THE KINGDOM OF PHOENIX - PART 12: Spiritual Belief

What heights are we able to reach?
What lies do we choose to believe?
What wrongs can we never correct?

These were the questions that lived inside Abdu, even as a boy. He often wondered: Do people choose their faith, or is it chosen for them before they are born?

He grew differently from his parents. While they bowed to tradition and the gods carved into palace walls, Abdu's eyes drifted upward—to the stars, the infinite dark, the silent mystery of the night. He did not fear the unknown. He longed to understand it.

His spiritual journey began not with prayer, but with departure.

---

At sixteen, Abdu left the gold-lined halls of the royal palace of Phoenix, where he was born the third son of the emperor's brother. His upbringing was one of wealth, health, and strength—a life envied by thousands. Yet to Abdu, it felt like a gilded cage. Each day was a step down a path not his own, toward a future without joy.

The catalyst came on an otherwise ordinary evening.

He had been summoned to his father's study, where maps of the seven kingdoms lay unfurled like sleeping beasts. His father, a broad-shouldered man with hands that had never known labor, pointed to a distant province.

"This will be yours one day. The people there are simple. They will love you because they must."

That night, Abdu could not sleep, not because of the responsibility—but because of the emptiness in his father's words. They will love you because they must. Was that all leadership was? A transaction of obligation? He thought of the gods carved into the palace walls, their stone eyes staring at nothing. His parents prayed to them each morning, their lips moving without feeling, their hearts elsewhere—with taxes, with alliances, with the next meal.

They did not seek the divine. They sought its approval.

Abdu escaped not in secret, but in plain sight. He simply walked out of the palace gates at dawn, wearing the clothes of a servant, and disappeared into the crowded streets of the capital.

---

For months, he wandered.

He saw the farmer bound to dry soil, praying for rain to the gods who never answered. He saw the Pawns—those born into debt they did not create—their backs bent under burdens no child should carry. He saw the Beggars with no name and no future, sleeping in doorways of merchants who stepped over them like refuse.

We speak against lives we've never lived, he wrote in a small journal he had stolen from the palace library, and pretend to know mysteries we've never faced.

One evening, in a tavern on the edge of the kingdom, he heard two travelers arguing.

"The mountain monks have abandoned the world," said one, a scarred man with missing teeth. "They sit in silence while the rest of us suffer."

"Suffer?" The other laughed, a woman with eyes like flint. "They've found something we haven't. Peace. Real peace. My grandmother climbed that mountain forty years ago. She never came down. Not because she died—because she lived."

Abdu approached their table. "How does one find these monks?"

The woman studied him—his soft hands, his straight back, the way he held himself like someone who had never begged for anything. "You don't find them," she said. "They find you. If you're worthy."

"And if you're not?"

She shrugged. "The mountain keeps you."

---

The stone path to the monastery was older than the seven kingdoms. Each step felt like walking through centuries. The air grew thin. The trees twisted into shapes that seemed to watch him pass.

When he reached the gate—a simple arch of uncut stone—the eldest monk was waiting.

Not standing. Waiting. As if he had been there for days. For years.

"We knew you would come," the old man said. His eyes were pale blue, like sky reflected in deep water. They saw not a prince, but a searching soul. "You are lost in more ways than one, Abdu. Finding your path may take a lifetime."

"How did you know my name?"

The monk smiled. "The mountain tells us what we need to know. Come. You will start with silence."

---

The first month was the hardest.

Abdu was given a cell with four stone walls, a straw mat, and a single window that faced the rising sun. His only duty was to sit. To breathe. To listen to the silence.

His mind rebelled. It raced through memories, plans, and questions. It replayed conversations, imagined futures, and dissected the past. The silence was not empty—it was full of noise, and the noise was himself.

One afternoon, unable to bear it, he found the elder monk in a small garden, watering plants that seemed to thrive on neglect.

"I'm failing," Abdu said.

The monk did not look up. "Good."

"Good? I came here for answers. For peace. Instead, I'm more restless than ever."

The monk set down his water vessel and met Abdu's eyes. "You came here because you believed enlightenment was a destination. Something to reach. But restlessness is not the enemy, boy. It is the messenger. What is it telling you?"

Abdu opened his mouth. Closed it. For the first time in his life, he had no answer.

The monk resumed his watering. "Sit with the restlessness. Do not fight it. Do not flee it. Ask it what it wants. And listen."

---

Three years passed.

Abdu learned stillness. He learned that thoughts were like clouds—they came, they went, and the sky remained. He learned that wanting nothing was not emptiness, but freedom.

One evening, sitting in meditation as the sun bled gold across the horizon, something shifted inside him. Not a revelation. Not a voice from above. Just... clarity. A sense that the questions he had carried since boyhood were not burdens to be solved, but mysteries to be held.

He went to the elder monk, who sat by the gate as if he had never moved.

"I think I understand now," Abdu said. "Happiness is not riches or glory. It's peace. The alignment of mind and soul."

The monk nodded slowly. "You have learned much."

"But?"

The monk's pale eyes held him. "You seek more than enlightenment, Abdu. You seek the face of God. That path is lined with shadows. What if you meet not light, but the void?"

Abdu considered this. "Then at least I will have seen truly."

The monk was silent for a long moment. Then he reached into his robe and withdrew a small leather pouch. "When I was young, I too sought the face of God. I traveled farther than you can imagine. I crossed deserts, climbed mountains, walked through cities where men forgot they had souls. And in the end, I found only myself."

He pressed the pouch into Abdu's hand. Inside was a handful of black sand.

"The Scorched Expanse," the monk said. "I walked to its edge and no farther. Something stopped me. Fear, perhaps. Or wisdom. I have never been certain which." He closed Abdu's fingers around the pouch. "Take this. And take my question with you: Is it courage that drives you forward, or fear of what you'll find if you stop searching?"

---

Four months later, Abdu stood at the edge of the Scorched Expanse—a desert beyond all seven kingdoms, a land said to be forsaken by gods, where good and evil bled into one.

His destination was a myth: Tophet.

The desert did not welcome travelers. It devoured them.

On the third day, his water ran low. On the fifth, he watched a man die—a fellow traveler who had ignored the warnings—his body collapsing into the sand as if the desert had simply reached up and pulled him under. Abdu could do nothing but walk past, the dead man's eyes already filling with grains.

On the twelfth night, the cold came. It was not the cold of winter, but something deeper—a cold that seeped into bones and memory, that made him forget why he had come, why he was walking, why anything mattered. He huddled against a rock and whispered the questions from his childhood, over and over, like a prayer to no one.

What heights are we able to reach?
What lies do we choose to believe?
What wrongs can we never correct?

On the nineteenth day, his mind broke.

He saw his mother in the shifting dunes, her stone-carved eyes weeping sand. He saw the elder monk, watering plants that grew from human skulls. He saw himself, walking toward a city that shimmered on the horizon, only to watch it dissolve as he approached.

You seek the face of God, the monk's voice echoed. What if you meet not light, but the void?

"Then at least I will have seen truly," Abdu rasped, his throat raw, his lips cracked and bleeding.

He walked toward the next mirage.

---

On the twenty-third day, he crossed the final dune and stopped.

The desert ended. Before him lay not glory, but gloom—the ruins of Tophet.

The city sprawled across the plain like a wound that would not heal. Buildings crumbled, not from age, but from violence repeated daily—walls scarred by fire, streets cracked by the stomp of armies that fought the same battles generation after generation. The air itself felt heavy, thick with something that pressed against his skin like unseen hands.

He walked forward.

The people moved like ghosts, their eyes hollow, their shoulders hunched. They did not speak to him. They did not speak to each other. In the marketplace, goods were exchanged with gestures, coins pressed into palms without a word. Children played in the shadows, but their games were silent—re-enactments of violence, tiny hands pretending to stab, to strangle, to fall dead.

And their blame was fixed, like stone, upon the seven kingdoms—including his own.

He saw it in the murals painted on what remained of the walls: Phoenix, rendered in dark colors, its towers burning. He saw it in the way mothers pulled their children closer when they noticed his straight back, his unbroken skin, the softness in his hands that years of monastery life had not erased.

He was the enemy. He had always been the enemy. He simply hadn't known it.

That night, he sat alone in the ruins of what might have been a temple. The stars were the same stars he had gazed at from the palace roof, from the monastery garden, from the endless dunes. But here, they seemed dimmer. Further away.

What heights are we able to reach?

He had crossed the Scorched Expanse. He had survived what no one had survived in four thousand years. And he had found not God, not enlightenment, not answers.

He had found the face of what happens when God is said to have gone away.

In the darkness, something moved. A figure, perhaps. Or perhaps just the wind, playing tricks on a mind still frayed from the desert. But Abdu felt it—a presence, or an absence pretending to be a presence.

The void, watching him back.

He closed his eyes. And for the first time since leaving the monastery, he did not ask a question.

He simply sat. And listened. And waited for whatever came next.