The vision dazzled her.
All her life she had heard Idumea described as a world, as a person, as a benevolence in the aether that blessed everything with life and health and joy through the intervening power of the Medium. Now she learned that Idumea was a place, not a person. It was a world filled with a race called the Essaios. They were beautiful and graceful beings, perfect in delicacy and strength. They looked like men and women that surrounded her, only taller, more graceful and beautiful than anyone she had ever seen. Even more, their skin glowed with the power of the Medium, for it obeyed them. She saw their beautiful cities, their enormous gardened cities and wept with joy and wonder. To her, the Abbey grounds were the most beautiful place in the world, but the city-gardens of Idumea were a thousand times more beautiful, a hundred thousand times more grand. The enormity of them defied comparison. She realized that the finely sculpted grounds of Muirwood were merely a pathetic attempt to mimic the wonders of Idumea. The Essaios were wise and powerful and they could never die. From the world of Idumea, they reined as king-mastons and queen-mastons over millions of millions of worlds spread throughout a skein of interlocking worlds that was beyond Lia’s comprehension, vast beyond anything she could imagine. Millions of little worlds, like hers, spread throughout the infinite expanse. The Essaios used the Medium to craft worlds, to command the forces of fire and ice and sea and storm to create and to tame the wild elements into obedience. As she watched, she hungered to be like them, to wield the Medium in such a powerful way. Then she realized that she could, someday – that she was already a part of them, and that they had created her as well as their worlds.
Lia was amazed to learn she herself had come from Idumea. It was her home, the place of her first life. So many times she had heard of her existence as a “second life” – that she was born as wretched, but it was not her beginning. There was a place before that, a place where she lived among the Essaios. How could she describe herself? A spark? A floating ember? A spider’s web of immateriality that lived among the Essaios, so fragile, so delicate. An intelligence. An awareness clothed in a substance as faint as a shadow. To become an Essaios, she would have to leave Idumea. Her shadow-self would have to come to a fallen world with no memory of her former life. All were equally ignorant. None were given the advantage of remembering their life in Idumea. She was promised – they were all promised – that if they would be calm and listen carefully, they would hear the murmurs of the Medium guiding them back. The Medium would aid them and assist them if they allowed themselves to be tamed by it. In order to tame it, they must first be tamed by it. If they followed the whispers of the Medium, it would teach them how to craft buildings of sculpted stone that would become a link back to the world of Idumea and allow their return.
That thought was profound and amazed her. Muirwood, as with the other Abbeys, was a gateway back to Idumea. And not just to Idumea but to any of the other millions of worlds where there were enough mastons to build them. Each generation of maston families grew stronger and stronger with the Medium until at last a new generation was strong enough in the Medium to banish death. There would come a time when the chain was strong enough that two mastons, joined by an irrevocare sigil, could use the Medium to bring all of their ancestors back from the dead, in bodies remade into the race of the Essaios and together cross the threshold back to Idumea and join the ranks of others who had so done. It had happened in Muirwood already, she suddenly realized. The stone ossuaries that had washed away, revealing nothing but grave clothes and wedding bands. The Essaios cared not for trinkets of gold or cemetery linen. Nor did they want to linger behind on a fallen world. Unseen, they had entered the Abbey and crossed the Apse Veil back to their true home.