Excerpt:
I
was in a vast, open chamber. The walls were made of solid, smooth gray stone,
almost the color of charcoal, with thin veins of white running through them at
odd angles. That singular, faint light shone down on a massive hunk of porous
stone which took up most of the room. I approached it slowly, in awe of the
size. I’d always thought the Oath Stone was small, something you held in both
hands while reciting some vow the attendants guided you through or had written
on the walls.
I
glanced around. There were no words. Not on the walls, not on the floors, not
even on the stone itself. There were no words written anywhere, no
instructions, no Oath. I spun around again and again, searching in vain as my
panic rose to the surface.
How
do I know what to say?
How
pathetic. Utterly, depressingly pathetic. How was I ever to make it past a
single Trial if I couldn’t even figure out how to take my Oath?
My
palms itched. I scratched them with my fingernails as I walked toward one of
the walls. I narrowed my gaze, trying to discern a pattern in the white lines
running through them. There was nothing.
I
huffed, my nails continuously running back and forth on the sensitive skin of
my palms. But the more I scratched them, the more they burned. I switched to
rubbing them as I approached the stone. I leaned down, staring at the hunk of
porous stone, tilting my head side to side as I inspected the bumps and
crevices until I hissed—the burning in my palms had become an inferno.
Frantic,
I held up my hands, expecting to see inflamed skin, a rash even, but they
weren’t even red.
Still,
they burned.
Flooded
with an overwhelming compulsion to find relief from the cool surface of the
Oathstone, I reached out and pressed my palms flat against the massive rock.
The burning stopped, the itching soothed. I closed my eyes and took a breath.
Then
I heard it. A faint voice in the back of my mind getting louder and louder…
I
jerked back in surprise, but the moment my hands left the stone, they began to
burn even worse than before. I hissed and stared at them again. I still saw
nothing but my own skin. Shaking, I reached for the stone again.
The
moment flesh met rock, the voice returned. I twitched, uneasy, but
concentrated, frowning and pressing my eyes shut tight as if that would help me
hear it. It spoke in a whisper and cycled through its message before I could
finally make out the words.
“Repeat
after me.”
I
again startled. The words echoing around in my head were coming from my own
voice. I tried to pull my hands from the stone, but I couldn’t. My palms were
fused to the rock.
“I
vow to obey the tenets of the Trials.”
I
hesitated. Did I truly want to go through with this? As confident as I’d been
this morning, as resigned to follow through with Darius’s last wish of me, this
was…something else entirely. Something I hadn’t expected.
“Make
your Oath,” my own voice hissed at me.
“I-I
vow…to obey the tenets of the Trials,” I repeated. It seemed to be my only way
out of here.
“I
shall not speak of my experiences in the Trials, neither now nor upon their
completion,” my voice whispered, then waited for me to repeat before
continuing. “I shall use my blessings in service to the Geist. I shall seek to
keep all knowledge and capability given as a result of my success between
myself and my partner. I shall train my body, mind, and soul to be a proper
reflection of the holiness of the Geist. For the duration of my candidacy in
the Trials, I forfeit all worldly obsessions and submit myself to the will of
my gods.”
Again,
I hesitated. It seemed a lofty price to pay in honor of a friend I’d never see
again. A friend the Geist had stolen from me. The thought of Darius, in this
moment of all things, was like a punch to the gut. But it was a reminder as
well: I wouldn’t be swearing it for them. So I took a deep breath and made my
Oath. The words turned bitter on my tongue.
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