Graeme Brandham - 340AD - Myra Turkey - Saint Nicholas
The Aurora Archives: Day 22
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 343 AD (The Inciting Incident) LOCATION: The Limestone Cliffs of Myra (Anatolia) SIGNAL RESONANCE: Genesis / Absolute
OPERATIVE: The Founder (Lumi) & The Anchor (Nicholas) TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED ARTIFACT: The Parable of the Heavy Heart, a scroll attributed to the monk Theophilus the Younger (circa 700 AD), found sealed in a beeswax jar in the sunken ruins of Kekova.
The Parable of the Heavy Heart
It is said by the common folk that Saint Nicholas was a man of magic and wonder, but the secret texts tell us he was simply a man of great weight, and not in the way you might expect.
By the winter of his seventy-third year, the Saint Nicholas was dying. He was not dying of the plague, nor of the sword, but of the earth itself. The years of carrying sacks of grain and barrels of salted fish had turned his bones to stone. Gravity, the cruelest master of all, was claiming him by the inch.
He stood that day at the foot of the Widow’s Climb, a path so named for obvious reasons, it was a treacherous goat path leading to a hovel where children boiled leather strips for broth. Nicholas carried a sack of flour on his shoulder, but it felt as if he carried the mountain.
He took one step, then another, and then, his old knees, worn thin by labor, gave way. He fell into the snow, a ruined monument, his beard and red cloack leaning into the snow. The flour spilled, white dust on white snow, a tragedy in silence.
“Lord,” he wept into the ice. “I am too heavy, my knees are too heavy. My spirit wishes to fly to them, but my body is an anchor. I am finished.”
He lay there, waiting for the cold to stop his heart. But instead of the darkness, he saw an anomaly, a snowflake that would not land.
It hovered near the cliff’s edge, dancing violently in the wind. But as Nicholas squinted through his tears, he saw it was no flake. It was a kit, a small white rabbit, kicking its legs against the empty air.
It was a pitiable thing. The wind buffeted it, blowing it out over the abyss. It looked at Nicholas with eyes wide with the terror of the abandoned and alone. The earth had rejected it.
Nicholas knew that look. It was reminiscent of his own soul. One trapped by the ground, one trapped by the sky. Both useless. Both alone.
A surge of pity, hotter than fire, thawed the Saint’s blood. He lunged forward, his old hand snatching the creature just as the updraft sought to claim it.
He expected weight. Instead, he felt pull. The creature was like a bubble of air underwater, fighting to return to the stars, despite the downsides. It trembled in his grip, freezing and terrified.
“Hush, Little bird” Nicholas wheezed. “You are too light, and I am too heavy. Perhaps we are two halves of a whole.”
He looked at his cloak. It was a thick, heavy thing of red wool, sodden with melted snow and lined with iron clasps, a burden he had hated only moments before. With fumbling, clumsy fingers, he unpinned the heavy cloth from his person. He swaddled him. He folded the heavy, wet wool around the floating creature, pinning it tight.
The weight of the sodden wool perfectly countered the lift of the rabbit. The creature ceased its struggling. For the first time in its short life, it sank. It settled into the crook of Nicholas’s arm, anchored, safe, and warm.
And Nicholas?
As he hugged the rabbit to his chest, he gasped. The agony in his hips vanished. The crushing weight of his years evaporated. The rabbit was not just floating; it was rising.
The Saint stood up. He did not creak. He rose with the bounce of a youth.
“I am the Anchor,” Nicholas whispered, stroking the long, white ears peeking from the red bundle. “And you, my friend, are the Sail”.
He picked up the flour sack. It weighed nothing.
They say he did not climb the mountain that night; they say he skipped up it, leaving footprints that barely broke the crust of the snow. The widow received her flour, and the world received its legend.
They walked together until the end of the Saint’s days. The Old Man in the Heavy Red Suit, and the White Rabbit who taught him that our burdens, when shared, can make us fly.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:
The Mechanic: This represents the first successful Lumi Protocol bond. The symbiotic relationship allowed Nicholas to utilize Lumi’s gravitational inversion for locomotion, the ‘flying saint’ myth, while Nicholas provided the necessary mass to keep Lumi from drifting into the stratosphere. The Artifact: The ‘Red Suit’ is confirmed here as a utilitarian device, a weighted containment garment, rather than a fashion choice. Note the shift in the Saint’s psychology. He stopped praying for death and started working again. This is the core tenet of the Order: Hope is an active force, often requiring a counterweight.
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