278-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars
October 4th, 2552 – Conversations with old friends
Pilot/Explorer/Interpreter Kat “S-Kat” James Reporting
Lil’bit showed up around noon and I somehow knew that I didn’t need him to talk to Jatuun. I knew that Jatuun had done something to me— something more than teaching me what I needed to use the well.
Jatuun was once one of the fates – one that Aziz would not speak off – and the others simply avoided my questions. Jatuun was another name – the name for a later self, one who had transcended their world and their ways and became something else. In turn – I have become something else and this time, I was a bridge between the me that was and the old one.
I felt his mind touch mine and called to him but the older name.
‘Aziz?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, and then added an infuriating ‘and no.’
If we had been speaking in person, I would have given him one of those looks where you roll your eyes upward as if to ask, ‘are you for real?’
He may not have seen me, but he understood my meaning. “I was Aziz – thousands of years ago – Until you came, I had forgotten that part of my life. It would be like you remembering your life before you could lift your head.”
And as he spoke, we were back in the grove of the Fate’s homeland. “As Aziz, I knew something— but I could not convey it. There were no words for what I have become.”
“And now?”
“I have the words, but you would not understand – but the older you can help…”
And for the first time I saw the older me— not the old me from the autopsy, but an older, more vibrant me— a me who had transcended the world I know and understand into something still beyond my capability of understanding but at least I could accept that now.
And the Old one, was much, much older than the corpse we found on Dancer’s retreat.
“Matter is matter,” the old one told me. “It cannot be destroyed— it can only change form.”
She walked me back through my life, helping me to remember things that made no sense at the time – like accepting my brother’s business proposal when his pilot turned up missing. With her help, I remembered that I was the one who called the police and told them where they could find him.
I put myself on that collision course with the law, and with the Vision Project. I had put my name into the prison system as someone who wasn’t beyond redemption.
I was, for lack of a better term, a manipulative, conniving bitch… and part of Jatuun’s world.
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