Over the next months I slowly, but surely, learned the basics of running the screwed up place that I called home. It was hard and stressful, but at the same time it was exhilarating. It felt good to know that I was doing something, making a change, and I had the back up of more than just Jalki and my friends. There were more people who decided to be loyal to me than I ever thoughts there would be, and each and every one of them helped me in more ways than I could count while I was getting used to the position that had been given to me.
The thing that surprised me even more than the fact that I got to enjoy it was that I was good at it. I knew nothing about it when I started, but I learned it quickly. It seemed natural to me, and the knowledge came to me more easily than anything I had ever learned before, even more easily than the chemistry that had once been my greatest passion in life. The people who taught me commented on it several times, and more than once I heard them mention that I seemed to have been born to the position I found myself in.
The split of church and state was every bit as difficult as I expected it to be. The biggest amount of corruption that I found was in those mayin who refused to choose between their positions of power in the church and their high ranked government positions. I couldn't strip them of their rank in the church, since I refused to have anything to do with it, but I ended up removing them from my government completely. It took me forever to weed them all out, and I had to remove most of the other Council members while I did it. It left huge holes in the structure that supported the government, but I wasn't afraid to remove them, since the people who remained were strong. It didn't take me anywhere near as long to replace the people I removed as I thought it would.
I never expected to keep everything intact when I took charge. It didn't help that I had purposefully created a rift by tearing the church away from the government. That created a lot of hard feelings towards me in some powerful people, though they realized before long that they weren't going to be given a chance to rise back to the power they had had before. Instead, they left the area. They all went to Yuraysha, and as soon as they arrived there they declared that they were the true Mayinists, and that they were not going to be ruled by me. I couldn't hold them, and I didn't want to try. The thought of trying run almost all of the inhabited world frightened me more than a little, so I was more than glad to let them cut themselves away from my lands.
It made my job both easier and harder at the same time. I had less to think about, fewer people that I had to try to keep in line, which relieved me. At the same time, I had them constantly watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake so they could try to work their way in and take my power away from me. They wanted Merik back more than anything else, and it galled them to see me slowly working the changes that I was determined to make while I had the ability to do so.
I felt sorry for everybody who lived in Yuraysha, especially anyone who had the same attitudes as I did toward general Mayinist values. All who thought even slightly differently than strict Mayinism taught them to think had their lives made into a living hell, if they weren't just taken and shoved into work camps. Someone who knew how to make collars had fled there as well, so hundreds, possibly even thousands, of people were collared there, and I couldn't do anything about it.
The hardest part of the months following my rise to power came almost immediately, when I had to go tell my mother about what Julo had done. I dreaded having to do it, but at the same time I knew it had to be done. Mostly, I was afraid to tell her because I knew that she loved him. I didn't want to see her cry.
The news hurt her deeply, but she never blamed me for it. She cried right after I told her, and I cried with her. Then, once we were both calm again, I told her the story of what had happened. She already knew that I had taken power and somehow neutralized him, but she didn't know what we had done. I told her the story, and she hugged me tightly. She never once suggested that it was my fault that he had died, that he would still be alive if I hadn't collared him and left him blind, or if I had left someone with him when I left the room. I blamed myself for doing those things, but she didn't, and neither did Dua when I told her.
I have Zeki working for me now. She is officially known as a researcher for the government, to help us come up with new ways to protect and help the people. She actually does that too, sometimes. Most of the time, though, she works on her own projects, and on things that I ask her to do. In fact, that was why I asked her to work for me in the first place. The first thing I had her make for me was a more permanent shield to put around the rooms Jalki and I chose as our place to live, so we wouldn't have to worry about bothering people with our nightly activities. She made it her wedding present to us.
As for that, we got married as soon as we could after everything that had happened. We were both officially adults by law, and had been for half a year. It was well within our rights to do it, and it actually looked bad for us to be living together without it. Myini performed the ceremony. He had passed his own seventeenth birthday while he was being held at the work camp, and his first goal once we were able to relax a little was to get himself invested as a priest. Marrying us was the first thing he did with his new power, and he told us later that it was the thing he would always be the proudest of doing with that power, no matter what else happened. I wasn't sure whether I believed him or not.
Jalki and I worked together to figure out what to do with the Central Chapel. We couldn't just have it abandoned, and I refused to let church or government try to reestablish their control of it. Besides that, Jalki and I had made the rooms we chose to live in comfortable, and neither one of us wanted to leave. It took us most of those first few months to decide what to do with the building, but when the idea finally came to us we knew that it was the right decision. We would make the Central Chapel into a school where anyone would be free to learn or teach. No one would be turned away because of gender, sub-race, or even beliefs. The only factor in acceptance at our school would be merit, and we wouldn't have to turn anyone away for a very long time because of the size of the building.
The first people we invited to the school were those we were close to, the teachers from Knight and other shelon school, and Dua and Tuadro. Still, we got several other teachers besides them once we announced our plans, and we had plenty of teachers ready when we decided to open. Interested students weren't hard to come by either, since there were hundreds of shelon and she-'s who had been denied the educations they wanted, and equally many non she-'s who simply couldn't afford the better schools. Jalki and I had decided to run the school with government money, since it would benefit everyone, so those hard up people could afford to attend our school.
Right around the time when the school opened up, the two biggest surprises of my life decided to happen. The first one was a casual call from Tuadra that didn't seem to be terribly important, until she mentioned right before she hung up that she and Serru were getting married, and that Jalki and I were invited to the wedding. This shocked me, since I hadn't even known that they were more than just friends. I fell silent after she said that, and she took the opportunity to hang up the phone before I could start questioning her about it.
The second surprise came during the oddest time. I was just relaxing, laying down and spending some time away from everyone else like I had started doing every day that I had the chance to since I had become the head of the Council. That day it was during the early morning, while Jalki was still asleep. While I was drifting off into a drowsy state where I wasn't quite asleep, but I was far too relaxed to actually be awake, I felt a mind questing for mine. The feeling of that mind was odd. It wasn't someone I knew, but I had the feeling that I should recognize it anyway. And it certainly didn't feel like any mayin mind I'd ever felt. It was much simpler, but still quite strong, and it had a completely different flavor, for lack of a better way to put it, than I'd ever felt before.
The strangest thing about it, though, was that I couldn't tell where the mind was coming from. It seemed to be all around me, not just over there, or something like that. I couldn't quite figure out what the mind's purpose was either. Usually when I felt a questing mind they were looking for someone, or something, specific. This mind didn't seem to want anything, though. All I could get from it was comfort and curiosity.
When I finally realized who that mind belonged to, I laughed at myself for my stupidity. The reason I couldn't figure out where the mind was coming from was because it was inside me. The mind belonged to the unborn baby developing in my womb, the product of that night of sex between Jalki and myself in that hotel room. I hadn't even noticed it until then, though I had noticed that I was starting to gain a bit of weight. I thought it was just because I was eating well for the first time in six months, gaining back some of the weight I had lost during the first half of my eighteenth year of life, but it wasn't. The simplicity was because it was just the mind of a developing fetus. The strangeness was because the child inside me was female. Jalki would have realized that right away, but it was my first time ever touching the mind of another female mayin.
The discovery surprised me, but it didn't scare me anywhere near as much as I originally would have thought it would. It filled me with a sense of wonder, love, and a desire to protect the tiny life growing inside me. I felt her question at that surge of emotion in me, and my response was to send some of the love filling me in her direction, and then to send some more of it toward Jalki. That last act earned me a sleepy and confused request to explain myself, since I woke him up, but once I did he joined me in assuring our daughter that she was very loved. Then, later that night, we celebrated the news with everyone we could gather on short notice.
Since then I have attended Tuadra and Serru's wedding and been invited to another. Dsekene went out searching for the school she had been kept in for two months as soon as she got her invitation to Tuadra's wedding. She was specifically looking for the aivan she heard playing the violin. When she finally did find him, he asked her to marry him, even though neither one knew the other, and they hadn't even had a complete conversation yet. Even odder was the fact that she accepted, and that Jalki and I got an invitation to the wedding of Dsekene and Okrint just a day later. When I got to meet him, though, I realized that they really were meant to be together.
Her wedding is today, in just a few hours. I have more work to do before then than I want to think about, but I want to finish up this account first. It's not perfect yet; I still have a lot of touching up to do before it's ready to show anyone, but at least it will be finished. The whole time I've been writing, as my belly swells and my daughter grows, I've felt that this accounting of what happened to me might just change someone's life someday. That was what caused me to press forward, even when the sadness that came back to me as I wrote some of it threatened to overwhelm me. It was all the hope that my words might someday make a difference the way my actions have.
It was that same hope that made me realize what I want, or rather need to name my daughter when she is born. She will be a female mayin with at least the ability to mindspeak. Beyond that I do not know if she will be like Jalki and myself, with multiple mayin abilities. I pray every night that she will not inherit the blindness that I in turn received from my father. Even if she does, though, she will be a symbol of the new world I am trying to coax into being. Jalki and I will raise her to be everything that we wish we could have been, though we will never force her into anything she does not want. We want her to be a shining ray of hope to everyone, to show them my dream for the future. And that is exactly what I will name her.
Hope.