stirring the water.

“The mountain remembers,” she says, the words rolling off her tongue like stones over a cliff. “The shadows sleep beneath and watch our dreams in daybreak. Their blood bubbles in the veins of the living. The spring holds its balance in silence. Possession waits where light forgets to trickle down, shaking itself free and onto us in fire. Fear not the beast in the dark but the whisper that teaches your heartbeat to falter. Stone after stone will awaken when its forgotten name is spoken to the ruins.”

The villagers lean forward. Some clutch their chests, others scratch their beards. Pythia does not see them. Her eyes are open but unseeing, fixed on the rippling spring. The spring shimmers brighter as if responding to her words, and the smoke from her clay bowl twists into shapes that seem almost alive, dancing in prophecy.

Pythia feels a presence watching from below, an awareness as old as the mountain itself, the serpent and its thousand shadows stirring. She collapses to her knees at the water’s edge, drained but filled with a certainty she has never known. She has spoken truth to the world, one day soon it will listen.

For the first time, the villagers realize they should take Pythia’s visions seriously. With the glass mask an oracle has been born.

She spends weeks speaking to the people beside the spring that feeds them water, fear, and hope. Hoping to break through the illusion prescribed to her by the mask and the voices in the wind, she gathers materials and a few men from the town to venture into the Corycian Cave to seek proof of her visions.

The first few days are fruitless. They return home and venture into new caverns each day until they finally find something that seems out of place. One tunnel glows with amber stalactites and glistening quartz veins, its figures scraped into the limestone walls. Ancient inscriptions and images reminiscent of those she saw in the temple beneath the desert. Promising and terrifying.

They move deeper. Torches cast shifting orange light across crystalline features. More ancient depictions appear. They enter a catacomb filled with the bones of people and animals. The bones are stacked neatly into the walls and ceiling. The bones near the entrance are fresher, some with small pieces of flesh attached, some burned, others left to rot. Deeper inside, the bones grow older. Overlaying the white bone patterned walls are paintings of shadow dancers carrying corpses of goats and men, living or dead, down into the abyss. Bringing them to what they still cannot say, but Pythia knows in her heart they are meant to feed the one with burning eyes.

Growing up she learned of primordial deities like Gaia and of chthonic gods. She wonders if the figure she saw was truly birthed in the underworld.

After hours traversing the sharp edges and swirls of the bone covered cavern, the group encounters ruins shaped like a flower, the same flower she saw blooming in her mind’s eye connecting her to the holders of the mask. On each white crystal petal rests the body of a person resting at peace. Pythia stands facing the center of the flower. The portal is carved directly into the cave wall, shining with thick veins of quartz and amber minerals.

The group in the cave stands silent. Only water dripping from the ceiling and the flicker of torches break the stillness. She knows from her visions this edifice has the capacity to be a portal, but in its current state it seems nothing more than an ancient piece of stonework, more intricate than anything she has ever seen. One thing she cannot understand is how this has been here resting in secret for all these years. Or had some people known of its existence before it faded from memory?

As she sits and ponders the possibilities, her fingers begin to tingle with static and her knees hit the jagged stone ground.

“Say it,” a voice yells, ringing from inside her ears… “Say it. SAY IT.” The voice yells louder and louder until she wakes up by the side of the spring. 

She had been carried out unconscious, and was now being woken up and cared for by one of the men she had ventured into the cave with. His name was Akireu. Before Pythia left on her pilgrimage she only knew him as a terrible man, but after his willingness to go into the cave and his help in this moment allowed her to feel at ease with him. He asked her what had happened and what she knew about the shrine they had seen. She told him all of the truths she knew and about the visions she had been having.

“I have seen a future where something otherworldly comes from that cave. I haven’t seen what it intends to do, but I cannot shake the thought that the only possibility is that everyone is in danger. I have no idea how to stop it from happening, and even worse, I cannot imagine any world in which we can stop it if it truly is set free. It reminds me of a story told to me by my aunt Nysa of a primordial beast that protects our spring at the center of the world from running dry. When I was speaking at the spring the other day, I was compelled to say, ‘Stone after stone will awaken when its forgotten name is spoken to the ruins.’ I believe that as long as nobody summons this thing with its name, it can stay buried beneath the mountain and behind whatever kind of seal that shrine provides.”

CHAPTER #4 - Ashen

“The sacrifices have been made. We have enough energy to bring 99 Asheni dancers and control Python in the overworld for one full night. All we need is for the boy to speak and break the seal.” Says a bloodied man wearing many peacock feathers atop his head.  “Compell him to do it in 3 days time, and have everything ready at the portal.” Says a man wearing three more pristine peacock feathers on a crown. 

The rivers in Ashen run with water, but an oily layer burns on the surface so that you cannot swim in it. To drink it would make somebody sick, but the people here are thirsty regardless of whether they drink or not. The same goes for hunger, comfort, and almost all of the other feelings one can have; all that survives in them is a pendulum swing between pleasure and numbness, what they call feeling now, two scraps left behind in the wreck: pleasure when it spikes, and the receding tide of numbness. The children play games and shoot each other with arrows for fun because they cannot die again. This place is a purgatory for the kinds of spirits that could not learn to be good, and became possessed by shadows during their life under the sun. Despite the perpetual pain the spirits here have created a society that mirrors the overworld. They dance hysterically to broadcasts of an underground radio show that is amplified over the burning streams and through the resonant damp caverns.

The city of Ashen is one of the richest beneath the crust. Millennia of human lifeforces have been siphoned to and invested into its rich soul economy. When somebody possessed by the shadows takes a life in the overworld they perform rituals to send their prey’s spirit essence down here, where it is weighed, divided, and converted into currency. Those in power have pried open secret paths to be reborn, but the cost is too high even for many of the old kings of Ashen. 

This is why they want Pythia. Since the beginning of time there has been good and evil, creation and destruction, all of the greatest spirits are tethered to and stored within the glass mask, and when it attached itself to Pythia it made her the most valuable person to kill to everyone in the underworld. The riches now bound into her spirit could ransom thousands of trapped souls out of Ashen’s fires.

The shadows have taken root in a cult that lives in the mountainous outskirts of Pytho. They wear the cultists like skins, driving them to raise altars of bone and stone, to spill blood in patterns that crack the world open just enough for the shadows to reach through and claw at the power tethered to the Glass Mask. In addition to opening the portal, these rituals have allowed the army of Ashen to capture and possess Python, a child of Gaia originally created to protect the spring and people of Pytho. Now with it subdued and mindless the shadows plan to set it upon the town to unleash calamity, using the chaos as cover while they close in to tear the spirits from the Mask.

To Be continued

This was a first draft of one of the 19 stories I have been writing, to be considered alongside my music. I am scatterbrained and have started all 19 but have finished none. Will share more soon!