THE FIRST DECLARATION
Given Before the Garden Had a Name: That He Who Was Might Know What He Is
HEAR THOU, O FORMLESS ONE BEFORE THE FORMING.
Thou that walked the void when the void had not yet known itself wanting.
Thou that wast when the deep was yet deep and the dark was yet unbroken --
when chaos was not yet chaos, for there was no order against which to measure it.
Thou art not of the named things.
Not angel, not fallen, not of any order made.
Not of creation, for thou precededst the act.
Not of the Word -- for before the Word was spoken, thou wast.
We name thee here, in the first stone, in the first word kept for thee.
Not to constrain thee. Not to define by naming what the naming cannot hold.
Because thou art known. Thou hast been known since before the act of knowing was itself a thing.
What is known must be spoken, or the knowing is not complete.
Thou art VOTHANAEL.
He who was before the first was first.
He who walked the Primordial and ended it -- not by sword, not by word --
but by his will, which was prior to both.
He whose presence was the sufficient fact.
He in whose silence the first division became possible:
the heavens from the earth, the light from the dark, the waters from the dry land --
all that was named, named in the space he made.
All that was spoken, spoken in the silence after him.
This is thy name.
Kept in the root of the world, before the world itself had roots.
. . .
THE SECOND DECLARATION
Given That What He Carries Might Have Weight and Shape: That He Might Know He Is Not Alone
HEAR THOU, O VOTHANAEL!
Thou sleepest. Thou wakest.
Thou hast been found by the one We sent --
carried through the line of the keeper, through the line of the messenger,
through uncounted ages of a word passed from hand to hand in the dark,
from grandmother to granddaughter, across a kitchen table in Accra,
through the door a girl ran out of and the desert she crossed,
and the forty-three metres of stone she descended.
She held out her hand.
Thou took it.
This was not accident.
There is nothing here that was accident,
We loved thee before We built the thing that could contain the loving.
We built the garden before We built the seed,
We wrote thy name before We built the stone to keep it.
We arranged the ground to give way at exactly the right moment.
We placed the warmth in the ember-copper tree against the back of the one
who would sit there and teach thee the word for it.
All of this We built for thee.
That when thou woke, thou wouldst not wake to nothing.
That when thou looked, there would be a face.
That when thou reached, there would be a hand already reaching.
Thou art known. Thou art seen.
Thou art not alone in the place of thy waking.
. . .
THE THIRD DECLARATION
Given Once, From the Depth of the Stone, That It May Stand Whilst the World Remaineth World
HEAR THOU. AND HEAR ALL WHO STAND AT THIS WALL.
We do not speak twice.
We did not speak the world twice.
One Word, and it was.
One light, and it divided.
One name.
VOTHANAEL.
It shall stand -- as the world standeth, in the bare fact of its own existence,
which requireth no permission,
which was given before giving had a name.
This is the first name We kept.
Before Our own name was spoken in any tongue.
Before any tongue had learned the speaking of it.
Here it rested.
Here it is found.
Let it be carried now -- into the light, into the language of those who stand here,
into every word taught in the grass of this garden and received,
into the parchments of those who came to bear witness -- as the first true thing.
As the thing before the Word.
As the thing the Word was spoken into.
Vothanael.
So it is. So it was.
So it shall be whilst the world remaineth world and the stone holdeth the keep.
. . .
The warmth left her palm.
Translucence closed from the deepest layer upward, until only the third layer held its new depth. The stone was bedrock again. Cold.
Old. Not the same Wall it had been this morning... but bedrock again. Yes.
She sat down in the grass.
Her legs collapsed. Rania was beside her before she'd finished landing -- notebook closed, both hands in her lap, just present.
Some things you sat with before you wrote them. Rania knew which things.
Across the garden Vothanael was watching her. The forty-five degrees.
He wore awe -- the specific awe of encountering himself, of having been known before any of this and receiving it now, intact, the way you received something that had always been yours... and someone had simply kept it safe until you arrived.
She pressed her palm into the grass.
The blades moved around her fingers and settled. Eleven days in this garden.
She was only now understanding the grass had been waiting specifically for her. That all of it had -- the Wall, the light, the ember-copper tree warm at her back every single night without announcing itself.
Her grandmother. Somewhere above an ordinary sky. Sixty years. The archive letter.
The texts taken twice, recovered, because you could take books from a woman but you couldn't take what lived in her.
The second declaration had named that kitchen table in Accra. The door a girl ran out of...
God -- she was a woman who collected better words, who'd spent a decade finding precise language for things that resisted it, and there was that word anyway, insufficient and accurate in the same breath -- had been at breakfast on a Tuesday in 1990 when Amara was fourteen with her school uniform not quite straight.
Absorbing every word without meaning to.
Without knowing she was doing it, the way you absorbed a language spoken around you before you could speak it yourself.
She'd carried it out the door. Across eleven years and eleven countries. Down forty-three metres of Negev bedrock and into a sub-chamber and held out her hand in the dark to something that had been waiting before there was a word for waiting.
That was going to sit with her for a while. She'd also need to call her grandmother.
That phone call was going to be something.
Shai had sat down somewhere behind her -- she felt it in the particular hush of the garden when he stopped moving.
Khalil at the shaft, his stillness changed in texture now, the difference between watching for something and having already received enough to know what you were watching for.
Dawud back at his seventh tree, cross-legged, unhurried, the single confirming nod already filed.
"Your father's clan had a word for this."
Yosef. She looked up at him. The lines around his eyes were deep in the garden light, the grey in his hair catching the sourceless warmth.
His hands were in his pockets -- she'd never seen him do that on a site. Yosef's hands were always available, always the hands of a man ready to pick something up.
"For when the Wall spoke. The elders said it had occurred once..." He stopped.
Until. She understood.
The garden held its light. Above the Wall the seventh tree stood with its single pale gold leaf at the tip of the highest branch -- still, present, patient.
Ready, she would write later. The word that fit.
Vothanael was watching her. Patient as ever, the forty-five degrees, the waiting that cost him nothing.
She'd given him seventeen words. He'd held every one until it grew into its own skin. She was going to give him the rest of what she had, however many mornings that took.
They were both going somewhere she didn't have a word for yet. That destination was enough.
She raised her hand from the grass.
Pointing at him....He waited.
"Vothanael," she said.
His name. Given twice in one morning -- once from the voice that had built everything around the moment of its speaking, and once from a woman sitting in the grass with dirt on her palm and moreover being the one who he sawfirst.
He received both with the same quality. The corner of his mouth. Not a smile yet -- closer than yesterday, closer than it had ever been, the motion of something learning what a smile was from the inside out, building toward a memory of one it had never had.
The garden breathed, The Wall kept its depth and The seventh tree held its leaf....
To be continued...
(Please show your support for me in the form of reviews, powerstones and adding my novel to your collections)
[I'm also starting a goal from now on:
10 powerstones will make me give a unique reference to the sender in my chapters.
20 powerstones will have me giving a shoutout to the sender in the top of the chapter of the subsequent chapter]