The Matriarch Mission: A Mythic Historical Novel of Love, Sacrifice, and the Divine Feminine

1913

Mountains surrounding Balaklava Valley, Crimea

“Asherah. Never forget. She calls me. We must go now,” my baba yells as my feet stumble among things of the unknown covered by this darkness.

Duty. Honor. Obedience. These three words are why I am here in this damp, dreadfully cold cavern—in honor of and obedience to my ailing baba, my mother’s mother. These three words called for me before anyone else in the house awoke. She came rushing to my bed, calling out the name that had haunted her for all of my short thirteen years on this earth.

As we now stumble in the dark, only a lantern illuminating the possible, plausible, pockmarked pathway along the sandstone-lined passage ahead, my baba says to me what might be her last words: “I must find her. Asherah. She calls.”

Who is Asherah? Who but a hermit lives in the darkest, dankest reaches of a Crimean cave?

Duty. Honor. Obedience. Three words that enslave us. As my ana, my mother, drilled into me—duty, honor, obedience. To your family, your parents, their parents. And one day, if I am to follow my duty, to my children. So, here I wander into the unknown.

A tug on my arm, and my baba, my grandmother, will not let me wait for an answer to my pessimistic pondering. She says, “My Oksana, I fear I have not had the time to teach you as your father teaches your brother.”

Then my baba insists, “You must teach your granddaughter as much as you learn today. For we all must seek the blue light. We all must help her return to the blue light. We must bring the one whom she needs to return here.”

If I had been born my father’s magnificent son instead of a meager daughter, he would be teaching me the ancient oral legend he insists my younger brother, Asan, repeat every day. Something about a bright, shining star at the tail end of a bird-shaped constellation, malicious marauding monstrous giants, and some mysterious ancient black object. One that will save mankind. Not womankind. Mankind. I learned this cold, hard lesson through a wall. My ear pressed to the cold plaster of the living room wall while my father’s voice rose and fell on the other side, patient in a way it never was with me.

Instead, my gender folds me over in this dark, damp den fit for bears or worse, holding my lower belly, for those cramps finally came into my life last evening. I hope this pad my mother gave me spares my off-white, many-times-mended, hand-me-down shift from red stains, as I wonder what compelled my baba to choose this particular cavern passage to descend. The voices of the armed men who are chasing us grow ever louder, saying this must be the cavern the tsarina’s priest foretold, where they would find what would save the tsar and Mother Russia.

Our little lantern’s light begins to flicker—its life nearing its end, as is my baba’s, whose each step now grows more labored. She awoke me before sunrise, saying, Death comes for me, so we have little time. Hurry!

I wrap her arm around my shoulders, and she feebly holds on—to her flickering lantern and her flickering breath. That energy, that essence that drove her this far, is finally fading.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch, go my boots. What on earth could those be? My heart jumps as the little lantern in my hand faintly outlines bones beneath our feet. Many of them of all sorts, all lengthy. With a long exhale, I ponder the legend told by my father, which said something about fleeing the giants.

As my baba crumbles for a moment, I brace both of us with a hand against the uneven, rocky cavern wall. A carving lies half my height above me. Lantern illuminates a bullhead carving.