Just one year with the monks of Collain, under the careful and tireless tutelage of Master Yuyo, and I had grown into a very different person. I hardly recognized myself.  Not only had I grown in physical stature, putting on muscle and growing lean and strong because of the ceaseless work required to live in such a desolate and demanding place, but I had also matured as a person. The monks had taught me the joy of having a servant's heart, the pleasure in putting other's needs before my own, and the satisfaction in working as a group to achieve goals that benefited all.

I was no longer thinking always and only of myself, my survival, saving my skin, and my next meal. The monks had taught me that I had so much more to offer the people around me, so much more to contribute to the welfare and well being of the people who I lived with daily.  They taught me the value of those around me. In short, they taught me to love my brother, my sister, and my neighbour as myself.

And I never would have been able to do it if they had not shown me by example. The monks of Collain had accepted me as one of their own from day one and had shown me nothing but the utmost respect and kindness. It began the moment I crossed through the dilapidated archway leading to the monastery and their standard never wavered. I had never been treated so well in all my days and their genuine good will was contagious.

It became easy to care for them in return. I found I did it without even being aware. I just woke up to the realization that I wanted to do well under Master Yuyo's guiding hand. I wanted to please him and reward him for all his many kindnesses to me. I wanted to help the other monks and students around me, who also had been good to me. I wanted to contribute to the common welfare and tranquility of the monastery like everyone else and not because I was afraid of being punished.

Fear played a factor in those first few days and weeks. However, at some point, love became my motivation. I wanted to grow and become more like the ever calm, ever kind, and ever helpful Yuyo, whom I admired greatly because he had shown me, a slave, much love.

I discovered that love - acts of kindness and selflessness without hope of reward - was easier to do than I realized and once I started loving my brother, my sister, my neighbour, well, it became quite contagious. I was not immune to it and I learned to relish it.

Love and kindness do not go unrewarded by those of like mind and spirit. Master Yuyo, once he became acquainted with my life story, made it his mission to enter the archives of the monastery and to try and discover what he could about my Mother's people, the Dhuuni. So while I laboured for him and learned to selflessly contribute to the needs of others for the benefit of all, Master Yuyo spent many late nights and early mornings, for months on end, wading through mountains of books, manuscripts and scrolls, some as old as time itself, looking for anything he could find on my people.

He was sure he would find something if he looked long enough and hard enough. He never once became discouraged. He never once tired of his mission. And, his diligence and hard work were rewarded. A year after I arrived he discovered a very important manuscript that would change my life forever and bring my time at the monastery to an end as well. The discovery would become bittersweet in many ways.

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I was sitting quietly in the prayer room meditating, which had become a favourite pastime of mine, when Master Yuyo called my name. 

"Neno," Master Yuyo called to me gently from the door of the prayer room. Neno was the name given to all new recruits. And even though I had been there a year now, I was still very much a new recruit in every way. I discovered that the more I learned from Master Yuyo, the more I didn't know. I felt I would always be a new recruit when I was with him. The thought did not displease me. It made me smile at the wonder of everything I didn't know, could know and would never know.

I rose to my feet eagerly and greeted my master with a deep, respectful and sincere bow. He was my favourite person in the entire monastery. After a year under his tutelage, I now looked at him as master, teacher and friend.

"Follow me neno," Master Yuyo said with a glimmer of excitement in his eye.

I was intrigued. The man was always in very tight control of his emotions. He never appeared too anything - happy, sad, distressed. Yet, I could clearly see for myself that something had ignited in his eyes and a little thrill went through me. I followed him grinning foolishly all the way.

Shortly after he found me we entered the Historical Records Room. This was where I first met Master Kazee when I arrived - the room overflowing with haphazardly stacked books, manuscripts, scrolls, parchments and any number of texts and artifacts. The monks of Collain spent most of their time translating old, and sometimes ancient, texts into the common language. This room was often a real hub of activity and, day or night, monks roamed up and down its shelves looking for works that needed to be translated.

"Come, sit here," Master Yuyo beckoned me.

He was standing at a small desk where a single manuscript was laid out. It looked as old as the monastery itself. He indicated with a hand that I should take the seat directly in front of the manuscript. I sat down willingly and looked curiously from Master Yuyo to the old book.

I was illiterate and would remain so all my life because it was prohibited to teach slaveborns to read. Being illiterate, I could not imagine what it was about this manuscript that Master Yuyo thought I might find appealing, but I waited expectantly all the same.

He leaned over the desk, from the opposite side and flipped the book open. It was filled with both text and drawings. Some of the drawings were even coloured, which seemed unusual in a book this old. I smiled at the coloured pictures. They were quite fantastical. They showed all manner of things and creatures that did not exist. What an imagination the artists must have had!

I could feel Master Yuyo's life energy spike with excitement. It brought my eyes from the book back to his face. Anyone looking at him might not notice the change in him, but I could see it in his eyes and feel it in his life force. His eyes sparkled and his life force sparked.

"What is it?" I asked in a sort of awestruck wonder.

He positively beamed at me and said in a triumphant voice, "It is an early history of your mother's people, neno - of the Dhuuni."

Master Kazee and Master Yuyo had been so enthralled with my healing gift that they had made it their mission to find and uncover as much about my people as they could in their archives. The only trouble was, since mine were a nomadic people, there was very little written down about them anywhere. What they could find was often small accounts written by other peoples that had encountered the Dhuuni at some point in their history. But, it seemed that all their diligent searching had finally paid off and we were looking at a book about my ancestors!

Oh how my eyes brimmed and then overflowed with tears - joyful tears! What a day this was! I let out and involuntary sob and then hid my face in my hands. I was too overcome with emotion to do anything else but cry.

Only after my tears were gone and my breathing was restored to normal, no deep shuddering sighs and no hiccups, did Master Yuyo address me. "Neno, do you know the story of Kinabuhi?"

"No Master Yuyo. Should I?" I asked in earnest.

He smiled so warmly at me that I thought of my mother and how he reminded me of her so often when he looked at me kindly.

"I think it might be an important story your people tell about their life and origins," he said with solemn conviction.

I shook my head. I could not remember my mother telling me anything about a Kinabuhi but I felt a little rush of adrenaline seeing I would find out more today. It seemed to me that I had been waiting a lifetime to know more and not just 7 years (since the time my mother had been sold and taken away).

Master Yuyo leaned over the table again and flipped through the pages of the manuscript until he came to a story near the middle of the book. He smoothed out the pages with his hands and began to tell me, "The Kinabuhi is the tree of all life." He pointed to a tree that had been drawn in the middle of the book. "According to your people's history, nothing that is and has life can exist outside or or apart from the Kinabuhi. She is not like other trees though. She is not rooted to the earth and plagued with disease and death like all the others. She walks the earth. Her roots are the rivers of life that flow all over the earth and her leaves are the lives of all who are living."

As he described Kinabuhi to me I closed my eyes and pictured a beautiful woman with a robe of roots and a head of hair like the full branches of a beautiful tree. I could see her, strangely glowing and full of life energy that swirled in and around her limbs and her body. She was walking, like an unseen giant, across the earth in my vision. Her steps were light and gentle. Though powerful, she was not a destructive force in the least.

I smiled as the woman in my mind's eye turned her head of branches and lush green leaves in my direction. She had startling emerald coloured eyes that shimmered like pools of water under the light of a full moon. And Kinabuhi had the most endearing smile that I had ever seen (or could imagine). It was filled with great warmth and tenderness. Upon seeing such unabashed love in her eyes, even though it was just a vision I conjured up from my imagination, I was instantly choked up. I felt a lump of emotion in my throat that I could hardly swallow, and my eyes filled to overflowing with tears.

But I was not full of sorrow. I was full of joy. I knew this incredible creature in my vision was pleased to see me. I felt in the deepest part of my heart that she had a great love for me. A love more profound than even my mother's love. I didn't know why and I knew I didn't deserve such love, but, all the same, I knew she was happy to look on me. The vision was, by this time, as real to me as Master Yuyo and the manuscript that I knew was in front of me if only I opened my eyes.

Master Yuyo called my name quietly and the vision was gone as quickly as it came. "Neno? Are you alright?" he asked as he let his hand gently fall on my shaking shoulder. I was shaking from weeping.

I sniffed and laughed a little as I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands repeatedly to try and stop the flow of tears. When I did manage to stop crying I opened them to grin happily at Master Yuyo. I could see the instant relief on his face. I assured him I was not in distress. I tried to tell him what I saw but I only ended up crying again. I couldn't help myself. I was weak with something akin to happiness. The feeling was so foreign to me that I couldn't put it into words. However, I felt my face must have said it all.

Master Yuyo's were full of understanding and he patiently waited for me to recover my equilibrium. After a little while Master Yuyo asked me in his quiet way, "Shall I continue?"

I smiled brightly at him, sniffed a few more times and then nodded my head. I really wanted to know more about Kinabuhi. The thought of her filled me with a strange excitement.

"It says here, " he began again while pointing to the text and the drawing of the tree of life, "that each leaf of her many branches represents a life on this earth and that to each leaf she deposits gifts." He paused and smiled at me. "Gifts like healing," he said with enthusiasm. "All a leaf needs to do is to drawn from the branch, which supplies life to the leaf. The branches then draw life from the trunk and the trunk draws life from the roots. The roots draw life from the air, the water and the earth. It is a ceaseless cycle of give and take." He stopped and watched me intently as I sat and thought these things over.

I closed my eyes a second time and pictured the leaf - me - drawing life from the branch and that life flowing from Kinabuhi and her robe of roots. I saw life energy - a soft yellow light edged in brilliant green that sparkled like a thousand stars - being absorbed by her roots and running with tremendous speed through her to me.

Suddenly, I could do more than just see it with my mind's eye. I felt it flowing from my inner most part, throughout my entire body and finally to my finger tips. The feeling was entirely different from the bubbling and boiling-over sensation I usually felt when stirring up my gift. This new feeling was like a mighty river running through my veins and muscles instead of a bubbling well. The feeling was so strong, so vibrant, so real, that I threw my eyes open just in time to see the most extraordinary thing. Life energy, as soft and sparkling as it had been in my mind, burst from my hands in a cloud of thick yellow and green mist.

I jumped up from my seat with such force that the chair toppled back and fell to the floor with a crash. I waved my hands around to see if the mist would dissipate and disappear. It did not. In fact, it entwined itself along my arms and soon encased me from head to toe. I stood there in front of Master Yuyo and a growing number of monks and students with my arms stretched out wide, mouth gaping open, and eyes bulging. The sparkling life energy of Kinabuhi was resting on me like a robe.

The room was as silent as our sacred prayer room. Every eye was watching me with great fascination. Clearly, I was not the only one who could see this spectacular manifestation of Kinaduhi's life energy.

My face broke out into a huge grin and I said with new found confidence and conviction, "Master Yuyo, let me go to the infirmary. Let me not waste this gift here in the Records Room."

Master Yuyo, still stunned into silence, nodded his head slowly, like he was in a daze, and led the way to the infirmary.

I never laid a finger on a single soul that afternoon, which would have been my usual practice when stirring up and using my gift. The power of Kinabuhi's energy in me was so strong that a simple touch of the mist flowing from my hands and swirling around my limbs set stricken minds at ease, healed broken bones, and removed internal diseases as if these things were no more than scrapes and bruises. My gift had never been so powerful or had such little impact on me physically as it did that day.

In fact, as I thought about the experience later, I soon realized that I had not been drained in any physical way at all from the experience. It seemed to me that I had learned how to tap into the original source (Kinabuhi) of my gift rather than the reserve power (life force) in me.

It was a truly spellbinding and astonishing experience. One I hoped to repeat again, and again, and again! That is, until I remembered who my true master was. Then my heart sank and my stomach turned into knots.

Was this why Master Bangkai had sent me to the monastery? Had she sent me here in the hopes that I would learn to tap into the full potential of my gift so that she could use me in some cruel way to revive the people she was ready to bludgeon to death with her ceremonial dagger?

My elation evaporated like drops of precious dew in a desert. My gift felt like a weight around my neck and I wasn't sure it wouldn't strangle me to death before Master Bangkai was finished with me. When I thought of my life with her, all my hope, all my joy, all my new found zest for life, was utterly snuffed out. I dreaded the return to the White City.

How foolish I had been to forget her!