Chapter 35

                                    

                                          
Joakim woke to voices both foreign and familiar, but his daze sat heavily enough that he couldn't focus. The words were empty, meaningless. As his mind drifted, he gradually became aware of a new sound singing, high, sweet and curiously warm. His ears swore they weren't hearing it. Instead it seemed to come from inside him, as though his heart itself had burst into song.
"He's awake." This voice was male, cracked with age and oddly familiar. "If you could leave, please? This is something I have to do alone."
"Can't we-" Joakim thought he recognised Erstas's voice. But that couldn't be right. Erstas was dead. Perhaps this was the realm beyond death? But that wasn't right; he'd walked that place–six lights and one, and a million voices singing. Now only one voice sang, so beautifully he felt on the verge of tears.
"I don't have much time," replied the ancient voice. "There are things he needs to know. Things I must tell him."
"Of course, master," said the abbess, her voice soothing and calm. "We will give you the time you need." 
Joakim heard the sound of feet shuffling away and a door closing, followed closely by the sound of a chair being drawn up.
"That means you too, friggitt," added the ancient voice, amusement making the syllables rich.
"Gabarone-Frigitt not want to go. Gabarone-Friggitt be quiet." The friggitt's voice was another brought from the grave. 
Joakim struggled against his heavy eyes, but sleep still held him.
"Gabarone-Friggitt will have time with his friend. I do not have that luxury."
There was a pause, and the exhalation of a breath.
"Gabarone-Friggitt go. Gabarone-Friggitt come back."
"I'm glad to hear it," replied the voice, and Joakim struggled to place it. It sounded so familiar.  "Joakim will need all the friends he can get."
Joakim heard the squeak of a window being opened, and the wheeze of struggling breath.
"You can open your eyes," said the voice, and this time he recognised Ole' Vid, the strange man who had shown them the phoenix's egg. Surely he was dead too? He'd burned away instantly, much like Joakim could remember himself burning. The memory was painless.
"I'm not dead," said Vid, answering his thoughts. "And neither are you. Be careful opening your eyes. The world will not look as you remembered."
Cautiously, Joakim obeyed, and only to be almost blinded. He recognised the high ceiling and scrubbed floor of the monastery's infirmary, but beyond that, nothing was like he remembered. Instead of the clear shapes of walls and furniture, coloured lines flowed through everything, like the stitches of a tapestry, connecting one thing to the next. The ribbons pulsed with energy, defining a world of light and beauty unlike anything Joakim had ever imagined.
"What are they?" Joakim breathed, amazed. He sat up straighter in his bed.
"Resonance," said Vid, "the secret power that flows through all things. You have been changed. Your eyes are not what they once were. The strangeness will fade in time. The day will come when you barely notice the energy that connects everything."
It doesn't flow through everything, thought Joakim. Looking down he found his body was black–most of it anyway. His right arm, the one burned away by the phoenix's egg, was whole again, and not just whole, but colourful, the lines of red and orange linking it to the world around him.
He could still move it. It answered to his will just as before, his shoulder a twisting mass of darkness and colour.
"How?" Joakim twisted his wrist this way and that, testing its function. "It was gone, burned away. And you? You died! I saw you!"