Eyes to See With

There had been many in the northern wilds who obsessed over the idea of seeing beyond Silence. That vast, uncompromising and unyielding wall through which no one could see or hear. It had little effect in everyday life, that was true. No one needed to see the far past to know how rains and winds would treat the next year, or to find out why the lifestock suddenly fell ill.

For many of the wandering folk, the wisemen and sages who had cut off their roots and began a life of belonging to nothing and no one, knowledge was it's own reward, and worth risking everything for.

There was a woman, a wanderer, who thought that much as well. She had desired a way to see beyond Silence and though she was better at divination than most her peers, nothing she tried could get her any closer to that one goal. At least until now.

Until the moment she heard a fracture of a story which led her down a path of discovery, of puzzling together little bits and pieces of myths and legends from the time men first walked into the northern wilds. And she found a way.

The materials were the difficult part, though that was often the case. The most difficult part were the eyes. The eyes of children, the younger the better. For it was children who resided closest to the world below even as they were awake, and their connection to it was rivaled by no one.

She fully intended to give the children back. Even then, if they weren't to survive the extraction process, it was only six little ones. Plenty more in the world, she thought. Twelve eyes in a bowl mixed with spring water carefully boiled, and the various bones of squirrels and crows, both sufficiently prepared of course. Nothing could be left to chance.

It was under the midnight sun, in the heart of the northern summer when the wisewoman climbed up a tall hill above treetops and kneeled on the bare bedrock revealed from under a bed of moss and blades of grass. She set fire on the bowl as she cited the words she had put together through various sources. A mix of mist and smoke ascended as a pillar before her as they swirled around each other.

That nameless woman and seasoned wanderer of the wilds, was found by another of her kind by dawn. Blood had spread over grey bedrock and stained her entire body as it had streamed down from her nose and mouth, but mostly from her eyes. Her eyes, which she had, it seemed, gouged out with her own hands before collapsing next to the clay bowl now cracked and ashen.