The Pythian's Prophecy
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
- BENE GESSERIT CODA
The Deep One's face was in the dark as the wax candles – primitive candles of old! – threw an acrid smell of smoke in the stone room. She did not move as Sheeana entered the eerie place. Her body sat cross-legged on a rock near the hole on the leveled stone ground from where white vapors emanated from below, rising into the small chamber, touching the stone vault, and slowly dissolving among other white wisps. The woman's hair was ragged like her clothes, dark and long and falling in braids and folds over her face and onto the rock. The stone platform sat three marble steps higher than the floor. This is one of the ecstatic Seers. Sheeana cleared her voice to speak, but the Deep One's voice boomed like an explosion, reaching her first: "Here is another petitioner. You are far past closing time. Come back tomorrow."
"I am past closing, yet you are still here, Deep One."
"I am the Prime Pythian, and I both serve and live in this place."
Sheeana advanced two steps in the room, bringing the bowl with the offerings she had prepared. The Pythian did not stop her, looking up from her rock, and murmuring so low that Sheeana had to strain to hear her in the dark: "In the beginning, the smells of spring aroused our senses, speaking of love. We summoned our instincts, compelled by the sweet murmur of Mother Earth. We followed the cycles, died and were reborn every year."
Sheeana moved closer. The Deep One's voice seemed to rise from the hole in the ground and reach the top of the vault, from murmur to a deep rumble: "Winters, famines and diseases harassed us. The Lord of Rats kept our muzzles to the ground, touching the soft black soil that had made us. The Lady of Crossings' many faces terrified us for every path meandered in the dark. The world was mysterious, omen-filled. Beasts laid in the depth of the caverns in which we found refuge, emerged from the night to snatch our young, green eyes ablaze. We crouched by the embers in fear, and screamed. Later, we left sacrificial lambs at the caves' edge, our bodies safely harbored in mud huts. But the beast, the rat, the snake, the beetle's shapes were forever branded in our awareness. So did the prey, the ox, the bison, the gazelle whose sacrifice fed our hunger, and elevated our consciousness beyond the callous daily search for organic propellant. Nature's roots, flowers, mushrooms, fruit and leaves gave us potions and drugs which caused electric sparks in our primitive brains, lighting pathways to weave perceptions that helped us break the bleak shroud of darkness. We sought the Light by worshiping countless false gods."
Sheeana's body rattled. Everything she heard moved her though it had no confirmation in Other Memory: "I beg you, continue."
The Pythian's voice was now booming and echoing in the stone room: "We drew simulacra of life on the cave's walls until they were cleansed from our minds. Our heads looked up from the ground. We departed from nature, our first act of hubris. We domesticated, planted, dug, burned. Fashioned talons and hooves and thick skins out of clay and bone and leather. We melted rock and plowed soil. The lord of Rats, buried deep into obscurity. Old gods turning into nightmares and children tales. We carved a path out of our animal past. We accelerated. Wheels to replace our backs. Words to replace emotions. Values to stand in the place of our instincts. This cultural programming made space in our minds while pushing the dark underground. The ghosts who walked by us every day, the sprites and dryads and daimons, the judges in the wilderness, now evicted to the far corners of our dreams."
Sheeana felt a vortex of colors whirl in her belly, a physical sensation that could not be detached from the emotions that it was stirring: fear, and awe and terrible forebodings... for a moment she saw a talon in the darkness, a wing bearing impious news, an elfin creature whispering a secret future in her ear. Impressions, just impressions, she tried to reassure herself.
"If you are the Pythian, are you then prescient?" Sheeana asked.
"Prescient! Ha! There is no you, there is no I. I give myself and every moment I am the vessel, ready for the taking. I cultivate readiness. I am consecrated to the life force that may use me to bring forth a vision, a riddle, or silence. I am but a fragile flute in the hands of the Almighty. I am blind, and the life force gives me vision, child."
"Why do you call me child, Deep One?"
But the Phythian did not listen: "Nightmares. And fantasies and fears and hopes. I transubstantiate the knot of human existence, splay it in plain sight. I call upon the powers of old who hide in humanity's own darkness, I bid them exude a hint of prophecy through my skin. In Pytho my sister, the priestess to Prithvi Mata, was slain by male hubris. Never forget! The drakaina, the she-serpent convulsed and died, blue blood spilling over the Delphian rock, every drop and every spill transforming before their eyes into new priestesses. Men installed their own power, called them Apollo's gift, but it was the priestesses who fell to the fumes and spoke the truth drooling Kyrkeon, them! The inscrutable holders of the ever-burning fire."
"And so you descend from the ancient line of..."
"Be quiet, child! We reached escape velocity. Transplanting to innumerable planets the horde brought forth a cosmic calamity, unleashing their double helix on countless unspoiled habitats, the sacred paradises of Gea, spoiled! Multitudes like insect swarms bringing chaos, a chaos they call civility! The Gods will stomp on the vermin of their own doing, unmake the mud that molded them. One day they will awaken the Ctonic Ones and humanity's hubris will fall."
Sheeana stood there, uncertain, purposefully discarding her Bene Gesserit training. No Reverend Mother could help here, the mysticism was their weapon but not their vehicle of inspiration. A force pinned her there, a magnificent sense of wonder, a hunger to grasp the slippery black void inside her.
The woman turned as she was about to leave, a hand supporting on the stone slab.
"Wait! Deep One, please! I seek your counsel," pleaded Sheeana.
"Have you brought the offerings, then?" she asked, turning to face her once again.
"I brought frankincense and charu for the fire of the gods. I quenched your servants' thirst and satisfied their hunger. I walked across worlds to come here. I gave the alms for the temple and for the poor."
"Have you prayed to the One?"
Which God is she referring to? Sheeana could not be sure. "Every day I am called upon by a greater spirit, but it is not answering me."
"Answering you! What shining gold do you think you are made of? You think yourself special, child? But the offerings you did bring, and so come closer, leave them, and ask three questions."
"Three questions, Deep One?"
"Aye. A prophet, am I? Holder of the world and the future? No, no, my dear. I am the Sybil. The value of my answers depend on the cleverness of the questions. Come closer."
The Sybil moved to the front of the stone pedestal, right after the hole that emanated the fumes. Deep wrinkles carved the lady's olive skinned face, her impossibly long hair twisted and braided with metal rings to keep it firm. From below Sheeana walked up the marble footsteps, placed so that her head would be at a foot below the Sybil's. As the fumes dissolved in the foreground, Sheeana looked up, longing to make eye contact with that creature. The proud chin, the dry withered lips, the aquiline nose. And then, the Sybil's empty eye sockets, black and dark, stared at her, and while staring, Sheeana felt completely naked. Her hands brought up the bowl with the offerings, and in the moment her hands touched the oracle's, both bodies shuddered like responding to the same wave.
"You! Why didn't you tell me you were an Elder One?" snapped the Sybil, breaking contact and placing the bowl away on the pedestal. "I have been waiting for the likes of you!"
"Us?" Sheeana trembled. The fumes evaporating from the rock were now white and gray, dense, extending themselves like they would envelope them all, and with them the world.
"The Reverend Mothers! The Invisible ones our eyes cannot see!"
"What good are my questions then, Sybil, if your eyes cannot see me?"
"You clasp my hand!"
Sheeana's left hand sought the Sybil's, a wave starting to flow once again between their bodies.
"There! I knew it. Invisible ones at a distance, but I only need to touch you to open my inner eye. I see you, Invisible no longer so. Ask three questions, now, and quickly, for the day is dimming and Morpheus is calling for me."
Sheeana caught her breath. There with her arm outstretched, she felt that the Sybil was lifting her up from below. She felt energy waves surging from her feet to the tip of her fingers.
"One warning!" boomed the Sybil's voice.
"Yes?"
"Only the helpless ask for their future, child."
That was a wise reminder. Don't let this Sybil fix your future into an immutable end-state. Ask for the underground currents, so that you will weave your own path.
A deep breath to focus, then she asked: "What is happening around me? Who am I, and what is my calling?"
"Your questions reek of Destiny!" she felt the Sybil's contempt in her voice, and her warm breath enveloped her. Melange. The Sybil consumed melange. Her consciousness poured itself through the outstretched arm and into the oracle's hand, seeking. "Are you too a past-stretching Agony survivor, Sybil? A Reverend Mother"
"Nah. The past I see on my own, Elder One. Now, we stay connected while I see you and wait."
"How long?"
"How long is too long? A vessel awaits for its crew to take it out to high sea. How could we hurry the crew? The captain? The tide?"
"I understand."
"We have been waiting for one like you for a long time, Reverend Mother. What is your name?"
"Sh..." she started to reply, but the woman was not there anymore. She had collapsed on the stone pedestal, her long robes falling over her and concealing her from sight, but still clutching Sheeana's hand. Her body was shaking with the same uncontrollable tremor of an epilectic attack, then it arose from the ground like a hand had pulled it up, a face distorted by convulsions, single nerves pulsing below the skin and contracting over large swathes of her face, eye sockets black but somehow glaring with magnetic force, arms clutching Sheeana's hand with the strength of a giant. The Pythian did not look like herself; her hair stood up on end as a guttural voice emerged from her twisted lips. Sheeana felt her entire being called upon to the surface of her skin, of her lips, the surface of her eyes' cornea, her throat and tongue, the cartilage of her ears, the tip of her own black long hair. And thus the Sybil spoke:
"I see Chaos beckoning from the region of Lightning
I see a cosmic snare
The godly ones searching, full of arrogance
Their multitudes in bondage
May you be many
May you be fire
May you be Nityamukta, the free one
Omnipotent desire-force
Consciousness bliss
Preserve the Mayavi
Master magician
The beast's scheme lying hidden
The end of the Great cycle and one will be born
Transform the sleeper to adamantine firmness like thunderbolt
Chaarana human-nature arising
A Yajina, a sacrifice
Raindrops of unquenchable thirst
Melting the bondage of the mind."
Up there the fumes danced to the rhythm of a non-existing air current, the air electric subsiding at once as the body of the Sybil crouched once again on the floor in a thud, Sheeana's hand still in her firm grasp.
"Deep One..." begged Sheeana, alarmed.
A trembling voice replied. "I am her."
"How do I..."
"Silence! Impress the words in your consciousness, Elder One! For I will remember none. I am an empty vessel."
"Your words hint at catastrophe and salvation."
The Sybil laid there for a long minute. She slowly raised herself up, back to sitting on the stone ledge, and spoke: "How could I tell you my dear! Those eyes who could see so clearly a moment ago, now those eyes are dark. The voice I lent to higher forces, no more it finds the words. I am left with only my own sensibility."
"Deep One," Sheeana started.
"Silence, Elder one! You carry with you an inscrutable portent. You are the Angel and the Demon. I need no talent to see that!"
"Come with me then, Sybil. I will need your help."
"The oracle makes no matter, Elder one! We give prophesy to kings and peasants alike. They all count equally in our eyes."
"Then, I thank you, and will let you be." Sheeana gently unclasped herself from the Sybil's iron grip, stepped two paces back and made to turn toward the door.
"You!" boomed again the Sybil's voice. "I will know your name before you leave."
What will I say? The power laid there, impossible to avoid. Instinctively, she grasped it.
"I," she began raising her voice to the ceiling of the stone vault, "am Sheeana Brugh of Dune, born of Rakis, and by the glory of the Divided God, the last Sandrider."
"Kull Wahad!" rattled the Sybil in disconcerted astonishment.
"Are there trainees who can take your place, Sybil?"
"You command and I will obey, Elder one."
"And your name?"
"Leyana Bidr Tabr Ehkar."
"Your Fremen ancestors would be pleased."
"My Fremen ancestors were gullible fools tamed by a civilization that was not their own."
"Keep that edge sharp for me, Leyana! Do you know why you are joining me?"
"I sense in you the higher force."
"I see you as you are, Leyana, a chaos dancer, a seeker of the deep sense. And I... am assembling the most formidable team of dancers this Era has ever seen."