5: The Hierophant

His hands brush along translucent pages made from calfskin and sheepskin emblazoned with arcane sigils. Sun-starved fingertips trace the graphs and runes of endless circles and pentacles and the ornate wings of zodiacal angels. His eyes are bright, blazing with ancient knowledge compacted into leatherbound, heaven-sent tomes.
His days begin with the chiming of bells and the wafting of incense through the pores of his wooden door. His mornings are spent somewhere else, locked away inside of his mind, desperately stretching angular arms at spiritual doorways on astral planes. He tries to find the universe in handed-down mantras and chants delivered to the earth in unison by tall figures in identical, white cloaks. He makes pilgrimages to altars bearing representations of what some dead old man considered to be enlightenment.
And he revels in it, rushing breathless from one esoteric illumination to the next, his eyes shining and blooming and breaking their ceaseless racing only to rush from one assigned text to the next.
Knowledge is his sustenance. His bread and his breath and his beads of sweat. 

For his meals he consumes little, more concerned with nourishing his spirit than his body. In his mind (if it is even his) wise, holy men are haggard and emaciated, as a testament to their commitment to the divine. He does not know what strange, cosmic truths link deprivation to devotion, but he does not question it. Who has time to ponder what is bestowed when there are parables to memorize and correspondences to categorize and foreign herbs to dry and grind? No, he cannot question if he is to ascend. 

As the sun droops into the evening he retires to a window seat, so the orange light of the dying day can spill onto parchment pages he covers in black ink, regurgitating the lessons he's learned, and discovering hidden pockets of wisdom in the age-old truths. He smiles and wonders if this is what he was meant to find, if this is the piece of the puzzle that spins threads of interconnection across islands of isolated theories. The thought is fleeting, as he returns to his transcribing

When the sky is black and dotted with stars he drags heavy legs draped in rough-spun robes up winding, stone steps, to a tiny tower room. And he thrusts his skull into the cool rush of nighttime air, and affixes his eyes onto shapes found in the light of stars that will have gone supernova by the time he sees them. His eyes turn to glass, into orbs, into scrying pools of pure thought, caught and transfixed in the dark shapes between incandescent bodies of hydrogen gas. 

His bed is hard, but his exhaustion transmutates it into cloudlike meringues of silk. When he dreams it is of facts he has memorized but not comprehended, of truths he still takes at face value, of hard lines drawn on old pages.

He dreams of strange things too, somewhere in the depths of his mind, of uncertainties, and ambiguities, of the rush of moonlight on water.

For now, however, he is ruled by the sharp outlines of the sun's silhouettes, by the gnawing hunger burrowing  into his soul, by the promise that someday, someday, someday, he will know the heart of the universe.