Chương 25: Chapter 24: Grey Robes

They headed to the communal dining hall, where they took their seats at the long, worn wooden table. This time there was no leftover bread, no crispy miracle to share, but the steaming tea was there as it was every night, its herbal aroma floating in the air like a promise of calm before the dark. Anya began the community time with her sharp clap and her tired but genuine smile. Conversations flowed like a mountain stream sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always alive.

First came the gossip about the neighbors: the woman from the backstreet who had screamed at her husband all night, the boy who had stolen a piece of fruit at the market and bolted between the guards' legs. Then came the funny anecdotes witnessed throughout the day: an anurhy that had snuck into a fabric shop and tangled a roll of linen with its clumsy paws, a nimora that had glided too low and collided with a post, falling to the ground with an indignant flick of its tail. Everyday things. Small things.

Things that made everything feel soothingly normal, as if the world were not a place of pyres and brutal hierarchies, but simply a stage where life happened, with its absurdities and small joys. Selena limited herself to listening until the evening ended and Anya led them to the chapel. Selena followed the sister of charity's words, her lips moving in silence, the ritual nearly memorized by now, though the words still felt foreign to her like borrowed clothes that didn't quite fit the body.

Then came the silent procession to the communal dormitory, the creaking of straw under settling bodies, the whisper of coarse blankets. The whistling of Enara's breathing, that raspy and labored sound that was already familiar to her, was the last thing Selena heard before falling into the arms of sleep. Then, she dreamed. She was in a labyrinth of concepts. The walls were not made of stone or adobe, but of elongated shadows doubts that rose like insurmountable walls.

The corridors were dead ends, and she ran through them with a racing heart, searching for an exit, a loophole, a crack through which to escape. When she finally found an opening, when light filtered through the end of the hall, what she found was an emerald-green flame, vibrant and menacing, blocking her path with its poisonous, jewel-like glow. She continued like this running, stumbling, rising until the dream shifted instantly, as if someone had changed the set of a play with the snap of a finger.

Now she was in a cave. The stone was dark, almost black, with grey veins that glowed faintly under a light with no visible source. Selena entered through the mouth of the cavern, feeling the cold of the rock radiate toward her. Right at the entrance, small glass jars were lined up against the walls, and inside them, blue lights danced like trapped will-o'-the-wisps, casting trembling shadows over the uneven floor. She moved forward.

Step by step, leaving behind the jars and their luminous prisoners, venturing into the depths. The passage gradually widened until it opened into a natural expansion of the cave, a circular chamber with high ceilings that vanished into the darkness. In the center, surrounded by torches whose flames burned with a normal, almost mundane orange color, stood a man. He was tall, very tall, and wore a hooded robe of grey ashen, the color of ash that still holds the heat of the fire.

He was thin, almost ascetic, and remained motionless, like a statue carved from the very stone of the cave. He did not move. He only listened. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Selena wanted to approach, but her feet were pinned to the rock floor, as if invisible roots held them fast.

The man, the acolyte, she thought, though she didn't know where that word came from turned his head slightly toward where other beings held the torches, blurry figures at the edges of her vision. His face was unrecognizable, only a pale smudge beneath the hood, a void where eyes, nose, and mouth should be. And then his voice reached directly into her mind, like a thought that wasn't hers but suddenly inhabited her skull.

—Consciousness itself is the divine act— he declared, and the words resonated like bells in the vacuum of the cavern, multiplying into echoes that chased one another. —And only the being those questions itself is free. Selena struggled against the invisible roots holding her feet, but she couldn't move. The acolyte continued speaking, but now his words were mute a movement of lips that produced no sound, like a fish out of water.

Until, suddenly, other phrases emerged with crystalline clarity, carved into the very air by an invisible hand: — Gods are mirrors carved by those who fear their own reflection. Break the mirror, and you shall see the pure form of thought. Selena felt a shiver that did not come from the cold of the cave. It was the heretics. The ones Lyra had mentioned with a trembling voice, the ones who wore grey robes, the ones who had been burned on the outskirts of town barely two months ago.

It was clear even to her dream: these words were heresy, divergent thought, the seed that the Church of the Eternal Sap uprooted with fire whenever they found it sprouting in fertile soil. And yet, they sounded strangely familiar. She didn't know why. She didn't remember hearing them before, not in this life, not in this world. But they resonated somewhere deep within her, in that space where the man from Earth still struggled to understand his new existence.

They were echoes of something that his mind, trained in another life for analysis and critique, recognized as an uncomfortable truth. Other words arrived in snatches, cut off, incomplete: —inside... flourishes... meditate... They were a counterpoint to Father Theron's teachings, to Aelthra's compassion, to the eternal Flow that connected everything. They were the shadow to the light, the doubt in faith, the question where there should only be an answer.

The tolling of a bronze bell reached her ears, filtering into the dream like water finding a crack. Selena already knew who it was. Even before opening her eyes, before her consciousness anchored itself fully to the waking world, she knew the sound was Anya's bell, calling them to a new day. The night was over. She opened her eyes. The beamed and thatched ceiling of the communal dormitory loomed over her, solid and tangible.

The greyish light of dawn filtered through the high windows, and Anya stood in the center of the room, her sturdy silhouette framed against the brightness. Selena blinked, trying to dislodge the images of the dream. But it wasn't like the other times. It hadn't been a memory of her other life, no glass desk with Cyrillic texts, no friend named Roman. It had been something new, something that unsettled her in a different way. The heretics, their words, that sense of familiarity with the forbidden. Was it suggestion?

she asked herself as she sat up on the straw pallet. Did the conversation with Lyra, the mention of the pyres and the grey robes, leak into my dreams? Her heartbeat fast, but it gradually calmed down with the routine Anya directed every morning. The cold showers in the courtyard, the freezing water clearing away the last vestiges of the night, the ritual learned by heart that required no thinking, only doing.

Just like every day, after everyone had bathed and dressed in their humble clothes, Anya assigned the morning tasks. Her practical, maternal voice distributed chores with the efficiency of someone who had done the same for years until she reached Selena. —Selena, today it's your turn to sweep the front courtyard with Pira. Selena nodded, feeling a small sense of relief. As she headed toward where Pira was waiting, broom in hand, Selena couldn't stop thinking about the dream. About the faceless acolyte.

About that heresy that, somehow, felt so strangely familiar. Gods are mirrors carved by those who fear their own reflection. The phrase struck her with the force of a revelation as she took the twig broom Pira silently held out to her. She knew, with the certainty she couldn't explain, that those words would not fade with the light of day.