The Tale of Romir and Solana
by Christina Janousek
part 1
There once existed a world from which no records — apart from the one you are reading now — have survived. In its core, that world did not differ drastically from ours, and could therefore easily be mistaken. Inquiring minds might ponder about the necessity of narrating this “saga” to begin with. It can only be revealed that that world whose name one might consider a prerequisite for conceiving of it better or which one might confuse with another Atlantis, or a parallel universe, set the path for ours, for how we live and breathe now.
Yet the readers’ suspicions are not entirely unwarranted. It is not the veracity of this story that is worth questioning, but why it is revealed now, at a time when even the worshippers of the moment have grown tired of its abundance and no longer appreciate its uncertainty and turmoil.
The tale of Romir and Solana is one of two lost souls, two life forces. While their origin and they themselves might seem highly idealized or unrelatable, these two were neither another manifestation of Adam and Eve, nor were they — or the ones from which these two originated — unflawed.
They were not saints, martyrs, or vigilantes who aspired to anarchy or a radical revolution of the existing world order. Instead, these two came to the fore under quite unfortunate circumstances or in many regards by accident, without possessing the knowledge of their purpose. Their story is not the kind that makes one yearn for a better world. Rather, it is meant to show the many forms of misrecognition, the unwanted theft of visual mastery, its causes and consequences and their continued existence. It is as well a tale of opportunity as of irreversibility.
* * *
It was on the day of winter solstice, close to an archaeological site in no-man’s-land. Thirty-year old Mary Obsidian, youngest member of a visual site reconstruction company, archaeologist, and team leader, was sitting on the bathroom chair, gazing at her reflection in the opposite mirror, partly in awe, partly in despair. Covering the little bulge on her stomach, she was thinking about how she had dedicated her entire life to her career.
Her articles about archaeological site reconstruction, lost civilizations and lives were considered some of the finest pieces of research. She had won several prizes from international scientific foundations. Her face did not only grace the covers of scientific journals, but also of the latest fashion magazines where she gave advice to young archaeologists to be. Her mother, formerly an archaeologist herself, could not have been prouder. Colleagues had been light-heartedly calling her “Mother Earth” or even admiringly “Graceful Earth Goddess” because of her youthful vigor.
Yet, she asked herself, what part of her old life would she be able to reconstruct were she suddenly to become an actual mother? Nobody knew about her current state or about the fact that she had been reckless with the company she had kept. She was fully aware of that, a recklessness with a breathing consequence. She knew that some women enjoyed pregnancy, and not just the feeling of sharing a bond with someone that is blossoming inside of them, not just the feeling of pure selflessness. The glowing appearance, the belief shared by many that nobody can compete with the beauty of a pregnant woman.
At universities, she had given lectures about indigenous groups where pregnancy was worshipped to such an extent that men had to cover their eyes. They were so struck by the radiance of the beauty that they feared incurring the wrath of their gods.
Although Mary had secretly never grasped the degree of exaltation to which even some “non-tribal” women used children as a mere prop to draw attention to and adorn themselves, it now occurred to her: What if she was not that much different? What if — despite her already achieved notoriety in the field of science — she might need this child to complete her public image as an example for women, when behind the cameras she was not willing to make any sacrifices or compromises for the child?
Mary’s stream of doubts was interrupted by the sudden buzzing of her phone. She glanced at the display, the site she and her team had discovered was finally ready for excavation. The excavation work had been put on hold three times during the last three years.
First, her country’s culture minister, who had already given her project a blessing, died suddenly, and his decision was undermined by his successor. Then diplomatic disputes burgeoned between her government and a country claiming sovereignty over this officially uninhabited terrain. Lastly came completely unfounded allegations that unofficial and illegal excavation attempts had been made at night by one of her team members. That is, if one was willing to believe the word of a child informant living in vicinity to the site.
* * *
Tearing herself away from her reflection, Mary jumped up hastily, put on a thick coat — the temperatures had gone down from zero to minus three within just three minutes — grabbed her keys, and rushed out of her base.
As she approached the site, light snow had already set in. Her team had been busy uncovering the remains of a large settlement, an endless maze encompassing several smaller cities where one border seamlessly transitioned into another; making it difficult to determine the boundary lines.
The team had found some human remains that were still in fairly good condition, many of which were those of infants buried on top of what seemed to be parents or relatives, with the latter cradling the former as if to shelter them not only from foreign intruders, but also from malignant forces beyond their graves. This scene was found in almost every house. The outlines clearly indicated the infrastructure of a commercial complex, but no specific trading goods could be traced.
The relief was quite distinctive in that it did not follow a rigid pattern. In some places it was curved and elevated, not big enough to be a mountain, yet bigger than a hill. In other places, it would just smoothly sink in again. Occasionally, it would do neither, as if it were indecisive about whether it wanted to be found or as if it refused to be staked out.
Like some sort of camouflage, the houses blended so perfectly with their surroundings through their material and color scheme they seemed to have just grown out of the ground. But they did not obstruct the landscape; they embraced it. They seemed to form a unit with the natural environment.
The team even found a tree trunk that was integrated into one home as if the residents had carefully built their house around it. Although they had always been reliable, the satellite images did not do justice to the vastness that unfurled itself in front of Mary. Precise measuring would be challenging. It would take her team at least a month to excavate everything and to conduct close examinations at the lab, and even then, they might have to go over the site again to make sure they had not missed anything. Several hours of arduous work passed, and the day slowly drew to a close.
Mary was usually quite resilient, but something — she could not quite put her finger on it — sapped her energy while at the same time she felt that, with every step she took, the site was pulling her in more and more. Although she was only two months along, she blamed her pregnancy for her sudden nausea, yet she was determined to persevere.
She lost track of time, and her path deviated from the one of her team members. A sharp wind was cutting her face, its howling was reminiscent of Melusine. When Mary was an infant and her parents had split up, her mother would incessantly read varying tales to her about this female spirit. What mostly struck a chord with her was that Melusine’s King-husband whom she had blessed with several children discarded her after establishing her other-worldly physique at a moment of utmost intimacy.
Sometimes, Mary wondered whether their partly disfigured children were an indicator of the King’s future betrayal of his wife’s secret to the public. All these thoughts had added a touch of menace to the site so that it started to instill a sense of fear into Mary: Was it trying to communicate with her?
Just when this idea had befallen her, she felt something rub against her boot, lost balance and fell, protecting her stomach with her hands. After a moment of perplexity, she brushed off the dust and looked at the hand-sized object that had caused her to slip. It was oblique and shiny, looked like a polished stone and was engraved. Mary reckoned that it could be volcanic obsidian, the material the first mirrors were made of. But at a closer look she realized that this mysterious residue contained a much older and unknown substance that she had never encountered before.
To her astonishment, the engraved words, still decipherable, were written in a language that she and her team were familiar with.
The first true mirror made by man’s hand,
will encouragingly accompany you as your friend,
shield you from evil if the heart is pure,
and help you find what you have been looking for,
rewarded for the rest of your life,
what is inside you will love and infinitely strive,
opposite possibilities will attract,
no bad allures to suspect.
But if on Equinox this mirror is misused for the sake of power,
and one obliterates the future’s bower,
it will burst into two instead,
all mirror images dead,
impossible the reunion of the halves will be,
unless two souls come together and learn to see,
that the halves are incorporated in their hearts to rest,
three times these will put them to the test,
scarred, the pain not modest,
only if they rise above it, on Equinox once more,
the balance they shall restore.Romir
Mary did not know what to make of this. Who or what was Romir? It would have been procedure to share her discovery with the team, to archive the mirror as a totem, to earn more praise and funding from the government, and publish yet another profound article. But something stopped her. It was as if she and the mirror were protecting each other. She was about to hide it in her pocket and rejoin her team when she felt someone’s breath on her neck.
“Where have you been? We have all been wondering whether we should send out search parties. Are you not feeling well?” a male voice uttered. It was Jose Opal, a member of her team and the son of a very influential political family that had often funded her research. However, Jose’s question was not stated out of genuine concern but rather out of smugness and even a touch of spitefulness.
She did not respond, they used to get along well, but had grown apart ever since “the incident.” Mary wanted to leave, but Jose must have seen her fidgeting in her pockets so that he noticed the glimmer from the mirror.
Before Mary could react, Jose had already snatched it and read the engraving. He smiled and put the stone in his pocket, declaring to Mary: “Listen, here is what’s going to happen. You will let me keep the mirror and not tell anyone else about it. Should you refuse to do so, I shall make sure that your research will be no longer funded.
“As for this item: There are things in this world that people with your fragile nerves cannot cope with. I’ve been working on a theory of the original mirror for years now, and it would have been in my possession a long time ago if that little snitch hadn’t interfered. Yet, that did not prevent me from going to great lengths to get hold of it at the right moment.
“Besides, we both know that lately you have not really been yourself; you have even been sloppy. The others might not see it, but I do. I also know what is changing you. It would be a shame if some stranger leaked to the press the hidden promiscuous life of the all-so-beloved Dr. Obsidian.”
It was as if the mirror brought out something uncanny that had already been deeply rooted inside of him, a fatal hubris Mary had conveniently missed before and had even been attracted to. She was in shock and felt as if the ground of shame would open up and swallow her whole, together with all the other buried families.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Christina Janousek
