14
"You enter my domain, Being of Creation."
She was beautiful and eerie.
"It was I that made you, small mortal. This is your rare moment. Ask your questions now."
I fumbled in my thoughts. A rebellion welled up. "So you declare that you made me...like the others...to dig in your mines?"
"In your homeland do you not make use of the beasts in your flocks? And could this be your only frail question in this moment at audience with Semjaza? How unfortunate!"
I remembered my Uncle's instructions, extended my hand to touch her's. She drew back. My courage increased.
"And precisely what are your origins," I asked. "Whom is your Creator?"
She spoke with a deep cadence. "We move in a dangerous Universe, a mistake, an impetus fallen to chaos, and yet we persist as we have always."
I continued, "and how do you create human flesh?
Up until that moment she had shimmered ghostly. "This is how we make flesh." She transformed and stood tall before me as a tangible woman. "Flesh is secondary," she said, "as I now wear protoplasm; thus, with this principle we create mortals."
"I do not understand?"
"We manipulate essence. We cast you like a reflection in water. The flesh appears as a statement within the web of your location.
"So you intimate that I am only a spell?"
She stared at me without emotion.
I was both attracted and repelled by Semjaza and her message--allured as though by a Siren--and yet something was amiss. I confronted in indignation. "You do not fabricate my soul! You are the dream, and it is I that create you!"
"Dare you test me!" Semjaza's countenance darkened. Her words came in a whisper. "What is unleashed can be retrieved." She moved towards me with a menace. "Behold!"
I felt a catastrophic shock. The world around me began to fade away.
I became stripped and without form plunged into an unidentifiable void. Perhaps I was there for a long span of time, or I was within a time that itself had vanished. And yet I still existed, that portion of self-identity, the I Am.
Semjaza was wrong.