Amari: Don't Resist

"Do you want to know the secret to a life free from suffering?"

Master Wei Li had a voice that naturally lent itself to telling secrets. He was a big man—a dragonborn, the first Amari had ever known—but he spoke softly, lowly, his voice carrying hardly a few feet from his mouth.

He'd knelt down next to Amari, who was curled up in her favorite hiding spot, an empty shrine alcove in the inner sanctum. At nineteen, she was unusually small for her age, regularly mistaken for a child. But Master Wei always treated her like she was wise.

"What is it?" Amari whispered, wiping tears from her cheeks.

Master Wei settled down more comfortably, leaning his back against the wall beside the alcove. He pointed to a window across from them, where a tree branch heavy with green buds was visible. "Do the trees suffer, Amari?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Do the birds suffer?"

She hesitated. "They don't seem to."

"I agree. But we humanoids—there's something different about us. Why is it that we suffer?"

Amari's eyes brimmed with tears again. She'd been thinking about her family all morning. "We have more to lose?"

"Ah. Loss is why we feel pain, but not why we suffer."

"I don't understand. Aren't those the same?"

"Oh, no, no." Wei shook his head. "If I prick my finger, I feel the pain, of course. But it's my choice whether or not I suffer. Because I can get angry, or sad, or frustrated that I pricked my finger. I can try to fight—but what would be the point in that? Why would I resist, when I can simply bandage my finger and move on with my life?"

Amari listened intently. She didn't understand what he was trying to teach her, not yet, but she sensed it was important.

"All suffering is resistance to what is," Wei said. "The birds and the trees don't suffer, because they don't resist. They live in harmony with the flow of life. Loss and pain are inevitable, but it's only when we refuse to accept them that we suffer. *No, no, no*, we say. We kick and scream. I don't want this loss. I don't want this pain. We fight it off. We resist. That is when we suffer."

Well, of course she didn't want her losses, or her pain. Of course she wanted her family back. It would be disrespectful to argue with him, so she didn't say anything. But he turned his head and looked her in the eye, and he read the doubt there.

"Feel your pain, child," he said. "Don't fight it. Feel it, and watch it flow past, once you remove the dam."

Amari thought about what he said. Later that day, she prayed and meditated on it. Then, she tried something unusual. She sat still, with her eyes closed, and focused on the feel of her pain. Reveled in it. Turned it up as intensely as she could make it go.

And when she was tired, she opened her eyes, and found that she was not as miserable as she'd been after all the times she'd tried to wrestle the pain away.

#

Master Wei, it seemed, resisted nothing, and he was the most at peace of all the clerics in the abbey.

There was a small orphan girl brought to them one day, nearly starved and with several broken bones. She was half feral, and she bit and clawed at Master Wei during his attempts to heal her. Wei never even flinched. He continued speaking to her softly, moving her hands away from him gently, no matter how many times the girl lashed out.

"She's afraid," he explained, when Amari questioned it. "Think of how much the world has tried to hurt her in her short life."

Even so, Amari was in awe of his patience. His kindness appeared to have no effect on the child, but he never wavered, not even an inch.

#

Master Wei was not quite eighty years old when he died. Amari had had him for twenty years, and she wasn't ready to let him go.

She suffered. She wept at his bedside.

"Amari," he said, wrapping one of his coarse, scaly hands around hers. "I want you to think of a flame, consuming oil as it burns. What will happen when the oil is gone?"

"The flame will go out," she answered dutifully, through her tears.

"Unless it is transferred to a new fuel source. Theoretically, it can burn forever. Moving from one wick to another."

"Yes?" She always knew better than to rush his wisdom, but he had so little time left.

"Our bodies are meant to die. But our thoughts, and our spirits, they can live on forever. Think of everything I've taught you."

She wiped her face dry and nodded.

"Don't resist, my child." He closed his eyes and smiled to himself. "Who knows? Maybe death will be so wonderful, I'll regret ever having lived."

He died peacefully, same as he did everything else.

#

"Two rapists, an arsonist, and a thief," Eli reported as he walked with her downstairs to the holding cells. "I'll give you the arsonist and the thief."

Amari nodded in acknowledgement of the consideration.

They were all male, all young, all lined up on the same bench. Amari read their body language and made a guess as to which two were hers. The arsonist was the pale-haired human boy, twitchy and bored, eyes darting and foot jiggling.

The thief—

Was a half-elf. Amari's heart sank.

There was always a half-elf. So many of her kind whom the world forgot.

He was folded up, tight and tense. Arms and legs crossed. The scowl on him was impressive. He could make someone faint with that scowl, if he turned it straight on them. As it was, he wouldn't meet anyone's eye. Angry he'd been caught, no doubt. Jaw clenching so tight she could see the muscle fluttering along his cheek.

Resisting.

She approached the two of them. "My name is Amari," she said. "You'll be assisting me throughout the abbey for the next month."

The arsonist stuck his hand out. "Sylar."

Amari shook his hand, glancing at the thief, who still hadn't acknowledged her. "Do you have a name, young man?"

The thief straightened up, made a scraping sound in his throat, and spat on the floor.

"He's Giro," Sylar offered. "I got it out of him while we were penned up together."

The thief rolled his eyes. "It's *Goro*."

Sylar snapped his fingers and pointed. "I knew that'd work."

Goro went back to scowling, and said nothing.

"It's good to meet you, Sylar and Goro," Amari said. "You must be hungry. Let's start with lunch."

Ah, those were the magic words. Goro flinched, almost, and his eyes darted up to hers for the first time. He was even younger than she'd first judged. Couldn't be older than seventeen or eighteen. He had acne on his forehead. His lips were cracked and scabbed, his eyes sunken. It had been a hard winter. He had the kind of hunger in his expression that wouldn't go away after a meal—or a dozen meals, even. The kind that could take years to be unlearned.

"Come." Amari beckoned them as she started to lead the way. "I'll show you to the refectory."

Most of the convicts Amari looked after had come off the street, and that was always the first step with them: letting them eat their fill, and then some. Sylar ate what most would consider a normal portion of food, and went back for seconds. Goro ate three bowls of soup, three-fourths of a loaf of bread, two slabs of beef, an entire plate of roast vegetables, and three pieces of cake, washed down with three glasses of milk.

His scowl didn't budge.

Amari took the two of them to the library after. It was her second step with the new ones, because it was a calming place, and it allowed her to inconspicuously find out who already knew how to read. Sylar proudly announced that he didn't, and Amari put him to work dusting. Goro wouldn't even look at her when she tried passing him a stack of books to shelve.

He sat at a table, arms and legs crossed, jaw clenched.

Amari let him be for a while. But at one point, when Sylar was at the far end of the room, dusting and humming to himself, she took a chair beside him.

"Goro," she said softly. "Do you want to know the secret to a life free from suffering?"

Goro's tongue prodded against the inside of his cheek. He rocked back and forth a little.

Then he looked her dead in the eye, bobbed his eyebrows, and said, "Is it you leaving me the fuck alone?"

#

Before he passed, Master Wei had told Amari she would need to take on an apprentice of her own soon.

"I'm not ready," she insisted.

"No one ever thinks they are," he said. "The secret is, you will learn more teaching another than you ever did from me teaching you."

"How should I choose an apprentice?" she asked.

"You'll know. Helm will tell you when you've found the right one."

It had sounded so sweet. Made her so optimistic at the time. She'd pictured a girl, maybe—someone who reminded her of herself, quiet and lonely, but good-hearted. Someone who would eagerly drink up every drop of wisdom Amari had to offer, just as Amari had done with Master Wei.

Instead: this boy, all tightly wound and clenched, who snapped and spat and cursed, who looked at Amari like she was trying to kill him when she wanted to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

The thought had come to her spontaneously: *He needs me.* It came from deep inside, a spark of intuition. It frightened her. She wanted to be wrong.

She spent hours in the sanctuary, praying; begging for Helm to point her in another direction.

*It can't possibly be true. He's harsh, and cruel. I can't be the one to teach him.*

But she'd seen a hint of kindness in him, too. When he found a beetle crawling along a windowsill in the abbey, he'd let it walk over his fingers for a moment, watching with an inscrutable stare. Then he'd opened the window and gently coaxed it out. It might not have stood out to her so much if she hadn't just watched Eli viciously smack a fly against the wall only a few hours earlier.

Still, she prayed. And prayed.

Helm never spoke to her. Instead of hearing his voice, it was Master Wei's words that finally rang in her mind, reminding her of the first lesson he'd taught her.

*Don't resist, my child.*