Mind or body? Book One of MYST MEGHA MYTH.
At 2:43 in the morning, a woman who knows everything and can do nothing begs a crisis line to pick up.
Jeanne is forty. She checks, for a living, that the record is clean. She has been burning alive in her sleep since she was thirteen - twenty-seven years of it, ten of them in counselling - and every room she has taken the dream into has agreed that the dream is the problem.
This is the winter somebody finally disagrees.
Underneath it, a garden in France in 1425, where a thirteen-year-old girl is visited by a light that warms and does not consume. The question is not rhetorical. It was never a question about anxiety.
"Madam, you are not ill. You are unrelieved."
"One wing beating on its own doesn't keep a bird on the ground, love. It sends her in circles."
"I was a soldier once, in a war we lost by winning."
The Ascent is the first book of the trilogy MYST MEGHA MYTH: a novel that braids fiction with documented history. The people of the present are inventions; the people of the past are real, and are treated with precision. The Historical Notes at the back separate, item by item, what is documented, what is legend, what is tradition, what is contested, and what is vision. There are no footnotes: every unfamiliar word is handed to you by someone in the story, at the moment it first arrives.
With twelve plates after Nicholas Roerich.
