Divine Dialogue
This is a standalone version of chapter 11 from the author's serial, Ruin Runes: Shrutimula submitted for: 1. After Hours at the Indie Ink Cafe and 2. Power Up Prompt #32
Top Image: ChatGPT-generated image | Bottom Image: r/oddlysatisfying
You were a human once, on an ordinary world. Something reached across the dark, copied the pattern of you the way a hand copies the newspaper with Silly Putty. That something plugged the copy of you into a body of bark and root, blind and far from home. This is the part where you learn what your new hands can do, and what they cannot. You are a drunk and a thief.
Places that shouldn’t exist are beautiful; the Triveni Blind shouldn’t have existed. It was miles and miles of desert made from the pollen run off of the planetary tree, Fig-on-Mount, hardened and crystallized into sand.
Then, too, the thousands of crystal blue lagoons interleaved between each dune should not exist either, but they too are beautiful.
And finally, this creature, too, shouldn’t exist — the cat that looked more like an otter, the color of shadow. It crested the dune on paws that seemed barely troubled by the sticky quartz-silicon feel of the pollen dunes. With each free leap dipping in and out of pollen-made sand dunes, the little otter-cat made mittens of the canary yellow pollen.
Each of the black-ringed rosettes unrepeated streaked across the land in a blur straight to the oasis lagoon behind the rising dune. Without hesitation, it leaped within the warm, life-giving waters of the Triveni where its pollen mittens dissolved into the water, pollinating the aquatic flora along their descent path.
“A rudrarundi cat, Seam. They’re a symbol of good luck and good health. I know you can’t see right now, but they sorta look like a cross between a house cat and an otter…”
You are a tree. You have been abducted by a giant six-legged dog named Cooper. This is the first time you have felt alive in maybe your entire life.
You have spent the last five days crossing a desert. You know it’s a desert because it is hot, and it is dry. You’ve had to wrap your new hands, these clumpy balls of root tendrils wiggling and wrapping around Cooper’s fur. The giant six-legged kujapada is really all that you can sense of the world now, his fur and sweat and heat emanating from him in waves. If you remember correctly, Great Pyrenees were not meant for hot environments like this, preferring to live on the peaks of mountains.
You are just beginning to feel sympathy for him until you can just make out through the vibration of his deep bass voice directly through your bark and straight into your center pith… “I know you can’t see right—”
“OWWWW MY GOD! WHAT WAS THAT FOR!?”
Of course you can’t respond, you’re a tree. So you kick him again. How would he feel if he was bound, gagged, and unable to breathe? Which is essentially what is happening to you.
Of course you can’t breathe, or drink, or speak, or see, or do anything because this STUPID, FUCKING DOG OF VONNIE’S KIDNAPPED YOU INTO THIS FUCKING TREE WORLD FOR THE BLIND. YOU ARE SO FUCKING THIRSTY!!!
“HEyY! HeEYY! SToOOP! OW!!!”
Without warning a symbol arrives within your mind—Āpas, and the root tendrils on all four of your hands come together in tendril-shaped mudra, an organic rune for water cosmic. And you see a small trickle of water seep from the ground, your roots struggling to wolf down as much of the water as possible.
It’s involuntary, the drinking, or more exactly, the gulping. All four of your hands and your stumpen feet are portals now and their root hairs and xylem tubes working to inhale whatever water it could find at a breakneck pace. You feel numb and dull, as if you had to give up something important to achieve just a bit of dampness in the sand–already evaporated in the sun.
Cooper barks his resonating speech straight to your pith, “Your new body is surprisingly good at Vaikharī. I knew the rohina you’re currently inhabiting was an excellent gatekeeper, but it is rare for one Seam’s age to have mastered the first gate of magic so easily. I’m certain if you were to tr–”
The lack of senses is almost worse than the thirst, because it leaves you room to think, and the first thought that comes is Cooper. The bass of him, still close. The heat coming off him in waves in the desert heart. You feel bad. He did not do this to you. He literally saved your life. But you also feel sinful. You feel the need to lash out.
So you attempt the gate Vaikharī again, working your tendrils in Āpas mudra once more – directly over Cooper’s head. As gallons and gallons of water crash upon the kujapada, knocking him into sploot position across all six legs, you are both tickled pink, satisfied that cooled him down, but most of all, you feel sorry. You’re being a rank punk. And you know it. Cooper did not bind you, gag you, or cut you from the drunken safety of Earth–but he did save your life, over and over again.
You want to tell him you are sorry. You reach for the apology the way you reached for the water, but this land has bound and gagged you from speech.
So you press one wrapped, clumsy hand flat against his side, where the heat is, and you leave it there.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I understand. Once we get to Seed, we can get your senses returned to you and some good food and something delicious to drink. But you’ve got to be more careful. I’ve taught you a lot in the last five days, but your body is much more advanced than your mind. It’s going to intuitively reach for the first gate to bring forth Vaikharī if you don’t monitor your responses.”
“A sign without the knowing of its full scope is just an empty shape,” he said. “A rune without the Madhyamā behind it is just an empty thought. A sound without the complete context of the word inside it is just a hollowed temple. Vaikharī doesn’t make the knowing real. It simply names it.”
In your head, you wonder if knowing a word is no small thing, if it has a pathology and a genealogy like any other living thing, then whatever form it crosses in, sound, sign, rune, the shape a hand makes, the work is the same. You have to learn the fullness of the word… right?
You noticed that he paused and stopped walking.
“That’s what the cat is for,” he said. “That’s what I can’t give you.”
Late that night as Seam slept, Cooper found the rudrarundi cat extending its neck outside a burrow hole beneath a restinga scrub. It had heard Coopy’s six thunderous feets sing across the desert for days, so the cat knew it would only be proper to meet its angelic supplicant within its own home turf.
Cooper nestled his wet nose into the mane of the rudrarundi which chirped a litany of pleasure.
“You’re going to take the human inward,” Cooper said. “Not just through the Putrid Delta. Into the Madhyamā itself.”
The rudrarundi purrs as it sits in its loaf with its feet tucked in its otter body.
“Look, the human is blind,” Cooper said. “And I don’t mean blind as a tree. I’m talking about before that, when I found the drunk at a bar. Taking a blind alcoholic into the Putrid Delta was going to be bad enough.” He paused. “You know what collects there, where the world rivers meet. All of us, somewhere, somehow decided their wasted words would wash out and be forgotten and that this country would carry it off. You know what exists there, silted and layered. And for them to enter Madhyamā there??? When they’ve never once seen the world whole, will destroy the fool. Why must you make their trial more difficult than beings who come from here? Everything Seam-copy knows about the world, they know as a human, and their kind have never once left their own plane of existence. You saw what happened in Pandemonium. The attendants didn’t even want to let them through Vaikharī.”
The rudrarundi let him finish. It opened one slitted eye, the nictitating membrane drawing back like the shutters of a bay window.
You have read the delta, gandharva.
You smell of book knowledge,
so you know the names of what rots there,
tand the count of the dead.
I have lain down in it.
The delta is not a passive place.
Putrid is just another word for living.
“Rudrarundi, hunter divine,” Cooper said, “if you take them into Madhyamā, they won’t just be in the dark. You’ll make the multiplicity of existence something they can hold in their mind. May they grow in extremis, my lord? Yes. But is this worth the risk of this universe?”
He paused.
“I’m asking you to tell me they will know the difference.”
The rudrarundi cat was still for the longest moment. It emanated.
I am the Lord of beasts, gentle gandharva.
I have walked this world
since before Aśvattha named it,
when it was still a vision
unspoken in the Lady’s mind.
I know what the interior holds.
I know what it gives.
I know what it costs.
The human is blind in Vaikharī.
This is true.
But the gifted must sometimes
learn the forest before the trees.
In Madhyamā there is no singularity to name.
The lagoon is not blue water in a white bowl.
It is the whole lagoon at once,
its full weight, its whole presence,
the undivided truth of the thing.
If they cannot hold it,
they do not proceed in this story,
and every gate above closes its mouth.
Cooper’s breath came out slowly.
“And if that undoes Seam?,” he said. “If the wholeness is too much — if Seam has been navigating the divided world so long that the undivided one breaks something in them before they can form the word —”
The rudrarundi snarls its growl in the back of its throat, the hairs standing at attention.
AM I NOT THE DESTROYER OF DARKNESS?
AM I NOT THE MASTER OF TIME,
THE LORD OF THE HUNT,
THE KING OF ALL THAT IS KNOWN?
AND STILL:
I DO NOT SAY.
I DO NOT KNOW.
I DO NOT PROMISE.
Cooper was quiet. The lagoon behind him was quiet too.
“They’ll want to name it.”
They will reach for names.
The names will not fit.
This is not failure. It is the lesson.
When the last name falls away,
the true word rises in its place,
not the word for the lagoon,
not the word for the dune,
but the word for all of it, seen whole,
the word with the weight of the universe behind it.
Cooper looked at the cat for a long time.
“If Seam comes through broken,” he said, “I will not forgive you. I want that said.”
The cat’s eyes did not change.
I do not ask forgiveness.
I ask for nothing. I never have.
I move, and the path exists.
At first light I go into the wasteland.
Seam will follow, or will not.
You will wait at the edge, or you will not.
I have told you what I know.
The rest is yours, brother universal.
It turned back toward the dark.
Be at the edge, or do not, it said, without turning.
The path does not care.
And neither do I.
Cooper stood at the boundary of the restinga and the dune for a long time after the cat had gone. He went back to where Seam slept. He put himself between them and the direction of the wasteland. “I love all of them, cat.”
He scrawrfed and rawrfed his muzzle into his paws and went to sleep. He let out a whine in the land of dream.
Click the handsome pic below to tip Coop a “Boop Tip”!
© 2026 Vonnie G. Clemens, jr. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.
