Exceptional AXTILLA GIVES DOCTREX A HISTORY LESSON ABOUT HER PEOPLE The Trining : THE TABLETS OF KYRN by Jay Squires

First Time Visiting The Trining? In a nutshell, this is what happened in Chapter Four: The Amnesiac gets a name. Axtilla, weak but apparently healed, explains to the disbelieving amnesiac that she had been conscious the whole time. She describes everything he had done, including carving the X in her ankle and sucking out the poison. She dubs him Doctor X (which is later shortened to Doctrex).   A loud rumbling and a pulsating glow, out from behind the mountain, frightens Axtilla. Doctrex says it’s the aurora borealis—but she calls it Kojutake and tries to escape up the hillside in panic. He goes after her, but she loses her footing and both tumble back.   In the middle of a horrendous light show, she explains to Doctrex that he has no memory because his is the new body of a person who killed himself! AND NOW ... ENJOY THE ADVENTURE ....    Chapter Five   A fist in the solar plexus couldn't have taken the breath out of me more completely. How tragically ironic! If I'm to believe her story, I so despised my life that I killed myself, only to find I'd bounced into another body, into another life. And I have a sense of belonging to this body so much that I have no memory of the other body. Bizarre! If true. I don't know how long I sat there, absorbed in my thoughts. Finally, I asked, "Why here, Axtilla? Tell me, why did I end up here?" "Many appeared here in the past. There will be many more in the future. You're asking why him? Here? Now?" She shrugged. "I don't know. There is a deciding intelligence. It is not a shared wisdom. I only know all who are deposited here are brothers to ones who died violent deaths. No one remembers everything from his brother; some remember more, some less. Some memories are sticky, others are slippery." "So ..." I grappled for words. "So, Axtilla, you're saying the one who killed himself was my brother?" "I’m trying to help you understand what is not otherwise easily understood. He was not actually your brother. It would be more correct to say you were really him, in consciousness, until the exact instant of his death. Why is it so hard to understand? Consciousness is not personal. Also, consciousness cannot die. It is the pure endless flow. When a vessel empties at death, the contents have to find another vessel." "Or, what? Tell me that: what? What if there's no one around?" Axtilla smiled a patient, non-judgmental, smile. "You think everything is framed in time and space, Doctrex?” I stared at her a long moment. If my mouth wasn't actually open, in spirit it was. Who was this woman? Not fifteen minutes ago she was trembling and in tears. Then suddenly she became uncannily calm. These profoundly spiritual thoughts and words she just now expressed came out of the same mouth that, not too many days ago, spoke in monosyllables and with words out of sync with her lips. Was she of another world? It was like she was a vessel herself. Wisdom flowed into her and out through her mouth. Is she a goddess? I wondered.  Is that what she is: a goddess who can still fall prey to the bite of a very worldly predator?   "There's so much I’m curious to know, Axtilla. But there are things I must know if we're to keep from being destroyed by this Kojutake."   As though in response to hearing his, its or their name, something like a huge arm of the most awesome interplay of light and color shot a hundred yards out over the sloping hillside—swirling colors of blue and gold and red—attended by a terrifying, rolling roar. Then, as quickly, it withdrew its mighty arm and there was again a glowing nimbus of light framing the mountain. "The aurora borealis?" Axtilla asked, softly. "It's not the aurora borealis, I'll give you that. But, for being such a threat, did you see how the Kojutake turned tail when he came out and saw us?" Giving Axtilla a smile, I slapped one palm, a glancing blow off the other. "Just like that. Gotta hightail it back behind the mountain!" I was hoping my antics broke the tension. I waited a few moments and then, I asked her, "How long do you figure before they pull out all their guns?" She blinked three or four times, rapidly, probably waiting for the image to slip into her brain. "In your time … about an hour, maybe two hours." I took a few large chunks of bark from the pile beside me and set them gently in the bed of the fire so they wouldn't release any embers. "Care to answer a few more questions?" I asked. "You are full of questions. Go ahead." "I don't have much of a sense of the passage of time. I don't know how long I was unconscious—hours, days, or weeks—while I was recuperating, but, I'm thinking it was more than a week since I first woke up on the shore …" "Okay, over a week,” she said, and paused..  “Why is that important?" "During that time no one's come to check on you, Axtilla. I find that strange. Where are your people? If the Kojutake is a threat to us, why aren't they coming to take you away, to protect you?" She looked away from me. "You know what I think? I think there are just you and me. No others. I don't think there are any your people. You know?" She still wouldn't look at me. "That's important, Axtilla. Don't you think that's important? We need to be realistic. The Kojutake may be too powerful for the two of us. But, if we had your people—" "My people banished me here." She turned back to me and I saw her eyes were filled with tears. "I'm sorry, but I find that hard to believe! You'd have to have done something horrible to be banished. They wouldn't have banished you unless you were a threat to your people. What did you do that was so terrible?" She was silent for better than a minute, her eyes closed. "Axtilla—what?" "I was the last one left—" I laughed a short, bitter laugh. "Then, who banished you?" "No, no, Doctrex!"  She held up a warning hand, her lips and jaw trembling, her eyes so tightly closed that her tears seeped through her lashes and onto her cheek. It took her a moment before she could speak. "Don't--don't be so quick to interrupt, please. You must be patient and let me unfold this in a way you will understand. I am the last in a group of the followers of the Encloy." She raised her hand. "Don't speak. Listen. In the beginning of our times, our people were savage and brutal. They lived for their bellies and their lusts. They existed on one plane without contact with any outside life; their destiny was to destroy themselves. "It was out of this mass of ancestral decay that the Encloy had its beginning. Think of it as a dot of light in a spiritual darkness beyond belief. How it first came into existence … and more importantly, how it became aware that it existed for something other than death and destruction—that was the first miracle. How it sustained itself, sheltered its tiny light from the darkness, no one can even guess. What started as just one, and then two, grew to many hundred individual points of cohering light. When they became a presence to the darkness, they became a threat. They were forced into hiding." "Wait, wait a minute. You're starting to speak metaphorically again. Darkness! Dots of light! It sounds a lot like the Book of Genesis. Okay, fast forward. Seriously! We don't have time. Who were these points of light? How were they different from the others in the darkness?" She cleared her throat, obviously irritated by the interruption. "The points of light: they formed naturally into groups according to their talents and interests. Some were students of the world around them. They asked 'why' and 'why not' and cataloged how things happened according to a pattern. They were our first scientists. Others were comfortable numbering everything. They were perfectly content inside their mind where everything in their world was represented by a quantity." I felt impatience rising in me. "Okay, mathematicians, I get it. And, I'm sorry, Axtilla, but this would be a beautiful story to tell around a campfire—if we didn't have the Kojutake breathing down our necks!" Axtilla smiled. "Okay, for the moment I'll summarize the composition of the Encloy as the embodiment of all that was life affirming and upward yearning." "Thank you—I think!" "You're welcome, but don't underestimate the importance of the details we left out." She blinked several times, as though fast-forwarding a tape in her mind. "The Encloy reached a membership of over a thousand at its highest point, with fifty times more sympathizers in the general population.” "So, over fifty-thousand supporters?" "This covered several generations." "Still … but out of how many total?" "At the time of the Bining, the population numbered five-hundred thousand." "The Bining!" If I were standing, I'd have been tapping my foot. "I'm getting there. If the Dark Forces were single-minded in dedicating themselves to destroying the force of light, we'd have had no chance of surviving their strength in numbers. But--and this is important, Doctrex--they were no stronger than their sense of self. You know what I mean?" "I—think so." I was starting again to feel a creeping impatience and I thought she perceived it. "Just listen, Doctrex. If we survive Kojutake, this history lesson will be important to you. They lacked unity, you see. And, without unity they lacked leadership. They were as intent on killing each other as they were anyone outside their circle of brutality. Remember that." I nodded, not really understanding how that information could be useful. She adjusted her position against the log. "According to the Tablets of Kyrn—" "Here we go again! You're throwing out the Tablets of Kyrn like I should know what it is!" "Kyrn was the first source of light from which our people were delivered from darkness." "That dot? That dot of light you were talking about?" "Yes, Kyrn. If I may proceed, Doctrex, according to the Tablets of Kyrn, the Bining occurred five generations ago and ushered in the Preview of Enlightenment, the equivalent of your Anno Domini or A.D. It's the beginning date of our modern calendar." "Okay, back to the Bining. You're giving me an information overload, Axtilla." "The Tablets of Kyrn accurately predicted the exact occurrence of the Bining. To understand this you will begin to see why my people banished me." Now we were getting somewhere. I needed to concentrate as never before. "The Encloy made a concerted effort to prepare the supporters of the light for the Bining, but that would have required a level of faith that not many had." She studied my face, I think to gauge my understanding. Finally, she added, "The Bining was the alignment of one plane on another." "Plane! What do you mean plane? Tell me you don't mean airplane." She looked briefly puzzled, and then smiled. "No, a flat surface, a disk. In the interest of time, may I continue? The Bining took place in darkness. And, since it was completed over a period roughly equivalent to your month, it was a prolonged darkness that had a symbolic significance to the Encloy. The weaker members of those who supported the Encloy—those who wanted to believe, but didn't have the mental stamina that faith provided, drifted more away from the movement, away from the inner light. This was all foretold in the Tablets of Kyrn. The Tablets also prophesied the completion of the Bining." "And, in the interest—" "Yes, yes. After the month-long darkness of the Bining, when the light finally fell on our land again, the Encloy discovered the creatures of the darkness had totally disappeared. They had simply vanished, without a trace. Likewise—and sadly— those I mentioned whose faith was weak had been drawn into the Dark Forces. They, too, vanished. They did not get a further opportunity to develop their faith."  Her voice faltered. "That always saddened me." "I understand." Noticing the fire needed more fuel, I crawled over to the dwindling stack of bark, took two of the larger chunks, crawled back and placed them on the fire and then began my return. At that moment the ground shifted beneath me. I teetered and fell to my side, got back to my hands and knees, and shot a glance at Axtilla. She was on her stomach, reaching for something to grasp onto, to stabilize her, but she was like a rudderless ship being flung about in a storm. I opened my mouth to tell her I was coming when my words were swallowed up in a deafening, roaring wind that whirled and whipped around us and over us and was gone, along with the shaking of the earth. By the time I got to her she was leaning back against the log, taking in deep gulps of air. "Are you okay?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. "Kojutake!" she cried, pointing an unsteady finger at something behind and above me. Her breathing was labored. "L-look!"       Recognized Author Notes This chapter gives the reader some information vital to the understanding of the rest of the book. It gives me mixed feelings: I'm afraid those who enjoyed the action in the previous chapters might lose interest. But it lays the groundwork for some important action to follow.

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