Prayer to His Eternal Warmth, Written Approximately 01/02, Recreated Here
Spica
Metadata
Reference Number: BICI/SSP/CRJ0102/002
Title: Prayer to His Eternal Warmth, Written Approximately 01/02, Recreated Here
Author: Spica
Date: Written approximately 01/02, Year 5607 A.o.W.
Extent: One letter, two pages long
Transcript
To His Eternal Warmth, The God-King of All Eternity, He Who Sparked Flame Into Being, The Keeper of the Forge, Commander of All the World:
I write this prayer in your name, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to send it. You see everything the flames touch. You hear every word swallowed by the blaze. You have heard my prayers, yet I am still not an Undying Ember.
I know I shouldn’t keep asking to be made one. My time has long since passed. Twenty-one is too old for a trainee Ember. I know that You have given me a different path in life. It is my own incompetence creating the false fog that obscures my path forward.
A part of me knew that my dream of becoming an Ember died with Jasmine’s parents. She wanted to see the rest of the island, not me. I just wanted to see her happy. She was rarely happy back then, and her happiness is rarer still now.
O, my god-king. She smiled at me a few weeks ago, and I have spent every day since turning that memory over in my mind with a reverent touch. Her mouth has remained in the same flat line since that day. The parts of her that once resonated with me have crumbled into the sea, and neither she nor I know what to do with the pieces that remain.
As a girl, I dedicated my life to You, and to her. She shaped this village from something strange and empty into a home. She gave me a dream to chase after. Now, I am stuck in place, looking at her silhouette up on the cliffside and wondering when she became a distant figure to admire on the horizon. My life is not something she wants now. I fear that You do not want it either.
Am I meant to stay in Seabreeze Shoal for the rest of my life? To keep my father company in his final days and tend to the lighthouse with Jasmine? She’s never accepted my offers to help before, always insisting that I should focus on conditioning myself for the day when You send me my Spark. If she knew every strike of my spear was a pointless endeavor, would she finally accept my aid?
Father wishes for me to go to the Hall of Kindling and Charcoal. To become a scholar like he and Mother were. He says I have Mother’s mind and a fervent devotion that would make that hall home. Am I meant to go there? If I did, would they even accept me? I’ve seen the books he and Mother wrote about you. I could spend my life immersed in every text exalting Your glory and yet I would never write a sentence half as eloquent as they did.
I worry that the scholars wouldn’t accept me, but equal is my worry for Jasmine. If I were to leave, she would have no one left but Blossom. The villagers have wearily accepted my father and I, but her lighthouse is a prison and a sickhouse. If she exists mostly in my horizon, then to the other villagers she is nothing more than a shape in the fog.
I ask that You give me just a fragment of Your wisdom, Your foresight, Your steadfast resolve — anything that would make me feel less like I could crumble at any moment. You see the sword that can be forged from molten metal. You can hone a blade fine enough to split a hair in two.
I no longer pray for a Spark. I just pray for a heart more discerning than my own.
-Spica