Anì Ajin: The Three Journals

By Ella E. Olliver

What are you willing to do to get what you want? Read Anì Ajin - The three notebooks by Ella E. Olliver could help you win an answer. Or maybe more than one. The surrealism of the work will stretch out your hand. Destination: new goals of the soul.
Surrealism and adventure characterize Anì Ajin - The Three Journals by Ella E. Olliver, the first narration of the fantasy-existentialist trilogy that the author has in store for the readers. At the center of the story two men with the same face who, however, live in different dimensions: Mr. TaldeiTali, a nameless child who will become a man without a soul, in the constant search for absolute power; Jacob, whose story turns out to be much more current, a man born in one of the most powerful family in the world. What binds them? The craving for omnipotence and the vivid desire to acquire more and more power, but also a bridge that will allow reality and imagination to meet.
The two protagonists, endowed with characters well defined by the author, highlight different human typicalities, with their relative tasks and interventions. In fact, Mr. TaldeiTali finds himself acting in the concrete, untangling the skein and rewinding the tape of his life in order to deny a power greater than his own. While Jacob appears more committed to psychological, mental and emotional, since it is required to deal with the emotions of everyday life, far from simple to deal with, to betray himself and his family of origin to conquer the infamous power. But a tragic event, that is, the untimely death of his wife, in circumstances that are not clear, changes the cards on the table: the man understands that the betrayal that weaves behind the men of his family is the same that will be forced to serve by women of his life. The entwining interweaving of Mr. TaldeiTali and Jacob's stories reveals the initiation phases of a society called "La Segreta" that gradually takes shape.
Power is therefore one of the main themes, understood as a form of domination over human existence and exercised through the manipulation of information and control over the choices of men. The supernatural, another pillar of narration, becomes a door to be crossed freely to reach new 'worlds' and new awareness. Love can not be missing, that is the force that generates everything, moves the world but, at the same time, disturbs the human soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ella E. Olliver
• Release date: May 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463964019

Ella E. Olliver

Ella E. Olliver is the pseudonym of an aspiring author who lives in Treviso. ItalyAfter the law degree and the hard way in the forensic world, Ella decides to “use” the art of writing in order to protect the past from the injustices and the new generations from the myths.I believe that everything is in continuous movement, my life, my ideals, my way of writing, my experience as a writer, and above all, the Spirit. Beginning to love writing since childhood, entering into contact with “physical” with the books in the library of my country town, where in the summer, I had the he task of cataloging the books that have just arrived. In those two halls of the library, in frequently dusty, I considered the books as living beings. Only now I feel the need to entrust to paper my thoughts so that they may become a living soul.I, also, wanted to translate this first work of mine to get in touch with distances of form and thought. It is an experiment on which I want to continue to work.Ella has in the pipeline, the sequel to Anì ajin, which includes two other chapters.

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ANI AJIN

Ella E. Olliver

Copyright © 2019 Ella E. Olliver

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

To my grandmother E. to whom I owe everything

Maybe truth is a riddle that only error can solve

Ella E. Olliver

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Agnes Eroque

Chapter 2: Franck

Chapter 3: The Way

Chapter 4: The Kingdom of the Profane

Chapter 5: Miiko

Chapter 6: The Riddle of the Temple

Chapter 7: Jacob

Chapter 8: Lady Prinn

About Ella E. Olliver

CHAPTER 1

AGNES EROQUE

Agnes had disowned her identity. She had forsworn her own face and forsaken her soul for a risible price. Or she had until then, at least.

There had been a time when all she had to do was look at the world with her child’s eyes to understand the way it was going. In those days, Agnes was free and happy. But now she felt betrayed by the very forces inside her. Fear and love had even deprived her of the will to live.

As a child she’d loved to stand apart from the others, observing. When Agnes painted the things she felt on a canvas, there was not a soul who wasn’t amazed by her vivid imagination, although she always made a point of swearing what she’d painted was real, something that everybody could see. Her grandmother would set her mind at rest, telling her it was her innocence that enhanced her greatness and she shouldn’t fear her solitude, because no living soul would ever be able to believe in her.

She knew her fate and didn’t blame Jacob; she chose to disown herself just as she chose not to disobey the rules he imposed on her - until that morning.

What time are you home for dinner? Agnes asked her husband, knowing she wouldn’t get an answer. That was rule number one, the firmest rule: don’t ask questions. But for a few days now she’d been feeling a terrible discomfort that seemed to constrict her breathing, like a hand gripping her throat. She wanted to talk to someone about it, give vent to her feelings, and she couldn’t do it with Jacob. She missed her grandmother.

You know well I can’t tell you! he answered in his usual shitty way.

OK! answered Agnes, shaking her head. She didn’t like this attitude Jacob had adopted recently, but it was too late even to talk about it. Not just that, she also felt the same insecurity she’d felt when she was a little girl. "You’re charming and courteous but you’ve no personality," her friends used to tell her. Not much remained of that little girl now. Yet she felt she had all she needed to be free again, free like she used to be, with her wonderful Irish-red hair and her freckles, her large eyes and her timidity. She’d never again looked on the world with the same intensity as her childish self. She relinquished that gift when her grandmother died, the fear of being alone became greater than her innocence. But she made her mother, Annabelle, happy by achieving every possible goal. She obtained a degree in the arts, became a dancer and then, after marrying Jacob, rose to an exceptionally high social status. She followed her mother’s advice to the letter, hoping she’d never be alone.

Her long red hair made her every movement beguiling. She didn’t need anything else. It was enough to turn on that dazzling, mysterious charm, Jacob used to say to her, convincing her she wasn’t alone.

And yet Jacob didn’t love her hair, and he’d soon persuaded her to cut it in a manner more in keeping with their social standing, a shoulder-length cut that made her face look fuller and gave her the expression of a woman constantly sad and unsatisfied. And perhaps, with time, she’d grown into this role. Agnes had understood that a rich woman was not necessarily a fortunate one.

In those days of torment she remembered nostalgically how her grandmother encouraged her to look closer, to see the things a common eye would never even glimpse. Exhorted her not to give into the game of banality and appearance. And she’d let her in on certain secrets, presumably to prepare her for that day. In marrying a powerful man who was heir to an enormous corporate empire, Agnes had certainly made her mother happy: but she’d betrayed the trust her grandmother had placed in her, for she too in the end had succumbed to the flattery of banality and appearance.

At the time, the secrets she’d inherited from her grandmother had made her see and paint something she didn’t like. When her grandmother died, she tried with all her courage to defy fate, drawing things that didn’t match the truth of what she saw. Agnes wanted to change her fate. She failed, and gave up painting. She even gave up photography. She would no longer look beyond the visible.

Until that day, Agnes had been convinced she was unable to shift the vantage point she was fleeing from by even a single degree. And now the old gift that for too long had been latent was reawakening inside her, fear suffocated her life. This gift was changing her image of her husband. Agnes saw other, darker, forces in Jacob. And what terrified her most was that those dark forces did not torment him. They made things easier for him. She wanted to talk to him, but about what? He would never believe her.

"What if it’s Jacob who summoned up these forces?" she’d been asking herself for days.

Her grandmother had explained to her the kind of attraction she exerted on certain people. "An equal and opposite attraction," she’d said.

Like his predecessors, Jacob had been pre-ordained to take the place of his father, who had taken the place of his grandfather, who had taken the place of his own father, and so on back through the years. An everlasting dynasty, was how Agnes defined it - not to vindicate her husband but because she knew very well what that word meant, she’d known since she was a child.

What Agnes couldn’t bear any longer was the gilded cage she was forced to live in. For five long years Jacob had tried everything to gain her pardon, for his rules, his prohibitions, for clipping her wings and leaving her imprisoned and diminished. He loved Agnes, but he loved her like a rabid dog, for he felt trapped in a life he hadn’t wanted and knew love would weaken him as a man. He loved her. Yet he was wrong. Agnes had allowed herself to be imprisoned out of her fear of rousing hostile forces.

Every Thursday at three in the afternoon, always the same time, the florist’s boy rang the doorbell of their house with three long-stemmed red roses for Mrs FuiSum and a handwritten note.

"I wish I didn’t have to remind you, Kisses, Jacob."

Once a well-known engraver of precious stones had presented himself at the door of their house. A stocky, moustachioed man, a Mexican. He had come to give her a pair of gota de aceite emerald earrings. The only ones of their kind in the world, and never worn by woman before.

This emerald embodies the connection between the events of this precise instant and the primordial chaos that generated them, the Mexican told her before launching into a strange story about a courageous woman. A woman called Regina who escaped from the prison she’d been confined in. She had to escape to save her children and the baby she was carrying in her womb. Regina had to summon all her courage to cross the underworld, which was the only way to reach the Kingdom that was waiting for her. But she made the crossing because of the big green stone she wore. The emerald lit up the darkness and drove back the shadows that thronged the underworld. And in this way Regina came out of the afterlife unscathed.

Agnes listened with curiosity to the words the little man’s big imagination spun out, acknowledging the power of the stone.

"You’re my butterfly. Forgive me. Jacob"

The inevitable note brought her back to reality.

The secrets that separated her from Jacob tormented her more and more. The day Jacob left with "Man must be a stranger to instinct, nature and women," she could have slapped him.

"I don’t want to know what guru said that rubbish," she answered, avoiding his eye. He didn’t answer, and his absurd words fell back into the void from which they’d come.

This is our Magic Cosmos, he occasionally used to tell her in moments of intimate weakness, perhaps to reassure her. Agnes would say nothing, looking at him with a feeling of profound compassion: his egomania was even stripping him of his dignity. Jacob was totally in thrall to himself. He’d become an ingrate god. What had brought him to this state, she had no way of knowing. But one thing she was sure of: he wasn’t the man she used to know. He’d never once uttered the word love since they’d been married, avoiding it like a heresy. And in fact he hadn’t even used it on their wedding day. Instead he’d taken the opportunity to give her a little speech on commitment and a few simple rules which had to be observed; rules which had become banal routines over the course of time.

"We can’t allow ourselves the luxury of life taking us by surprise."

Parking the car according to a clearly defined procedure would become one of these banal routines.

The house keys, all of them, were to be hung in a little hardwood cabinet.

Nothing was to be left to its own devices. Everything was to be returned to its place in a precise order. Everything was orchestrated in Jacob’s mind. Every day a train of synchronized events saw him from his kingdom to his home. Which was a way of telling Agnes their home was nobody’s kingdom.

"I don’t want to spoil the beauty of this bureau, it belonged to my great-grandfather." And every evening, without fail, after making sure that not a speck of dust lay on it, he’d turn away to admire some antique that Agnes detested: an antique that smacked of shady dealings and bloodshed. Only after bowing in this way to the glorious heritage of the FuiSum lineage did Jacob turn to his beautiful wife, always the same way, repeating the same stupid words, "How was your day? You look wonderful." And so their daily re-encounter became a habit too.

Curiously, the previous evening Jacob had tried to start a conversation with his wife.

Did you know that the mark of genius is in the left hand? Of all the conversations Agnes had imagined and hoped for, this remark made her start. She answered him brusquely, forgetting all the many rules she’d obeyed up to that point.

"Jacob, by forcefully exercising a certain part of the body, you develop a corresponding region of the brain, as simple as that.

Many powerful men are left-handed, he retorted.

I don’t imagine I can dissent from your opinions, or scoff at you or make fun of your sarcasm, she answered. She’d set a precedent and it didn’t bode well.

Something had been bothering Agnes for several days, and her sense of suffocation made the conversation all the more unbearable for being so singular. Her insipid life was unbearable. The superciliousness of the FuiSum family was unbearable. Jacob’s methodical, obsessive-compulsive madness was becoming more unbearable every day. There were certain things Agnes didn’t want to confront her husband about. They had become two equal and opposing forces. But something made her fight back.

"It’s written in the Bible that on the Day of Judgement the righteous will sit on the right hand of Christ…"

All right, all right… I understand! Jacob tried to cut her off.

"…and the impious on the left. The good inherit the kingdom, the bad fry in the