Many species agreed that Vulcan was a beautiful, ancient world; it's wealth in art and scripture were next to none. Over the centuries of unrest, the awakening and the current peace of the federation, Vulcan had endured.
To the foreign eye, this red world hung calmly in the orbit of its star, keeping a silent existence…
In reality… it burned.
Just as it's people had in those unrested years; when emotion ran as easily in the Vulcan heart and mind as the winds whipped through the dry and scorching deserts.
Those times left scars on the psyche of all Vulcan's children; forcing them to control those instinct and cover the wounds of the past.
It was the purging.
The Kolinahr.
Spock had spent many weeks in one of Vulcan's untamed and beautiful lands. This was his final stage of the purging… allowing the unbearable warmth of his blood to peak with the sands and the sun so that their mutual heat could cool and allow logic to soothe both mind, body and heart.
For now the Forge was in the height of summer.
The heat was relentless; no living thing could survive at the peak of the Vulcanian star's passing across the desert.
Beside the suns destructive, direct stare the Forge was prone to extremes of weather; sandfire storms raged stabbing sand and wind while forks of electricity cut through sharp and jagged landscape.
Rage blasted the caves entrance as Spock breathed deeply to cleanse his thoughts; he imagined the red, Vulcan, sand forming bricks in the wall of his mind. One-by-one, they blocked out all around him.
This should have been an easy task for a son of Vulcan. But Spock was born of two worlds. He was much a part of the fire as he was of the salt sea.
Earth was the blue water that ran through every crack in the walls of his reserve.
And he had spent so many years living with the humans that it sometimes felt there was a dam in his mind, holding back the pool he had built over the last few decades in Starfleet and the academy.
Against the red purity of logic there was a tidal wave of feeling his wall of sand had been designed to restrain.
To be surrounded by emotions, as he had been, would not be deemed acceptable by his Vulcan relatives… while his constraint and continuing reluctance to engage those same emotions made any relationship with a human almost impossible.
Almost…
And before he knew it, Spock was thinking of Christine again.
How they had shared the heat of passion once more before parting in cold rejection.
The heat and the cold collided once more; his logic and emotion crashed in on that moment as he looked back into her eyes.
They were ice.
The stone cold set of a raging torrent.
There was the necessity of his leaving.
But there was the drag beneath the water; she had not wanted him to go.
And what had been his action.
Fly as far away from her as he could go.
He was home in the desert.
The heat could blast away almost anything.
Almost.
The theory was that nothing could reach you in the forge. Perhaps that stubborn, human, part of him that had set his heart on Starfleet had been wrong was testing that theory.
Often, he had found himself reflecting on the times he had spent on Enterprise; with Jim and McCoy… Mr Scot, Uhura, Sulu, Checkov…
And Christine.
It was difficult, being part of them while not being a part of them.
Humans… so willing to love and be loved; his friends and those who would have been his partners.
Spock had tried to allow himself some, small, level of latitude… As his mother was so often reminding him; he was part-human.
But that part surged and ebbed with the tide.
There was no logic.
Sometimes the only thing to understand was the energy of those around you.
Perhaps that was why the Kolinahr was so appealing.
It had all been too much.
The end of the mission.
End to Starfleet.
Goodbye to the Enterprise.
And the crew.
…
Christine.
Fire and lightening raged.
She had loved him.
He had wasted that time.
By the time he had realised it, allowing himself that latitude it was too late.
Leaving Enterprise and Starfleet in the search of absolvement seemed a last-ditch effort to assume a higher-state of being.
And it was failing.
A sweat broke across Spocks brow.
He was coming to the end of his desert trial and Spock knew the others would be gathering in order to perform the last stage of his kolinahr and still… he was as conflicted as he had been as a child.
It pained him to think of those ties being lost.
The irony of a Vulcan was that, as others would assume the emotions they felt so freely were beyond a Vulcans comprehension, the sheer strength of feeling those passionate states evoked was far too dangerous in the heat of the Vulcan heart.
He missed her with all the fibres of his being.
Trying to purge those feelings was as impossible as a planet borne of nothing…
Every desire must exist before it's conception, in one form of energy or another…
And a whisper called him…
There was an equal longing for knowledge and understanding drawing in from the depth of time…
Was there more than this?
It whispered.
And Spock, drawn from the desert, found himself on the steps before the elders waiting for the promise these last few years had brought but doubting…
And before the priestess could bestow the honour he had worked so hard to achieve…. He kneeled and moved his hand to stop…
He did not want all he was to be cleansed.
He did not want his birth rite abolished.
Spock felt the red heat of Vulcan beat down on him in anger as he rejected the Kolinar
There was something more in the universe; a deeper form of understanding.
Logic was the beginning of understanding and not the end.
It was the resonating conclusion that filled his mind as he knelt at the sacred monuments.
There was the simplicity in all logic that Vulcans denied.
Vulanoid and humanoid alike… felt.
Emotion may be controlled… but the base of all living things… was feeling.
How could one deny this?
But he had travelled so far.
And there was so much at stake…
Spock was born of two worlds, it was true.
And all these months seemed to be a waste.
There had to be some form of accomplishment… so all he had needed to do was to accept the honour of completing the final stages of the ceremony.
But now he knew there was more…
He had heard the call.
And as the knelt in the heat of the forge, there was still a pull into the sky. Beyond the sun and the planets and even the system of Vulcan… Shading his eyes to gaze out into the abyss did nothing but make the sizzle fizz all the more.
There was no surprise, that as the priestess raised the IDIC symbol, Spock could not accept the final stage of the purging.
Logic was the beginning of understanding… not the end.
His fellows were insulted… incensed.
So much for the purging.
All life was a mask… others were simply presenting themselves as holding a deeper understanding over you. This comprehension was realised as the priestess announced that the knowledge he sought dwelt elsewhere.
She and the other Vulcans left him there.
They did not understand; nor could they… trapped, as they were, in vain insult and ignorance.
Spock knew there was more to learn.
And realising that moment led to only one logical conclusion.
Spock needed to find the Enterprise.