Chapter Twenty: God's Whisper

"I was born about two hundred and fifty years ago, in the Koopa Kingdom of old. Back then, the kingdom was led by a different royal family, a different dynasty, than the one that was ruling a few years ago and ended with Bowser Koopa. This family was ruthless for power, and its members fought first at the dinner table, then out in the fields. They stabbed forks into their dinners, and then before too long, were sending out legions of soldiers to kill each other. That is to say, a civil war broke out.

The war ended very shortly after I was born. I was fortunate in that my mother survived the fires that engulfed our village, but many other families were not so fortunate. Before the village was destroyed, several of the people prepared a plan to protect the children, even if the armies of the warring royal family should come and ruin everything. The plan was successful, so many children survived— but they were left orphans.

When the underground passage we hid in was opened, we children emerged to find a newly desolated world. Again, I was very fortunate. I wandered not too far out before my mother, who had found miraculous shelter in a brush of trees, embraced me. Most of the children found their mother and father gone.

The war ended shortly afterwards… Excuse me if these thoughts seem jumbled. Though I have thought over my memories for many years, I have not told them to anyone else for a very long time…

So the war was over, and the danger was largely past. The victorious brother of the royal family settled into place on their throne. For us, little became better for us— we mostly felt the loss of our neighbors and destruction of several surrounding fields.

And yet for some of us, this was the beginning of something else that would direct the rest of our lives…

It started in… and yes, was centered in… the appearance of a single orphan, an infant no one recognized. Amongst us children found huddling in the hidden pit, uncovered after the fires had died down, was a baby boy held close by a very young girl— herself perhaps two years of age. A young girl, who could not even speak, who could barely walk, clutching an even younger child, a very little baby. They shivered together.

The girl was recognized— her parents had both perished. But the boy she held… no, no one knew. There were not so many families in our village, so there should have been little mystery. The older children, who could speak, could not remember where that baby came from, or if the girl even entered the pit with the boy.

So. The children were divided out among the women still alive. The girl… ah, her name, was Merla… she, in her wordless childish wisdom, stayed closely with the boy who had ended up in her arms, and would not be separated from him. So it was.

No one thought much of all this. There was so much chaos following the war, including the work of rebuilding the village, repairing the surrounding fields, and taking care of the children. It was easy enough to see the lost boy as, perhaps, a child that had been brought in from outside the village somehow. And when Merla was able to speak, was able to communicate a little, she was able to explain the faded memory of a woman in red handing down the baby to Merla, asking her to protect the child…

It doesn't matter.

When the boy— Ah, his name was Rûm. An accented R-u-m that sounds like room—was about twelve, or thirteen, he discovered he had a strange ability. A miracle. He, though he was physically a koopa in appearance, had the ability to transform. He could make himself look like any person he met… or any animal… yes. With a puff of smoke, he would change. He could become any living shape he desired.

He knew this was a dangerous secret, and tried to keep it hidden. But he was so eager to use this power, child that he was, that he was discovered very quickly. And you can imagine the reactions of the other villagers, hundreds of years ago.

Witchcraft! Wizardry! Evil magic! Impossible… against God…

Rûm was made to flee. He had no choice but to run away from our little village, when he was only thirteen. I knew him, and felt somewhat sorry. We were barely acquaintances then… Though our village was small, we were a quiet, stoic people…

But, Rûm fled, alone. He fled into the vast mountains and forests of the kingdom, far more numerous and unconquered centuries ago than now.

He was gone for fourteen years.

When he returned, he was utterly different.

He claimed he had met God, the almighty God. And he had been given sacred instructions… to save the world.

Yes, you've heard this story before. A person claims to be a messiah, claims to have received special instructions from God, or to have found new, profound meaning in an old text…

But Rûm was ours. He came from our village, and returned speaking in marvelous riddles. Gone ten years, we hardly recognized him when he returned— adorned with a gray traveller's cape and terribly deep eyes… eyes that had seen God and an ocean of devils. He had seen, he said, straight through the world, into the vortex that lay beneath. There the spirits of the world lie, spinning and spinning, moving in diverse and abstract manners, alive in their own way.

But that was later. At first he only returned to preach. There was some power in his speech, a line of thought that brought us to listen. Our town was bigger then: we had become a minor trading center, and thus had taken on a larger population…

And soon enough, Rûm performed miracles. They were the same miracles that had cast him out as a child, but now as an adult, he could wield and reveal them carefully, and cause the transformation of material in a way that was not outright heretical. Later on, when his miracles became greater and greater, and he could not allow people to see the transmutation of his self into various elements, he began to wear a gray sheet over his body, something like a ghost. He would transform beneath the sheet, and in the flash of a chant, create water, earth, fire, air…

Only I and a few others of our home village knew of Rûm's transforming abilities— as the source of his miracles. When Rûm's pilgrimages began, and more villages began to follow his word (for there were so many people back then who thirsted for the word, A word) Rûm was known as a holy man, a savior of some sort, who would bring about a golden age for the Koopa Kingdom. A few of us, the most dedicated (myself included), became disciples. It was we who were taught the deeper secrets, the deeper nature of Rûm's revelations— still so difficult, still so misunderstood.

Some of us remembered his transforming powers had come about before he had gone out into the wilderness and found his revelations. But =Rûm declared that he had those powers only because he had been visited in infancy by an agent of the Lord— a prescient angel. His early abilities were a sign of the spiritual understandings he would receive directly from God. It all tied together— the early whisperings lead to the early abilities, the early abilities lead to the later whisperings, and the later whisperings lead to later abilities.

It is the old idea of the chicken and the egg. The original philosophical point, perhaps, is that there is neither a first chicken nor first egg to begin the cycle, their existence inherently wrapped up in each other, as are so many processes of life. How does a fight start? Someone punches, because someone else gives insult, the insult is prompted by an angry look... tension upon slight tension, like delicate layers of a cake, wrapped in-between each other, the origin of the conflict lost in subtleties… the same, Rûm said, was the nature of his encounters with God.

He did not speak like this. These are my descriptions, after years of ponderance, conveyed to you. Rûm, like most of the great messiahs, spoke simply but enigmatically (enigmatic only in our own misunderstandings). You prefer complexity… you prefer explanation, after the modern standard of the pursuit of scientific truth, where logic connects to logic. That kind of route will not hold with the common people, who can hear their hearts quite well, but do not hold council as well with their minds. A messiah must pull truth directly from the heart, so that all can, even if they cannot understand him, feel the truth and intuitive power of his words.

Rûm, trekking through the smaller, isolated provinces of the old Koopa Kingdom, built up quite a following. These were villages still devastated after the civil war, full of people feeling antagonistic towards the old Churches in the cities that had no interest in helping them— were too busy gathering power and gaining favor with the king in power. Rûm, speaking a clear spiritual message again, cutting straight through pomp and the intricate, seemingly meaningless rituals of the old Churches, was inspirational.

Many of us disciples lived to follow Rûm— he was what seemed to be the truth incarnate. Some of the others had political ambitions, too, and hopes that Rum's quest for peace... would be the beginning of a revolution.

What was Rûm aiming for precisely? Beyond his spirituality, his journeys across our kingdom… What was it all leading to?

We would never find out, of course. If the salvation of the world was his true end… Well, as you can see, that did not come about.

There were two developments that ended our pilgrimage. One was the growing attention of the powerful Churches, especially those in the kingdom capital. Rûm, claiming himself as… at least, a prophet… was a heresy.

The other development was Devada."