How had I arrived at this place? What possessed me to walk up to those ruins, which I had ne’er before seen but echoed with the familiar songs of my oldest memories? As I drew nearer and began to ascend the stone steps, I came to remember this as the dream that always began, but I never allowed to finish. My heart sank, and the air itself gained an icy, biting chill.
I closed my eyes tight, my face screwed up in knots trying to wrestle myself awake before I reached the end of the staircase. But this time, a first among so many nights where I had denied this dream its hold over me - I could not escape. My eyes drifted open again, and I sighed with the knowledge that this time, I would be forced to face that which I had not been able to for the entirety of my adulthood. A single tear rolled down my cheek, warm against the cold breeze blowing through the pillars, now behind me as I approached what faced me. Or… who faced me, rather.
Her.
The face before me was one I had banished to the darkest recesses of my mind, the voice in my head that I buried beneath locks within locks within locks. Layla of the Yasi, the most revered among my people, who led our clan with a quiet determination, and… most importantly, my mother.
I should have known this was to come eventually. The only item of hers I still carry is the ornate white stone passed down within the Yasi people, the one which cemented her position among her peers and carried the whispers of our forebearers - the Dancers. Until recently, it remained locked in a trinket box I dared not open for the pain it would bring each time.
It was only once I came into my own once again, free of the machinations and manipulations of the man who held my mind prisoner that I began to wear the stone on my person again.
As if waiting for my mind to stop running, she finally spoke with a voice I can’t even claim to remember, and we spoke for the first time all over again.
“My little lion… my dearest boy…”
“I… always hated when you called me that.”
“And yet, you fashioned yourself a new name after it the day you ran away from yourself - Aslan, the golden lion of children’s tales. The day where you had to grow up all too fast… I’m sorry that I left you so soon, my little Faysal. Will you… forgive me?”
“Forgive you?” I asked. “There is little to forgive when you didn’t choose to die. Fate is a cruel master, and yet it reigns as King over us all.”
“You are right in that Fate took me before I was ready to leave. Your sister, and father before me too. But you must remember, Faysal, that cutting the weeds of summer will not bring back the roses lost to the winter before them.”
“Roses? I don’t… I don’t follow,” I sighed. She always had the most beautiful way of phrasing things, but oft got carried away with a metaphor and lost all sense of direction.
“You’re right… you’re a man now, and not a boy. I shouldn’t lace my words with honey any longer, I just… I need to know you’re ready to hear them.”
With a moment of pause, I swallowed and gave her a nod.
“You dance only for death, Faysal. Our people were not needlessly cruel, and we both know that the path you are taking is not the one I would have wanted for you. Remember us as we were, and all that we meant to one another. Do not let your ears grow dull to the beat of the song that goes on all around you, and consider what it means to you to be the last of the Yasi. Fate tore us apart, I know, you must not let the past write your future.
Quell this rage within your heart and rest your urge for vengeance, lest it consume you entirely. Do not disgrace our people by carrying out this warped idea of justice you’ve become so accustomed to. Take the stone within your hands and listen to the souls who came before you… listen to all that they did, all that they believed in, and all that they have witnessed since the very beginning of our line.”
“Will I… will I hear you, too?”
“If that is your wish, then will it to be so. I too carried the stone, as you well know. I am a part of it as much as any other… as you yourself will one day will leave your legacy upon it.”
“So this is… you are…” I struggled to speak, a small tugging sensation at my back swiftly growing until I could barely keep my feet on the ground. I knew this sensation well, and wasn’t ready for her to leave yet. “Are you really my mother? Or are you just the memory of her, called forth from within my own mind?”
I knew I could resist no longer, and gave into the force pulling me away. As I drifted backwards out through the pillars and up above the stone steps to awaken, my mother finally smiled.
I had spent the rest of that night wide awake, pondering the conversation we’d had in the confines of my dream with my mother’s Soul Crystal in hand. I realised that my final question was foolish, for even if she were a figment of my imagination, she never would have admitted to it. And frankly, I didn’t need to know the answer to it to move forward.
Real or not, what she spoke was true, and it was time that I realised my actions of late had only served to hold me back. Hunting down thugs and criminals and delivering unto them their end as I felt they deserved… it was not what the art of my people was meant for. To skulk in the shadows and strike down who I saw fit… the Viper I had become was a dishonour to the memory of those who walked before me.
It was that night that I allowed myself to close the book on the chapter of my life that had brought me only pain, and I laid the name Aslan to rest with the bodies of those who had brought him into existence. Of the man who twisted my sense of love and devotion into a chain that bound me, and the pleasure houses who took advantage of my will to survive, I finally let go. I learned that night that to be bitter is to build yourself a palace and prison in the same breath, and to cling to your anger is to forget who you are, and who you were meant to be.
My name was Faysal, son of Layla and last of the Yasi people, who brought beauty to the world through the dances of which they poured their hearts into each step. They adorned their garments with the colourful feathers of birds, symbolic of the freedom they felt in dancing to the beat of the very world around them.
It is time I remember who Faysal really is, and all he was meant to become.
