The Cyborg Crone Chronicles
The Water Remembers
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Obelia Ash was raised inside a church she will not name — only ever the church, the way the faithful speak of a thing they believe is the only one.
She left it. Not in anger, and not all at once, but because she came to believe it taught the single thing she now holds to be the deepest harm of all.
What follows is the belief she built in its place. Read the symbols first — they are few, and they repeat — and the whole shape will come clear.
Beneath every symbol lies one law: the greatest harm is any teaching that we are separate — that an arm could be severed from the body, a drop cut from the sea.
Obelia's God is not a person and keeps no throne. God is the conglomerate of everything that exists — and her chosen image is the octopus, a creature that senses through its whole body, each of its arms holding a personality of its own while remaining one animal.
Every soul is an arm. Its own — and never not part of the body.
The sacred, then, is never above you. It is the felt knowledge that you were never separate from it to begin with.
The body, the arms, and the drops — each soul a point of light, held in falling water, and the lone gold drop at the deep.
The body is going nowhere — there is no destination, only living. Its natural pull is toward peace. But peace alone, Obelia says, grows stagnant.
Chaos is the mother of new ways of order.
Not good warring against evil — a generative cycle, each needing the other. Where her church gave her a battlefield, Obelia found a rhythm.
And the octopus is mostly just water.
This is the hinge of the whole cosmology. The body that holds you and the sea you return to were never two things. The octopus is what water looks like when it gathers into a living, sensing form; the drop is a soul lifted briefly into an arm; the ocean is where it returns.
One substance, all the way through. Even Obelia's symbols refuse to stay separate from one another.
A drop is unmistakably itself — and the instant it meets the sea, there is no seam. It was always the same water. And a drop may rise again as rain, water the whole time.
Obelia holds that water remembers. Suspended near a poison it never quite touched, it takes on the imprint — and carries it even after the poison is drawn back out. So a soul keeps its lessons. It keeps who it was.
The self returns to the whole. Its sharp edges soften and dim — not erased, but diffused — a memory the ocean holds forever.
Not annihilation into nothing. Not a separate self preserved intact in some far, white room. A third thing: a drop going home, and the sea remembering it was here.
In Obelia's belief, the beloved dead are not waiting elsewhere to be earned back. They have become the sea — and that sea holds the drop still out in the arm, living its mortal stretch. They are nearer than the living, because they are no longer bounded as separate drops. They are the whole that holds her up.
Present tense. Touching her.
And time, she insists, is not flat. It is circular, and sometimes permeable — so the dead are not only behind her. They are around the curve, alongside, sometimes leaking through. It is how a dream may be a true encounter. How a moment among the trees may be contact.
Long before Obelia had words for any of this, she dreamed her way through the sacred map of her people — and found every holy waypoint turned against her. She tells it like this:
I was flying, high above it all, a bird's eye over the world. I came down to land upon a great iron rod — the very rod the faithful cling to, the one promised to lead them safe to God — and where my feet touched it, they turned blood red. I could not walk its length. Too many clutching hands were in the way.
So I flew again, and came to a tree, and ate of its fruit, and the fruit was delicious. I had partaken. But the people gathered there struck me away, hoarding the sweetness for themselves alone.
So I flew again. I crossed a river and came to a building with an open window, and I flew inside — into a celestial room, all of white, and everyone within it robed in white. At the sight of me they screamed. They chased me to the window and slammed it shut behind me as I fled back into the air.
When I woke, I knew where I had been. I had flown, bird's eye, through the old vision of the tree of life. And the white room they say is full of those who mock the faithful — that room was the temple. Even those at the tree of knowledge had no welcome for the bird that only wished to partake alongside them.
Every figure in the dream teaches the one thing her cosmology names as the deepest harm:
this is ours; you do not belong; go. The dream was a catalogue of severing — drawn years before she had the language of arms and drops to name it.
And through all of it, she was flying. Above the rod. Never clinging. The bird never needed it to go anywhere at all.
If the greatest harm is the teaching of separation, then a faith where belonging is conditional — where a soul can be cut from its family, where disbelief casts one out — is, by Obelia's own measure, the wound itself.
She did not drift away from the truth. She found her way back, past the distortion, to the thing beneath it.
She kept even the holy name. The great I AM — the most intimate name of God in the tradition that raised her — she carried into a cosmology that has no exile in it at all. For there is no being cast out of an ocean.