The moment the fruit left the grass -- he stopped. In the texts of heaven, the ones no human archive held, there was a record.
A fruit from a specific garden. A specific moment at the beginning of everything. The similarities between what Amara held and what those texts described were not partial.
They were exact -- down to the blossom, down to the gold, down to the weight of it in a human hand.
He moved before he had decided to.
He stood.
He placed himself between Amara and whatever was crossing the garden toward her. Did not look at Vantini.
His attention remained on Amara -- on the fruit in her hands, on her face -- as though nothing else in the room had made a decision worth acknowledging.
Vantini realised, "He doesn't even see me as a threat"
· · ·
Vantini stopped.
From behind the anomaly -- from the simple passive fact of him standing there, it arrived.
Not anger. Not threat. The absolute void of something that had ended the Primordial Chaos allowing its awareness to rest, without intent, in his direction.
The universe pressing from all sides simultaneously. No floor. No ceiling. No purchase anywhere.
The mind-numbing terror not of death but of scale -- of being completely, utterly beneath notice, and knowing it, and knowing that the thing above him had not even turned around.
· · ·
He spoke. Liaison vocabulary, scholarly interest, the correct professional register.
Trying to stick to the mortal cover Vantini had built painstakingly over a span of a few decades just so that His Holiness would have an agent inside the Vatican.
He did not turn. He allowed the weight of what he was to rest, passively, in Vantini's direction -- no focus, no intent; gravity resting on a thing simply by existing. Vantini stopped mid-sentence. It suddenly turned:
Suffocating.
He retreated to the surface.
Khalil watched him go longest -- the ground near the rope, the rope itself, the shaft above.
Then returned his eyes to the grass. Said nothing. In the way that meant everything had been noted.
. . .
She held the fruit.
He had given it to her without explanation. She had carried the unanswered question of it for days. Now the question had its answer.
The garden made this. Before there were gardens. He had given it to her the way you returned something to its rightful keeper.
She understood. She had understood since the second layer. She had been waiting for the right moment.
She divided it.
Practical, unhurried.
Rania. Yosef -- still on one knee; he took it without rising.
Shai. Khalil, receiving it the way he received everything: with precision.
Dawud, already on the other side of whatever the rest of them were still crossing.
She kept a piece for herself. Then held one out to the man they unearthed.
He looked at it. Then at her. He took it -- the same deliberate motion as the first time he had taken her hand.
· · ·
It tasted Not of magic. Not of fire. Nor of any vision.
Divine -- in the oldest sense of the word. The sweetest apple. The juiciest mango.
The taste of something that predated the names for both -- the taste of the garden before the garden had a word for itself, before good needed a comparison.
Simple. Complete. Like the first good thing.
· · ·
He looked at the piece in his hand the way he had looked at here before he said it.
Then he ate.
The seventh tree put out its first leaf.
Pale gold -- the colour of the fruit, the colour of late afternoon that had no afternoon to come from -- at the very tip of the highest branch.
One leaf. Dawud looked at it for a long moment.
"It's started," he said.
Nobody asked what.
· · ·
Something shifted.
Not warmth -- they had warmth since the light arrived. Not clarity -- they had clarity since the Wall spoke.
Something older and quieter. The feeling of having been, for one moment, exactly where they were supposed to be -- in a place prepared for them before they existed, by something that had loved them before they had names.
They could not name what changed. They felt it anyway.
The garden held all of them like mother nature gently embracing it's children.
. . .
Undisclosed Location:
Amara called.
Third ring. An aged female voice said, "My dearest Amara" -- low, unhurried, sixty years in every syllable.
Amara rambled on. What the Wall described. What the second layer said. Who she unearthed and taught grass to. Her voice held through all of it. Wavered once, on the word Eden. Held again.
Her grandmother was quiet for a long time.
Then:
"I am coming to Israel."
Not a question. Not a request. The voice of someone who had been waiting sixty years for absolution and finally, finally. Is able to see the light for once amidst the cloying darkness.
Of being denied, of being called a heretic, of having texts, scriptures, everything she put all her life to confiscated.
No, she decided. She is not going to let this chance go.
"Grandma --"
"I am coming, Amara. And you had better stop trying to stall or deny me this."
With that she cut the call and breathed out a long sigh of relief.
'Lets see if that crone sitting at Vatican tries to stonewall me this time'
With having thought that last musing, Amara's Grandmother stood up and started packing any essential stuff she'd require for the trip.
After all, these old bones are not as they were three decades ago, spry and filled with energy to unearth unseen scriptures from ancient ruins.
. . .
Having sorted everything at the small cabin she was staying at, the old woman took one long look at the place. And promptly lugging her suitcase with her, turned back and walked away.
Israel Awaits....
Author's note: I am sorry for the short chapter today folks. I am dealing with a scheduled medical visit today hence was unable to upload today :'). But fear not!! I shall give you beloved readers 5 chapters tomorrow! Otherwise my name shall not be Author