Lover Enshrined Read Online Free PDF

She’d also started working on the floor so she had more space.
    Leaning forward, she checked the drawing she’d done before she’d started, the one she used to guide her. Next layer would decrease in size, as would the one after that. Then she would add a tower.
    Color would be good, she thought. But how to work it into the structure?
    Ah, color. The liberation of the eye.
    Being on this side had its challenges, but one thing she absolutely loved were all the colors. In the Chosen’s Sanctuary, everything was white: from the grass to the trees to the temples to the food and drink to the devotional books.
    With a wince of guilt, she glanced over to her sacred texts. It was hard to argue that she’d been worshiping the Scribe Virgin at her little cathedral of peas and picks.
    Nurturing the self was not the goal of the Chosen. It was a sacrilege.
    And the visit earlier from the Chosen’s Directrix should have reminded her of that.
    Dearest Virgin Scribe, she didn’t want to think about that.
    Getting up, she waited for her light-headedness to clear, then went to a window. Down below were the tea roses, and she noted each of the bushes, checking for new buds and petals that had dropped, and fresh leaves.
    Time was passing. She could tell by the way the plants changed, their cycle of budding lasting three or four days for each bloom.
    Yet another thing to get used to. On the Other Side, there was no time. There were rhythms of rituals and eating and baths, but no alternation of day or night, no hourly measure, no change of season. Time and existence were static just as the air was, just as the light was, just as the landscape was.
    On this side, she’d had to learn that there were minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years. Clocks and calendars were used to mark the passings, and she’d figured out how to read them, just as she’d come to understand the cycles of this world and the people in it.
    Out on the terrace, a doggen came into view. He had a pair of shears and a large red bucket and he went along the bushes, clipping them into place.
    She thought of the rolling white lawns of the Sanctuary. And the unmoving white trees. And the white flowers that were always in bloom. On the Other Side, everything was frozen in its proper place so there was no trimming needed, no mowing, never any change.
    Those who breathed the still air were likewise frozen even as they moved, living and yet not living.
    Although the Chosen did age, didn’t they. And they did die.
    She glanced over her shoulder to a bureau that had empty drawers. The scroll the Directrix had come to deliver sat on its glossy top. The Chosen Amalya, as Directrix, was issuer of such birth recognitions and had appeared to complete her duty.
    Had Cormia been over on the Other Side, there would have been a ceremony as well. Although not for her, of course. The individual whose birth it was received no special due, as there was no self on the Other Side. Only the whole.
    To think for yourself, to think of yourself, was blasphemy.
    She’d always been a secret sinner. She’d always had errant ideas and distractions and drives. All of which went nowhere.
    Cormia brought her hand up and put it on the windowpane. The glass she stared through was thinner than her pinkie, as clear as air, hardly any barrier at all. She’d wanted to go down to the flowers for quite a while now, but was waiting for . . . she did not know what.
    When she had first come to this place, she’d been racked by sensory overload. There were all kinds of things she didn’t recognize, like torches that were plugged into the walls that you had to switch on for light, and machines that did things like wash dishes or keep food cold or create images on a little screen. There were boxes that chimed with every hour, and metal vehicles that carried people around, and things you ran back and forth across floors that whirred and cleaned.
    There were more colors here than in all the jewels