Part III of The Last Gurus of Kireval

In the days that followed his vision in the Vire Thread, Dr. Ellison Virell found that the world no longer felt as solid as it once had. Not fragile — but fluid. The boundaries he once believed immutable had softened, as if space and time were no longer walls but fabric.

He awoke earlier. His hands moved differently. Sometimes, when he stood still long enough, he could hear a soft humming beneath all sound — like the world breathing through stone.

The elders, now calling him simply Virell, had accepted him as an apprentice. Not as a guru — that could not be rushed — but as someone who had touched the deeper layer of reality and returned intact.

His first lesson came not in spell or ritual, but in observation.

Maela brought him to a garden carved into a cliffside. It overlooked nothing — a vast plain of mist, eternal and unnamed.

“What do you see?” she asked.

Virell frowned. “Plants. Stones arranged in… some pattern?”

She shook her head gently. “You are seeing objects. Try again. Feel the motion. The space between.”

He tried. At first, it seemed pointless. But then — something subtle revealed itself. He noticed the way the moss crept exactly halfway up each stone. The sound of wind brushing one side of the garden but never the other. He realized it wasn’t a garden — it was a map. Not to a place, but to a state of awareness.

It was a silent transmission.

Later, Oras taught him the art of shaping through stillness. He placed a basin of water in front of Virell and told him to calm it without touching it. Not by willing it to still — but by stilling himself.

“Water does not resist balance,” Oras said. “Only the mind does.”

It took days. But eventually, Virell noticed that when his breathing aligned with the rhythm of the leaves outside, when his heartbeat became quiet enough to listen, the water stopped rippling.

He laughed aloud when it happened.

“You moved the world by unmoving yourself,” Oras said. “This is the root of what the others would call magic.”

By the second moon-cycle, he was able to light the temple lamps with a gesture, not by commanding flame, but by matching the desire of the wick for heat with the invitation of energy to arrive.

He learned that all true power in Kireval came not from domination, but from intimacy with the nature of things. To change a stone, one had to first understand the story it was already telling.

But power always brings temptation.

One evening, as he wandered the outer paths beyond the guru dwellings, Virell came across a stone mirror pool. There, sitting alone, was Soralen — the former heir who had vanished after rejecting the council’s way. She looked older, but calmer.

“I see they’ve shown you the thread,” she said without looking up.

“I thought you left,” Virell said. “That you rejected the teachings.”

“I did,” she replied. “But rejection isn’t the same as abandonment. I needed to find the path outside the circle. But I return now and then, to see who else has stumbled in.”

Virell sat beside her. “Why did you leave, really?”

Soralen looked at him then, her eyes sharp but kind. “Because I feared what would happen if this knowledge escaped. If someone carried it back into the world of industry and war and used it not for balance, but for control. You come from that world.”

Virell hesitated. “I want to share it. To help my people. This could heal so much.”

She nodded slowly. “And yet, you would explain it. Name it. Categorize it. Dissect it. And in doing so, kill it.”

He felt the sting of truth in her words.

That night, he dreamed of cities built on the thread — glowing spires powered by intention, medicine grown from song, skies tuned to hum in harmony — but also of laboratories dissecting gurus, weapons tuned to will, and tyrants weaving whole populations into obedience.

When he awoke, Maela was waiting for him.

“You have seen the fork,” she said. “Now you must choose.”

“Choose what?”

“To learn more — and bind yourself to our silence. Or take what little you know and leave, before it roots too deeply in you.”

He looked at his hands. They trembled, not with fear, but with possibility.

“Teach me,” he said. “And I will stay.”

Maela’s eyes closed in quiet sorrow and quiet joy.

“Then tomorrow,” she said, “we show you the first loom.”

And deep below the roots of the world, something ancient stirred — for another weaver was being born.