e last read The Twenty-Fifth Chapter, in which the territory faced unrest. If you have recently joined us, start with The Prologue.
We wonder if there has ever been a moment when the reader has noticed something rather peculiar—a person standing quite near, perhaps, or a hand placed upon a shoulder—only to realize in the next moment that nothing was there. That, by some trick of the imagination, the reader was startled into thinking someone else was with them, when on second glance, no one was.
These occurrences happen to all of us, and yet, despite their regularity, we bat them away, convinced that what we see with our eyes is more reliable than what we see with our minds. Like the moment just after one wakes from a dream, we quickly shake the visions from our heads, believing them the imaginings of an overactive mind, our five senses providing the only information that can be trusted.
And yet, there is another sense—one that cannot be seen and touched and felt and tasted, and yet for all those things cannot be explained. Do we not feel a loved one’s touch on our cheeks after they have left us? Do we not have a premonition that something will occur before it does? Do we not live moments that we have clearly lived before? And do we not deny ourselves those mysteries all the same? A wishful thought, we think. A coincidence. Déjà vu.
The abbess, though she once did much the same, could no longer afford such thinking. Her eyes were aged and weathered and ceased to be as useful as they once were, but though she had become quite blind by all literal connotations of the word, by another she was able to see more clearly than she had since she was a child—that being, of course, when all of us see most clearly.
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