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Atziluth, Tzaphiron, Tassili n’Ajjer
Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
Genesis 11: 4
Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11: 9
***
1977 — Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria
As the sharp spears of the Saharan sun pierced through the seams of his rickety, ramshackle yurt for the fifth consecutive morning, Alaric von Vergessen sank deeper into his sweat-stained pillow and let the illusory darkness carry him back to the shadow-casting pines of his beloved Baden-Baden childhood home. For a fleeting moment, he caught a whiff of browning butter mingling with the nutty smoke of rye as it crisped in the oven—each laced with the sharper tang of dew-damp moss drifting through the mullioned windowpanes. The aroma flickered in and out—one moment palpable, the next smothered by a gust of scorched sand and acrid dust.
Despite being the lead archaeologist on the expedition, Alaric was the last to awaken that day—clinging well past sunrise to the scraps of his dream he could still salvage from the night before, secretly yearning to be anywhere but this merciless maze of endless desert dunes. It wasn’t that he had given up—at least not yet—but rather that a realization, as slow and insidious as the heat-thick smog, had begun to settle in: he had, once again, gravely—and now perhaps irrevocably—underestimated the toils of his pursuit.
For as long as he could remember, Alaric had been possessed—perhaps even cursed—by an indomitable ambition, a hunger sharpened with each year of praise from the most eminent archaeologists at Europe’s prestigious institutions. So when, at the robust age of twenty-seven, his research into Neolithic North Africa uncovered tantalizing traces of a long-lost, rumored civilization known as Tzaphiron, and earned him the Gerda Henkel Stiftung grant, Alaric had accepted the 60,000 Deutsche Mark without hesitation, packed his gear in haste, and departed the oak-paneled halls of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin for the searing heart of the Sahara Desert: Tassili n’Ajjer.
In fact, Alaric had been so exuberant, so pertinaciously convinced that some monumental revelation lay dormant within those oracular cavern walls—just waiting for his hand to brush away the veil of dust—that in his zeal, he had entirely overlooked one simple yet crucial fact: his inability to withstand the heat. A minor discomfort, he had assured himself again and again—a noble sacrifice in the name of knowledge. But by that fifth unrelenting, ruthless sunrise, his characteristically German predilection for overcast skies and pine-shaded fog had already begun to eclipse his resolve. And so, burrowing even deeper into his cushioned cocoon, Alaric surrendered once more to the mirage of memory and let the thick desert fumes evaporate back into the cool green mist of Baden-Baden.
Suddenly, the hum of his mother at the stove dissolved into the hiss of sand as a cry sliced through the fragile membrane of his reverie in rapid Darja Arabic:
“Lqina haja! Lqina haja!”
Alaric groaned, reaching for another ottoman cushion to muffle the intrusion back into illusion. But the shout pressed closer—now in English, a clear sign that the message was meant for him.
“We found something! Professor von Vergessen, we found something! You must come at once!”
Just beyond the hide of his hut, Alaric recognized the voice of Samir Barzakh—whose fierce curiosity had already set him apart from the others dispatched from the Universitaire de Tlemcen. Samir burned with such rare fire that even after the Boumédiène regime’s reforms suppressed indigenous languages, he had taught himself fluent Tamahaq out of sheer resolve. Alaric had been quite impressed—he’d even begun to develop a sort of affinity for Samir. Yet no affinity could temper the irritation that now swelled with each syllable of the young man’s holler.
Grumbling, joints stiff, mind sluggish from the leaden heat, Alaric finally heaved himself upright.
But the moment he stepped beyond the scant shade of his shelter, the sun struck like a molten scythe—singeing his blistered skin and forcing him to squint at a cluster of silhouettes huddled around a single object in the distance. Just beyond, three others trudged forward, hunched beneath the weight of what looked like massive sandstone slabs. As they neared, Samir broke away and approached, cradling something in his hands. When they met face to face, he revealed the source of the commotion: a small, worn leather-bound book—its spine splintered, its cover faded to pale umber.
“We discovered it just this morning,” Samir said, his tone barely containing its exhilaration.
“Near three heavily eroded sandstone slabs, each chiseled with a series of strange symbols none of us could identify. My first guess was some rare variant of archaic Tifinagh—I could’ve sworn I’d seen some before. But Dr. Azouaou was adamant—they don’t stem from any known Afroasiatic script. And with each layer of sediment we cleared, we began to realize just how peculiar—how anomalous—they truly were. Then, just meters away…”
Still powdered with dust and calloused from hours of excavation, Samir extended the book toward Alaric, who was immediately struck by the give of its spine.
“It appears to be someone’s personal journal. Written in the late 1920s. Mostly in French,” Samir continued. “At first glance, you’d assume it was insignificant. But after skimming just a few pages…”
He paused, searching for the right words.
“Well… it may be even stranger than the tablets. Obviously, none of us have had time to read it closely yet, but from just a quick glance…” His gaze lingered on Alaric’s grip, as if momentarily bewitched by its pull.
“All sorts of bizarre ramblings—impossible chronological inconsistencies, abrupt digressions into a multiplicity of languages—some of which seem entirely alien. And near the end…” A mixture of a sigh and an inhale slowed his breath.
“Only a few entries remain in French. After the first handful, the author begins to sketch the same symbols we found etched into the tablets. At first, the task clearly challenged them. You can see the strain in each early line—hesitant, uneven, almost trembling. But then, page by page, something shifts. The sketches improve—gradually at first, then swiftly, assuredly. By the final few, despite their complexity and the difficulty of transcription, each is replicated with perfect precision. They’re rendered with such deliberate care, such unmistakable rhythm, that they almost appear… legible. As if, despite belonging to a language extinct for millennia—if not longer—the author had somehow become fluent.”
Samir steadied his breath, preparing to deliver the final revelation.
“And yet, somehow even more astonishing—” he began, thumbing frantically through the yellowed pages the moment he snatched the journal back from Alaric’s hands. “Countless times, scattered across multiple entries—”
But before he could finish, Alaric had already seen it. How could he not? Half-submerged in a sea of flowing French cursive, coiled amidst a labyrinth of unintelligible scribbles and scrawls, a single word gleamed forth as resplendent as the sun above: Tzaphiron. In an instant, the exhaustion, the inertia, the slow disintegration of his will—all flared into a sudden incandescent blaze. The sunburnt sting on his flesh, the throbbing ache at his temples, the long erosion of days spent chasing chimeric phantoms across the dunes—none of it mattered anymore. A fire he’d thought extinguished now flared anew—brighter, hotter, blinding. With renewed urgency, he seized the journal from Samir and rifled through the pages in a frenzy until finally—he reached the first. His pulse staggered, stalled—then surged. There it was: Ariadne Solène Mornève.
“Do you know whose this is?” he asked, his stare unfixed—as though he were no longer seeing the desert.
A few exchanged puzzled glances. One or two shrugged. But the confusion on every face told him what he needed to know.
“Ariadne Mornève,” he repeated, his voice edged with slight agitation. “The infamous French linguist who vanished in the Sahara in the late 1920s. One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century. You really mean to tell me not a single one of you recognizes her name?”
They continued shaking their heads, confusion deepening into collective bewilderment.
“Actually,” Samir offered, breaking the silence, “now that you say it… the name does sound vaguely familiar—though vaguely is an understatement, and I haven’t the faintest idea why.”
Alaric blinked. “I suppose I’d be more familiar with her than most,” he said. “But to be the only one who knows her name? I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Hmph—no matter,” he collected himself with a sigh. “Ariadne Mornève was no ordinary scholar. A genius of such staggering magnitude that had fate been slightly kinder, she would have gone down as one of Europe’s greatest minds.”
“She studied under Marcel Cohen—and even Meillet, in his final years at the École Pratique. Her dissertation traced a proto-Afroasiatic tongue in North Africa, dating to 3500 BCE or earlier—long before Egyptian or Sumerian. She christened it Atziluth, after the highest realm in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life—believing it to be the primordial progenitor of all languages.”
Among the furrowed brows and skeptical stares, only Samir’s eyes—aglitter with wonder—stood apart, like a lone cedar hung in the desert drift.
“Her revolutionary comparisons of Libyco-Berber, Proto-Sinaitic, and other ancient Afroasiatic scripts uncovered patterns that appeared to suggest a single, shared ancestral root—one with improbable affinities to language families as far-flung as Uralic, Turkic, even Sino-Tibetan. The claim was bold. Controversial. But it brought her immediate acclaim.”
“And yet,” Alaric continued, “her brilliance began to spiral. Lucidity gave way to obsession, and soon, her research bled into all manner of esoteric delusion.”
“With staunch conviction and no substantiating proof, she began to claim that Atziluth was the long-dismissed Ursprache—the ancestral mother of the human species, the primal father, the accursed tongue God sought to scatter at Babel. She read the Babelian tale not as scriptural allegory, not as divine parable, nor even as literary myth—but as a real, historical event. An irreparable tear in the very fabric of the human psyche. The cataclysmic loss of a syntax that once held the Infinite. A language from an age when the divine was not ineffable, but speakable.”
Alaric’s gaze drifted toward the tablets, still half-mired in sand.
“These speculations were, of course, outright dismissed. Too mystical for the linguists. Too linguistic for the mystics. Denounced as delusional by both. And yet…” He turned back to the group.
“Even now—though sparse and scattered—there are still those who believe Atziluth is no mere myth, but a secret yet solvable riddle—a language encrypted deep within the collective marrow of human consciousness.”
Murmurs rippled through the group, their expressions swinging like pendulums between incredulity and intrigue. Samir, however, remained firm and fixed—not in disbelief, but in quiet, speculative awe.
“But if she had proof,” he asked, “then why did no one take her seriously?”
Before Alaric could answer, another student interjected with a scoff:
“Isn’t it obvious? Monogenesis has been debunked for over a century. The Enlightenment made sure there’s no room left for religious fantasy masquerading as science.”
Samir refused to let the slight dim his fascination. “But if she did have proof,” he pressed, “if she traced Atziluth through real, rational evidence—then it wouldn’t be ‘religious fantasy,’ would it? Wouldn’t it then be science?”
He turned to Alaric. “Didn’t she have that evidence?”
“That depends,” Alaric replied, tilting his head with a faint smirk. “She presented a mountain of material—artifacts, petroglyphs, manuscripts—that she believed confirmed her theory.”
Samir, hearing it as affirmation, allowed himself a slight grin. But Alaric quickly interrupted his satisfaction:
“That’s the strange thing about evidence, isn’t it? Some say her findings were irrefutable. Others insist they weren’t evidence at all. And in the end—can anything ever truly be proven?”
He pressed on, almost without pause. “To her, the signs were so compelling that, nearly a decade after the war, she set off on a solitary expedition into this very desert—Tassili n’Ajjer—convinced the final pieces of her puzzle lay hidden in some undiscovered cavern. Scholars implored her to reconsider. They say her mother wept for days. But Ariadne was unstoppable—impervious and consumed. And sadly, as many predicted, she never returned.”
He let the silence settle for a moment.
“Over the decades, theories have multiplied like mirages,” Alaric said at last. “Some say she collapsed from heatstroke—dehydrated, starved, then swallowed whole by the dunes. Others suspect madness. And then there are those who believe it wasn’t disappearance at all, but a wilful choice—a deliberate surrender to whatever fate the desert had in store for her. A self-orchestrated annihilation, born of mounting melancholia and an ever-deepening solitude.”
“She must have been mad—a young woman alone in the Sahara! What sane person would do such a thing?” The remark came from one of the Germans. Alaric barely registered it.
“In any case, nothing was ever found. No remains. No trace. And whatever she discovered—if she discovered anything at all—has long since been swept away by the gale of time.” He exhaled. “That is, until now.”
Alaric’s thumbs tightened gently around the flaking leather spine.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I think it would be best if I examined the journal alone—at least for now. I suspect it will require my full attention—and therefore complete silence.”
Without waiting for a reply, Alaric turned and began walking back toward his hut.
“In the meantime,” he called over his shoulder, “begin cataloguing the inscriptions. We’ll reconvene this evening.”
With every step, his thoughts drifted further and further—from the rust-hued auburn wasteland to the dim solitary hush of his yurt, all the way back to the quiet green cradle of Baden-Baden—until, finally, they reached their true destination: squiggles snaking, ink splitting, words coiling down the yellowed paper, sentences unveiling the momentous revelation he had crossed continents and suffered so valiantly to uncover—the titles of his future books, the generous grants and prizes, the accolades, the acclaim, the lecture halls echoing with his name—the brave archaeologist who solved the mystery of Ariadne Mornève, the brilliant scholar who decoded Atziluth, the man who revealed the truth of Tzaphiron: Dr. Alaric von Vergessen.
He drew a deep inhale and steadied his pulse once more.
***
July 16, 1927.
I never succeeded in keeping a journal—a source of deep regret, given my lifelong struggle with memory. Perhaps it is because the present unfurls within me with such tempestuous force that it leaves little room for retrospection. Or perhaps my memory is simply too porous, too permeable—allowing the past to surge in formless torrents rather than collect as distinct drops. Whatever the reason, I have recently come upon something so strange, so singular, so impossibly—yet undeniably—extraordinary that I must record it, faithfully, with care, before it too evaporates into the same fog where so many others have vanished into obscurity.
As improbable as it may seem, I have reason to believe this blossoming discovery traces back to a most peculiar incident from my early childhood—one I long dismissed as inconsequential, but which has now crawled out from its shadowed nook and shimmers with eerie clarity. After nearly consigning it to oblivion, it reemerges not as a lucid window into the past, but as scattered shards of something once whole—puzzle pieces whose original shape I can no longer reassemble.
I fear I am moving too quickly. I’ve begun my tale too far ahead. Allow me to backtrack—to retrace the path more slowly, lest I lose myself once more in the impenetrable labyrinth of my own memory.
July 17, 1927.
It was late May (though, for reasons aforementioned, the precise date eludes me), and I was working well past midnight at the Bibliothèque Mazarine—immersed in research for my forthcoming dissertation on the Berber languages of North Africa.
At the time, I was conducting a philological comparison between Libyco-Berber stelae and Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions excavated from Serabit el-Khadim—a formidable, turquoise-veined mountain that broods over the Sinai Peninsula. Scattered across my desk lay an assortment of reference texts, but the one that held me captive was a copy of Fabre d’Olivet’s La Langue Hébraïque Restituée—an obscure, esoteric volume I had stumbled upon only days prior, buried in the marginalia of a manuscript on the origins of the Phoenician alphabet. I had opened it out of idle curiosity, but within twenty pages found myself utterly transfixed by its central proposition: that each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is not merely a graphic or phonetic signifier, but an immaterial metaphysical force—a primordial essence that not only precedes, but exceeds, articulation itself.
What haunted me most—and continues to gnaw at me even now—was his interpretation of the Hebraic Aleph. The first letter of the Semitic alphabet—a silent consonant, an emblem of unity, the mathematical sign of the Infinite—was, to d’Olivet, not simply a cipher for “oneness,” but oneness itself. Not a placeholder for the divine, but a perforated vessel through which divine luminance seeps. Aleph, he claimed, inscribes the indescribable; it is silent because its very form contours the ineffable.
It was within the mystic hush of that scene—the scent of leather and candlewax hanging thick beneath blackened oak ceilings; the mezzanine of Latin titles and esoteric treatises tucked into shadowed mahogany shelves; the dim flicker of an oil lamp casting halos across the desk—that I first encountered the enigma that now harrows me so. An anomaly, a coincidence, a synchronicity—call it what you will—but it struck with such precise, uncanny clarity that I find myself writing here for the first time in my life, compelled not by habit or fervor, but by urgent necessity.
My body is pleading with my mind to rest—I must wait until morning to continue.
July 18, 1927.
Perhaps it is important you should know: I despise sleep. What a dreadful waste of time! My body—keenly attuned to this disdain—rarely slumbers more than four or five hours. So do forgive me if I write until I quite literally collapse onto the page—and for any errors that may follow.
Now, to continue: amidst the Libyco-Berber symbols strewn across my desk that fateful May night, my gaze fixed upon one in particular—a circle enclosing a single dot. I recognized it at once: the Tifinagh letter Yas, still used today in Tuareg variants of Amazigh. My interest was piqued. Nearly every other character along the evolutionary arc from Proto-Berber to modern Amazigh had undergone some degree of visual or phonetic modification. Yet this single circled-dot had remained unchanged—untouched, as if immune to the churn of linguistic drift, impervious to the fevers of time. How could that be?
Intrigued, I began to trace its lineage. Starting with its present form, I worked backward through 19th-century Tuareg ethnographies and early Amazigh epigraphic reports until I arrived at a surprising realization: in older Tuareg Tifinagh, the letter Yas did not appear as a circled-dot at all, but as a forked, zigzagging trident—decidedly angular, anything but circular. And yet, when I turned back to the Libyco-Berber facsimiles before me, there was no mistaking it. Again, and again, and again—almost everywhere I looked: scattered across sketches of prehistoric rock art, photographed in Neolithic inscriptions, scribbled through ethnographic surveys, stamped in archaeological catalogues—the same unmistakable shape: a circle enclosing a single dot.
I began to wonder: if the modern circled-dot—the Tifinagh Yas—bears no phonetic or semantic link to its ancestral Libyco-Berber counterpart, then how had such a symbol, with seemingly divergent meanings, come to occupy such prominence at both ends of the lineage? Stranger still: how could it appear so prolifically in Libyco-Berber inscriptions from 2500 BCE onward, so insistently in its twentieth-century Tifinagh form, and yet be entirely absent from the epigraphic record before the second millennium? It was as if the symbol had emerged inexplicably—sprung from nothing, passed through some arcane semantic alchemy, and resurfaced centuries later, unchanged in form, without a single variation.
Seeking diachronic analogues, I turned to Sir Alan Gardiner’s index of Egyptian hieroglyphs. To my astonishment, there it was: Gardiner N5—a circled-dot, signifying the solar radiance of Ra—the divine totality of the Sun, incarnate. I widened my search.
In ancient Chinese oracle bone script—again, solar: a circled-dot. In the Gothic alphabet, the letter ƕair: a circled-dot. My pulse thrummed. I pressed further.
In the Ashokan Brahmi script: tha. In Old Cyrillic: a monocular O. And then—clear, aglow, luminous and unmistakable—the ancient Pythagorean emblem for μονάς: the Monad, the Essence, the Absolute, the indivisible unity of Being: a circled-dot.
In Hinduism, the Bindu—the point where cosmic unity fractures into multiplicity; in Gnosticism, the primal emanation of the divine; in Kabbalah, the crown of Keter; in alchemy, the perfect radiance of gold; the sun of the astrologer; the star of the astronomer; the Seed; the Womb; the Egg; the Origin; the Center; the Source; the Ineffable One. The same symbol—across millennia, continents, and cosmologies—without a known origin, without a single source, without explanation: the circled-dot.
I began to wonder—could this omnipresent circled-dot (later revealed to me as the circumpunct, from the Latin circum, “around,” and punctum, “a point”) possess an invisible metaphysical charge akin to what d’Olivet believed resided in Aleph? Aleph descends from a pictogram of an ox-head; the circumpunct first appears carved into the flank of a sheep-goat. Both ancient. Both persistent. Both inexplicably ubiquitous. Might they not be equally primordial?
I recalled rumors I’d recently overheard about a small circle of American linguists who, like d’Olivet, believe in some deeper, hidden power of language. They’ve begun to speculate that language does not merely reflect reality—it actively shapes it. That grammar and utterance are not just mirrors of perception—but the very loom upon which perception is spun. And if that were true, then might not the centered dot, like Aleph, encode something far more elusive? Perhaps not d’Olivet’s “divine totality” in the strictest sense, but what about a cognitive architecture? A mode of thought? An ancestral way of seeing the world? A prehistorical, prelinguistic grammar of reality? A gaze unbound by the spatiotemporal confines of the human eye? For if language indeed sculpts the cosmos, then would not a grammar capable of articulating the Infinite grant one the power to speak eternity? Might not such a tongue—divine, primordial—breach the very breath of God? And if so, would God wish to scatter it?
I became obsessed. I chased its specter across marble floors and forgotten archives, through crumbling codices and abandoned lithographs, within the marginalia of esoteric manuscripts, and along the tangled lexicons of ancient tongues—until, at last, I came upon a sequence of petroglyphs in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, sourced from Oued Mertoutek—a desiccated riverbed in the Tamanrasset region of southern Algeria—allegedly dated to 3000 BCE: the oldest known Libyco-Berber inscriptions ever recorded.
I was certain—absolutely certain—that somewhere within those scribbles and scrawls I would find some precursor, some trace—a seed, an ancestor—something, anything, that might anchor the circumpunct within the genealogy of language and release me from this vertiginous dungeon of unknowing.
But there was nothing. No circled-dot. No related shape. No embryonic form. Nothing in 4000 BCE. Nothing in 3500. And then—suddenly, inexplicably—from 3000 BCE onward, it was everywhere. Fully formed. Recurring across sites. Scattered through disparate scripts. No lineage. No mutation. No visible evolution. As if it had written itself into being ex nihilo—a diachronic aberration that should not exist, and yet, somehow, nevertheless, appears omnipresent.
Still disoriented, my gaze fell upon something else: a hybrid sheep-goat etched into one of the rocks, its flank chiseled with a cluster of undeciphered symbols. Among them, one in particular seized me with a strange, almost magnetic force. It was circular—eerily similar to the circumpunct, yet grotesquely deformed. Its lines were mangled; its center anything but a dot. So close—yet so divergent. I froze, transfixed. It bore no resemblance to any Libyco-Berber script I had ever studied. And yet—I was certain I had seen it before.
I strained to recall where. Hours passed. Nothing surfaced. No trace in Cushitic, Egyptian, or Semitic. No affinity with any proto-language family—not Afroasiatic, nor Nilo-Saharan, nor even Niger-Congo. Only one conclusion remained: what I had unearthed in those nocturnal hours was not some remnant of the past, but something else entirely—a language wholly unknown to the chronicles of human history.
Overwhelmed, overexhausted, my body finally gave in. I collapsed onto the brittle golden pages of the Corpus Inscriptionum, slipping into a dreamless, involuntary sleep. Hours later, when the first rustlings of Sorbonne students stirred the silence, I awoke with a sharp inhale and a racing pulse. The realization crashed over me like a flood. I suddenly knew where I had seen that symbol before.
Not in an inscription. Not in any lexicon. Not carved in stone, nor printed on parchment.
I had first encountered the language I now call Atziluth in a dream.
July 20, 1927
I grew up in a quiet, lonesome commune called Germigny-des-Prés. Nestled in the rustic heart of the Loire Valley, the village was almost entirely unremarkable—save for a single relic: the oldest surviving Carolingian church in France. I cared little for its sermons or sacraments, but was enchanted by a singular marvel: an ornate mosaic ceiling depicting the Ark of the Covenant.
After nightfall, I would often slip into the Oratory alone, drawn like a moth to its tesserae of lapis and gold, hypnotized by the immaculate geometry, bewitched by the iridescent emerald and cobalt wings of two cherubim coiling inward in perfectly perplexing symmetry toward the radiant center. But after the letter arrived—informing us that my father had mort pour la France, his heart torn open by a German shell in the trenches near Verdun—my mother’s grief hardened into bitter disdain. And the only thing she seemed to resent more than the French Army was my unwavering devotion to the Oratory. One night, having shrewdly discerned my paralytic fear of Father’s old study, she devised a punishment she knew would put an end to my nightly escapades once and for all.
It was a storm-heavy night in December. I had just returned from one of my clandestine visits to find her waiting—arms crossed, stone-cold—by the door. Without a word, she seized my sleeve, dragged me down the corridor, and thrust me into the study, slamming the door shut behind me.
I screamed. I thrashed. I pleaded. I pounded the maroon walls with my fists—but every cry dissolved into the indifferent silence. After hours of weeping, my body finally surrendered, collapsing onto the mahogany-splintered floor. What followed was neither dream nor nightmare, but a slow slither into a more corporeal abyss.
I awoke in the same cobwebbed study, though something implacable had changed. The air was thicker, heavier—with a sharper tang of mildew and the metallic sting of mold. The silence had deepened: hollower, bleaker, more absolute. The dust that once stifled my cries now clotted in my throat. And this time—I was not alone.
In the farthest corner, half-shrouded in a murk of shadow and debris, crouched a small figure—its head buried in its knees, its shoulders quivering with mute, primal sobs. Though every nerve in my body recoiled, some dreadful, inexorable force compelled me forward. As I neared, the creature stirred, slowly raising its head until—our eyes locked. My breath caught. Staring back at me was a mirror image of my own face.
Her features were mine—but distorted. Her limbs were warped, her posture contorted—like a disfigured, cracked porcelain doll. Viscous strands of hair clung to her temples. A feral gleam burned in her agape, dewy eyes. And worst of all—when she beckoned me forward, I obeyed without hesitation.
I knelt beside her. Our shadows mirrored one another in grotesque symmetry. She leaned in. Her bruised-blue lips parted, but no words escaped—only a low tremor, barely audible, yet so discordant it crawled up my spine. Then, with a sudden, sharp flick of her finger, she pointed into the pitch-black thick, where something slow and sinister had begun to writhe. At first it was indiscernible—but gradually, a proliferation of scribbles and scrawls began to cohere into strange symbols and vague, serpentine shapes.
With each symbol, a terror beyond articulation pierced through my flesh, as though I were being slit from within. I could not move. I could not cry. I was frozen—fused to the floor, to the fog, to my monstrous twin. And the very instant I awoke, the memory had already begun to fade.
Years passed with my mind unperturbed. But somewhere, buried deep in the sediment of my psyche, the symbols endured—waiting, with pernicious persistence, until the night, decades later, when I saw them again: scratched into the belly of a sheep-goat in a sandstone petroglyph—the same monstrous contours, unmistakable, and stranger than ever. The marks of Atziluth.
July 23, 1927
I have spent the past several hours ruminating in the solitude of my study, mired in the deep despondency today’s events have left me in. I had hoped—perhaps naïvely—that my exposition on Atziluth might rouse wonder; or at the very least, spark a twinkle of curiosity. Instead, it was met by all fourteen professors and linguists at the École Pratique with a shallow pantomime of polite nods and tepid disinterest. Even the theological philologist Dr. Éleuthère Béraud dismissed it as a mere “interesting idea” before veering into an irrelevant tangent on Valentinian Gnosticism.
Valentinian Gnosticism—how ludicrous! As if I had conjured Atziluth from mystical hallucination rather than unearthed it through rigorous study and thorough analysis of the sandstone inscriptions at Oued Mertoutek. Even without revealing the more intimate dimensions of my research, there is no other plausible explanation for the recurrence of the circled-dot.
Despite their dismissal, I remain steadfast. I cannot—will not—forsake the one thing that has come to animate my soul.
September 2, 1927
Though my pen has lain dormant for some time, I hope my silence will not be mistaken for any apathy or wavering conviction.
On the contrary—I have spent the past few weeks wholly absorbed in the long and laborious process of refining and submitting my findings. Two weeks ago, my article, “The ‘Atziluth’ Hypothesis: Proto-Afroasiatic Glyphs in the Neolithic Rock Art of the Central Sahara,” was published in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum.
Today, I stepped briefly away from the usual rigors of my research to record what may prove to be a most momentous development. Yesterday afternoon, I found a letter postmarked from Algeria waiting in my École mailbox. I believe its contents warrant direct transcription:
Dr. Ariadne Solène Mornève,
I have followed your work with interest since encountering your recent article in Acta Orientalia. My name is Dr. Yamina Suhaila Nazeera, and I am a philologist at the Université d’Alger specializing in trans-Saharan orthographies.
For the past three years, I have conducted fieldwork in the remote town of Illizi, at the cusp of the Tassili n’Ajjer. During this time, I’ve encountered numerous sandstone carvings and cavern paintings that bear striking resemblance to what you call ‘Atziluth,’ and what I have provisionally termed ‘Tazarfus.’
Perhaps of particular interest to you: among the Tuareg Imuhagh elders I’ve interviewed, several recount legends of a powerful figure known as Tin Hinan—a woman said to have crossed the dunes on camelback bearing with her a divine tongue. Many of these accounts claim she descended from Amunet, and often invoke Amon—intimately linked to the circled-dot of Ra and, notably, to his sacred animal: the sheep-goat. While some elders warn against seeking the tongue of Tin Hinan, the parallels in our research has rekindled my interest.
If you are willing to travel to Illizi, I would be honored to welcome you on a joint expedition into the Tassili n’Ajjer.
— Dr. Yamina Suhaila Nazeera
November 2, 1927
I have arrived in Illizi.
It is far smaller than I imagined. No paved roads, no electric lamps—only dusted footpaths stitched between huts and mudbrick dwellings, their canvas awnings crackling beneath the late-afternoon heat. To the north, a tangled palm grove fans outward; smooth pebbles gleam among gnarled acacia roots, nourished by hidden springs. To the south, the horizon bleeds into the sand-scoured vastness of the Tassili plateau, where jagged stone silhouettes rise like titans from the desert basin.
Amid this earthen palette of clay, stone, and blood-orange sand, a pale anomaly pierces the periphery: a cluster of lime-washed outposts, concrete stations, and iron gates. One reads Poste des Douanes, another Gendarmerie. Further uphill, a garish fortress of steel grates, olive shutters, and blistered stucco stands above a faded tricolor flag, limp in the heat, casting its striped shadow across a rusted plaque: République Française.
Of course, I knew what I would find. And yet—does foreknowledge ever truly soften the impact? When you’re standing in the thick of it—squinting through the garish glare of iron scaffolds, longing to inhale the desert wind but tasting only asphalt, diesel, smoke—the disquiet clings to the heat, seeps into your lungs, becomes pervasive—infects everything in its path.
That afternoon, I wandered into the northern grove, where I saw a boy—no more than ten or eleven—crouched at the edge of a dry wadi, his bare palms streaked with mud, his feet chalked with dust. He was so absorbed I hesitated to disturb him—but my curiosity always triumphs over restraint.
As I neared, I saw that he was carving into the clay: spirals within spirals, overlapping loops, concentric circles—again and again, without pause or falter. Each stroke was etched with such slow, deliberate focus he seemed spellbound. And even more remarkable—his only tool and paintbrush: a small goat-rib bone.
He never looked up. Not when I greeted him softly with a Tamahaq “Azul.” Not when I knelt beside him in the coarse red-ochre grit. He remained fixed on his project for what may have been hours, though I scarcely noticed the time pass. I had meant to meet Dr. Nazeera before sundown, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Even now, I cannot say whether it was his stillness, his focus, or the spell of the shapes that held me there—but something did. I hope to see him again when we return from the plateau.
November 7, 1927
We set out two days ago: Dr. Nazeera, Dr. Harithi, our Tuareg guides Asur and Isamar, and myself.
The heat here does far more than scorch—it seeps inward, presses into the flesh, dragging you into its heavy rhythm, forcing your body to yield to its torrid force, altering your cadence. I don’t mind it. I surrender. I even prefer its rhythm.
At dawn tomorrow, we begin our first excavation.
November 9, 1927
No discoveries yet—but Isamar shared something just as extraordinary.
Last year, after centuries of dismissal as mere folklore, a joint team of French archaeologists uncovered a burial site believed to be the tomb of Tin Hinan—the matriarchal queen Dr. Nazeera mentioned in her letter.
A real tomb. For a real fourth-century Tuareg queen.
November 10, 1927
Still nothing definitive. But during our long treks, Asur and Isamar continue to share some of the most magnificent Amazigh legends. Today: the tale of Tislit, the moon and water, and Aneẓar, the sky.
Cursed to live apart by divine decree, the lovers yearned for one another with such vehemence that their tears spilled outward in torrents, dripping through the stratosphere as rain. Her longing became the rivers; his grief, the storms. Their sorrow seeped into the Sahara, carving subterranean rivers and hidden aquifers beneath the crust of sand.
I should feel worn down—but despite fatigue, I feel quickened, held by a radiant hope. I feel closer to Atziluth with each day.
November 12, 1927
On the southern face of a weatherworn bluff, we uncovered a panel of Proto-Berber inscriptions. Most incisions had eroded into faint scars, but a few remained: archaic forms of Yabh, Yah, Yey, and a skeletal Yaz.
One glyph stood apart: a crescent arch intersected by three vertical bars and a diagonal slash. Dr. Nazeera later identified it as a funerary sigil from the central Ahaggar, used to mark the place where the dead await the return of Ra.
November 13, 1927
Shortly before sundown, we made our most astonishing discovery yet.
As we prepared to reverse course, Asur halted before what first appeared to be an impregnable escarpment. With a swift sweep, he cleared the sedimentary drift, revealing a narrow fissure—nearly imperceptible at first—that opened into a sepulchral concave chamber. There, cloaked in a fine layer of coppery dust, we unearthed three sandstone slabs—their edges worn, yet their smoothed surfaces astonishingly preserved. Each was inscribed with intricate webs of interlocking loops, serrated spirals, and interlaced tangles. Petroglyphs—unlike any I had ever encountered.
Some bore a faint resemblance to Libyco-Berber, though most were alien beyond classification. And then—impossible to mistake: the circled-dot. Not once, but twice. Incised with unmistakable precision into the surfaces of two of the three tablets.
Strangest of all, each composition seemed to spiral inward toward a shared focal point—a central glyph, carved into all three, uncannily similar to the sigil I first saw in the Oued Mertoutek inscriptions.
This central glyph is so anomalous it resists description entirely. It’s as if some not-quite-human hand had attempted to mimic the circumpunct—yet failed catastrophically—birthing instead a mangled, disfigured muddle of warped geometries and inscrutable asymmetries. Stranger still, despite its aberrance, I feel drawn to it with an almost gravitational pull of familiarity—not quite recognition, but something close to recollection.
We made camp just beyond the rock’s bend. Exhausted by the day’s labors, the others fell asleep almost instantly. I did not. I could not. Even now, hours later, my gaze remains fixed upon that central glyph.
November 14, 1927
Nearly twenty-four hours of relentless scrutiny, and not one of us has made any headway. I’ve resisted sleep, but the exhaustion is becoming untenable.
November 15, 1927
Strange—I almost never dream. But last night, something feverish must have overtaken me. I awoke drenched in sweat, with Isamar informing me that I’d been chanting strange syllables throughout the night. Yet my memory eludes me once again. I cannot recall a single sound or image.
Our supplies are thinning. I must begin preparing to return to Paris. The tablets will remain with Dr. Nazeera, who will escort them back to Algiers. I have photographed and sketched everything I could.
November 16, 1927
Sleep evades me. My limbs are heavy with fatigue, but my mind thrums with sharp, hungry anticipation. I’m too alert, too eager—too ravenous. How could I possibly rest now?
One of the glyphs from the second tablet has seized my attention for days. At first, I dismissed it as illegible. But now—the more I look, the more certain I become: I’ve seen this symbol before. The memory hovers just out of reach. This time, the feeling is even more potent than with the central glyph—more arresting than the circled-dot. And yet, no recollection surfaces. The déjà vu is maddening.
My memory is quite the hindrance.
November 17, 1927
This morning, while rummaging through a satchel of old notebooks I’d nearly forgotten I’d packed from Paris, I stumbled upon a marginal gloss I once wrote beside the Nahuatl compound xochicuicatl—“flower” (xochitl) and “song” (cuicatl)—not metaphorically conjoined, but coalesced in a metonymic act: a flower-song. The utterance is not representational or symbolic. It does not describe the cosmos—it enacts it. Nourishes and renews its motion. Performs and sustains its cyclical regeneration. Bear with me.
In Nahua metaphysics, the cosmos is not a fixed entity, but a generative energy in constant motion—teotl—omnipresent and omnipotent, at once divine and immanent, both force and fabric. It pulses through all matter and phenomena in a peculiar rhythmic motion—something between weaving and oscillation: a ceaseless interlacing and intertwining of the antagonistic forces that thumb through the universe—life and death, day and night, fire and water—merging all into a single continuity.
I thought of the circled-dot. I recalled Aleph. And then it struck me.
On the second tablet—there it was: the same crescent-like symbol found in pre-Columbian Nahua codices to signify teotl. Two civilizations, oceans and millennia apart—no contact, no transmission—and yet the glyph is nearly identical.
What am I to make of this, if not a common ancestor? A shared origin? It becomes clearer with each day.
November 19, 1927
Another fever dream last night. This time, I managed to retain fragments—scattered and strange—yet nonetheless intact. I will relay what I am capable of.
Though I once studied Nahuatl morphology with deep and devoted passion, I never quite managed to master the language. Yet somehow, in the dream, I spoke it not just fluently—but effortlessly, with a startling precision, as if it were my native tongue. And more astonishing still—each word spoken in Nahuatl was accompanied by a visceral bodily and psychic sensation: each syllable seemed to shift my body back and forth, swinging in synchrony, both through and within me, like the sweep of a pendulum. Allow me to exert more effort to describe it:
As my limbs swayed like a seesaw caught in invisible tides, my mind flummoxed—seamlessly and simultaneously—between impossible dualities: past and present, flesh and soul, matter and spirit, death and breath—the list could be infinite. I was not just the weaver, nor merely the woven—but the very act of weaving itself. I was string, spindle, and loom; thread, pattern, and quilt; the logic of entanglement and its undoing—the act of interlacing and unraveling—all while continuously winding and unwinding.
Forgive me if this sounds confusing. I know of no word or phrase in any Indo-European tongue capable of conveying the texture of this motion. The sensation itself transcends metaphor.
I write this now while rattling across the Tassili plateau, en route to Djanet, where I am to board the train for Algiers, then Paris. Dust coils behind us as we retrace the path of my arrival. And then—something strange.
As we passed the outskirts of Illizi, I looked up to find the strange edifices—the fortress, the shutters, the barracks, the flag, the plaque marked République Française—had all vanished without a trace. As I stared into the emptied horizon, I noticed a kind of magic, an earthy beauty I felt in my bones, one I had not seen upon arrival.
November 26, 1927
I have been back in Paris for several days now.
Each night, the same dream recurs: I stand before the cavern cleft in Tassili. But this time, when I peer inside, I see not tablets—but the Ark of the Covenant mosaic from Germigny-des-Prés. Yet its medley of blues, greens, and golds is now ash-caked, copper-smeared, and blood-washed. And where the cherubim once coiled in luminous symmetry, two figures—one demonic, the other angelic—have fused into a singular, deformed wraith. Stranger still, despite such perversion, the mandorla still suffuses my soul with the same serene, solemn harmony it did when I was a child. I do not fear these dreams. In truth, I long for them.
My attempts to share my findings here have been met not only with rejection, but with ridicule. I plan to write to Dr. Nazeera. Perhaps her expertise might carry more weight than mine.
December 3, 1927
In the past few days, I have made what I believe are substantial breakthroughs in decoding the first two tablets. While I still cannot determine how the pieces fit together, I’ve begun to isolate and tentatively translate several glyphs.
On Tablet I, the sequence appears to read, in order: human, difference or separation, language, seeking (or perhaps longing), then a symbol uncannily akin to the Semitic Aleph. After that: ancestor, labyrinth, the Tifinagh Yey, then language again, followed by the circled-dot (whose meaning remains elusive in this context). Thereafter: space-time (conjoined in a single glyph), fabric (or to weave), and finally: the arcane, esoteric, unearthly central glyph.
Tablet II begins similarly: human, difference or separation—then diverges into three unknown symbols, which I have provisionally labeled X₁, X₂, and X₃. X₂ appears to carry mathematical valence—some structure of measure or value. Then: the teotl glyph, denoting generative oscillation; a quincunx (whose semantics remain uncertain); the circled-dot again; space-time; fabric (or weaving); and, at last, the elusive central figure.
Tablet III is by far the most enigmatic. The symbols are more abstract, the syntax more opaque—but the core motifs persist: space-time, weaving or fabric, and, of course, the center glyph.
Now, I speculate that one of the figures may signify flow, emergence, or some other form of continuous movement. But in truth, it has become nearly impossible to focus on anything but the central symbol. It recurs with such unnerving insistence, it feels as though the entire syntax coils toward it. At night, it slithers into my dreams; by day, it curls around the edges of my thoughts. I am bewitched—haunted and transfixed.
December 6, 1927.
Today, Dr. Delprat warned me: should I continue with what he so crudely dismissed as “this mystic esoteric nonsense,” I will forfeit my position at the École.
It has now been nearly two weeks without a single word from Dr. Nazeera. I will write to her again this evening. I only wish there were someone—friend or colleague—willing to offer support, to corroborate my claim, or simply to listen. But alas, there never has been, and there most likely never will be.
November 14, 1927.
Last night, I returned to Tassili—though not as myself.
I was Tislit, the moon and water. And Aneẓar, who bore the face of my father, hung suspended in the overcast heavens above, his gaze a melancholic constellation lit with distant sorrow. I cried out for him. My longing tore through the sky. Yet no rivers welled, no springs surged from the sand. Instead, my grief transmuted—bleeding tremendous torrents of gold into the dunes, rising in plumes of dust and sand. Each tear descended into the valley and gave birth to a miraculous serpentine dune. With every collapse, another would form; with every formation, another would fall. Again—and again. And again. The dunes did not rest. They spun, spiraled, dissolved, reassembled. And within this ceaseless cycle, the motions began to blur—growing too fluid, too continuous to perceive—until, at last, they became imperceptible. All I could glimpse across the desert terrain was a proliferating procession of innumerable, miraculously symmetric, impossibly geometric, circular, recursive spirals. The sand. The loops. The procession. The exquisite completeness of their circular form. The spellbinding alchemy of the spectacle. Birth through decay. Wholeness through collapse. Continuity through ruin. It clicked. When I awoke—breathless, brined in sweat—I knew exactly what I had seen.
I have deciphered two more glyphs: X₁: love; X₃: death.
December 7, 1927
Ever since I named Dr. Nazeera as the leader of our expedition into Tassili, disturbing rumors have begun to circulate around the École.
More than one colleague insists there is no record of any Dr. Yamina Suhaila Nazeera—not at the Université d’Alger, nor in any faculty directory, archive, or bibliographic index. I’ve searched myself. Nothing. And now the letter she sent me is gone. Misplaced? Lost? Vanished?
They’ll say I’ve lost my mind. I must write to her again.
December 11, 1927
The center glyph—why does it remain so impenetrable? Why must it devour me?
Human. Language. Love. Death. Thread. Thread—what thread? What binds them into a single weave?
I keep pleading for someone—anyone—to help carry the weight of this unraveling—this entangled disentanglement. I once cherished solitude, but a deeper loneliness has begun to gnaw at my ribs like a hunger without end.
December 12, 1927
I wonder if my tears will become rivers or dunes.
December 14, 1927
Lately, I’ve been thinking—obsessively, excruciatingly—about what makes a word mean anything at all.
If meaning arises only through difference, then isn’t the very architecture of this world a catacomb of separation? How cruel—to dwell in a kingdom whose very grammar is severance. How lonely—this lonely, lonely world.
December, 2197 BCE.
Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth!
December 16, 1927
Terminated from the university.
No matter. So be it. Let them scoff. When Atziluth emerges—when it proves itself as primordial as it is real—they will hang their heads like fools.
December 17, 1927
Another dream. Another glyph.
Infinity—that must be it! Surely the abstruse mathematical X₂ denotes the boundless.
Marvelous, isn’t it? That as early as 3500 BCE, the human mind had already begun to trace the shape of the Infinite.
December 18, 1927
No—not the Infinite. Zero.
I now suspect the mathematical X₂ marks absence: the void, the silence, the vacancy, nothingness, and so forth.
You might call me inconsistent. Allow me to explain.
This afternoon, beneath an unnaturally blazing winter sun, I wandered through the Jardin des Plantes and saw a young boy—perhaps ten or eleven—tracing the glyph into a patch of wet soil with nothing but a goat’s rib bone. I meant to thank him. But by the time I reached the spot, he was already gone. How exquisitely strange.
December 21, 1927
I have been having the most marvelously peculiar dreams. They grow stranger with each passing day. But forgive me—I can no longer describe them. The language in which I began this journal is no longer the realm I inhabit.
December 22, 1927
A letter arrived from Mother—her first and only since I left the Loire. I know she did not write from love, but from shame. Word must have reached Germigny-des-Prés: the fall of Ariadne Mornève. The expelled prodigy. The girl who squandered her brilliance on desert delusions.
Madness, they say. Ha—how absurd. Little do they know, I am more lucid than ever. I am so close to Atziluth, I can nearly touch it.
Still, I believe I will return. I wish to behold the Ark once more.
December 23, 1927
I have returned to Germigny-des-Prés.
Hardly a moment passed before Mother asked about my expulsion from the École. Of course, what had finally moved her was not the many months of silence—nor the unspoken estrangement that has come to define our relationship—but the faint whisper of scandal. Not the years of distance. Not the absence of love. Only the rumors.
My loneliness once thickened around me when I first glimpsed the marks of Atziluth. But lately, as I’ve begun to trace its syntax, I feel something different—no longer estrangement, but a pull. Something drawing me outward—toward the world, perhaps even through it. As if I am being unspooled—not snapped, not severed—but carefully unwound. Once again, the words escape me. I can scarcely begin to describe it.
Tomorrow, I will rise before dawn to visit the Oratory while Mother still sleeps. I must be gone before her morning grievances begin to take shape.
Undated.
I open my eyes to a muddled murk the color of desiccated blood—maroon, dense, darkening by the second. As if the smog itself were imploding, sinking into a far more inscrutable dark. Not the vacant dark of a starless night, nor the coffin-sealed black of a funeral home. No—this is something else entirely. Older. Hungrier. A darkness not made for the human eye. No edge, no air, no sound. A black without boundary—though not without depth. Perhaps nearer to the mute void of dreamless sleep, or the silent chasm at the bottom of the sea. Something in me loosens. Untethers. A dread begins to crawl beneath my flesh. Then deeper—into bone; terror into marrow. My stomach convulses. My limbs unfasten. I sink—mind and body—helplessly into some unfathomable abyss. The nausea is excruciating. My breath slows. Weakens. I feel myself dimming. Then—something stirs. There is another nearby. I am not alone. I begin to sob—violent, guttural, feral tears. With each one, a pressure mounts inside me. As if every grief I’ve ever carried—every death, exile, shame—collapses inward, all at once. The sorrow floods my limbs, presses against my skull, lacerates my tears, poisons them into something venomous. They burn like acid as they streak down my cheeks. And yet—how strange. The venom begins to change. Each drop no longer wounds, but quickens. As if something long-dead inside me now twitches back to life. And oh… dear God. I cannot see it—but I feel it. It is near. Closer now… watching… hesitating. Then— A flicker. A silhouette. I lift my head. My breath catches. We lock eyes. I freeze. I can hardly believe—oh God… oh dear God… how can it be? It is me. My own face. My own eyes—yet younger, gentler, untouched. And her gaze… oh, dear God—her gaze locks me in place. Not with fear, but with pity. The quiet, terrible pity the innocent offer the damned. What have I become? Have I truly gone mad? Can she see it? Can she tell? I long to reach her with terrible desperation. The urge is unbearable. I move toward her—she recoils. I whisper—she retreats. Her eyes widen. Not in fear, but in revulsion. Is this what I’ve become? So desecrated that even my own reflection recoils? Then—another shift. The weight begins to lift. Not upward, but inward. Into the space between us. The silence thickens. The darkness folds like a veil. A gossamer cocoon. A warmth enters. Slow. Subtle. It touches her. It touches me. It moves through us—into us. Breath by breath. Pore by pore. We are made porous. Her light seeps into me. My shadow spills into her. I look into the dark light, and the luminous dark gazes back. It glows from within. I blink—nearly blinded. Golden tesserae shimmer across the sand. The dunes ripple. Collapse. Ripple again. From the shade of an overgrown oasis, the Ark of the Covenant gleams—emerald and bronze—its surface scattering mirrored chimeras into impossible geometries. It has never appeared so beautiful. So real. The cherubim lean inward. Symbols slither through the air—serpentine, silver. Glyphs spiral in mirrored winds. Coiling inward. Uncoiling outward. Once more. Again, and again, and again. Diffusing. Dissolving. Unity into multiplicity. Multiplicity into void. The sun collapses. The moon swells. He offers his light— She returns it in rebirth. The sky churns. A tower crumbles—brick by luminous brick. I long to save it. I plead. No—wait— I pray. But the prayer unravels me. Thread by thread. My limbs dissolve. I burn. The longing thickens. The marvel ripens. The dark deepens. The light becomes unbearable. And then— My loneliness softens. Not vanquished, but transfigured. The emerald kingdom knots into one. The twilight realm rejoins it. I wait—silent and porous. Devoured, but no longer afraid. Tick by tick. Alone—but no longer lonely. Why was I ever afraid? The separation has gone away. And now… It is coming. Yes—tick, tick, tick… Brighter. Darker. The sun. The moon. Yes—I knew this day would come! Finally, it is here. I am not afraid. Yes… Irrefutable. Ineffable. Unfathomable. I knew it all along. Yes—the marks of Atziluth…
At last—it has emerged!
***
The sun had already begun its descent, casting long, skeletal shadows across the dunes. But dusk brought him no clarity. He did, in some part of himself, long to make sense of it all—but hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin. After nearly an hour circling the same opaque passages, parsing symbols like a weary pilgrim lost in a maze of unsolvable riddles, Alaric finally let out a sharp exhale and closed the fragile spine with a sigh and a measured, deliberate shut.
“Samir,” he called, standing upright, brushing grit from his hands.
When Samir approached, Alaric continued. “I’ve given it my most concentrated effort. Yes, a few fragments appear translatable. But the rest?”
He gestured toward the open page as if the disarray might speak for itself.
“Obfuscation. Nonsense. A chaos of symbols. The ravings of a brilliant but tormented mind. A chronicle of her descent into madness.”
He paused, wiping his brow.
“It makes me quite ill, if I’m being honest. Tell the others to bring one of the tablets—I’d like to begin a clean transcription. As for the journal, you’re welcome to it. Though I suspect it to be a complete waste of time.”
The students from Tlemcen—well-acquainted by now with Alaric’s shifting moods—carried the sandstone into his yurt. Samir, meanwhile, had already drifted several paces away, the journal clutched tightly in his hands—his eyes, once again, aglow with that quiet, hungry wonder.
Shortly before the expedition’s end, just days before their departure, Samir Barzakh vanished without a trace. No one could say when. Some claimed it happened at night; others, during a solitary afternoon walk. But most agreed on one thing: in those final weeks, something in him had begun to shift. He grew more withdrawn. He would disappear into the canyons alone, whispering phrases no one recognized, filling his notebooks with strange symbols he refused to explain. He left no note. No footprints. The only thing he took with him was the single complete copy of Ariadne’s journal. All that remained were the meager, partial fragments Alaric had lazily transcribed.
In the years that followed, Dr. von Vergessen returned again and again to the theory of Tzaphiron—reshaping, revising, elaborating one speculative hypothesis after another. Although he initially drew a small circle of scholars intrigued by the promise of decipherment, the spark was short-lived. Interest waned. Funding dissolved. And so, at fifty-five, Alaric took early retirement and returned with his wife, Marlene, to Baden-Baden—back to the pines, the bread ovens, the shadowy fog. He spent his remaining years reading Hölderlin, composing the occasional essay, and consuming generous amounts of homemade dark rye.
Within decades, the journals had fallen out of circulation. Tzaphiron remained undiscovered; Atziluth, untranslated. Both trapped in that same liminal oblivion where myth and memory blur.
***
The pages in this manuscript were recovered from the private library of Dr. León Nahum Teozintli Mendoza, a Mexican historian whose lifelong obsession with Ariadne Solène Mornève and Alaric von Vergessen led him to acquire a near-complete corpus of Mornève’s unpublished writings—including the partial Vergessen transcriptions—at an esoteric antiquarian auction sometime in the early twenty-first century. His intent had been to compile a definitive chronicle of their interwoven trajectories, a manuscript he intended to title: Atziluth, Tzaphiron, Tassili n’Ajjer.
Dr. Teozintli Mendoza died under sudden and uncertain circumstances before the manuscript could be completed. The surviving folios were later deposited in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, where they now lie sealed in a cabinet on the eleventh floor—marked only with the catalog number: heurēma 131-A. According to the archivist’s log, it has been nearly two centuries since the cabinet was last opened.
And yet, astonishingly, to this day, there are still the occasional few—linguists, occultists, archaeologists, wanderers, mystics—who swear they’ve seen those symbols before, somewhere implacable: in petroglyphs, in trance-states, in hypnosis, in religious ceremonies, in ritual acts, in dreams. A small handful have even ventured into the bleeding, sanguine labyrinth of the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau. Most return empty-handed. Others are swallowed whole by the drudges and dangers of the dunes. The tale is almost always dismissed as mere legend or myth.
And yet—one final enigma continues to leave many wondering.
During a recent restoration of the ninth-century oratory at Germigny-des-Prés, a group of conservators uncovered a series of inscriptions hidden behind the Ark of the Covenant mosaic. Etched into the substrate beneath the gold and lapis tesserae, the lead epigrapher claimed the hand was unmistakable: Ariadne Solène Mornève. December 1927. Nearly six months after her supposed disappearance.
Consensus remains divided. Some dismiss the carvings as an elaborate hoax; others insist they constitute the long-sought final entry of Mornève’s journal. Yet those who have seen them firsthand speak with unwavering certitude: the same intertwining spirals, the same serpentine geometries, the same impossible symmetries. The specters of a language that once bore the divine and mounted the Infinite, yet now lingers like a wraith in the flesh of mortals—haunting its dearest prey, the lonely soul—and taunting countless others with impossible dreams of ineffable unity. Waiting, hidden, in almost every moment, for the chance to sprawl through pages and crawl forth once more: the marks of Atziluth.
“Atziluth, Tzaphiron, Tassili n’Ajjer” PDF Version
The Virgin Ceiba
At the ripe age of thirteen, Anacleta de la Cueva first felt that indelible spark of destiny kindle within her soul. She cupped it close in her small hands, letting its pale glow illuminate the dark corners of her path. Soon she walked with lifted shoulders, gliding through the halls of her home with newfound poise. She would skip and chatter to her parents, her dolls, even to the ants on the floor, always proclaiming she was meant for something more. Yet for all her confidence, she never seemed boastful. Even months later, when she received her first vision and that ember burst into flame, Anacleta remained steady in her humility. From that night on, she carried in her heart a certainty few ever glimpse: though the road ahead lay hidden, she knew it would end in the arms of God.
The Virgin Mary first came to her not through sight but through sensation. Still too young to name it, Anacleta had already felt a strange, implacable loneliness seep into her once-blithe blood. Each night she knelt by her bed and whispered pleas into the cold, begging the Lord to cast out whatever pest had nested in her thoughts. She had once been so carefree, wholly content with the love of her father, mother, and guardian above. Now, scarcely an adolescent, she wept herself swollen over a void she could not trace. Convinced no other cause could explain so strange a malady, Anacleta believed herself poisoned.
At first the infection worsened slowly, day by day, until one pale December night her ache swelled with sudden force, rising like smoke to lodge in her throat. Desperation tightened around her limbs, binding her still, until tears blurred her sight and she could no longer tell where sorrow ended and suffocation began. Then, gasping through the frost, she felt it: a faint breath of warmth scrape her skin. She froze. On such a frigid night, the heat itself felt uncanny. Yet the graze bore a tenderness too otherworldly to mistake. Evanescent as it was, Anacleta read it at once as a sign from God, an answer to her endless prayers, so full it left her convinced she had been healed.
In the months that followed, her solitude thinned into a sadness she could bear. Convinced some celestial ear had heard her plea that night, Anacleta drifted through her days, buoyant as a petal on water, trusting the cure was already at work. Some days pressed heavier than others, but never as dark as before, for now she prayed with the secret assurance that someone above had listened.
Yet one quiet night in February, just as she had begun to settle into that tenuous calm, her mother appeared at the doorway with the words no child should ever hear: her father had died in the night, taken without warning by the plague. A gale slammed into her chest. Moments later it ripped through her veins, ravenous to burrow deeper. The venom she had once believed divinely cleansed had returned—keener than ever.
Until then, Anacleta had known little of grief. She had never imagined it could strike so quickly, or why it seemed to aggravate the toxin already coursing through her bloodstream. From that moment on, alongside her strange malaise came a second torment: the specter of her father. Her nights grew sleepless, her hope withered, her light wilted. Still, she clung to her faith, meeting her sorrow the only way she knew. Night after night she knelt in prayer until she collapsed on the floor, when her mother would tiptoe in, stealthy, worried, to lift her back to bed.
For weeks the silence held indifferent. Then one night, her cry seemed to pierce the heavens. At last her prayers were answered, not with a fleeting touch this time, but with a true, ardent kiss. Startled yet enraptured, Anacleta wept as a figure took shape in the fog drifting through the open window. She rubbed her eyes in disbelief. Crowned in stars, robed in specks of cerulean and sapphire, stood the High Lady, her face aglow with moonlight.
“My daughter, do not be afraid,” she said at last.
Anacleta told herself it must be an illusion. Yet the words fell soft against her cheek, like snow that would not melt.
“Tonight’s moon rises only to greet tomorrow’s sun, and the storm flooding your soul is but a divine deluge, sent to clear the path ahead.”
No doubt remained in her mind: an arm’s length away, on the other side of her bed, it was the Virgin Mary who spoke.
“Endure, my child,” she said with a kind smile. “The Lord placed that ache in your heart only to hollow a chamber within, for there He will enter, and there He will dwell.”
At her final word, the Virgin dissolved into mist. Exhausted from shock, Anacleta curled on the floor and sank at once into deep sleep. All night the spectacle replayed in her dreams, each time confirming what she already knew: the Virgin had come, her kiss was real, her words were true.
She held these tenets with the same intensity with which she had once clung to her pebble of destiny. But unlike that fleeting kismet, Anacleta guarded her private moment with the divine like a sacrament, terrified that even speaking of it might fracture its sanctity. Yet the opposite proved true. Her Grace returned night after night, in dreams, in prayer, in the flicker of candlelight, in the whispers of the wind, each time her aureole brighter, her caress softer, her clutch more complete.
As their bond deepened, the Holy Mother revealed her true desire: not silence, but praise, for Anacleta to become her lips on earth, gathering her words and carrying them into the world like a feathered courier. At first the request filled her with dread. Even in her innocence, she had sensed the Church’s narrowing regard, the eagerness of friars to brand mystics as witches and seers as deceivers. Shrewd as she was, she learned to veil her revelations in modesty and cloak her prophecies in restraint. Yet with each visitation, her love for the Virgin grew until it became too powerful to resist. She confided first in her mother, then in the Franciscan at Vinuesa, and by week’s end even the Guardian of the Royal Convent in Atienza had heard of the girl whose passage into womanhood was marked by miracle.
Luckily for Anacleta, the very woes that had once driven her near to damnation had also tempered her spirit, sensitive, pure, and diffident enough to shield her from suspicion. Month by month her love swelled, her fervor widened, her piety strengthened, until at last, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, the long-awaited moment arrived. Yielding to the urgings of her mothers—both earthly and divine—Anacleta shackled her soul, cast the chains heavenward, and took the final step of her exodus with joy. From the ivory peaks of the Picos de Urbión she descended into the Gothic abbeys and narrow alleys of Salamanca, where she granted the Queen of Heaven her wish and entered the Convent of Santa Clara.
As a young novice, Anacleta learned to mend habits, recite psalms in Latin, and obey without question. Above all, she mastered the art of alchemizing suffering into devotion. Any desire for rosy dresses or her mother’s lullabies was soon conquered by the convent’s revelation: pain was beautiful.
Yet Anacleta’s faith did not rest on sisters or scripture alone. She tended it as a farmer tends his fields, certain the harvest would come. Just as rain promises fertile soil, she took the faint trace of rose in copal smoke as a pledge that her servitude was not only seen, but soon to be acknowledged. And sure enough, Her Holiness returned again and again, at times radiant in lapis and gold, at others gleaming in the pearl of a rosary bead, most often as nothing more than sensation: a sharp flush in her cheeks, an irresistible urge to weep. However she appeared, the outcome was always the same: her presence emptied Anacleta’s fear and filled her with a wholeness so complete that agony and adoration became one.
Before long she began to seek sorrow willingly, opening herself to its void, hoping to catch His light in her fissures. And so, after a single year of confessions and fasts, she made the choice without hesitation. Kneeling before the altar, Anacleta took the veil and swore her vows of chastity and submission—reborn as Sor Anacleta de la Luz Carmesí, bride of Christ.
Word of Anacleta’s rare piety and mystical gifts spread through Castile almost as soon as she was professed. Weeks later, when a letter arrived from the Archbishop of Mexico requesting Spanish-born nuns for the expanding missions, it was no surprise the Abbess named her first. Many thought her too young, too newly avowed, but her ardor pulsed too brightly to be overlooked. And so, in May 1561, scarcely fifteen and younger than most ever sent abroad, Anacleta left her nest once more, bound for the tropical wilds of Cuetzalan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, New Spain.
Her first days in the New World differed little from those in the Old. She rose before dawn, recited the Hours, folded linen, and took her meals in silence. The beaterio of Santa Rosalía de las Lluvias housed nine sisters: two elder Castilian nuns, three mestiza beatas, two newly baptized native servants, and one infirm elder, Sor Gregoria del Rosario. The Castilians, long settled in the colony, showed little interest in Anacleta, likely deeming her too young and untested. The beatas were polite but distant, offering only a cordial nod. The servants were just as reserved, speaking to her solely of chores.
At first the isolation did not trouble her. It even offered small consolations, moments of peace she needed to endure such a strange, secluded place. When sent for beans or squash, Anacleta would tarry, slowing her steps to savor the bristles of stalks against her fingertips as she meandered the rows of maize. Yet her deepest solace lay just beyond, where the golden field opened into unknown wilderness. From the meadow’s edge she fixed her stare on foliage rising in lustrous tiers of green. Some force always seemed to beckon her inward, but the threat of vipers and pumas always held her back. Instead, she strained her eyes until she could imagine the jungle enfolding her into a chrysalis of leaves. Even then, she would return to the beaterio gates with that wild vision pounding in her mind, its allure tugging her closer still.
So consuming were these savanna daydreams that nearly two months passed before Anacleta realized her visits from the Holy Mother had ceased altogether. For a time, the forest’s spell had renewed her almost as fully as the Virgin once had. But a glance alone could not sustain her soul forever. The long days without a single word from Mother, Son, or Spirit finally shattered upon her, splintering the illusion. She stopped walking the fields, forbade herself to dream of the jungle, and turned instead to the only weapon she knew against despair. Night after night she crawled across the chapel floor, groveling at Christ’s feet, searching for the flaw that had driven Him away. But the silence held, and with each day another thread came loose, unraveling her bit by bit.
At last her old malady returned—faster, hotter, hurling her into a grave fever. Unable to discern the cause, Mother Superior declared it the phthisic plague: the same that had taken her father. With no doctor nearby and no remedy at hand, she laid Sor Anacleta in an empty infirmary bed beside the fading Sor Gregoria and placed her care in the hands of one of the young beatas: Leonor Xóchitl de la Cruz.
To Anacleta, the arrangement felt like a cruel jest. Only weeks before she had been Christ’s bride, the Virgin’s chosen child, the Church’s exemplar of devotion. Now she lay reduced to a madwoman, left to decay beside an old, forgotten nun already at death’s door. She imagined her caretaker’s resentment at being pulled from holy duties to tend an invalid and bore the thought like a second illness. Yet if Leonor had in fact harbored any bitterness, she never showed it. Each morning without fault she entered the infirmary with a sponge and clay basin, patient as she bathed Anacleta, gentle as she drew a comb through her tangled curls, careful never to pull a single strand. Still she spoke little, and Anacleta kept silent in return, first from shame, then from fear that Leonor disliked her voice or her company altogether. But as the days wore on, Leonor’s compassion proved steadfast and genuine, melting Anacleta’s trepidation and sowing in its place a longing for connection. After nearly two weeks of silence, Anacleta resolved at last to speak.
“Does it feel swollen to you?” she asked one afternoon as Leonor pressed a warm cloth to her chest, trying to ease the rasp in her lungs.
Leonor looked back, puzzled.
“My throat—does it feel swollen?”
Leonor touched her neck lightly, then drew her hand away. “No, Sister.”
“Does my voice sound strange? Ill?”
“I do not know, Sister.”
Anacleta paused, searching for what else to say. “Do I seem so sick to you?” When no reply came, she hurried on. “Forgive me, Sister—I hope I’m not troubling you. I can’t seem to read my own symptoms. I think the fever has driven me a bit mad.” She hesitated, then spoke more softly, “It’s so lonely in here, left with nothing but my thoughts. You’ve been so kind to me… I only wish I could know more about you.”
She took Leonor’s silence as permission to go on. “How long have you been in the beaterio?”
“I’m not sure,” Leonor said after a pause. “I haven’t kept count.” But as soon as she caught the desperation in Anacleta’s eyes, her shoulders eased. “No more than a few years. Two, maybe three.”
“How did you come to Santa Rosalía?” Anacleta asked, lowering her stare as though afraid to push too far. Still, she could not help herself. Something in Leonor’s muted gray-blue eyes transfixed her, like seawater under a storm-heavy sky. Their depths seemed endless, darkening to indigo in shadow, silvering to pearl in light, flowing with hidden currents of intimacy and infinity.
Leonor noticed the stare. Unbeknownst to Anacleta, she too was ensnared by the flecks of gold and amber in Anacleta’s eyes. Their pupils widened, locked, until Leonor at last broke the silence.
“If you truly wish to know, I’ll tell you. But I should warn you—my story is far from calm, far from ordinary.” She hesitated. “And I’m not sure you should hear such darkness while you’re burning with fever.”
“I don’t mind, Sister. You might be surprised at the shadows in my own past. I won’t be frightened, I only want to know you. And for that, I need to hear your story.”
Leonor lowered her eyes to the basin, as if to anchor herself before she began. “My mother and I came from a small village just south of here—Xiloxochico. My father was Castilian. I never knew his name. But my mother’s was Citlali—‘star’ in Nahuatl, a name that suited her. She was full of life, tireless, tenacious, but with an old soul. More than a healer, she was a singer. She healed through her songs. My grandmother had taught her the sacred art of in xochitl in cuicatl—”
“In xochitl in cuicatl?” Anacleta gently interrupted.
Leonor smiled, bittersweet, slightly sad. “Forgive me, I forget you don’t speak Nahuatl. You really should learn. Most of the sisters know at least some. I could teach you, if you’d like.” Her timidity faded as she went on. “In xochitl in cuicatl—‘the flower, the song’—is our word for poetry. Where I come from, poetry isn’t just words on a page. A flower is never only a flower, and a song is never only one voice. Flowers hold the deepest powers of nature. Each one is a key that unlocks a song, and every song brings us closer to truth. That is why flower and song can’t be separated: the flower gives birth to the song, and the song gives birth to the flower. Through the flower we chant to God, and through the chant, God sings back.”
She glanced at Anacleta, worried she had said too much and lost her. Yet far from lost, Anacleta hadn’t looked away once. She listened intently, her ears clinging to each word as firmly as her stare clung to the obsidian strands slipping from beneath Leonor’s veil. It wasn’t only the words that held her. It was Leonor’s voice itself, steady yet tremulous, soothing yet unsettling, like the pull she sometimes felt staring into the jungle from the edge of the corn field.
“I’m telling you this,” Leonor went on, heartened by Anacleta’s gaze, “because it was through in xochitl in cuicatl that my mother drew her strength. Each flower-song gave her wisdom, as a bee gathers honey, carrying it back to heal the living. She guided women through birth, reverted curses, mended grief.”
Her tone darkened, her features grew solemn.
“I was thirteen, only just entered into womanhood, when the Franciscans of San Miguel began descending into the lowlands,” she said after a long pause. “They ravaged village after village, tribe after tribe. Ancient or new, strong or weak, it did not matter. Word soon reached them of shamans, singers, flower-songs… of women like my mother. And their thirst for blood only grew. Healers became witches, singers idolaters, flower-songs the Devil’s work.”
“My mother was no fool. From the moment they set foot in Xiloxochico, she knew her days were numbered. Yet she neither fled nor hid. She clung to her calling, fiercer than ever. Her songs grew louder, her remedies more wondrous. Until one afternoon a friar caught her serenading a grieving widow. He seized her, spat curses, and gave her a choice: renounce everything—her songs, her tongue, her healing, her ancestors—and bury herself alive in a cloister, or die.”
Anacleta drew a worried breath, afraid to hear what came next.
“My mother did not surrender. Days later they returned with soldiers. I crouched behind the thorns of a mesquite bush, as paralyzed by fear as I was powerless to act. My hiding place didn’t last long. Before I could even grieve, they cut my hair, bound my wrists, and left me at the gates of Santa Rosalía. It has been my world ever since.”
She hesitated, her eyes flicking toward Anacleta as if bracing for admiration to curdle into judgment. But Anacleta’s expression only softened, her gaze turning warmer, almost loving. Even so, fear and habit pushed the next words from Leonor’s lips.
“It’s alright, Sister. I do miss my mother. But she was… cursed by pagan ways, lost in idolatry. Her death freed me. In the order I found my true calling; in her death, I found salvation in Christ. I was nothing but a sinner, a monster. Now I am His servant. For that, I am grateful.”
Anacleta was at a loss for words. She could hardly believe the disgust with which Leonor spoke of herself. Was it a performance, this self-hatred, or had they truly convinced this tender, beautiful girl that she was a monster? Either way, Anacleta’s heart broke. She longed to comfort her, though she knew no words could mend such wounds. All she could offer was to hold Leonor, to draw her into the tenderness the Virgin had once shown her. She was no Blessed Mother, but in her hold there was true affection, true care. And so she clasped Leonor’s hand, pulled her close, and held her until the midnight bells tolled their separation.
With Leonor back in her chamber, Anacleta was left alone, another night without sleep or solace. Lying awake, her every thought circled Leonor, heaving her into a maelstrom of yearning and heartache. Then, without warning, a warmth brushed her skin. Before she could grasp it, it burst into a blizzard of heat, wrapping her in its mantle. She did not hesitate, nor doubt, she knew at once. Her pupils widened, first with relief, then with joy. A bright, uncontainable smile bloomed across her face. The Virgin had returned.
She shut her eyes to let the Spirit enter. But when she opened them, there was no Mary. No glimmer. No golden kiss. Instead, a searing flash, then thunder. A mighty gust of love tore through her marrow like a comet, sweeping her into a starlit womb. The Presence was heavy, immense, enclosing her in a vortex before hurling her onto the black volcanic grit of a primordial desert. From the corner of her eye she saw it: a colossal tree, its branches sprawling impossibly wide in every direction. No one came, no voice spoke, yet Anacleta knew who dwelt within the trunk. She fell to her knees, arms outstretched, bracing for His embrace, when a knock at her door wrenched her from the brink of consummation.
Any trace of anger vanished when she turned the knob to find Leonor in the blush of dawn, a basin of water in her hands. She entered quietly, pulled up a stool, dipped the cloth, and pressed it to Anacleta’s cheek. At once its warmth sobered her, lulling her back from the terrible grandeur she had just witnessed.
Anacleta weighed her choices with each twist of the cloth. It wasn’t distrust that kept her silent, if anything, the opposite. To an outside eye, they might have seemed like opposites: Anacleta of the Old World, Leonor of the New—dark waves against fair curls, one gaze tempest-tossed, the other rosy like firelight. Yet beneath those differences lay a familiarity neither could explain nor deny—as if they had known each other long before Santa Rosalía, twin souls once bound and now torn apart. The very thought of losing Leonor, even of frightening her away, sent shudders down Anacleta’s spine. But when the cloth returned to her chest, pressed so lovingly into her skin, she knew she could no longer keep her secret.
“I have something I must tell you,” Anacleta confessed at last. “But you mustn’t think I’ve gone mad.”
Leonor’s face softened. “Sister, I would never have shared my own story if I feared judgment between us. Please—tell me what weighs on you.”
Anacleta let out a troubled sigh. “Before I left Salamanca, my Mother Superior made me promise to keep silent about certain… matters. She warned the line between mysticism and madness had grown dangerously thin, especially here in the Indies. So I obeyed. I held my tongue. I spoke of it to no one. But with you…” She drew a breath, steadying the knot in her chest. “Forgive me for hiding this part of myself.”
Her voice hardened. “Since I came of age, I have been visited by the Holy Spirit. In the stillness of dawn and dusk, He sent me His messenger: the Virgin Mary. Sometimes she spoke, other times she was silent, but always she came to anoint me with a kiss, to remind me that my suffering had meaning.”
Her pupils brightened with a sudden glee. “Oh, Sister—what visions they were! In every doubt, in every fear, there she was, wrapping me in her seraphic wings, soothing my sorrows, lifting my faith. I came to love her more than life itself. So when I was called to this land, I seized the chance to give my life to the Lord, for He had already saved mine a hundred times.”
The blush in her cheeks turned pale, the bustle draining from her voice. “And then, when I arrived…” She stuttered, as if on the verge of tears. “She stopped coming. No warning, no reason. At first I tried to go on as if nothing had changed. I wanted to see her again so badly I mistook the rustle of leaves for the sweep of her cloak. But deep down I knew. She was gone. And I could not bear it. I believe it was grief itself that made me ill.”
Leonor reached for her hands, her face tight with worry.
“Dear Sister—what concern I see in your eyes!” Anacleta cried, gripping back. “Please, let me finish before you make yourself sick with fear. I don’t know what summoned it, but yesterday, just before you came to my door…” Her voice quickened. “The Spirit returned. Only this time—” She clutched Leonor’s fingers tighter, as if to still their tremble. “It was not the Virgin. It was Him—the Lord Himself!”
“Oh, Leonor!” She erupted, alight with elation. “I can hardly speak of what He awakened in me—the terror, the rapture! His voice… my God, beyond words, sublime! And His touch—” She faltered, searching for words that would not come, then pressed on. “I’m afraid this is where you’ll think me mad…if you don’t already.”
Leonor shook her head softly, her thumb tracing the back of Anacleta’s fingers.
“I was with Him,” Anacleta said, her voice fluttering. “Not in heaven, not in the deserts of Jerusalem, but here—in the valley of Mexico. I beheld Him in all His glory when all of a sudden—” Her words erupted into a cry. “I longed for Him—not only as spirit, not only as savior, but as a lover! Don’t you see, Leonor? Why else would He rouse such gnawing in me, even when I was a child? He wants to unite with me—not only in paradise, not only after death, but here—in this soil, in this body, in this flesh!”
Her breath hitched, flaming with a delirious certainty. “I am not meant only to be His bride—I am destined to bear His child!”
Leonor gasped. “Oh, Sister, please—don’t speak such things! You frighten me…”
“You don’t believe me?” Anacleta’s voice quivered. “Why would I invent such a thing?”
“Of course I believe you,” Leonor quickly affirmed. “I swear it. But if the others hear, they won’t see devotion. They’ll see delusion—madness! You could be cast out, exiled… or worse.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t even bear to think of it.”
From that night on, Leonor scarcely left Anacleta’s side. With each day, their bond tightened, like a serpent’s slow coil around the throat. In the afternoons, as she braided Anacleta’s hair, she would sing the few hymns she still remembered from her mother. At night, reading from the Psalms or the Canticles of Solomon, Anacleta would break in with her own confessions—memories of longing and solitude, nightmares and dreams, visions and apparitions.
When her temperature soared and shivers wracked her frame past midnight, Leonor whispered the names of flowers in Nahuatl to distract her from the pain. But nothing could silence her screams. Night after night they rose until at last they pierced the thin infirmary walls, waking the entire beaterio in fright. Sisters would rush in, crosses clutched, to find Anacleta convulsing, babbling in tongues, weeping without end. Leonor would press her palm to Anacleta’s mouth, muffling each cry of ecstasy or howl of pain. And when the storm finally subsided, she would lie beside her, take her hand, and whisper:
“Tell me… what did you see?”
“In the sky,” Anacleta murmured one night, “a claw ripped straight through the stars. I was lying naked on a stone altar when a sudden twitch began to—”
“Anacleta!” Leonor cut her off, her body rigid with fear. “You mustn’t speak of this to anyone but me. Do you understand? Promise me!”
“I won’t tell them,” Anacleta promised, again and again. But the visions only grew stranger, each one harder to contain. Soon Virgin’s name vanished from her tongue altogether, her every word bending toward that haunting tree. As her body weakened, its image ripened. By day she swore vines crept around her ankles; by night her moans turned raw, almost bestial, forcing Leonor to keep vigil at her side, smothering each sound before it could escape into the corridor.
“I can feel Him, Sister,” Anacleta gasped one night, waking in sweat. “He wants me… He needs me—”
“Anacleta, please,” Leonor pleaded, glancing toward the door. “Enough!”
But Anacleta pressed on, as if powerless to stop herself. “Leonor, don’t you see? I’ve pieced it together. I see it now, clear as day—I know what He asks of me.” Her words tumbled out, giddy with conviction. “He has bound us together—entwined our destinies as one. I cannot obey Him without you.”
Leonor blinked, shaken. “I don’t understand. I thought… I thought your destiny was to bear His child.”
“It is!” Anacleta cried. “But first—I must conceive.”
Leonor pulled back slightly, her face caught between confusion and care. “But if the child is Christ, the conception would be immaculate… How could I—how could anyone—be part of it?”
“I do not know how it happened in Nazareth,” Anacleta said, “but I know how He wills it here, in the jungles of Mexico. At first I thought it would happen entirely within the dream. But when I reached for His embrace… I felt thorns against my skin. And when you knocked, breaking the spell—it came to me.” Her eyes shone. “His arms are not arms at all, but branches. He means to hold me not as a man, but as a tree! Why else would He come night after night in the same form—the same leaves, the same trunk? It is no coincidence—it is His command!”
Leonor frowned. “I am more confused than ever. What tree are you speaking of?”
“Think of it as Sinai, as Nazareth, a place of meeting. The Lord has chosen it as the ground where He will join me in the flesh. Moses had his mountain; I have this tree. As he heard God in thunder and stone, so shall I hear Him in the trunk of this living giant. Through the tree He will touch my womb, and through my womb, He will speak again.”
“Anacleta… do you really believe this tree exists outside your visions?”
“I am certain of it.”
“But how could you ever find it? A single tree in all this wilderness?”
“I know its face better than my own,” Anacleta answered in haste. “It comes to me each night, without pause, without reprieve.” Her gaze fell, fixed on something only she could see. “I know the moss on its pearl-gray bark, smooth in places, jagged at the base. I know the shadows in its creases, the bend of every branch. Even now I see it, its buttress roots fanning out, shimmering as if lit from within, its fibers catching daylight like strands of sun—”
“What kind of roots?” Leonor cut in, her voice suddenly urgent.
“Buttressed. Broad. Spread wide across the forest floor.”
“And the fibers?”
“They hang in wisps from the branches, like cotton, like—”
“Anacleta!” Leonor gasped. “I cannot explain it, but—I think I’ve seen that tree.”
“What?” Anacleta blinked, searching her face for answers. “Leonor, please… you mustn’t say such things just to comfort me.”
“I cannot be certain,” Leonor admitted. “It was long ago, and I was only a child. But hearing you now, it comes back to me.
“I must have been six, maybe seven. It was May, at the end of the dry season. Our village was celebrating Huey Tozoztli, the feast of fertility, rain, and maize. The elders led us children to sacred places—trees, caves, mountains—to give thanks to the gods of the earth. That year my mother and aunt brought me to make my first offering to Tlaloc, lord of rain, and Chicomecóatl, goddess of maize. I chose mine with care: a few dried cacao beans, a red feather, a chipped jade bead from my grandfather’s altar. My mother always said a first offering bound you to the land for life.
“We walked for hours through the hills and thornwoods until late in the afternoon we reached a wide cenote where—” She paused, her glance far off. “There it was. Taller than anything I’d ever seen, its roots spread over the ground like rays of sun. My tía called it a pochotl. I think the Spanish call it a ceiba, but—”
“Leonor!” Anacleta cried. “It’s the same tree—I know it! Don’t you see? Our Lord, our Christ, our very world—it needs us. You must help me find it!”
“Find it?” Leonor’s forehead tightened. “Anacleta, please… they’re already speaking of sending you away.”
“You might as well say you don’t believe me.” The brightness dimmed from Anacleta’s voice, leaving only hurt.
Whether Anacleta had been chosen to bear a new Christ or was only lost in fevered dreams, Leonor could not say for certain. She knew only this: God—or something just as mighty—had descended upon Anacleta with a hunger beyond lust, and whatever form He took—Virgin, seraph, vision, or tree—Anacleta burned for Him all the same. Yet something stranger, perhaps stronger, had taken root elsewhere. Not in the mountains of Spain or the lowlands of Mexico, but in the instant Anacleta met the silver gleam of Leonor’s eyes and saw her own amber mirrored there. In that moment, she was marked forever. No touch in heaven, earth, or hell could pierce her solitude as Leonor’s did.
And for Leonor, a single glance into Anacleta’s desperate, doe-like eyes was enough to make her yield. That night, at Anacleta’s behest, Leonor snuck from her chamber and tiptoed through the halls of the beaterio to the front door, where she whispered to the gatekeeper that the friars had granted them leave to seek a healer in the southern villages. At dawn, as the gate creaked open, Leonor obeyed Anacleta’s wish, and Anacleta followed her lead, guided only by the faintest pull—south, into the jungle.
They reached Xiloxochico within hours. Leonor had not returned since her mother’s death, yet the land seemed to greet her. Ravines and moss-dark cliffs, clouds snagged on their slopes—all welcomed her home. Orchids released their fragrance, as if rewarding her for remembering their secret language. For a moment, it was as if no time had passed. Yet she soon saw the stone cross hammered into the old temple ruins, and sorrow and shame rushed in at once. Before they could take hold, Anacleta had already reached for her hand.
“Do you remember which way from here?” she asked with a sweet smile, her caress easing Leonor at once. Neither could say when it began, but even the smallest gesture between them carried a magnetism—wordless, irresistible. They turned southeast into the lowlands, descending into a forest that thickened with each step. Down moss-slick switchbacks and through ankle-deep mud, their clasp never once let go. What Leonor had once crossed with her tía in a single day now took several. But by the fourth morning, the ground had grown so damp and loamy that she knew they were close.
At last the trail opened into a round hollow, volcanic walls draped in vines and moss, dew dripping into a still jade-green pool. Anacleta stumbled, nearly falling into the slippery soil. Clutching a branch, she gasped, “Leonor—look! Just as I dreamed!” Suddenly ablaze, she rushed forward—bareheaded, breathless, chasing the musk of earth and the metallic tang of water as if under a spell. Leonor called after her, but Anacleta had already vanished into the cleft ahead.
Roots sprawled like wings across the jungle floor, veined with moss and lichen that glazed the bark in shimmering sage and clouded green. The trunk, massive as a mammoth, rose like a leviathan from the sea before bursting into an emerald cascade above the canopy. Impossible to miss, impossible to mistake—the ceiba stood before them in its full majesty.
Leonor stepped into the clearing just as Anacleta’s awestruck face broke into tears. “I’m frightened, Leonor. Frightened and—” She stopped short, her voice catching as she stared at the white blossoms pushing out of the trunk. “My God… do you see them? Can you believe such beauty?” Her lips trembled—half awe, half fear. “Help me, Sister. I know what I must do—I just don’t know how.”
She lifted her tear-bright eyes. Leonor caught her wrist, pressed her palm to the wood, and guided it slowly down the trunk until the rough bark gave way to moss—warm, damp, alive beneath her touch.
She pressed Anacleta’s hand harder into the spine of the ceiba, her voice quickening. “Do you feel it, Sister? Nothing else is like this. Shh—listen. There… beneath the bark. That faint tremor—it’s His heartbeat. Close your eyes. Yield to it. Let Him move through you.”
Anacleta obeyed, lashes fluttering shut. A bead of dew slid over her knuckles as Leonor leaned against her, pressing her frail frame to the barked column. Wedged between Leonor’s curves and the giant’s ridges, her skin scraped along the grooves, shallow scratches marking where bark cut into soft flesh. Leonor pressed her palm deeper, fixing her in place—chest to trunk, ear to wood—until a pulse, steady and immense, thudded through the heartwood. The ceiba seemed to draw her in, folding her into its bends, until they were no longer two nor three but one: one spirit, one flesh, one soul. Then, with an abrupt twitch, the antlers of the tree heaved skyward, pods splitting open, releasing clouds of snowy floss that drifted down across the forest floor. At last Anacleta tore herself free to find Leonor waiting at her side. She collapsed into her arms, and together they leaned against the ceiba, holding fast as the hours slipped by.
At dawn, at Anacleta’s urging, they set out for the beaterio, vowing to guard the night as secret and sacred. On the road they spoke little—not from fear or shame, but because both knew they had crossed into a place words could not follow, an obscurer realm, verdant and deep, where language could not reach. All was calm until midway through the journey, when a sudden throb seized Anacleta’s belly, folding her forward with a soft cry. A pressure gathered low beneath her navel. She had sensed it coming for weeks, yet when the blood came—thin, dark, sliding down her thighs—it carried a chill no anticipation could ease. By nightfall, Leonor understood: there was no turning back. Anacleta was with child.
They returned to the beaterio to find Mother Superior and the friars waiting, arms crossed, vision narrowed, faces set in contempt. Fortunately, Leonor had rehearsed their story on the road: they had gone in search of a curandera said to cure afflictions of the mind, only to lose their way en route to Atotocoyan. Told plainly, without flourish, it was convincing enough to spare them harsher punishment.
For a few nights, life seemed to resume as before—two figures curled beneath a thin wool blanket, whispering in the dark how they might one day reveal their miracle to the world. But quiet soon gave way to chaos. Anacleta’s body betrayed them: fever, cramps, nausea, hunger, bleeding—what should have taken months erupted in mere days. Each night it grew harder to disguise the changes beneath her habit.
One evening the fetus kicked so violently that Anacleta escaped from Vespers, stumbling into a hidden side chapel. She fell to her knees before the crucifix, but the words stumbled. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” She stopped. The next line would not come. Father. Spirit. Son. Each name felt strange on her tongue. Yet her lips kept moving. Unbeknownst to her, the prayer no longer levitated toward a distant sky. It circled the air like a whirlwind, sank into the earth, and spread through the cosmos—toward the ceiba, toward Leonor.
Just as the realization struck, so did the next blow from within. Pain ripped through her, folding her inward as if she herself were the child. A cry tore loose from her throat, echoing down the corridors before she could smother it. When the sisters and friars arrived, they found her collapsed and unconscious at Christ’s feet.
After endless hours, Anacleta at last opened her eyes. The glare was brutal—white, harsh, bare—yet not so blinding that she failed to see she was back in the infirmary. As her vision cleared, a swarm of figures emerged into focus: Mother Superior, the nuns, the friars, all arranged in a semicircle. Their stare was flat, their faces stripped of concern. Her stomach sank, and with it a deeper horror: her womb felt hollow. Panic surged. She darted her gaze until it caught on a wooden tray before the two Castilian nuns. Upon it, laid on fine white lace, rested a dark, almond-shaped shell wrapped in pale gossamer strands of silk.
Relief swept through her. Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh—praise the heavens, praise the Lord!” Anacleta cried, nearly shaking with joy, blind to the looks of horror around her. “Mother, Sister, Brother—look! A miracle—Christ has returned!”
“She’s lost her senses!” one Castilian gasped. “Mother, what are we to do?”
“Child,” Mother Superior snapped sharply, “you cannot call this—this thing from your womb—our Christ.”
“Pay her no mind,” a friar barked. “She cloaks her sins behind this creature. She has dragged the devil into Cuetzalan. Fallen, deceived, blasphemous—do you understand the weight of your crimes? The shame you’ve brought upon yourself, your sisters, this holy house?”
Anacleta’s thoughts lurched and spun. Could they truly not see? Her glance scampered around the room, searching for Leonor hidden in the shadows, the Virgin flickering in the halo of a candle, for any sign she was not alone. But nothing came. A tear slid down her cheek. She had to confess.
“Yes, I have given birth,” she said at last. “That much is true. But what I’ve brought forth is not what you believe—”
“Not what I believe?” the friar roared. “You bore not a child of God but a monstrosity—something no woman, no mortal, should ever bear! There can be no absolution—”
“Father, I swear, I have not known a man,” Anacleta cried. “My sin is no greater than that of the Blessed Virgin. He came to me—here, in this very convent. For years His Spirit spoke through the Virgin, and then one night He came to me Himself. My suffering, my solitude—they were never punishments. They were His hand, shaping me for the destiny He had prepared in secret.”
She lifted her head, voice quaking with fear yet firm with faith. “I am Sor Anacleta de la Luz Carmesí—Wife of God, Mother of Christ!”
A gasp rippled through the room. Shock widened every eye. Yet Anacleta pressed on, her words falling faster, her zeal now unbound.
“He led me into the jungle to stand before Him, face to face. And there, He entered me, as the Spirit once entered Mary—though not as a dove, not as an angel, but as a tree. As sap, as leaf, as flower, He wrapped me in root and trunk and branch. And the fire He kindled within me—oh, Brothers, Sisters, the fire! I was made whole in a way I had never imagined. More alive, more radiant than I had ever been—even in the womb itself!”
“Blasphemy!” the friar roared. “You call God your lover? You claim this seed to be His Son? Madness—or worse, possession!” He turned sharply to Mother Superior. “Neither the girl nor this… thing can remain here. They will bring disgrace—and His wrath—upon us all.”
Anacleta and her child were locked in separate cells, far from the beaterio, farther still from Leonor. In the days that followed, Mother Superior, the friars, and the Council of Elders argued over her fate: confinement or exorcism? Penance or banishment? On the fourth day, the bishop delivered his verdict. Appalled by her testimony yet fearing scandal more than sin, he chose silence over trial. The council concurred. By episcopal decree, Anacleta and Leonor—condemned as her keeper and conspirator—were excommunicated. By dusk, they were denied communion, stripped of their habits, severed from the Body of Christ. Mother Superior’s command was final: they would leave Santa Rosalía at dawn.
When the sun rose to herald their departure, Anacleta, Leonor, and the child stepped through the cloister gates with nothing but a scrap of bread, a flask of water, and their cloaks. No breviary, no habit, not a single rosary bead was permitted. Their steps were heavy, their heads bowed in grief, yet neither looked back once. As soon as they crossed the threshold, Anacleta, cradling the child in one arm, reached with the other for Leonor’s hand. Together they walked beneath the searing orange blaze of the Mexican sun—east toward Xiloxochico, then south into the marshlands, where, in the valley of a hidden cenote, an ancient ceiba awaited their return.
The journey took only two days. They prowled like feral cats through dusk and shadow, vaulting rivulets and skirting mud as if the swamplands had always been their true home. Hollow with hunger, shriveled by heat, they nearly collapsed when at last they reached the base of the ceiba. Without a word, they began their task, layering ferns and palms into a cool, mossy bed. Anacleta laid her newborn gently upon it, then sank into Leonor’s arms with a weary sigh. As dusk darkened into night, the tree gathered mother, lover, and child into its core, holding them close as all three sank into a deep, hibernal sleep.
When they woke beneath the cenote’s dark shade, they could not tell whether hours, weeks, or years had passed. The seedling had somehow grown into a towering tree of its own. Beneath its olive wreath of leaves, Anacleta and Leonor wed themselves to the ceiba and, in the years that followed, bore dozens of its children—tiny miracles unseen in a world blind to its own light. Each sylvan child returned its mothers’ love with gifts: spoons carved from wood, quilts spun from cotton floss, sweet tea steeped from bark, simple yet precious, for they gave the sisters what they desired most: the means to remain together forever at the ceiba’s side.
What had once reached Anacleta only in ephemeral flashes now sprang steady from the soil beneath her feet: the ominous whistle of birds, the rumble of thunder warning from afar, the soft give of the earth hinting at hidden water beneath. In that wordless dominion, the wilderness forced her to listen, as if demanding she learn to speak its tongue. Leonor became her sorcerer, Anacleta her sage, the forest their shaman—lover, teacher, healer, each role transfigured through the other.
Over time, they came to understand what the outside world had long forgotten: warmth stiffens without the sun, grandeur shrinks beneath a sky without mountains, and the sublime terror of the deep dissolves without the sea. Apart from the forest’s web, the threads that bind each creature begin to unravel. Sheltered from the turning of the seasons, time stretches into a single, lifeless line. When storms no longer strike terror and the haunt no longer determines fate, the power of God seems to wither, His many faces fading into obscurity. For if He cannot be found in the petal of a marigold, He will not appear in the soil beneath it. The wooded trail twists into a foreign maze, condemning the seeker to pursue a sun long eclipsed, a hope long forgotten. Yet beyond this barren expanse lies another realm: a lush hinterland where the sun burns as brightly as before, ruling a land where every creature must learn its rhythms, move with its rise and fall. In this emerald empire, where the jungle reigns absolute, God runs naked and free, racing through vine and feather, in fur and wing. Only here, in the jungle’s dark depths, does magic still ride the wind. Only in a secret world where jaguars speak and women give birth to trees could Anacleta at last complete her journey. Leonor gave Anacleta the jungle, and Anacleta showed Leonor how to run through it unbound. In that exchange they discovered a different kind of love—feral, fearless, free. With that love—love like puma, like jaguar, like ceiba—they plunged deeper into the forest, further into its bottomless heart. For beneath its leafy mantle, solitude was nothing but a myth, rustling from somewhere far beyond the trees.
Many years later, or perhaps only hours, for they had long slipped free from the serpent-loop of time, the sisters lay beneath the ceiba. One pressed her cheek to its trunk, the other to her sister’s breast. Through the viridian prism of leaves, shards of turquoise and gilded silver sparkled into the star-strewn sky. They giggled softly, eyes glistening in the moonlight, so coy and whimsical they felt like little girls again, playing the oldest game of all. With their ears against the ceiba’s torso, they listened closely for its pulse, savoring each thrum, thrum, thrum as though it were a sip of fine wine. “Listen,” Leonor beamed with glee, her smile shining in the dark. Anacleta lifted the pair of drums they had carved from deerskin and wood and struck its hide with a steady, cyclic rhythm. The jungle roused awake at once. With every flash of color and beat of drum, spiders and howlers rose as if reaching skyward to shimmer in unison with soil and stars. Their chant cut through the canopy, summoning the night itself to rejoin. When at last it obeyed, when souls wove into voices and kisses seeded into songs, the hymn did not ascend into the heavens but sank deep into the earth. To Mother Superior, the friars, the other Castilian nuns, the heretical sisters had died within a week of exile. Minds bound in dogma could never fathom a mystery as sacred as the ceiba. Yet in one sense they were not mistaken: the moment Anacleta and Leonor pressed their palms into the ceiba’s trunk, they relinquished their souls to the music that secretly resounded in its hollows. Laments of lust, odes of sorrow, ballads of love and death—each a mere murmur swallowed into the jungle’s indomitable bellow.
Anacleta lifted her arms into the moist midnight air, not to break free but to bind herself more tightly within Leonor’s embrace. She knew then what she had always known—as child, as mystic, as madwoman—that her end lay in the arms of God. Exalted, overcome, she rose and readied herself to waltz with the woods and the heavens, surrendering at last to the call of the wild. She spun and glided, aglitter like a firefly, while Leonor beat the drum onward, carrying their chorus further into night. Cradled in the ceiba’s bosom, cocooned in each other’s love, they chanted louder, longer, deeper into the endless dark. Their hearts beat as one, pulsing in a song beyond all measure, jingling past the chimes of time. Long after the earth has turned to dust, after forests have burned and seas have withered away, the music of the wild will still thrum: a dirge and a lament, a beat and a chant, bearing the lunar-honeyed song of Anacleta and Leonor forever into the beyond.
“The Virgin Ceiba” PDF Version
Amora
Amora Rosalquía was born cradled in a bed of wild passionflowers, whose frilled violet petals, drunk with the ecstasy of blooming life, exhaled a fragrance so potent it was said to have roused the soul of the Rosalquía home from centuries of slumber. At the fall of her first tear, the motes of dust suspended in the humid air lit like fireflies, stirring the ancient tendons of the tezontle-stone walls, who trembled awake at once to shield her newborn gaze from the molten glow. The emerald bougainvillea vines—whose roots had entwined with Rosalquía blood since the first dawn of Santa Rosa—sprawled through the cracked adobe in a fevered bloom, unfurling like the vexed wings of a mother quetzal to weave a fierce green cocoon around her purple-plumed cradle.
Amora spent most of her childhood alone—a solitude that, though sharp at times, drew her toward places other girls never thought to look. Day after day, she wandered vine-draped alcoves and ochre corridors, parting leaves like velvet drapery, trailing her fingers along the ridges of volcanic stone, as if each fissure held some secret spell. She whispered dreams into the walls, convinced the spirits of her ancestors slept within—dormant, yet listening. As she ripened into adolescence, the house began to murmur back. At times, she felt its mossy breath whistling through shadow and bloom, a hush drifting across her skin. With every graze and shiver, she grew more intimate with its stones, sensing their longing to wrap her in old Rosalquía magic, to unveil the mysteries curled inside their bones. What began as a lonely girl’s strange imagination bloomed into the labyrinth that would one day become Amora Rosalquía’s mind.
Her mother bestowed upon her a beauty as elusive as dusk: a shadowed warmth in the coils of her obsidian hair, a moonlit glow beneath the olive sheen of her skin—as if sun and moon had seared her in a single fevered kiss. From her father, she inherited an intensity that throbbed through her veins like the jungle’s drumbeat—both intoxicating and fearsome to behold. Yet it was neither beauty nor spirit that made Amora so singular. What others mistook for childish fancy soon revealed itself as something far rarer. A fire had been stitched into her soul—so luminous, so strange, so wild—the villagers of Santa Rosa swore it could have been lit only by the gods. Amora Rosalquía bore the gift of a true storyteller.
From the moment her gift came to light, Amora was no longer seen as merely a girl. She became the blessed daughter of Santa Rosa—a living talisman of its jungle breath and volcanic blood. Her skin shimmered with the jade of the canopies. Her eyes twinkled with the turquoise-lit veins of the cenotes. Her blood thrummed with the primordial pulse of the mountains. It was glaring and undeniable: the molten heart of the land had poured its fire straight into her soul.
Even Amora stood in awe of what blazed within her. She painted the faintest hues and sculpted the subtlest textures of her every sensation: the smoky nectar of passionflowers warming in her throat, the sultry musk of vines clinging to her skin, the golden-green light fractured through the canopy in prisms. Her father’s palace rose from the soil and glared through the overgrown foliage like a half-sunken jewel—strung with jade, rimmed in obsidian, tiled in turquoise. But it wasn’t her honey-umbered home that set her imagination alight. It was the land itself—the tangled marshes, mist-laced mangroves, moss-matted roots, and jaguars that prowled through rustling foliage like spectral beasts—that kindled her flame and breathed life into her stories. She spun the myths of Santa Rosa into song: brave warriors who slit the bellies of pumas with obsidian blades, fearless women who toiled and burned beneath the unrelenting sun, gods and goddesses whose laughter once mingled with the hummingbirds at dawn—each woven into a melody so vivid and sharp it swelled warm tears from even the coldest eyes.
Word of her gift spread like wildfire. Whispers of a celestial beauty whose voice could hush the wind and beckon the stars reached faraway lands, luring strangers to brave jungles for just one glimpse of her tale-telling magic. Her visions stretched far beyond the present—backward into the primeval womb that bore the cosmos, and forward into the tragedy already etched into her fate. From her very first breath, Amora had known: they would come for her land.
The visions struck with monstrous clarity: a procession of pale riders silhouetted against a bleeding horizon, their horses tearing through palms like vipers, hooves churning her beloved savanna into a maelstrom of dust and decay. Spears glinted like shards of light. Arrows shredded the blackened sky. Swords cleaved the thick tropic swelter—and with each stroke, the steel sliced not only heat and flesh, but some deeper sinew of her soul.
Her parents called the village doctor, unable to understand why their daughter’s gaze kept locking to the clay floor. But Amora wasn’t staring into nothing. She was watching the future unravel in merciless detail: banners dancing triumphantly against a vermilion sky, their blood-bright pigments mocking the devastation below. Forests stripped to bone. Huts collapsing into smoke. Villagers fleeing the chains of slavery—their cries swallowed by a sky gone carnivorous, arrows striking them down mid-scream.
She wanted to scream when the bougainvillea vines were hacked and hewn, torn mercilessly asunder. She longed to disappear when the passionflowers she once adored so fiercely bled their wine-dark hearts into desiccated soil. She ached to recoil as their ambrosial fragrance curdled into the metallic stench of death. But her body would not move. She stood frozen—impotent as a ghost in purgatory. Condemned to witness. Unable to act.
Amora understood then: they would come not as men, but as a ravenous gale—driven not by conquest, nor glory, nor even gold, but by a blind and bottomless hunger to consume all that pulsed. She knew what it meant for Santa Rosa. And still, through every vision, through each fevered nightmare, she remained a silent witness. Powerless before the cavernous chasm of fate. Cursed to bear a prophecy that no spell, no prayer—not even her sacred gift of words—could undo.
The air—once sweet with banana leaves and heliconias—curled into smoke and soot. The hearthstones that had once kindled her family’s warmth now blazed red-hot as funeral pyres. No prophecy, no vision, no warning could have shielded her from the piercing shriek of her own heart as it shattered, shard by shard, into the blood-drenched soil.
The vulturous gaze of her captors devoured her long before their hands ever reached her—but that did nothing to dull the pain. They took her first for her beauty, seizing her as one might seize land: defenseless, ripe to ravage, theirs to plunder. Bruises bloomed beneath their grip like poisonous blossoms. Each mark leached the light from her olive skin, leaving her blank—a canvas to bear the scars of their conquest. By nightfall, she lay hollowed and hopeless. Yet, quivering between surrender and survival, when the shadow of death leaned in to press its fatal kiss, Amora summoned the strength to draw one final breath. Not to beg—but to speak.
At first, her voice was no more than a patter of rain. But with each word, it swelled—gathering force, pouring forth in torrents that ensnared her captors in a spell for which they had no armor. Every syllable pulled them deeper into a world beyond their reach, submerging them in a thirst they had never known—and would never quench. By the time her final word fell, they had already chosen to spare her life—but only to bind her anew.
They sealed her inside the decomposing husk of what had once been her home. Now desecrated, it stood like a corpse. The windows gaped. Damp clung to the walls. The air reeked of mildew and smoke. The golden dust had congealed in her throat. With each passing day, Amora faded. Only in the pallid twilight—when dragged out to perform for eyes that no longer lusted for her flesh but for the marrow of her mind—were her shackles loosened. Night after night, they devoured her stories. They feasted on every syllable, ravenous for something they could not name—yet still forced her to feed.
Before captivity, no prayer had ever been holier to Amora than writing. It was not merely her companion or joy. It was her tether to memory, her compass through time. Her sanctuary. Her spell. So when she woke to find herself stripped—not only of her mother’s cacao-stained journal, not only of ink or parchment, but of the illusion that words might still offer comfort—a scream tore loose from her ribs. So raw it scraped her throat. So seismic it seemed to rattle the bones of the cellar. For a moment, she believed it might summon the stone walls—that they might stir to protect her once more. But she no longer knew their language. The tezontle had gone silent—vanished with the final bougainvillea vine. With the last passionflower. With the slaughter of the Rosalquía name.
Each night, she pressed her tear-damp cheek to the mildewed floor. The void gnawed at her—piece by piece—devouring rest, devouring memory, devouring even the outline of hope. Until only the ache remained. The dull, deep, bottomless ache of desolation.
One night, worn to the marrow by the toll of storytelling, Amora’s body finally surrendered to sleep. As her breath slowed, her spirit slipped through the veil of the waking world and sank into the grieving womb of Santa Rosa. The bougainvillea vines reached for her at once. Their moss-damp tendrils wrapped with such tenderness that her body seemed to dissolve into the loamy warmth of the soil. Before she could even register that she was dreaming, she was already wandering through fields of hibiscus.
As if afraid the dream might vanish—or worse, betray her secret joy—Amora began whispering into the violet petals. She confessed everything: the march of steel-hearted soldiers, the pillaged treasures, the chains that bound every woman, the silence that smothered every man who dared to resist. And then—suddenly—she remembered what she could do in this world.
She murmured farewell to the passionflowers and began to ascend a narrow spiral of stone and moonlight. At last, she stood once more in her childhood room. There, untouched upon her desk, lay her old cacao-leather journal.
With an urgency that bordered on rapture, she seized it. Ink spilled like blood across the page. Every broken song, every desolate prayer, every scattered memory poured forth. She conjured her captors in trembling, fractured cursive: fingers never far from the triggers of their pistols, belts always bristling with bullets, eyes gleaming with a hunger no flesh could satisfy. And yet—even then, as she etched their cruelty—she couldn’t help but imagine them, just for a moment, as young boys: voices still soft, faces still gentle, not yet bruised by the brutality they’d been taught to wield by the very hands meant to cradle them. The vision did not last. She awoke with a violent jolt to the crack of gunfire.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Each shot tore her from her sanctuary. Each bullet flung her back into the fetid dark. Before she could even parse dream from waking, she was already beneath the cruel moonlight—forced once more to endure their rage.
The days blurred. Hope thinned. Their jagged laughter carved new wounds into her flesh—one rasp at a time. And yet—even shackled, even hollowed, even battered and broken—they could not cage the part of her that fled where her flesh could not follow.
In stolen scraps of sleep, she was unbound—tethered not to the men who broke her, but to memory, to soil, to song, to a world where she had once been whole. Night after night, she shut her eyes with desperate urgency, and the moment they obeyed, she returned. Barefoot through sun-drenched gardens, she inhaled cinnamon, exhaled vanilla and cloves, breathed in the scorched perfume of peppers and caramelized plantains rising from her mother’s hearth. Again and again, she anchored herself to the one truth that remained: she did not belong to her captors, but to the land that had first cradled her tears.
But the gunshots always came.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
By dawn, the soldiers were already firing into straw targets—and Amora was wrenched back into the damp dark of her cell.
As the years dragged their rusted chains across her flesh and the fog of captivity settled deeper into her marrow, Amora’s beauty began to unspool—not like a petal wilting beneath moonlight, but like a vine left to rot in the loneliest dark. Her azure eyes, once alight with hidden worlds, dimmed into dusk. Her lips, once hibiscus-soft and cherry-sweet, darkened into a bruised, bluish carmine—the hue of old blood. Her hair, once silken obsidian, thinned into brittle, gray-streaked strands. But worst of all was the starvation of her imagination. Once her lifeblood—wild and unbound—it had dwindled into a dying trickle. Her memories scattered like ash in fog. She was stranded. Lost. Estranged. Even from herself. Even from her dreams.
She knew all too well what this meant. Night after night, she scoured the wreckage of her mind, desperate for a single ember—one last story, one flicker of fire to keep the slaughter at bay. The instant her eyelids fell, she clawed inward with bloodied fingers—only to find vacancy. Blankness. Silence. And the silence shrieked louder than any scream.
Then they came. Not for her body—its sanctity had long been stripped—but for her voice. They arrived with rifles and brittle grins. They unbound her wrists and dragged her into the sickly twilight, cloaking desperation in cruelty. They jabbed her ribs with sticks. Flung stones at her shins. Nudged her with their boots. Sometimes even let out a kick—never to break, only to bruise.
“Come on, sweetheart,” one crooned, voice slick with mockery. “Just one little story, and we’ll let you go.”
They cackled. Roared. But their laughter rang hollow—off-key, off-balance.
“Speak, you wicked wretch!” barked another. His chuckle cracked. Beneath it: a tremor of fear.
Still, she said nothing. Her voice had vanished. Her stories—once armor, compass, world—had crumbled into dust. There were no words left to give.
“What in the devil’s name is wrong with her?” one spat, slamming his gourd of malt against the pyre’s frame.
“She’s no angel,” hissed another. “Enchantress? Ha. Just a shriveled hag.”
“A lying serpent,” growled the third. “A devil who spun dust into dreams. Who tricked us with her filthy, twisting tongue. Who made fools of us all.”
Amora stood still in the eye of their fury. Lips sealed.
For the first time in years, they removed the iron from her wrists—only to lash her to the splintered crosshatch of a pyre. The air reeked of resin, sweat, and rot. They hauled her uphill in a riot of boots and curses, smoke and spittle spewing from their mouths like venom.
“¡Bruja malvada! ¡Ramera de la selva!” they shrieked and howled. But their roars were jagged with dread.
At the summit, they doused her in gasoline. It slid down her spine in cold, stinging rivulets. Soaked her scalp with the promise of flame. Pooled at her feet with the certainty of pain. But before she could shed a single tear, it had already begun.
The fire leapt like a starving serpent, tongues licking her skin, heat curling around her limbs in ferocious spirals. And yet, as the flames pressed close, something deeper had already begun to stir.
Suddenly, memory ignited in her blood—hot, immense, whole. Every tale she had ever told flared through her veins, faster, brighter, fiercer than the fire consuming her flesh. Her lips, cracked and quivering, curled into the faintest smile.
In the heart of the pyre, Amora stood still. Not screaming. Not afraid. The flames, wild and rising, radiant as she once was, rose not to destroy her—but to unbind her. Her smile widened. It cut through the smoke. It stilled the tremble in her bones. At last, she remembered.
The fire, no longer her executioner, enveloped her in an incandescent cocoon. Pain softened into heat. Heat into clarity. Agony into strength. Smoke spiraled around her—not to smother, but to summon. To beckon her home. And in the scorched hush of charred hibiscus and mineral warmth, she rose. Her spirit—burning, unbound, feral—began its final ascent.
The hum of hibiscus shimmered through the haze. Petals fluttered—dark, delicate, and trembling. Guided by the crackle of burning wood and the hush of keening stone, Amora stepped through the spiraling fumes and climbed back to where she had always belonged.
At the summit, the door of her childhood room swung open.
There—steadfast, waiting—her journal lay open on the desk. She seized it without hesitation. Her fingers knew the rhythm by heart. Ink spilled across the cracked cacao-leather surface. With each word, she dropped deeper—sank once more into the cradle of her home. And then, like a passionflower breaking through frost, something began to bloom. What if she wrote a different story?
She summoned the bougainvillea to rise. She willed their tendrils to stretch backward and sprawl forward through centuries. She conjured the day of conquest—not to recount it, but to rewrite it. Turned anguish into defiance. Shrieks into hymns. She did not summon the vanquished, but a legion of warriors—bright, brave, fearless as flame. She recast the invaders as cowards. Her words became sword and shield, ember and seed, blade and root. From the cinders, she forged a fire no darkness could extinguish. And so she wrote:
Amora Rosalquía was born cradled in a bed of wild passionflowers, whose frilled violet petals stirred the slumbering stones of the Rosalquía home—who rose, blades of volcanic fire drawn as armor, to defend the sacred land from any who dared defile it.
With words spun into spells, Amora cloaked her village in living armor. When the day of conquest came, the bougainvillea rose in revolt—smothering screams, devouring bones like serpents starved for centuries. Santa Rosa lived on. And Amora sang, tale after tale, her voice growing as wild and eternal as the wind that thrums through the jungle.
As her pen stilled, the smoke curled skyward like a wayward spirit. Through the thinning fume, she glimpsed a pale procession of riders—their spineless silhouettes dissolving into the ash-thick dusk.
That night, beneath an indigo sky heavy with stars bent close to listen, Amora waltzed barefoot through the dust-softened pathways of Santa Rosa. Her skin fragrant with ash and hibiscus. Her heart blazing with triumph. It was her greatest story yet—one that drew pilgrims, wanderers, and dreamers from faraway lands. But Amora knew the deeper truth: she had not merely survived to tell the tale. Only she knew what she had truly done.
A few miles beyond the Rosalquía palace, a splintered pyre stood half-swallowed by soil. Its blackened beams brittle with age, its purpose long lost and forgotten—entombed within the thin marrow of silence and time.
In Santa Rosa, the bougainvillea still climb. Their ancient ascent unbroken, they cascade in torrents of crimson and jade, threading vines through the veins of the present—weaving root into memory, bloom into blood. Centuries later, the villagers still speak of a girl who conquered death, not with blade or fire, but with her ink and her dreams. Her story endures, bound in a weathered cacao-leather journal inscribed with a single name: Amora.
Hand to hand, heart to heart, it is read, remembered, and cherished anew.
And if you stand very still on the quietest of nights—when the cicadas fall silent, when the mist curls close to your skin, when bougainvillea presses against the windowpanes, and the first passionflower cracks its crimson bloom—some swear you can still hear her voice. Willowing through the dark. Whirling in the smoke. Cackling in secret flame. Stitching wind to vine, vine to song, song to blood. Since time immemorial, like the vexed wings of a mother quetzal, whispering her story into the breath of Santa Rosa—forevermore.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The gunfire echoed with the crackle of the last flame, flickered with a glint of obsidian silk, then vanished into ash.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 