Opou Komaye

"At last I know my Gardens."

- Opou Komaye's last words

Opou Komaye, known to his disciples as Master Komaye and to history as the Man Who Knew the Gardens, was a male Vuul philosopher, also considered something of a mystic during his lifetime. He was famous for his many writings and his infatuation with the Pentuyi Memorial Gardens.

Early life
Komaye was born, like many Vuuls, a twin; his brother Talo was born shortly after him. In school, Opou was a voracious reader who enjoyed reading history and studying art while he disdained most natural sciences. He continued to pursue a study of history at the undergraduate and graduate levels while also enjoying philosophy. As a young academic, he took a position as a lecturer in the city of Besraael.

By his forties, Komaye was considered a promising thinker; meanwhile, his brother Talo had ascended to a junior ministerial position in the government. Opou continued to study, but found that increasing his store of information was no longer bringing him satisfaction. His professional publications diminished, while his personal diaries betrayed considerable internal conflict.

The Gardens
Like most Vuuls who lived in Besraael, Opou had been to the Pentuyi Memorial Gardens; he found the nature and architecture lovely, but gave it little more thought. In the midst of his internal turmoil, however, he began taking longer walks through the Gardens, and found himself appreciating things he had not previously noticed. By the time he was fifty, Opou was walking through the Gardens every day.

At age fifty-three, Opou caused a minor academic scandal by resigning his academic chair, donating most of his property to the school, securing a small apartment, and spending most of every day roaming the Gardens. He had come to believe that breadth of knowledge was inferior to depth of knowledge, and sought to test his philosophy by coming to completely know the Memorial Gardens in what would become a lifelong endeavor.

Over the next nearly sixteen decades, Opou visited the Gardens nearly every day; when he was too ill for his long walks, he made a brief study of the exterior walls to consider the Gardens from yet another perspective. He left the Gardens entirely only three days—his parents' funerals, and Talo's decades later. Over time, Opou began to attract a following of other Vuuls; it began as a mix of the curious and the amused, but eventually attracted serious philosophical students. Opou was always pleased to share his musings on whatever part of the Gardens had caught his attention that day, and debated questions with those who showed enough interest.

In his one hundred forties, Opou began to theorize that not only was depth of knowledge more valuable than breadth, but that complete and total understanding of one thing would lead to complete and total understanding of all things. His writings (both what he recorded and what his disciples wrote down) also turned to the transcendental nature and interconnectivity of all life.

Death and legacy
In his later years, Opou retained much of his vitality, which he attributed to a combination of his deepened understanding of life and the fact that he had walked many kilometers every day for over a century. He began to walk more slowly in his final years, using a staff and taking shorter walks. When he was 231 years old, on an evening walk with one of his students, he stopped outside the, observing the way the moonlight played on the area beyond, smiled, and said, “At last I know my Gardens.” He sat down on the path and died.

After some debate, the curators of the Gardens elected not to dedicate one of the eighty-four columns of the Memorial Colonnade to Komaye. There was discussion of building him a tomb inside the Gardens, but he had anticipated this and, in his will, expressly forbade it, not wishing to change the face of the Gardens. He was interred in a tower nearby, overlooking part of the Gardens.

Many of Komaye's students collected his various writings and sayings, and continued to teach them for centuries afterwards in philosophy departments throughout Yin. Others occasionally spent years wandering the Gardens in hopes of gaining some of Komaye's enlightenment, though none came close to the sheer amount of time Komaye spent in the Gardens.

Centuries later, the Vuul Centurion Eskol Kaartinen and his Ky`Knomi brother Centurion Terran Saul both read Komaye's works. They shared them with Rin Sakaros, who theorized that Komaye might have been Force-sensitive, seeing in his musings about the interconnectivity of life an outline of reality similar to the.