Why do I have to know about being reincarnated as a bug that will finally learn to be a truly good one, – whatever it is that makes for a truly good cockroach! How does a rat or a frog get everything right? How’s that even determined? And by what? Is some bug ever going to transform into me? Was I ever a cockroach?” The shastri who taught such things were never as impressive as their skills, always small and thin, looking like they came from a long line of starving people.
He recalled the look on the face of his Hindi guru, Murthi, when he’d suggested the guru must have spent five lifetimes as the village bore, not as the exalted swami he said he’d just been; no believer in reincarnation ever owned up to having been humdrum in their last life, always they’d been significant, their former life some kind of noteworthy drama. He rubbed the fresh burn mark on the back of his head where Aktiarh burned him for saying that to the man.
His eyebrows raised. “Rubbish. The Master’s not part of any other system, he’s not stuck in that hopeless Hindu ‘wheel of life’ thing. The Hindi resent it themselves as a relentless trap. And I’m not in it, – beggarboy to majus, one leap! So?” He fingered his scalp again. Aktiarh said routine punishments ‘helped free him from his investment into earthly matters’. He frowned.
His life for sure would stay a loner’s, his final future self unknowable for him but destined to be unlike anyone else. He reviewed all the other inhabitants one by one through indifferent eyes, regarded the oddness in their faces and eyes one more time. Then he practiced his special rictus smile that always kept his real feelings to himself.
But the dilemma came back. As it always did, – because their distorted faces always showed a certain down-turning toward insanity, and he’d seen it happening to all students as they progressed, even the ones his own age. Steadily the mystic fire that burned within them slowly changed their appearance over the years the more intense they became in their practices. Every senior adept had a fierce stare, an oddly also disconnected one, behind whatever other look was in their eyes.
He looked in his mirror.
“What will I turn into! They all just go crazy with power. Like madmen! Too late to wake up!” Or he might end up like the loners who instead just inhabited the world in their head, meditating and projecting their will all the time. If it weren’t for the fact the Master was out there somewhere exerting his supreme will over the spiritual layers in the place, they’d likely have done each other in with their highest spells! Pointlessly. Tediously. But he couldn’t know himself.
His exalted path narrowed. Though of greater powers, he had to keep chanting against assault when merely walking dark corridors; entering any adept’s room meant countering the multiple hexes in place at their door despite how friendly the person seemed to be. His rank set him apart from outright harm, but he became a royal mole careful to keep to his own secured channels down the halls. Was he being isolated so that when he grew beyond all their powers he naturally would head into becoming a new kind of being, maybe other than human?
He could neither decide the issue, nor opt to stay forever as he was. He stuck to keeping his feelings flat, life was simpler that way.
At that conclusion his intellect immediately sharpened to another height. Which the Priest, as ever, secretly noted and tracked.
From then on he felt he was preserving his true self the more he disdained the others. He’d always had a natural sense of humour and now he came to regard them with an acid wit, discovering he had one. His comments were a mean joy, but lightened things for him all the same. None of them wanted to be with him much after that.
And then, at seventeen and a half he noticed breasts. Pleasing, rounded mounds of them that moved with a bounce and with their tantalizing knob poking around under the females’ silken robes.
This was a new learning Hamar had never expected at all.
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