Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
“I WILL BE a new person,” Erid Sovar told his friends, savoring the warmth of the afternoon sun on his face. “I will be a person this world has never seen before.”
His companions laughed good-naturedly and reminded him that everyone is like that—a person the world has never seen before. And they said that was true even before a person went on his adulthood quest.
But Erid wouldn’t have his enthusiasm dampened. “I will be truly different,” he said. “I will be so different from anyone else, you won’t know me when you see me again.”
They laughed again. And this time, he laughed with them.
Over the next several hours, Erid and his friends completed their hike into the barren highlands of Ra’ad Cuhloor. At the doorstep of the gigantic Vuuren Pass, they paused to eat something. While Erid prepared himself for the task ahead, his friends traded scandalous stories about him and laughed even harder than before.
Then, as the sun began to set, he hugged each of his companions and said goodbye to them. After all, he was certain they would never see him again—at least, not as the Erid Sovar they had known.
Continuing his journey on his own, he mused that one other should have been there to say goodbye to him. Unfortunately, that one was gone from his life forever. It was best to forget about him, the youth told himself, and to move on.
Without benefit of food or water, Erid made the long climb up to Otros Paar, the legendary Field of Heaven. When he got there, he saw the dozen tall, lonely stacks of rocks that awaited him.
Erid chose the pile farthest from the ruddy light of the setting sun and, therefore, nearest the light of the sun that would rise the next morning. Then he climbed the rocks, laid one on top of the other in ancient times, until he reached the highest and most precarious of them.
Sitting, he crossed his legs. Then he took a breath and composed himself, his light clothing barely any help against the cutting lash of the wind. Putting aside all thoughts of the life he had led to that point, thoughts both good and bad, he began to sing.
It was the way it had been done by his ancestors for the last seven hundred and fifty years. It was what tradition demanded of him. And Erid was only too eager to comply.
So he sat there, alone under the terrible and unexpected brightness of the stars, and sang psalms to the inclinations of his spirit. Nor was it like any other spirit in all the universe—his elders had assured Erid of that again and again.
All he had to do was sing the song, they had said, and he would find the elements that made him unique … the elements that finally and irrevocably made him Erid Sovar.
For a brief time, the stars were obscured by a herd of gray clouds. Erid felt a cold, eventually numbing sizzle of rain, but he sang his way through it. Then the rain stopped, and the clouds dissipated, leaving only a few breeze-rippled puddles as evidence of their passing.
As he sat there shivering, he was again haunted by thoughts of the one who should have been with him at Vuuren Pass. Anger and resentment rose in him. And pain as well.
No, he told himself. You must clear your mind, driving away such thoughts as the clouds have been driven from the sky.
Closing his eyes, Erid dropped deeper into his song, seeking solace. He wrapped it about him like a cloak against the chill, and in time his thoughts became pure again.
He pursued mystery after mystery, seeking who he was and who he might yet be. He came up with questions, a great many of them, but nothing at all in the way of answers.
Not at first, anyway.
Then, with the first pale hint of dawn, a change began to take place in Erid. As the wind lost its edge and the land grew still, the answers he craved started to come to him, one after the other—slowly at first, and then in a dizzying, breathtaking rush.
The youth felt a rush of confidence, a heady unfolding of grand potentials and possibilities. With great satisfaction, he realized that he was doing what he had set out to do—shedding one existence and donning another. Finally, the song