If you missed the previous episode, read Tales of the Ozhmehron!

In the community of the Ozhmehron, there was a painter named Izal. He lived in a spartan room near the top of Tiroa’s city, a crested ridge so overpopulated it looked like a pile of rubbish being pushed over the edge of the world.

However, from his room he had an unobstructed view of the fog banks that settled over the Syr valley, concealing the vast expanses of their shadowy wilderness.

The people on the ridge lived in constant fear of falling over the edge down into the Syr. For generations they had heard of its terrible bogs down there that were filled with man-eating lizards, and trees that upon the smell of human blood would reach up their roots and pull their victim into ground, burying him alive.

But Izal found something else to captivate his attention. On rare days, the heavy gray clouds on the very far horizon of the Syr valley would dissipate just for a moment to uncloak a peak of another mountain.

He told no one of this sight, for at first he was not sure it was a mountain or a mirage. But the more he saw it, he solely wanted to keep it for himself, as his private wonder and a challenge to his canvas.

Every opportunity he had to see it glancing back at him, he raced to his canvas and painted the aspect that came into view before it quickly vanished again. Eventually, it became more convincing to him that indeed it was a mountain; a mountain even taller than Tiroa’s mountain. This gave Izal great pleasure to know something with his own eyes that could stand taller than Tiroa.

Izal’s secret mountain emerged more and more in his painting, until he could realize that streams were flowing from its sides. They were not red like lava, nor blue like water. They actually seemed to reflect all the colors of the sun. The streams sparkled all the time he caught sight of them, yellow flecks turning to green, then pink and black, always changing, as if they were full of many different blooming flowers, twisting together in a multi-colored braid.

He also noticed that the streams flowed both up the mountain and down, in the same stream. They moved past each other like throngs of people on the street. He smiled at thinking that is what they very well could be, so he named them “the rivers of nations.”

And then one day when the light of the sun was at its peak of the year, it shone upon something on the opposite side of the mountain peak, causing a turquoise glow to swell into the atmosphere over the mountain top. Izal stared in amazement, for it was the same light he remembered of the fallen star that gave the Ozhmeron their name.

He knew there was life. It was there, breathing beauty and peace.

He dropped his brush and ran at once to the Ozhmeron, no longer able to contain his secret.

Not wanting to draw too much attention, he took only a couple whom he loved the most back to his room while the light was still in the sky, and he showed them the mountain, the rivers of nations, and from beyond the top that turquoise aura they knew well.

The two companions returned and told the rest of the Ozhmeron about their astonishing sight, and Izal shared his painting for the first time to tell them more.

Every year at the same time, a few more would come to Izal’s studio to look out his window and see for themselves the amazing beauty of the mountain, the mountain they came to call Ya-kure, “the mountain of peace”.
Izal told them boldly,

“The day will come, now I am sure, when we will all join the rivers of nations and ascend Ya-kure. And from the summit we will look back across the valley of Syr to Tiroa, but without fear or loathing. We will only have the desire to descend and climb again and again, in complete joy of seeing the new ones rise to the top for their first time and weep at the embrace of peace. We will go there not so much to teach as to learn; not so much to conquer but to commune.”

From then, Izal was beloved as both the painter and the prophet of Ozhmeron, and he welcomed all to come, albeit in small numbers, to see for themselves the beautiful sight on the horizon of the valley Syr.

Copyright 2013 by Kalina Kucera. All Rights Reserved.