The Mythical Book

The dripping raindrops outside were the only sounds she could hear, almost as if the very weather were mimicking her own tears as they dribbled down her face. This night had to come eventually; it was inevitable. Now that it was here, though, she felt a twisting inside her body, almost as if her very organs were rearranging to make up for the empty hole that was quickly eroding its way through her.

Ayla had dreaded the impending doom of her lover for so long now, she forgot what her existence had been like before him. Before loving another being so deeply that nothing else seemed to hold value any longer. Everything felt trivial.

She eyed the small object in the corner of the narrow room, across from where she sat at the very recently cold deathbed. Through blurry eyes, the darkness of the thing seemed like a fuzzy blob. A nothing. Only if it were nothing.

Forcing herself to turn back away from it, Ayla decided to ignore the faint calling she heard coming from it. The beckon was more of a feeling than an actual sound, but she knew it would soon grow stronger. More demanding. She wouldn’t be able to ignore it forever, not now that her previously declared life-purpose was officially at an end.

“Be grateful to the Powers,” her mentor Raj, had said. “Be grateful they allow you to choose each time.”

Ayla scoffed at the memory now. How young and naive she had been when she stumbled on this existence. She could not have known. Nothing could’ve prepared her for how it would escalate, how it would feel to truly be bound to the cruel fate forever.

But that was nearly a century ago now. Many more to go. She was still relatively young, as Raj used to remind her daily.

Standing now, Ayla crossed the small space that she had once found cozy, suddenly growing eager to leave as she could feel this thing calling more strongly. Resentfully, she picked up the seemingly simple object, looking down at it with that ever-present cocktail of emotions. Disgust, awe and wonder, depression, and something like heartache now. But something much more weary than just pure heartache.

This little black leather-bound book was something she had fated to have found, Raj had told her. Ayla was destined to have found it, to come into the possession of it.

It would have eventually come into possession of her, more like, she thought now as she lightly brushed two fingers over the soft cover before opening it. That first page stared back up at her, the dead language she’d once never heard of now spelling everything out perfectly to her:

As comes the good luck, so comes the bad. You belong to the hands of Fate now.

All those years ago, she picked it up from that traveling gypsie’s cart, merely curious by the designs engraved into the little black book. Of course, she’d had no way of knowing it was about to change her life forever. Change her existence.

“You are resenting the Book of the Powers right now, aren’t you, my young friend?” Raj’s voice sounded behind her as Ayla still stared blankly at the page. Ayla wasn’t even sure if she was surprised that he’d come. She wasn’t sure how she felt or what she expected at all anymore.

“I feel nothing,” Ayla replied, voice sounding as hollow as her words described. “He is gone.”

“No one is ever utterly gone,” Raj countered. “But that is a lesson for another day, much in the future.”

“What’s the point? What’s my purpose?” She couldn’t help but ask aloud, even though she expected no real answer.

Raj paused. Then, “To share a wisdom that no one else could. The Powers chose you for a reason, because you have a gifted way about you. Yours is a teaching soul, and you touch lives so very deeply. What better person to give the chance for such a long life, than one who passes on learned wisdom so well?”

“ ‘Wisdom comes from suffering’,” Ayla let out another scoff at the recited line from one of the pages.

Raj gave a reproachful look. “You are misrepresenting that section. Out of context.”

“What context is needed? He’s dead.”

“You knew this would come. He is not one of us.”

“He’s still young! He could’ve had a good thirty, forty years left!” Ayla’s tears began to spill over anew.

“It was his fate. Forty-one was his time. You had fifteen years with him, Ayla. The Fates stole nothing from you.”

Ayla didn’t know if her own bitter laughter sounded more like crying, or if her sobbing sounded more like laughing. “He barely even had a chance to realize I wasn’t aging. That is how short of a time we had.”

A long sigh escaped the ancient being as he looked at his pupil with sympathetic reprimand. He knew Ayla’s stubbornness would not allow her to have a quick breakthrough. But he also knew that she was stronger because of it. She would eventually become ultimately one of the best teachers of them all.

For now, however, it was baby steps.

“Do you remember,” he began. “When you first tried to read this book? How it called to you so peculiarly? How the change in luck came so quickly?”

Ayla’s tears dried up as she bitterly recalled the so-called good luck. Shortly after acquiring the mysterious book, she’d had a strong desire to join her brother in a round of As-Nas, the old gambling game. It was something she never had wished to play a day in her life, yet there she was. She won $20,000 that night - the equivalent of something over $200,000 now - even as a novice. Everyone in the room had been dumbfounded at the stroke of luck.

She enjoyed a few years of comfort and the good feeling that came with her charitable donations, until realizing how empty she was also feeling. That was when Raj arrived, finally giving some clarity to the book. He explained about Fate, the Powers and their Book. He explained that she would experience many extremes of good luck and bad, about the yin and yang of life, as it were. He taught her the dead language and how to interpret the callings of the Book. He gave direction as she found her way to her purposes, always challenged to decipher the difference between what her heart wanted and what the Book was influencing her towards.

“They will always be working together,” Raj now echoed his own words from years ago. “Your heart and the will of the Powers. You will always be learning what you need to learn, experiencing what you need to experience. Every life you touch will benefit from your special existence. One day, you will see the full connection of all you see and all you go through.”

Ayla looked back down at the book, closing its cover as she took a deep breath.

Perhaps that is what everyone else is ultimately doing, too, she thought. In the end, we are all just searching for our purpose.