The Priesthood

What is that which forms the identity of a man? Surely his experiences and the life they have lived. All the people they have known—all the good, all the bad, and all the ugly—live in our memories; they affect us, and they are what make a man.

But if, for a long time, you find yourself to be someone else, perhaps one who lost his memories and previous experiences and then lives another life of his own, with a different name, with different people around, in what seems like a different world, even though it is the same, or at least not that different from what you might’ve already once known before, but even these new experiences and new people that one would meet form the identity of a man. When one remembers two lives and has two sets of such memories, they can become interwoven; they can become the meeting of two differing identities, and together they can form another identity of a man—a new person.

But now, there were many memories to deal with and to remember. It was as if he were again staring at the doors in the hallway, where he could see different endings to his life and different forms of the man he could’ve been.

Behind each door lies a memory, either one that you’ve already experienced before or one waiting to happen, waiting to be discovered. The doors that the Angel of Time presented him with were the latter, and the other doors in this house of his childhood gave him the former.

But things get complicated. One asks a question: What is the difference between Kanrel and Ignar? In the end, are they not the same? Aren’t they fundamentally the same person at this point?

Perhaps the experiences that have happened aren’t his own; perhaps even the choices aren’t his own, but the thoughts must’ve been. And the actions Ignar had to take weren’t so different from those that Kanrel would take, or so he felt.

At least those actions that he had to take during the Empire of the Dragon.

Kanrel could relate to those actions and the thoughts behind those actions, even when at times they felt like they were not his own; even when they felt like they were destined to happen, they were predetermined outcomes that he could not change.

The Angel of Time was correct. We cannot change the past. We cannot go back. We can only regret the choices we have made and hope that we do not repeat them in the present or the future; we can only hope that there won’t be more things to regret in the future.

But to again remember who you are, or rather who you were, and to become whole with that past self again. Once more, lacking the ability to feel the emotions he had once before, in the vision, he could tell that there were people that he loved. He could feel warmth when encountering them; he could feel alive—more alive than he had felt in such a long time.

He was jealous of a murderer. Even in the most tragic of times, he could feel love the way one is supposed to feel it. There would be this target of affection, be it a family member or another, and there would be this feeling of goodness and warmth—a genuine smile brought to the face of a man.

There wasn’t just the tyranny of love, the one to which we are all subject to. This tyrannical love doesn't mean that we would take tyrannical actions toward the person, or people, we love, but our mind would be tyrannical with ourselves. It would constantly remind us of that love, not always in the form of warmth or happiness, but often in deep yearning and the fear of severance from that other who has taken a place in the heart of another man. It is apparent that it is not easy to peer into your own heart, but for some reason, other people find their way in, sometimes quite easily.

And this tyranny of love is something we can do nothing about. We just have to hope that our love is accepted, that it is rightful, and that the person who has their hand around your heart doesn’t die away or rip it apart, leaving behind shreds of a broken heart, one that soon grows regretful and afraid to love once more.

How long does it take for a heart to grow whole again? He wondered as he grasped his chest, feeling the emptiness and the yearning that he had had for so long now. He missed home. He missed people. He missed his friends and family. He missed his mother. He missed life as it once was.

What can one do? It isn’t even that one can control who they fall in love with. In fact, he believed that one doesn’t really fall in love; instead, they one day realize that they are in love; they just find it out and figure out that this has happened, and many don’t even understand this. You can’t force yourself to love someone; it just happens, and there often aren’t good reasons for it. It is not like you can explain and describe the mystery of such a thing.

It is not like you can control the tyranny that you are now subject to.

But truly, it is complicated. For now, he realized that there were many more people that he loved than there were before. Now, he loved Kalla; he loved Erjen; he even loved Urgur; and somehow, he found that he also loved Kalma.

Even with fear mixed in with this love, even with the knowledge he had of this creature, this god, this man, he still loved him. This feeling, this complicated feeling, would not go away. It could not be explained in words, truly. But it could be understood by others—people like him who have had such a complicated form of love toward another.

One could imagine it this way: If a mother finds out that her son is a murderer, will she then not love him anymore? Wouldn’t she love him either way, even with all the things her son had done incorrectly, even when they had grown terrible and, perhaps, evil?

He sat on a bench in the small garden where Jan once spent much of his days, taking care of the lonely apple tree and the flowers that grew beneath it. There was snow; it was no longer the first days of winter but a summer in bloom.

He could remember this house, the flowers, and even the apple tree; to this day, he could remember all of it. He could imagine himself lying beneath the shadow of that tree on a bed of flowers, and in that moment he would feel pain. He would not be lonely, and he would remember the faces of the people that he loved. And it would hurt, for he would not be able to see many of them ever again. He would only carry a memory of them. A fragment of someone who once was. A love that still remains, a complicated feeling that forces its tyranny upon you, a form of hollow radiance within that seems to persist through time.

Until time runs out, and memories are forgotten and love dies, so does the memory of that love. In the end, even that form of tyranny will end, and another form will take its place. The tyranny of forgetting, the tyranny of falling out of love, the tyranny of life, and then the tyranny of death. All things that one can’t do anything about.

Before, he wished that he could forget; now, he wishes that the memories would always remain intact, that they would remain there as faces and as moments from where he could find those that he loved; and in the future, he would wish that he could still remember; he would become like Kalma, wondering if there was ever only the hut, the lone apple tree, and the bed of flowers beneath it.

By now, it had become quite clear: We need our memories, and we want so much more of them. We want to be remembered, and we want to remember those we loved.

He now believed that he didn’t really want to return to a static moment now long gone, but rather he wanted to create more memories that were as happy as those that he had had before. He didn’t want to be that child that he had once been; he wanted to be who he was now, just less sad, less regretful, and still able to enjoy life as it is.

He didn't necessarily want to become happy. Such a desire was outlandish to him. What most people want is to be “just alright." Somewhere in the middle of our emotional landscape.

You can’t really be happy all the time, nor can you be sad. If you were either or, then in the end, you would surely either become happy enough or sad enough, as your emotions would plateau. It is like the feeling of excitement; it peaks, and then it dwindles off, and the next time you do that thing that made you excited, the amount of excitement it might garner is less, or your “tolerance” to it is higher.

So it must work with other emotions. A sudden burst of happiness feels greater than its slow approach. A sudden sadness is dramatically more life-altering than one that comes gradually. The things that we don’t expect, the things that seem to fall upon us, form the greatest moments of our emotional turmoil, be it a moment of ecstasy or an entrance to depression.

So in the end, he figured that his situation wasn’t that bad. What he had was constant. Sure, it didn’t feel great, and it would never feel great as it were, but generally speaking, it would be better than jumping between bliss and woe.

At least he could sit here and enter memories of something that was better than what is now. At least he had been informed that this was something he could perhaps cure, that there might be something past the two abysses, something brighter, and something far wider than the imagined fine line.

For some reason, he was more or less pleased with such an ending to his thoughts. Even when it was likely that he would return to such thoughts, as he had done so many times before, even when it was likely that he would change his mind about something, it still felt like the right moment to stand up, breathe in the summer air around him, and once more enter the interior of his childhood home.

To again walk among the memories and the doors that might rekindle them. But there were doors far more important that he would have to open.

The room was round, and where there once were walls, an emptiness laid itself bare toward each direction. The door from which he had entered, when he looked back at it, was no longer there, nor was the house he called his home, nor were the people that he so dearly loved.

There again was just Kanrel and the Angel of Time who peered into that emptiness, as if it were the passage of time itself, as if that darkness was the essence of that dimension we know so little about. Its purpose is more or less a mystery to us, one that beckons us to think that we ourselves invented time as a tool for us to chronologically measure things happening in the past, those that are even more in the past, and those that came right after those moments.

In the middle of that round room, there were three doors. One was open, and on the other side, there was once again the field that he had entered, perhaps years ago. Or just moments past. It didn’t feel like that long, yet it did. The new memories from this other life made him think that it had been years. But his own inherent memories made him believe that he had just now entered through that door and then returned right back. It was a curious experience, this confusion of time within. And he dared not ask how long had passed, lest his mind have been tricked into believing that a longer time had gone by, or worse, that he had lost decades of his own time.

The other two doors were shut. The second door was very different from the first door, for there was no handle, only a keyhole, and the door itself seemed far more sturdy than the first one. On the other hand, now that he looked at it more closely, he could remember a door he had seen before. It wasn’t the door that led into the cabin he had shared with Kalla; this door was the door that held behind it the last moments of Kalla’s life. A magical lock nullified, and a carpet waiting on the other side, only that the carpet he could see was made out of grass instead of the one that lay beneath the lifeless corpse of his father.

He gritted his teeth and asked, “Where might the second door lead me?” His voice was muffled as he couldn’t help but battle against the bitter tears that wanted to show themselves to the world.

The Angel soon snapped out of the deep gaze they had held with the abyss, on their face a confused expression as they peered at Kanrel. Soon they recognized the person standing before them: “As I told you before, behind this door is the so-called present. Not the one that you expect, not the one from your own life, but one from the life of another.”

The door slowly opened, and a loud creak could be heard from all around. Kanrel looked inside, only to see something that reminded him of a courtroom. A figure sat behind the bench: a judge.

He took a step forward, and he could hear as Time whispered, “Enter, and let the judgment begin.” As he entered through the door and onto the wooden floor beneath, he was greeted with the sounds of a gavel hitting against wood, and the words soon declared, “Good afternoon, fellow Sharans. This courtroom is now in session, as we are here to assess, address, and judge the actions of the plaintiff, also known as Hartar Agna.”

He looked around and saw many others. The person who just now spoke was the judge, and this was a courtroom, and the court was now in session.