Stories: Recent Episodes

Francis Rosenfeld

Poetry and Fiction

“The approved list for the flower
arrangements reads as follows: lilacs, French lavender, and water
lilies," Lily announced, excited.
"Aren't we lucky Sys can make this stuff up
at the last minute? Who asks for lilacs in an equatorial climate?"
sister Novis mumbled, slightly annoyed.
"They fit into the lavender theme," Lily
tried to explain.
"Yes, I got that from the draping, the light
show and the purple bunnies sister Joseph is breeding," sister
Novis acknowledged, completely unimpressed.
"Kittens, they are kittens!" Lily
snapped.
"Whatever," sister Novis said. "When we're
done spinning lilacs out of thin air, where do you want them?”

“Where are the feeding schedules for the dragons?" sister Joseph
boomed through the interlink.
"I thought you were going to draw them up, you said you didn't trust us to do them properly," sister Felix defended herself.
"What do we need you for, then, if I have to do everything myself?" sister Joseph said.
"Sister, please tone it down," Seth intervened.
"At least I can do my job!" sister Joseph snapped back.
"Since when is putting together the feeding schedule for the dragons my job?" sister Felix protested at the unreasonable expectation.
"Since you've been assigned to the logistics team," sister Joseph replied.”

“What are you doing?" Seth asked Sarah,
startling her.
"Recording the atmospheric readings," the
redhead replied, without turning her head.
"Really?" Seth asked, and Sarah could feel
the smile that came with the question, without seeing it.
"Why is this surprising? You know I always
record the atmospheric readings at this time of day?" Sarah asked,
finally turning around.
"I don't know, I thought you'd have
delegated this to one of your students by now. Besides, nobody had
a moment's peace since the preparations for the blessed event
started, I'm just so relieved to see someone live a normal life for
a change," Seth replied.
"Define normal life, what's normal about
being here? We move time-space slices across the universe!”

“What are you doing?" Seth asked, staring in
disbelief at sister Felix, who apparently spent several hours
trying to put together a puzzle of sorts from left over pieces of
gauze featuring every shade of purple, from lavender to violet. "If
I didn't know any better, I'd swear you were putting together a
quilt!"
"I am," sister Felix replied, concentrating
on the floral pattern she was working on. It featured several mixed
posies of sweet violets and irises, with lilac blossoms scattered
in the spaces between them.”

“Sister Therese,
can we count on you to perform at the joyous celebration? The wisps
seem to be fascinated with music, especially vocal music. I often
wonder if this isn’t the only reason they
agreed to communicate with us. That and the
immortals’ nagging, those Purple chatter
boxes can talk you to death when they want something,” Lily asked,
skipping the introductory chit-chat.
“I was planning on it, of course.
Do you have anything specific in mind?” Therese
answered.
“Purple wrote a story for Lelia.
Can you take a look at it?” Lily handed the sister the score,
without waiting for agreement.”

“Where are we going to host the science symposium? It has come to my attention that the wisps expect to spend some of their time here discussing multiverse physics with Purple."

Sarah lifted her head from her research to find herself face to face with Roberta. She didn't hear her come in, but that wasn't an unusual occurrence: her private office, the spacious one with its own VR room, covered lanai and garden was anything but. Sarah had long abandoned the expectation that if somebody wanted to stop by, use the equipment or borrow something, they would bother to ask her.

"I assume that any number of conference rooms in this impressive building will prove adequate," she replied.”

“Sister, did you finish the table placement
cards?" sister Jesse asked sister Benedict.
"I thought you said you needed them
Wednesday," sister Benedict replied.
"Today is Wednesday."
"Today is Monday."
"I'm pretty sure it's Wednesday."
Sister Benedict looked at her calendar. It
said Monday. Sister Jesse looked at hers. It said Wednesday.
"One of us must be losing her mind," sister
Benedict mumbled.
"And it surely isn't me," sister Jesse
replied.”

“Sister Novis," Lelia whispered, so softly
that Novis, who had just returned from a rock climbing expedition
and was struggling to put away her gear on a high shelf, almost
didn't hear her.
"Oh, sweetie, I didn't expect to see you
here, I thought your mother kept you busy with the preparations for
the ceremony, your input is very important, you know!" the sister
said, cheerfully.
"Not as much as you think. Bonding
ceremonies are very prescriptive, other than the actual clouds
involved, there isn't much that can be changed," Lelia replied.”

“Places, please!" Lily spoke, a little
sharper than she wished. She had shouted directions to staff,
friends and caterers all day, and her voice was giving out a
little.
"Sister Joseph, you will lead the
procession, followed by sister Novis and Sarah, then Seth will
bring the rest of the group from the left side of the podium. Sys,
queue music," she instructed.
A soothing melody poured on the beach,
making Purple hum, delighted.
"Stop!" Lily interrupted the immortal bliss.
"Where is Humon? He is supposed to stand right behind Lelia,
according to tradition."
"And the approved list," Seth couldn't help
herself.”

"We are going to wear our ceremonial robes,
I assume?" Seth entered Sarah's apothecary.
Sarah was mixing perfumes, she and Sys had
come up with the idea of creating a scent to match the lavender
gauze and flower arrangements, even though the plant decorations
were still in question on account of the dragons' appetite. The
small shed was saturated with a clamor of floral scents, which
shouted at each other so loudly one could no longer tell them
apart. They all ended up in a overpowering blend, screeching in
sharp tunes of lavender and hyacinth. Lilac tried too assert itself
as a top note too, but it was trounced by the other two scents, and
whimpered helplessly at the end of the lab table where its open
vial resided.
"Good Heavens! Open the louvers, you can cut
the smell with a knife. Whatever it is you are working on right
now, throw it away it and never consider it again!" Seth protested,
stifled by the heavy fragrance. "How can you even breathe in here?
I'll never get this smell out of my clothes!"
"It is a process," Sarah defended the
obnoxious perfume.

“Who is waiting for Jimmy and Jenna?" sister
Novis poked her head through the door that sister Roberta had left
ajar. The sister was revising a last minute idea for the
festivities, secretly offended that Lily was so adamant about not
having anything happen that wasn't already approved. What a
bore!
"I thought you were," she stopped from her
work to look intently at sister Novis.
"Nobody told me anything, you worked with
Jimmy a lot during the last three months, I thought you already
arranged something, we all assumed..." the sister defended
herself.
"All of you always assume, what a punishment
for the scientific mind!" sister Roberta philosophized. "When are
they supposed to arrive?"
"They already have, if you'd check the
solenoid room..." sister Novis gently suggested.
"Oh, dear, they're locked in. How long have
they been there?" sister Roberta started panicking.”

“Did you see my notes?" Humon asked,
shuffling the pads on Lily's desk. Lily lifted her eyes from the
mound of packages, reminders, and party decorations that had been
slowly accumulating around her ever since they got the blessed news
the Bonding Ceremony was going to be celebrated on Terra Two.
Her maternal desire to be of assistance to
her eldest daughter was fighting an older, more personality
specific urge to dump everything at once and take a trip to a
region of space she hadn't visited before. She realized, while
thinking this, that there were no regions she'd never seen, and
strained her overwhelmed mind to figure out if and where she saw
Humon's work. She jerked, aggravated.”

“Who is in charge of the hors d'oeuvres?" Seth
asked.
"Sister Abigail," Roberta replied, focused
on a delicate piece of machinery that needed soldering under the
microscope.
"You're not serious!" Seth yelled, making
Roberta's hand shake for a second.
The pen slid over the board, covering it
with a slobber of molten metal. "Thanks!" Roberta snapped, snatched
the slide from the microscope and threw it on the growing pile of
similar slides in the trash can, proof that the sister had kept
very busy the whole morning.
"Who in their right mind would put sister
Abigail in charge of cooking anything?" Seth continued, like a slow
growing storm, ready to strike at any moment.
"Do you realize that I've been working on
that board for the last six hours and I finally got it right?"
sister Roberta growled at Seth.
"That means your next one will be even
better. Who put sister Abigail in charge of the hors d'oeuvres?"
Seth asked, deadly calm.”

"What exactly are you doing?" sister Roberta asked Sarah, who was fumbling with a knotted bunch of ribbons, growing more frustrated by the minute.

"I can't believe I'm wasting my time with this! Where is Sys? Why can't we just remake this?" the redhead abandoned the struggle, her cheeks flushed and her eyes gleaming furiously. "Can you take this to your lab and bring me back a fresh spool of non-knotted ribbon? You have no idea how many things I have to do right now, all at the same time!"

"I think I beat you in that department, my dear. I haven't even started the staging for the light show, so if you'll excuse me..." Roberta left before Sarah had a chance to pass on to her the ribbon unknotting challenge.

"What. For. Use. Ribbon." Purple inserted their unavoidable wisdom. "Wisp. Think. Matter. Worthless. Anyway."

Vlor Consular Mission in Airydew, Terra Two, July 2nd, 3245

Beloved Lelia,

My eyes well up with joy seeing you all grown up and ready to set out on your own path. Many centuries passed me by, they brought me challenges and successes, knowledge, wisdom and occasional silliness, and they opened my eyes to the universe, this strange and wonderfully complex, multi-layered reality I could never have dreamed existed.

Of all the precious gifts this unbelievable dream ever gave me, you are the greatest, my child, for I can’t even fathom what you are, or how you fit into our limited understanding of existence, half real, half thought and gifted with the perception of a lot more dimensions than us humans can grasp.

"My Principal Progenitors have always had a flair for the dramatic," Humon reflected out loud after reading Tagas Cloud's letter, in the same even tone of voice Lily had become accustomed to.

"What do they mean, Humon? What does all of this mean?" Lily started tentatively, her voice overcome by an instinctive indescribable panic. Humon didn't answer, he just waved, annoyed, trying to chase away the aggravation with the brusque gesture one would use to shoo away a fly.

"Procedure," he uttered eventually. "I swear, if our world really ran according to procedure we'd all be long gone by now. It took them seven planetary rotations to answer my request, seven! And now they expect me to rush to attention in less than ten gyrations! Good grief, my progenitors really know how to dish administrative bulk three layers thick! Do your parents push your buttons too?"

The day after the Night of the Mothers, for the second time, grandmother asked Aifa.

“Did you enjoy the ceremony, granddaughter?”

And again, Aifa responded.

“It was beautiful, Doyenne, I just thought I’d feel different after that, is all.”

Atthe end of November, nature had finally settled into its cold season slumber. There was a chill in the air, a chill whose fingers got colder every morning, and which was embroidering lacy frost on the ground and on the windows, the icy breath of the earth made manifest.

The Twins seemed unsettled. Aifa could see them look out to the horizon, towards the sea, as if waiting for somebody, or seeing something that was revealed only to them in the frigid mist.

“Are you coming, granddaughter?” grandmother asked, somewhat impatient. Aifa was still fiddling with her garment and time was growing short. “We have to go right now, otherwise we’ll be late.”

“Late for what, doyenne?” Aifa asked, heading towards the door.

“Our trip, dear. No, don’t take that, we are not going to need it,” she said, when Aifa tried to pick up a lamp for the return trip. Sunset was about an hour away, and the shadows of dusk had already started concealing the farther surroundings.

Aifa looked out the window, a little worried about a couple of leaden clouds that had started gathering over the horizon. The feast of the Victory of Good over Evil was mostly celebrated outdoors, and she didn’t want the rain to ruin her delicate silk garments or wash off the intricate body painting that several of her relatives had worked so hard to finish the day before.

The dances had already started in the streets, and people were slowly gathering in the Market Square, where preparations were being made to set evil on fire.

Everybody loved the Blessing of Animals and Nature, especially the children, of course, who had waited all year to bring their pets to the Hearth so that the Twins could utter a benediction over them.

At the beginning of October, all families climbed the stairs up to the Market Square, bringing a basket, a birdcage or a fish bowl, happy to show off their beloved pets, which had been specially groomed for this particular occasion, even though they looked a little grumpy in their carriers, appalled by the indignity of being dragged around town.

At the top of the stairs that led to the Market Square, merchants were handing out ribbons of every color, for people who wanted to make a last minute decision to beautify their furry or feathery friends for the happy occasion.

The sun set slowly in the sound of the trumpets, falling like a large orange ball into the sea. The trumpets kept calling as the light subsided, and the people looked out into the open waters from the elevated platform of the market square.

“Today we release our burdens. Cast all your regrets to the winds, don’t let them follow you into the future.”

There weren’t many times when the Hearth was bare, but the Celebration of Harvest was one of them. People were scattered around the city, busy with the preparations, only returning to the Great Hall to bring things for the feast. The Twins, who had far outgrown the need to be watched like children, were often left alone at this time, with only one or two Caretakers to attend to their immediate needs.

It was for this reason that Aifa found herself alone with the Twins the evening before the feast, at the time when day and night again found themselves shifting balance. The air was still sultry, rich with the humidity and fragrances of summer, the harvest season lingered, bringing with it a bounty of grain, apples, squashes and grapes, but the light had already shifted to that hard to describe but immediately recognizable golden mellowness that accompanies the turning of the leaves.

Aifa, her grandmother and the rest of the Caretakers had been working hard all morning, braiding bunches of colorful ribbons into rainbows. The entire Grand Hall of the Hearth was filled with ribbons, whose silky threads seemed to be animated by their own inner spirit and slithered into crevices and recesses, never to be found again.

In the middle of the room, the Twins were getting ready for the ceremony, learning how to properly carry their ceremonial staffs.

“Are those snakes?” Aifa whispered, daunted, as she looked at the elaborate decorations on the staffs, which seemed to depict two snakes swirling around each other, in opposite directions.

“Of course. You don’t remember the story of this holiday?” grandmother asked, surprised.

“Hurry up, granddaughter, we wouldn’t want our guests to find us unprepared,” Aifa’s grandmother commented, more to assuage her own tension than anything else. Everything had been prepared, cleaned, shined to a blinding polish, planned to the last detail. “Today is a big day, you know, the time when the door between life and death is left ajar, so we can rejoice in our departed loved ones’ presence once again.”

“How would I know if they are here, doyenne?” Aifa asked, a little confused.

“Oh, you will know, child. When they arrive, without a doubt, you will know. Where are the sweets?” she asked, worried again, only to notice that the table had been properly set and everything was already on it.

“Knead joyfully, granddaughter, you don’t want that bread to be heavier than a rock,” grandmother teased.

All the Caretakers were gathered at their house to bake together for the Day of Abundance. They had started early in the morning and the aroma of fresh bread, right out of the oven, filled the whole house. Under their diligent hands, the first grains of harvest yielded their goodness, transformed into an elastic and malleable dough that was lighter than air.

Masterful fingers kneaded and shaped it into a million different shapes, crescents, wreaths, boules, baguettes, rolls, and, to the absolute delight of the children, little bread critters.

The middle of July brought with it an abundance of early harvest, but the Caretakers were so busy, they didn’t even notice the buoyant unfolding of life around them. They spent day after day, gathered around the Twins, listening to the wisdom the two poured forth, wisdom whose source nobody really understood, and which, they believed, could only come from on high.

“What about you, doyenne?” Aifa asked. “Haven’t you heard this before?”

“Oh, no, child. No two years’ teachings are ever the same. What would be the point of divine guidance if you could sum it up in one year. The wisdom has no end.”

For the second time that year, the community took their trip down the side of the mountain, down to the sea. It was the middle of June, and it seemed like the whole world was covered in flowers, especially the tall, bright yellow flowers of the meadow, which some still believed were faeries in disguise. There was talk that at night, on the eve of this feast, they could be seen dancing across the fields and meadows, as if stepping on air, ethereal like the breeze itself. When asked about it, people whispered about the terrible fate which befell those who dared spy upon the unearthly creatures during their private dance. For this celebration, however, they lent their flowers eagerly, to make crowns, garlands and wreaths.

“Are you nervous, granddaughter?” grandmother asked.

It was Aifa’s first public speaking assignment, one for which she had prepared the entire week, and she was, of course, all nerves.

“Don’t fret over it, you will do just fine.”

“What if I don’t?” Aifa asked, wretched.

“Then you won’t,” grandmother joked. “I’m sure they’ll let you live.”

“Don’t joke about it, doyenne!” Aifa chided.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” grandmother said, trying very hard to be serious but unable to suppress a smile.

The Great Hall was filled with light and flowers, there were so many flowers, so many candles, the whole floor was covered in them. It felt strange for Aifa to watch the Twins, who were dressed up in their simple white garments and had flowers woven in their elaborately braided hair, sit donning unearthly smiles on top of a mound of flowers, like living statues.

“Aifa,” grandmother whispered, although nobody in the house was sleeping. “Are you ready, granddaughter? It is time to go to the Hearth.”

Aifa wrapped her garment a little tighter around her waist and washed her face with the rose water her mother had made, put on her shoes and walked in silence behind her grandmother, stepping purposefully on the old stone paving, under the eerie brightness of the full moon.

There was no wind in the air, there were no clouds in the sky, and the perfume of the lilacs filled Aifa’s lungs like the essence of an ancient mystery, as if its fragrant flowers wanted to partake in the holy time when the spirit itself came down from above.

Anyway, that afternoon Aifa and the Twins were out on the daffodil meadow, which Ama and Jal seemed to be particularly fond of, when all of the sudden the sky grew dark and shook with rumblings. Any other children would have run for the hills, screaming their lungs out, but not the Twins, who looked mesmerized towards the horizon, as if they have been waiting for this particular event their entire existence. Covering the horizon, gigantic and proud, their wingspan the width of a mountain, their feathers and scales the color of fire, their mighty cries a deafening rumble, the thunderbirds had returned.

Their first rumble, like a slow rolling thunder, had brought everybody out of the city, running to welcome the return of the glorious birds, which flew, majestically, over the city, like they did every year, to cheers of joy and waves of ribbons in every color of the rainbow. The thunderbirds had returned!

From the moment the Twins arrived, poor Aifa hadn’t experienced a moment’s rest. They were five years old now, constantly moving around and getting into everything, and last, but not least, they never stopped talking. They seemed to have reached that glorious age when everything aroused their curiosity and the Caretakers couldn’t stay abreast their endless lists of whys.

One question they seemed to be obsessed with was that of mortality in general, and their own mortality in particular. They couldn’t understand that they would show up again the next spring, no matter what, they were afraid of what might happen to them during the winter, and they kept pushing Aifa for answers. Aifa, who was a little more than a child herself, didn’t know what to tell them.

The closer it got to the spring equinox, the more animated the Grand Hall of the Hearth became, engulfed in a flurry of activities related to sprucing up, clearing and decorating it for the arrival of the Twins. Every now and then one of the Caretakers went out into the yard, to check if the ice on the pond had thinned, or even melted, gazing intently at the space above it in the hope of seeing two snow flurries, the last of the last snow, fall into the water, the sign that marked the blessed event every year.

Every Caretaker hoped to be the lucky one who could announce that the Two had arrived, but it never worked that way; by the time they rushed to the Hall to tell the others the good news, the Twins were always somehow already there. This year was no different. Regardless of the time differential between the Twins’ arrival and the belated announcement of said event, the thrill of being the one who saw the snowflakes fall into the pond still held its charm, and this year it was Aifa.

The Day of the Blessings usually started early in Aifa’s household. Aifa and her siblings were already dressed up in their costumes by the time the sun was high up in the sky, and were crowding each other in the kitchen, where they were all gathered to stuff their goody baskets with filled pastries and other yummy treats.

They were lucky this year, the day was sunny and relatively warm for the beginning of March, it was really no fun having to wear a heavy coat over the costumes they had spent so much time and energy to create for themselves.

Towards the end of February winter started easing its grasp on the mountain springs, allowing them to come back to life, almost suddenly, in bubbling expressions of movement and sound. The tiny brooks searched for each other down the mountain, forming tiny pools and waterfalls, and when they could, they joined their forces in larger streams, with the playfulness of living things, and very young ones at that. From the window of her room, Aifa had a very good view of that side of the mountain, and the moment the water started shimmering between the distant peaks, she hurried down the stairs with great noise, to give the entire family the news that spring was near.

Ifyou were born in Cré at the beginning of February, you would be among the youngest people to enter the Hearth. It was the yearly tradition that new mothers should bring the babies who have been born over the course of the previous year to receive a blessing. Aifa was born in the summer, so she was a few months old when she first breathed the air of the Hearth, which was believed to be able to imbue people with health and vigor, and even, in some instances, restore health, but many of the babies that had been brought to the Hearth that year, bundled by their doting mothers in several warm blankets, were merely days old.

“Wake up, granddaughter,” Aifa’s grandmother shook her gently, so she wouldn’t be startled out of her deep sleep. “We need to go to the Hearth soon, we don’t want to keep people waiting.”

Aifa got up quickly, washed her face and hands and put on the clothes that she’d been setting aside the day before, hand made and never worn before, like tradition required. She knew they weren’t going to leave immediately, one had to sit and think, and write down what one perceived to be one’s shortcomings from the previous year, to be relinquished to the sacred fire.

Aifa had always asked herself, ever since she was a little child, why would a community decide to perform a ceremony that featured water during the time of year when it was almost guaranteed to be frozen. Of course if she asked her mother, she would have gotten hours of cross-referenced instruction about the significance of the holiday, complete with historical dates and the most important writings about it.

It had to do with the Twins, of course, everything in Cré had to do with the Twins, but as far as the particular time of year, she couldn’t remember a reason. To her family’s dismay, whose members were never satisfied with the level of interest Aifa showed to her doctrinal studies, she didn’t much care what the reason was, but that didn’t prevent this holiday from being one of her favorites, because it involved something very special indeed: a trip to the sea shore.

Itwas the week before the feast of the Birth of Life, a time when the city of Cré was usually bustling with activity. Everybody rushed to finish the preparations for the feast, get the gifts wrapped, and most importantly, get ready for the big social gathering that happened at the Hearth each year to mark this event.

Onthe longest night of the year, the women of Cré gather quietly, dressed in their festive garments, whiter than snow, to walk the gentle hill towards the Hearth of the Gemini, whose limestone walls glow ghostly in the distance. They have no lights to guide them, other than those of the stars and the moon, as they slowly join in long files, which in turn join larger streams, which in turn join the main procession to pass through the gate of the Hearth together, like confluences of rivulets and rivers finding their way to the sea.

Nobody utters a single sound, as it has been the tradition for thousands of years, and with each year passing, the significance of this silence amplifies and lends more decorum to the sacred ritual. It isn’t forbidden to talk, there is no mention in the law that everything has to happen in silence, but every woman and girl past the age of thirteen knows and abides by this unspoken rule, as a measure of respect and pride in their tradition.

“Taylor? Taylor Bradford?” a voice called from behind the counter, with non-dissimulated boredom. “I’ve got the reference materials you requested. Where do you want them?” Taylor pointed to the table in the middle of the reading room and one of the assistant librarians who were working in that section dropped the thick stack of books on it, went back behind his counter and adjusted his ear buds to disappear into his own musical world.

Taylor was at a loss as to where to go from here. How do you search for something as unthinkable as a door that doesn’t exist, especially when you can’t ask anybody about it? Logic kicked in, impeccably, and suggested that if there was any information to be found about such a thing, even folk tales or urban legends, the library would be a good place to start.

“Whoa, what’s on fire?” Taylor woke up the next morning to painful, unholy banging on the door. “What’s gotten into Christine, and why doesn’t she just come in, she knows the lock doesn’t work?”

She stumbled towards the door, nursing a bear of a headache, surprised to see that somebody had already repaired the broken lock. The door burst wide open, slamming into the wall, and in came Matthew, carrying a giant pizza, steaming hot. The sheer amount of meat on top of it was enough to make Taylor’s stomach revolt.

“Wake up, man! Coach is going to bench you if you’re late again. I brought help, your favorite, meat lovers’. Edge to edge, my friend!” He stared at Taylor, who was about to protest on behalf of vegans everywhere, and a doubtful look appeared on his face. “What on earth are you wearing?”

Taylor looked down to find out what was wrong with her pink jersey pajamas and was shocked to notice a pair of unusually large and very hairy legs emerging from their bottom.

“Where are we?” Taylor looked around, trying to recognize her surroundings. There was something very familiar about the place, it felt as if she had spent a lot of time there, but so long ago, maybe in a dream.

“For lack of a better word, dead,” he clarified, too calm for comfort. “Not dead-dead, just on the other side of the river Styx, visiting, sort of. Don’t worry, we’re going back.”

“I didn’t know one could visit,” she thought, “without being, you know…”

“Sure you can,” he reassured her. “Well, I can, some people can, that’s beside the point. Welcome to the great beyond!” he smiled and raised his hands to present the environment, in an attempt to be a gracious host. “To give a more specific answer to your original question, we aren’t anywhere, at least not anywhere that can be pointed on a map in normal reality. We’re in the world inside your mind,” he suggested, “you can make it look any way you wish.”

“Then why does it look like this? I’m sure I’ve never been to this place, nor did I imagine it. Why does it feel so familiar?” she kept looking around.

“Of course it feels familiar, it is your mind, you just didn’t know what it looked like before. It feels a little bit like seeing your own face for the first time. Without a reflective surface you have now way of knowing what you look like, but you can sort of recognize yourself, even if you don’t understand why. Cozy,” he commented upon looking around. “What’s that smell?”

“Sugar plums. They’re over there,” she pointed to the corner of the table from which the scents of vanilla, cinnamon and orange wafted. “So, we’re in Heaven?”

“That depends. Do you like sugar plums?” he asked, very serious.

”Are you sure you are ready for this? It may be a little unsettling,” he asked.

“As sure as I’ll ever be,” Taylor answered, doubtful. She hadn’t slept well the night before, well, with the sea lion visiting and whatnot, and was a little concerned about the extra preparation required for this door. “What is it this time?” she tried to anticipate her challenge.

“Just remember, whatever you see or feel, it’s all in your mind. You are perfectly safe and you can leave anytime if it gets to be too much. That being said, here goes,” he said, and got up to open the door. A wall of water flooded the room, so fast that Taylor didn’t even have a chance to react to the prospect of imminent drowning. They both got swept by it, despite their best efforts, and carried away in a white water stream that rushed violently between large boulders, where they struggled to keep from getting pulled under, grasping at anything they could get their hands on.

Taylor wanted to speak, but her voice didn’t carry over the deafening roar of the stream. For a second she felt suspended into a quasi-imponderable state, where all of her being was freed from any pulls or pressures, and then tumbled into the void at great speed, almost gliding over the surface of a tall waterfall whose bottom got lost in the mist.

She wanted to be scared, every rational thought told her she should be scared, but she couldn’t feel fear at all; as it turns out it is the emotion itself, and not the thought behind it, that really matters. She kept falling, dazzled by the surreal beauty of her surroundings, melting into a million drops of water, becoming the stream itself, its wild rush, its jump over the rocky edge, and the mist at its bottom.

The thing about the human mind is that it trains itself to be very efficient, so it automatically eliminates the events that have an extremely low probability of happening so that the brain doesn’t get burdened with useless information to the detriment of day to day activity. When these very rare events happen, the mind gets confused and resentful, trying in vain to reconcile what it thought it knew about the world with the new image that simply doesn’t fit into that knowledge. Stepping into the hall of doppelgängers without warning definitely fit into this category for Taylor, so she wrapped her arms around the first reasonable justification that came to her mind in order to discount whatever it was that she was seeing with her own eyes.

“I must be drunk, I never should have had that beer,” she closed her eyes to make the image go away.

“Oh, don’t worry, they don’t really look like you, I just altered your perception of them to make it easier for you to notice,” her neighbor whispered behind her.

Taylor woke up to a timid knock on the door, followed by a soft fumbling with the door handle. It was Christine, who was trying to balance a large box of jelly donuts and two cups of coffee. She entered, sheepishly, waiting for Taylor’s reaction.

“Peace offering?” she said, from behind the donut box.

“What gives?” Taylor asked, more curious than upset.

“I”m so sorry, Taylor! I realized yesterday afternoon it wasn’t you, it was that girl, Jessica, I told you she’s following Matt and his friend around like a shadow. Turns out I was wrong about which one of them she was after. Sowwy?” she took a comical Tweety bird pose to lighten the mood.

“Exactly how nuts are you? And how can you mistake me for Jessica?”

“What do you mean?” Christine said innocently.

“Well, for one, she’s a foot taller,” Taylor pointed out.

“I just saw them from a distance,” Christine explained.

“She’s blond! Like really Nordic!” Taylor pointed at her own skin and hair.

“People make mistakes,” Christine looked down. “Friends?” she asked.

“Sure,” her friend shrugged off the logical inconsistencies.

“Have the lessons from yesterday’s field trip reached you yet?” he asked, smiling politely.

“More than I care to process,” she thought, still upset about the musts and the have to’s, but she answered in the same good mannered vein. “A few, I’m still analyzing them.”

“Just remember, before we go through door number three, that not every rule is there to be broken, but it helps, every now and then, to question your assumptions. It seems fitting, since we are on this subject, and given that all of these doors look more or less the same, to remind you of a rule that you shouldn’t be breaking. Do you remember what I warned you about during our first encounter?”

“Don’t go through door number eight,” she recited, trying very hard to suppress an eye roll.

“You say that, but you don’t believe it, not in your heart, anyway,” he probed her with a sharp gaze, and then, not finding what he was looking for, continued, slightly disappointed. “Anyway, ready when you are,” he took a bow, pointing towards the door.

“What’s through there?”

“You.”

“I have to ponder this rationally,” Taylor thought and quickly put together a plan to address the current situation. Whether it was real or not, she figured all of this weird stuff kept happening to her around four o’clock, and if she managed to avoid her haunting ghost, hallucination, prankster or whatever he was around that time of day she should be fine. Since the thought of locking herself in the women’s restroom for an hour sounded a little bit like overkill, she moved to the next best option, which was spending every single second in Christine’s company.

First, she wanted to assess whether Christine could see her “ghost”, or if he was a hallucination of her stressed out mind, and second, she was kind of hoping that a public setting would deter future kidnapping attempts.

Taylor woke up and got ready for classes, as if nothing had happened the day before, trying to avoid looking at the door, somewhat uneasy with the thought that if she did, she might not see it there anymore. The first day was filled with the trepidation of adjusting to new settings and finding her way through the maze of buildings and hallways, and in all the excitement she almost forgot about the “class” that was supposed to start at four. She hadn’t had anything to eat the whole day and stopped almost without thinking at the cafeteria for a quick bite.

“Taylor? Taylor Bradford?” a voice called from behind the counter, with non-dissimulated boredom.

Taylor fumbled with the paperwork and rushed to the counter to finish registering for classes before the four o’clock deadline. The clerk handled the documents absentmindedly, while she watched the clock and switched to a more leisurely mindset in anticipation of the get together she had planned with her friends later at the bar on the campus corner.

Taylor walked out the door thirty seconds after four, trying to avoid the clerk’s resentful glare and careful not to slam the door behind her. She was a shy person and, even if she didn’t want to admit it, she found this whole situation of being on her own a little overwhelming.

“Persephone, darling! What a joy to have you back home!”

Demeter welcomed her daughter effusively at the mouth of the cave of Cumae and presented her with the traditional sheaf of barley.

The oracle of Cumae bowed deeply to both goddesses, concealing a resentful glare, while Demeter performed a critical assessment of her daughter, staring her up and down in search of things that required attention.

“You look thinner, Persephone. Are you sure you’re eating enough in the underworld? I am concerned.”

“I’m exactly the same, mother. As you well know, we never change.”

“No worries. We’ll make sure to feed you properly as soon as we reach Olympus. I’ve made you a list of tasks, just to get you started on your duties. Dionysus wants to talk to you. Make time for a meeting with him as soon as feasible, will you?”

Persephone was careful about lifting her torch, to avoid scorching the healthy roots which poked through the vault of the cave, drawn by the sound of the small stream running through it. Plants can hear water from great distances.

Plants can hear water from great distances and extend roots to capture it. They are a lot more sophisticated than people know.

A delicate root tracery was covering the entire vault, surrounding the larger tap roots, which found themselves mimicking stalactites, and growing in thin air, no doubt managing to absorb the water droplets generated by the feisty little brook.

She couldn’t help imagine what a thicket this place became in the summer, when the root systems expanded to fill the entire cave. She was surprised to realize she never gave any thought to what was happening in Hades while she was gone; how different it was from the lovely winter home, which always welcomed her in pristine and splendid glory.

As spring approached, Persephone started getting restless.

She was startled from her sleep, shaken by the feeling she forgot something important, whose absence had consequences which were now piling up out of sight.

Her daydreaming trips to the gardens got shorter, as she spent more and more time with Hecate preparing for her trip.

Most of the hard work of spring was happening underground, quietly. While the dirt was still frozen, the seeds already started their labor of sprouting, and the old roots were patiently rebuilding their aerial parts.

The dark earth concealed this fierce struggle towards the light, which lasted for months before being rewarded with results.

All people ever saw was the miracle of spring, nature bursting suddenly back to life, happening incredibly fast, while Persephone, who looked young and delicate, like she’d never seen a day of work in her life, seemed too unlikely to be its enabler.

Hades always felt empty after Persephone saw the returning souls off into the world. To allay her sadness, she went to the Hall of Scrolls, to reread what the Moirae had in store for them.

Hades’s palace was vast, and not many people knew that, because very few had been allowed past the sumptuous rooms at the front, which were intended for receiving visitors.

It had libraries and vaults, salons and dining halls, and since his marriage with Persephone, interior gardens.

Since Hades didn’t have weather, half of the spaces were open to the outdoors, facing colonnades and atria, fountains of living waters and magical trees.

Everything had spirit in the Underworld, and Persephone often lost track of time talking to the trees in the open courtyards, or the flowers in her daffodil garden.

The latter was a gift from Hades, who worried she might miss the meadows of her maiden days, a garden bursting with daffodils perpetually in bloom.

Life doesn’t change.

Sure the technologies advance and the day-to-day gets easier, but people aren’t fundamentally different from how they were centuries ago.

The same emotions and drives push them on their paths, and the same disappointments sour their spirits.

Persephone tended to her souls like a gardener tends to his or her plants, watching them get born, live and die, forget their experiences and come back to life the next time around, like seeds sprinkled on the ground.

It is human hubris to imagine there is a purpose to this repetitive endeavor. Just like is the case with plants, there is no purpose for them to exist other than to perpetuate themselves. Life wants to continue and slowly evolve.

If there was a greater purpose under Olympus, it was too high for anyone to understand it, and it most likely did not involve building mighty empires and fighting bloody wars, the empty vanities and illusions of power that die with their creators.

Every four years in the middle of summer, the mortals gathered to celebrate the muses in a gentle valley at the feet of Mount Helicon.

The nine daughters of Mnemosyne, they weren’t your usual goddesses; they were a gift to humankind. Nobody talked about them as such, out of fear these wonders that fired the human mind to create masterpieces might be taken away, to leave mankind only the toiling and the wars, a drab existence made of hopeless and uninspiring days, all the same.

The muses were born of the goddess of memory and the highest of the gods, a splendid metaphor for the mind’s union with the sublime.

And, just as happens with the human minds, their relationships and connections with other gods and with the mortals got complicated from there.

Unexpected friendships and mentoring roles emerged, and if one wanted to understand them, one had to know their whole family history.

Pegasus himself had struck the ground with its hoof to open their source of inspiration, the stream of Hippocrene.

Their mother, Mnemosyne, the keeper of the fount of memories in Hades, was Hypnos’s neighbor and friend.

Remembering is the opposite of forgetting, and therefore, it embodies the same concept. They are two halves of the same whole.

Every object in a universe of duality must have an opposite, and the two opposing elements are intrinsically the same essence.

They are what is, reflecting itself into what it is not.

Those blessed with the gift of prophecy form a small but very special community.

They instinctively seek each other’s presence, they are drawn to those who are similarly blessed.

If they are mortal, they become oracles and seers whose wisdom is sought and revered, and people travel from far away to seek their counsel. They are the living vessels of the gods, who speak through them in cryptic messages, which are only understood in retrospect.

It’s not that the gods were trying to make their teachings obscure, or that they even cared if they were. People can’t form concepts about things that don’t yet exist.

Immortal prophets like Apollo, Phoebe, the Moirae, doled their wisdom onto the world below, speaking through their official oracles, like those of Delphi, or Cumae, who were famous and revered and to whom people dedicated temples and compounds, theaters and springs.

And then there were the quiet visionaries, who saw a lot but kept it to themselves, not wanting to put any more strain on the greater order of things than it was already under, and staying out of the affairs of the mortals, whose misinterpretations of godly wisdom were a constant source of disaster and false hope.

On the westernmost edge of the Oceanus, which spans the vast distance between the world of the living and the underworld, there is a splendid garden, constantly bathed in the glow of the sunset.

The garden belongs to Hera, a wedding gift from her grandmother, and wonderful apple trees with golden fruit grow there, under the jealous guard of the dragon Ladon, an offspring of the Typhon, and the rather distracted oversight of the Hesperides, the daughters of night and of the evening star.

The legendary orchard was far from the real world, in both location and appearance, and because of its priceless bounty, a perpetual temptation for those driven by greed.

When someone broke in to steal the apples, the circle of displeasure, complaint and requests for retribution invariably closed in the Underworld, a constant source of annoyance for Hades, who was expected to do something about it.

“Who was it this time?” Persephone asked.

“It was one of ours, actually. Eris decided to take it upon herself and plot against Hera. You remember Hera, don’t you?”

“Vividly,” Persephone replied.

Hera took exception to the smallest slight, never forgave an offense, and always made sure to drag the entire Olympus into her drama, satisfied only when she was the center of attention.

Persephone stood tall on the bow of the ship, against the breeze.

Behind her, the fortune’s chosen, the ones who managed to navigate its treacherous waters through three lifetimes in a row, without reproach, were gazing towards the islands in the distance with apprehension and awe, not yet able to believe their luck, eyes moist for what they left behind.

Lost for words, they feared the promise of this new and wonderful existence was just a mirage which would dissipate the second they stopped believing it.

Hades stood next to his wife, like a symbolic shelter against the winds.

He always attended these happy occasions when mortals earned themselves the right to perpetual bliss.

Also, he loved the Fortunate Isles, which he rarely found the time to visit, with his schedule as full as it always was, and besides, he had promised Persephone.

The islands were two, so close to each other one could think them a single land mass. They weren’t that far from the shore, but a whole world removed in terms of privilege and grace, even compared to the Elysian Fields.

There was much sound and fury in Hades’ chambers the next morning, the clamor of many people speaking in anger, and above them all Persephone recognized the voice of Zeus.

She got dressed in a hurry and sneaked into the anteroom of the large conference hall where Hades was involved in some very heated negotiations with an entire delegation of Olympians, which, as an extraordinary circumstance, included Zeus himself.

“We’re doing everything in our power to retrieve him safely. As I told you, no effort is being spared.”

“But how was it possible, brother? I thought you ruled this kingdom supreme! Just command your minions to deliver him at the gates.”

“If the Hecatonchires were commandable, you wouldn’t need to keep them in Tartarus. They’re trained to some degree,” Hades replied, “but definitely don’t exhibit the level of obedience you seem to expect.”

“So, you’re telling me there is no hope and you can’t do anything about this?”

“Quite the opposite, brother. I just told you every effort is being made.”

“Yeah. That means you can’t do anything about it. I’m so disappointed in you, Hades. I entrusted you with the fate of one of our finest, and now he’s lost in Tartarus with no expectations of rescue.”

When she wanted to take a break from her daily activities, Persephone wandered along the banks of the Lethe, under the slender branches of the willows, which arched to touch its waters, and walked all the way to the cave of Hypnos.

She went there mostly to pick poppies, whose flowers surrounded the quiet realm of the god of sleep.

The bright red blooms glowed from afar in the perpetual sunset, a bucolic image whose beauty was worthy of a painter’s canvas: a small tributary of the river Lethe was dancing between large boulders atop a rocky bed, surrounded by poppies, lavender and chamomile, and other soothing herbs, in the shadow of large linden trees, perpetually in bloom.

The fragrance surrounding the place, it had no match in existence, not even in the gardens of Olympus.

The flowers were always swarmed by bees, the goddess’s faithful companions, who built their hives in nearby tree hollows, which were dripping with melting wax, amber, and honey in the warmth of the sunset.

The softest grass grew on the banks of the stream, tall and bright green, so delicate its texture seemed unreal, and even its touch was barely felt under the fingers.

The little stream bubbled along its winding banks and entered the cave, getting lost in its depths.

She rushed home, crossing the bridge over the Acheron, past the elm of false dreams, through the mucky banks of the Vale of Mourning and the orchard to get home faster, so she had to stop and shake the pumice dust off her sandals before she entered the palace.

Hermes was waiting in the loggia overlooking the gardens, impatient, as always.

“Great! You’re here.”

“Good morning to you too, cousin.”

“Aha. Yeah. Listen. The cave of Cumae gets water in it every time there is a storm; it needs a new levee to fend off tidal flooding. And consolidation. That project had sat on the shelf way too long, if you ask me.”

“So, what’s the hold-up?”

“The Cumaean Sibyl thinks making any changes equals blaspheming Apollo. She barricaded herself in the cave and refuses to prophesy. She threatened to burn the last three books, too. To tell you the truth, I think it’s a shake-down. Greedy wretch’s demands for coin never cease.”

“Well, look on the bright side: she can’t burn them if they’re underwater. Not that it would be an improvement.”

“Don’t joke, cousin, it’s serious. The woman is on a mission.”

Hades is a water realm.

Surrounded by Oceanus, it’s crisscrossed by rivers and streams whose rash and unsettled currents can be heard in the background almost everywhere.

From the quiet Lethe meandering between boulders in Hypnos’s cave, careful not to awaken him, to the echoes of the Styx, muffled as it flows through underground caves, the sights and sounds of water are everywhere, sometimes soothing, sometimes unsettling.

The rushing waters of the underworld carved intricate stone tracery and painted the rocks in spectacular hues.

They flowed slowly through sleepy valleys only to abandon themselves suddenly to grand waterfalls, diving into bottomless chasms nobody ever dared explore.

The perpetual sunsets painted their watery curtains with rainbows, and sometimes, when the light hit them at just the right angle, it illuminated them from behind.

The fiery river Phlegethon crossed the real waters sometimes, and their mingling gave rise to sharp hisses and clouds of steam, and turned its incandescent lava first to embers, and then to black stone.

The placid river Lethe branched into a delta when it reached the land of dreams, seeping countless rivulets and streams through its open fields.

Those who’d been brought to Hades through the gate of the sun could be deceived they were still alive when they reached this familiar landscape, only to be set straight when it changed without warning, lulling them into rationalizations in order to deceive them again.

The spirits always found an explanation for why their world stopped making sense. Any explanation but the real one.

Persephone sneaked out into the gardens the next morning, grateful to have a few quiet moments to reconnect with her plant companions.

Everything had spirit in the Underworld, even the rocks and the streams, and her beloved trees were the goddess’s most trusted friends.

The poplars flittered in the twilight, their gold leaves shimmering in ways which would have gratified Demeter, who always thought her daughter’s attire too plain for a goddess and often urged the latter to show off her riches.

Persephone didn’t need to impress in the nether realms, where even the leaves of the trees in her garden were made of pure gold.

She grabbed a handful of the soil beneath her feet, picked out the glossiest onyx, obsidian and jet pebbles to place in her little knapsack and let the rest fall to the ground.

The muses had inspired her to create a mosaic that morning, and she was on a mission to pick the most colorful gemstones for its motifs.

She said goodbye to her mother at the mouth of the cave of Taenarum, crumbling under the weight of her sorrow and tears, and harboring guilt over feeling relieved when she finally stepped into its dark depths and its silence.

Hecate was supposed to meet her and lead the way, but Persephone had walked that path so many times she really didn’t need the dark goddess to guide her.

She grabbed a lit torch from the wall and started her descent, feeling a little spacey and out of reality, and wondered whether this is how all those postulants she appeared to in dreams must have felt.

The path looked the same as theirs too, something she had never noticed before, careful as she was not to fall behind Hecate’s quick stride. Everything was dark and quiet, so quiet. She’d forgotten how still the Underworld could be, compared to the world of the living, where the noise never ceased, not even in solitude.

The narrow path swept between large rock formations, who had been shaped and carved by underground streams, and their constant flow had covered them in rainbow layers of reds, ochres, blues and whites, almost like somebody had painted them on purpose.

The path was covered in soft silt. Persephone had to guess this narrow tunnel must have been a riverbed at some point, which now dried up. Its silky consistency cradled her feet without a sound, making her footsteps softer than those of a cat.

To say that everybody woke up the next day nursing a headache would be an understatement. The wine and the herbs left a parting gift - a vicious nausea, amplified to epic levels by the main part of the ceremony.

The Antleriai, the wailers, descended into the Megara pits, specially outfitted with snakes for the occasion, to retrieve decomposed pieces of the pig sacrifices, which were then placed on the altars to be blessed by the goddess, and then taken home, as they were believed to offer bounty and protection to the crops when buried in the fields.

The only silver lining of the previous day’s overindulgence was one couldn’t be sure anymore whether the smell of rotten meat was real or the result of a massive hangover.

Through the headaches and bleary-eyed confusion of the morning after, the celebrations continued, however, libations, dances, obscene language and all, and actually helped the participants feel better, because it provided them with a cure in the guise of the hair of the dog that bit them.

The third day was all about fertility, and honoring Kalligeneia, the goddess of childbirth, for protecting those in labor, nursing mothers and the well-being of their infants.

They never missed out on enlisting Demeter and Persephone’s help in the matter as well, since childbirth, the most perilous endeavor any woman would ever go through, and which cost so many their lives, needed all the help it could get.

A mournful song and the unmistakable scent of winter filled the mist the next morning, when the festival attendants woke up to an eerie landscape.

The meadow grasses were covered in a thin dusting of ice, and their dried flower heads, which the freezing rain had pounded relentlessly overnight, were encased in transparent globes of ice that acted like magnifying glass to enhance every detail of their intricate structures.

The most beautiful among them, the latest flowers of the season, had been caught by the sudden freeze while still at the peak of their bloom, and the icy shells displayed their half opened blossoms like works of art, like summer frozen in time, insulated by a magical crystal ball from the harshness of the dark season.

Towards the morning the cold and the rain gave way to a plushy fog, thick like soup, which caressed the frozen wonderland with ghostly fingers and muffled the sounds. The warmth melted the surfaces of the ice globes, making them glisten in the low light, and look polished like mirrors.

Nature was so quiet in the fog, a soft, comforting and unnatural silence which reminded Persephone of home.

“Have you prepared yourself, daughter? You have to set an example for all the married women: fast for nine days, refrain from the pleasures of the flesh and purify yourself to be worthy of the Goddess’s blessing.”

“Yes, mother. Although I find it a bit ironic that I need to prepare myself so I’d be worthy of my own blessing.”

“You are a role model, daughter. Everyone is looking to you for guidance. Among the Attic women, you should be the strictest follower of the ritual preparations.”

‘Shouldn’t be that hard,’ Persephone thought. ‘We only eat ambrosia, and I haven’t even seen my beloved in months. What is ambrosia made from, anyway? I hope it’s a proper lenten meal.’

“Have you chosen your pig, dear?” Demeter asked innocently, reminding her daughter of the unavoidable and loathsome drudgery of sacrificing some poor creature, which seemed to be mandatory for every celebration, be it of joy or of mourning.

“Why don’t you choose one for me, mother?” She smiled back, waiting for a snarky retort, but her mother was in a good mood, so she took her daughter’s bratty comment in stride.

“I wouldn’t dream of making choices for you. You’re a grown woman, mistress of your own fate. Just make sure to pick a fat one this time. The ladies seem to believe it makes a difference in the abundance of next year’s harvest.”

“Mother, aren’t we going the wrong way?” she asked Demeter when the ship left the shore and started following the sun due west instead of sailing towards the sunrise.

Demeter smiled, but said nothing.

“Where are we going?”

“Sicily.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see, the latter smiled in anticipation.”

Anthesphoria was a festival of flowers, and as such, dedicated to Persephone, or, more precisely, to her incarnation as the maiden, Kore.

The mind creates sophisticated models to get a grip on reality, abstract structures which are often personified to make it easier for it to relate to them.

These models may not make sense rationally, they are archetypal, and are useful in interpreting the world in the absence of knowledge.

They build stories to explain the unseen patterns of nature, which are experienced, but not understood.

The archetype of the Goddess kept shifting, depending on its symbolic meaning.

The delegation left early in the morning, poised to reach the shores of Magna Graecia at sunrise.

Everywhere else Persephone was just another goddess of the Pantheon, but in Locri, she was the goddess.

Two majestic temples were raised for her worship, and the city had bestowed upon her the additional honor of being the protector of childbirth, thus managing to intrude upon the attributions of both Hera and Artemis, and therefore offend them both.

Persephone tried to suppress a smile, and figured out if any of the lands of Hellas were going to have the gumption to question the gods, they had to be Locri.

The city had been founded by the Achaeans and was protected by Poseidon; its citizens were aristocratic and never backed down from a fight.

Their sophisticated, unbendable laws, and their appreciation for athletics, culture and the arts, were supported by the enviable wealth of their thriving commerce.

The women of Locri were very special to Persephone, who favored them as much as they did her.

They were independent and powerful, undaunted by their men’s ambitions, and they didn’t indulge the whims and demands of the latter.

They were masters and administrators of their own homes and wealth, acting like earthly goddesses in their own right, and so they didn’t aspire to gain the favor of Aphrodite, and her enchanted binds of desire, or Hera, the ideal obedient wife, or either one of the virgin goddesses, who had to forgo marriage in order to enjoy their freedom.

“Welcome back, daughter,” her mother greeted her, all smiles, at the mouth of the cave.

Persephone felt a little stiff from sleeping on the ground and still a little turned around after traveling back and forth twice between worlds within the boundaries of one night.

“I take it you had a pleasant journey home,” Demeter continued, way too cheerful so early in the morning. “How is your husband?”

“He’s well, thank you,” Persephone mumbled, squinting from the crude light.

“I take it your followers are still looking for you,” her mother pointed to the group, which meandered through the forest and valleys carrying torches in the middle of the day.

“I wouldn’t deprive them of the excitement of finding me, eventually. Let’s give them a few hours. I have a few things to tend to in the meantime.”

“Your husband gave you homework, dear?”

“No. It’s a favor I promised a friend. In fact, I was wondering if you’d be able to help. It’s a plant.”

“For Proteus.”

When you spend so much time switching between realities, whether it’s from death to life or from sleep to consciousness, you are bound to cross paths with the shapeshifting god of the unconscious, whose gift of prophecy and ability to alter the properties of matter were unmatched, even among the gods.

The communicants started their descent into the depths of the earth, with nothing to light their way other than the high priestess’s torch.

The latter was tall, and her pallid members stood in stark contrast with her long hair, black as night, which flowed freely and draped around her shoulders like a mantle, and the black chiton, tied around her waist three times with a thin golden girdle.

She wore a tri-faced mask, which wrapped around her head, hiding her identity, and on her temples, the silver horns of the crescent moon: the symbol of Hecate.

As they continued their descent, the trail became narrower, sweeping between large boulders, overgrown with tree roots in places, its quietude disrupted by the sounds of an underground river flowing nearby.

The supplicants’ faces looked carved in stone, they all look the same, as if their spirits have left them.

They seemed unaware of each other’s presence, their fixated stare darting into the darkness before them, as if something powerful inside it pulled them into its unknown depths, a ghostly army of the dead whose footsteps were muffled by the soft silt on the path.

All of them had partaken in the ceremonial drink, a hot wine mixed with herbs and spices which felt like liquid fire running through their blood, a paradoxically still fire, bringing peace beyond understanding.

Their spirits turned inward, leaving their earthly shells vacant and making them look as if they were sleepwalking down the path.

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home.

Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric.

Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to harmonize with it, an exquisite mirage, poised to fool the senses.

It looks solid and permanent enough, but it’s not, and if you touch it, it shrivels under your fingers like a mimosa plant, contracting into itself and letting you hold on to thin air.

Reality is made of nothing, just like dreams; it comes from nothing and has to return to it eventually, it just does it so much slower than the latter.

Persephone used the pretext she had to oversee the progress in the barley fields to take her leave from the city, which was bursting at the seams with crafting festival paraphernalia, cooking, and the stress people always experience on the eve of major holidays.

The city’s noise and bustle gradually disappeared as the goddess ventured into the fields, which had already been plowed and sown, and whose fresh shoots were starting to emerge, green and slender like grass.

The clearings and meadows overflowed with daffodils, and though the air was still cool, Persephone felt Gaia’s vibrant return to life.

The honeybees, her underworld messengers, emerged from crevices and hollows, to greet their mistress with the latest news from home.

She watched them dance their messages, smiling to old memories, intoxicated with the scent of daffodils and caressing the tiny shoots of wheat as if they were her little children, gathered round to bask in her presence.

Such blessed peace she felt in the fields, whose bounty filled her heart more than any offerings left on the steps of her altars.

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home.

Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric.

Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to harmonize with it, an exquisite mirage, poised to fool the senses.

It looks solid and permanent enough, but it’s not, and if you touch it, it shrivels under your fingers like a mimosa plant, contracting into itself and letting you hold on to thin air.

Reality is made of nothing, just like dreams; it comes from nothing and has to return to it eventually, it just does it so much slower than the latter.

“Good morning, princess!”

Dionysus entered the room, surrounded, as always, by a large posse of obviously impaired maenads and satyrs.

He never went anywhere without them, and sometimes Persephone wondered if he’d ever been alone.

Huge Etruscan amphorae filled with wine had been brought to the room for his visit, a welcome escape from the white on white decor, even though the god himself barely partook, since he drank nectar like the rest of them, to restore his beauty and youth.

Persephone admired his graceful demeanor as he approached her, a vaguely androgynous countenance, with long flowing hair, braided with wild vines, a beautiful figure who looked deceptively young, his gait as light and carefree as the spirit which shone, childlike, in his eyes.

He smiled at the goddess, who was close kin, and with whom he shared the gift of walking between worlds.

‘How did he keep so fit?’ Persephone couldn’t help but be amazed, ‘when he was constantly engaged in this self-indulgent lifestyle!’

It obviously took its toll on his entourage, the satyrs who, she assumed, had never experienced sobriety, and the maenads who roamed the forests drunk and out of control, acquiring the strength and ferocity of wild beasts from the substances they consumed.

It was almost midnight when the goddesses and their suite reached the temple, where they were welcomed in complete silence by the priests, who took them to the Thollos and retreated respectfully, content with the privilege of watching the ceremony.

Persephone parted the veil between worlds, allowing the denizens of her kingdom safe passage to the land of the living.

“Merry meet, Asclepius,” she welcomed the famed doctor with a smile.

“I carry glad tidings from your husband, mistress, and all his love. I will be happy to return and reassure him you are well.”

“What dreams you bring, my friend? Will the afflicted receive welcome news?”

“I bring healing for some, and comfort for others, and news from the ones they have loved in this world. The portal between worlds is open and we await your command, my queen.”

With that, he bowed deeply and moved to her side, to control the flow of healing dreams to the patients, who were fast asleep, curled up on the stone floors of the temple.

“Who is coming forth to seek guidance?” She uttered the first words of the ritual.

“It’s Attalus, goddess, son of Cassander.”

“And what is your need?”

The sleeping soul gave her the full measure of his ailments, while Asclepius listened keenly, occasionally nodding.

When the patient was done talking, the doctor thought deeply, then scribbled a recipe for medicine in light, on a parchment made of air, and handed it to the sleeping soul, to remember upon awakening.

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance.

A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the innards of the place, dug deep into the earth: the huge underground metropolis that marked the beating heart of Anatolia.

A large delegation welcomed the goddesses, with the traditional sheaves of grain and prolonged orations, and when it was done prostrating, the group surrounded them like living water and carried them down stairs and ramps through large subterranean chambers and hallways, past people carrying on their mundane activities, past carved galleries and alleys and arcades, public spaces and ventilation shafts, temples, tombs, and sanitation systems, stables and wells and water reservoirs, all the parts of a flawlessly functioning city, miles beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated only by Prometheus’s gift.

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her.

A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselves in the presence of the goddess.

A prolonged monotonous droning of odes and praise ensued, a spectacle Persephone listened to with patience and appreciation, like a good immortal would, secretly relieved when it finally ended and it was proper for her to get out of bed.

The darn thing was massive, placed atop of a stepped marble platform to loom over the also enormous room, which would have been a better fit for a ballroom than a bedroom, and whose glistening white portico opened out to the sights above the clouds.

Far into the distance, the peak of Mount Olympus poked through them, a vision in rose and lavender, halfway between dream and reality.

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother.

She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations of the powers that be, the gaudy, useless pomp, the empty rhetoric.

When tall, dark, and handsome walked her way, she had rolled her eyes at first, in exasperation of having to endure yet another episode of the over-inflated male ego, and was determined to evade his attention as soon as feasible and with as little damage to her eardrums as possible, but he turned out to be nothing she expected.

He didn’t tell her who he was, of course, out of fear he’d be rejected before he had a chance to speak his woo, and by the time they got closer, he had even more reason to keep his identity quiet, grateful for the miracle of her and worried not to lose her love.

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination.

Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times.

Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn’t share them with anybody, not without being scolded.

Throughout her childhood this imaginary world shared the landscape of her mind with the real one, and she allocated equal importance to the two to the dismay of her family and friends.

When time came for her to go to college, she shocked her loved ones by choosing a discipline deeply grounded in science, replete with experiments, fact finding and extensive research, a choice they had difficulty believing at first, used as they were to her wild flights of fancy.

Local: Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these.

My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we’re like the orange that falls off the side of a wagon and upsets every other fruit in its path. We get a sense of our surroundings based on immediacy and adjacency; we rush to the familiar to solve problems and favor the most recent things we did when we look for quick ways to tackle something new.

Our minds economize when they take in the world, we keep our trusted standards to the forefront of our thinking, so we don’t have to do any more of it than necessary.

We can only experience things that are available in our corner of the world. Just because something does not exist where we are, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in general.

Here is a simple example, we only know what snow looks like because we live here, where it gets cold in the winter. If we lived in Egypt, we could go through our entire lives with no knowledge of it. Everything that hasn’t dawned on us yet does not exist.
There may be states of being stranger than words, time crystals, solar winds, condensates of reality itself, but they are all unavailable to our perception, because we can’t live inside the conditions that define their worlds.

Fractal: A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern.

[This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed.

The large and very cold snowflakes signaled to us that the wind currents that made this strange weather event possible drew precipitation from the clouds in the higher atmosphere faster than they could adjust.

Snow in summer is rare, but it happened before in this area, as the weather records from 1816 indicate.

The snowflakes melted quickly, because of the heat embodied in the earth, but not before we had a chance to immortalize their delicate array of intricate shapes, no two alike.

Because this event was as short lived as it was unexpected, it didn’t affect the library grounds, which have been a haven for many rare species of historical plants for the last two centuries.

All the vegetation, from mosses to succulents and from herbaceous perennials to trees shrugged off the late chill, all but the ferns, whose fiddlehead growth will probably be delayed by a month.

The cool and humid weather encouraged the proliferation of snails, to the great distress of the groundskeeper and to our unexpected amusement.

Their shells dazzled in a broad variety of colors, patterns and shapes, which, for some strange reason, remind me of the illuminations of the manuscript.]

Scale: The relative size or extent of something.

The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can’t escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist.

The reason we don’t know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it.

We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves.

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.

[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.

This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.

The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.

The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down?

She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript.

Constant: A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions.

The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic.

Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants.

They are not fixed in the sense we normally understand that word, so things appear to us to be changing, even though in a larger sense they are not. There is a fine structure of constants underlying existence, a structure that governs it discretely and throughout.

For example, we can see every system in creation at a large scale, where we can measure its energy and its movement, and at a small scale, where we can define its essence.

These two values, the measure of its energy and the measure of its substance, are always in the same proportion, no matter what system you are contemplating.

This is not something reality makes obvious to us, from our standpoint all we see is matter, constantly decaying, recombining, bouncing into other instances of itself.

We can’t see the law behind its apparent chaos, the law that says that the energy of a system and its temperature are always relating to each other in the same way.

Constants like that are few, but together they are enough to define our reality, and if we were to alter even one, whatever we know of it would cease to exist. No need to worry, though, this is impossible.

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.

I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss.

I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night. There was something different about that early morning, a strange stillness, like all existence had come to a stop - no sounds in the branches, no gusts of wind, no calls.

I couldn’t feel the air against my skin, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. The light switched gradually from violet to gray, enough that I could distinguish the things around me, and be astonished even more by their strange stillness.

I sat on the ground, and I couldn’t feel the coldness of the earth beneath me, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. It didn’t feel like one usually expects, and you know exactly what I mean if you ever had to sleep on the ground.

Revelation: The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world.

The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding.

Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws.

Think about it.

We can only understand the things close to our scale, everything that is significantly larger or smaller is outside our grasp.

We can only see things that get revealed by the light, everything that is finer than the top if its range or coarser than its bottom is invisible to us.

If I were to move so fast that, as you blink, I shifted my position from this side of you to the other, your mind could not find a reasonable explanation, and would think me magical.

Faraway things may look real to us, when in fact they are just mirages of light.

You say that the mirage phenomenon is not foreign to our understanding, and that we all heard about the strange tricks eyes play on weary travelers when they’re lost in the desert, thirsty and exhausted.

Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.

Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between.

This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs.

It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can’t even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression.

It is often easier to recognize the shifts.

They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can’t figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can’t recognize it, for the simple reason we haven’t seen it before.

These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you’ve been caught in them.

Option: An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen

Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice.

Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body.

It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down things that are in the way of processes in progress and it keeps altering the states of its major systems until they reach a balance with each other.

There is an unseen simplifier to this process, one that runs quietly in the background and one we don’t pay attention to: reality is constantly eliminating all the outcomes of a set of circumstances safe one.

We don’t think about it because that would add an unnecessary amount of complexity to an already overburdened understanding of life.

Synapse: A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.

There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free.

Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as easily as breathing.

These free moving concepts are like rapping raindrops of knowledge on the roof of your mind.

There is no logic in this space between your mind and the ideas that are trying to reach it, not in the sense we usually understand it. In this space all the forms that human thought creates are equal and stripped of moral charges.

It is a place where ideas move constantly at great speeds and bind in amalgams that only last fractions of a second, but in their endless morphing all these ideas are valid, at least temporarily, and they function as scaffolding in the construction of your lasting thoughts.

Sympathetic: Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere.

Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric.

Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image.

Never can these shadows and reflections act independently from the object that generated them.

Unlike reflections and shadows however, these pairings of events work both ways, like they are both the objects and they are both their mirror images too.

These reflections are random and inexplicable, not bound by logic or causality, they just exist randomly in the fabric of reality and pop up for no reason now and then as a reminder that we understand very few of the rules that govern existence.

Imagine walking down a sumptuous hall where everything fits into the design and is in harmony with its proportions, color and style.

Concentration: The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one’s attention on mental work.

You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop.

Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium to extract the essence blended inside it.

Let me help you understand how you can concentrate and direct your mind so you can extract its essence in a similar way.

Whether we are awake or asleep, our mind never stops churning.

We buckle under the weight of our thoughts, most of which are incidental and contradictory.

Like the alchemist who distills the essence of a thousand roses into a single drop of perfume, so should you be able to remove the bulk around the core of your ideas to refine their content.

The theory of how to do this is simple, the practice not so much. The mind is like a scared little rabbit, constantly on the run, alert to the slightest noise, disturbed by the faintest memory. It never stops building defenses around itself and consumes enormous amounts of resources in the process.

Derivative: An expression representing the rate of change of a function with respect to an independent variable.

Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement.

Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variability. Imagine the collection of all of these games as threads, clusters, and fabrics. These threads of things happening, let’s say, are not even, they display changes in speed; they have lumps and thinnings; they stop and change direction, they soar, plummet or disappear. Their changes imprint a secondary metric into our world, a measure of variability, a smoothing over of its irregular nature. These measures show trends and directions, they clean the world of detail to reveal only the impulses of motion. They are diagrams of change.

Take, for instance, the line of highest slope. The water always follows it when it flows down the hill. Or the line of lowest slope. A donkey will always find it when it carries burdens up the hill. These lines are not obvious, they are abstract measurements of the change in incline and they only become visible when the water, or the donkey, reveals their existence.

You will say to yourself that it is not reasonable to guide yourself by the wisdom of lesser things, and that is a vanity of human thought, which deems itself the arbiter of things only because it gathered a few droplets from an infinite sea of knowledge constantly refreshing itself.

Precursor: A substance from which another is formed, especially by metabolic reaction

You can think of precursors as the ancestors of an event. Everything that is has evolved from something else, which also evolved from something else. The universe is a giant chain reaction still in progress. What you are looking at right now is a step in a very complicated sequence of transformations that started at the beginning of time.

I am not talking only about matter itself, which is a good example, but about everything: events, concepts, physical laws.

Every happenstance is born from the interaction of a series of factors, its precursors.

Change one of those factors and its structure becomes fundamentally different.

Good students of the laws that govern existence don’t limit themselves to observing these interactions, they understand and anticipate the results of the reaction, and, if possible, they seek the elements which, mixed, will yield the results they desire.

These elements can be anything: the right timing, a certain level of need or curiosity, spreading the word, the right state of mind.

Everything is a reactant in your alchemical cauldron, the world itself is your laboratory.

Current: A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement

We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid.

Underneath the surface of this endless sea that is reality, a sea with deep, perpetually troubled waters, there are currents and eddies and vortexes.

They manifest in every one of its components, there are currents in social mores, which we call zeitgeist, there are currents in thought, which we call schools, there are currents in spiritual life, which we call religions.

Under normal circumstances we accept these currents without thinking, just as we don’t wonder why blood is running through our veins, but once they draw our attention, they become impossible to ignore, so much that they can be distracting.

Timing: The choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done.

Don’t mistake timing for scheduling, or planning.

It is difficult to explain what timing is, some things are easier to demonstrate than to describe.

You have already encountered timing, and you take it for granted, because it is woven into the fabric of reality and occurs naturally in all the processes that work well.

Its most obvious use is in music, which would not come together without tempos, measures, and counterpoints. Their planned pauses build anticipation and lead to the moment when one expects to hear the sound.

We accomplish a lot of this instinctively, of course, but the fact that everybody understands the purpose of those rhythms reveals that timing is built into our being, very much like our senses are.

Timing is the mental sense that helps us both create and pay attention to synchronicity, and it organizes the timeline of an event in the same way placement cards predetermine the seating of guests at a dinner table.

Folding: Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers another.

Today we will talk about folds. The purpose of folding is to minimize the surface of a thin flat object for better storage or transportation. Just like a tablecloth, all things that get folded will display distinguishable characteristics: grooves, lack of wear, wrinkles.

We fold memories in our minds for many reasons, to free up space, to obscure things we don’t need all the time, to conceal unpleasant memories. We wrap this knowledge with great care, mark it with the contents, minimize its conscious footprint to just that marker so we can retrieve it at will, and submerge the rest of the packet into long-term storage, deep beneath our thoughts. There is an entire world of these mental artifacts under there, all labeled, a strange collection of treasure and garbage.

Every now and then we accidentally stumble upon one of these labels and the respective fold suddenly unfurls, spilling its guts into its surroundings and disrupting current activities.

Cycles: Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.

Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not.

Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while.

This happens because existence is motion, stillness means death to our universe.

Anyway, about the cycles.

If you watch a phenomenon long enough, you notice that it starts displaying repetitive patterns, a fact that shows in all the workings of life.

Some of these repeating patterns take too long to yield useful information, but if your life span allows you to observe a phenomenon enough times, you can perfect your response to it and better your odds of success in tackling its challenges.

Training a skill, weather prognostication, sailing by the stars, these are all examples of using recognizable repetitions as instruments that allow you to engage in conscious interaction with events instead of randomly reacting to them.

Your ability to read cycles is a tool, just like the quill you write with is a tool.

Layer: A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body

Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities.

This creates a lot of confusion as life’s level of complexity increases.

You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current events, temporary priorities or invisible puzzle pieces coming into play, but never forget that all the layers of your life are always there, and just like in a set of plans, making changes on one layer has consequences in all the others.

I know, I know, after a while this living layer set gets so complicated you’ll want to throw it away and start over with a blank sheet.

Rejoice! This means you’re finally doing something worthwhile.

All the things that matter, all the things that are consequential in the long run are always complicated.

The really consequential ones are usually too complicated to tackle alone.

storytelling #audiobooks

Megapuzzle:

A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledge

To start your instruction, what is life?

Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can’t see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do.

The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the pieces they can see, no wonder nobody ever figures things out.

When architects design a building, they draw plans. Flat sheets of paper on which they describe what you can see at a certain level. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a building out of floor plans, like a finger thin stack of pancakes smothering each other. It is implied that things happen between those levels, things that are not described in the plans.

Beloved,

I don’t know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I’ll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder.

I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all immortal, our kind, we never leave, we never die, we stay behind the ebbs and flows of the world to keep watch, to guide and to listen.

I was born before the rise of the cathedrals, before the monuments of Egypt, before the age of reason. I was born many times, in many forms, although I’m sentimental and often return to a variation of my current one, and I will be born again some day, many centuries from now, as you. It is to you that I write this letter, my guidance for your life, filled with undying love and all the wisdom I accumulated over my many lives of learning.

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so.

We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which they often do not, and since I'm talking to people long dead anyway, I became an anthropologist.

It is a solitary journey during which you're always surrounded by a crowd, always submerged in its beliefs and convictions, to the point where they drown you out.

People who even entertain the thought mediumship may be possible, and who don't drop me immediately in the crazy or deluded category, often ask, what is the point of speaking to the dead?

What is the point of speaking to anyone, really?

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless?

My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way.

The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used to.

The ocean air carries a lot of moisture to the islands, which traps warm air under its cloud cover, but tonight there were no clouds, and the sky was full of stars, which felt close enough to touch, and looked so brilliant.

We can no longer imagine a sky so bright with stars that even on a dark moon it illuminates the earth enough to see its every detail, cast in cool hues.

I looked at Denise and almost didn’t recognize her: she had a light blue halo in her hair, and her demeanor was so serious it made her look wise beyond her years.

While listening to a lecture on postmodernism and influence, a sudden recognition stunned me.

Of course there are no new stories! Of course everything we think, regardless of our erudition or awareness, has been thought many times before!

We all wade blindfolded through the endless pool of knowledge that is the collective unconscious, fishing out random revelations.

The human brain is not sophisticated enough to fathom the structure of this giant repository, but that structure must exist, as it is fitting for something this complex.

Its organization is discrete and too close to be perceived as a whole, but acts with the cohesiveness of waves or prevailing winds.

Sometimes the river of thought flows through rapids, smothering the new born consciousness with the many faces of reality, so rich and thick with meaning you don’t even know if they’re yours, if they even relate to you, if they even exist, whether existence is something tangible, something whose presence you can guarantee tomorrow in this ever shifting unfolding of meaning that surrounds us.

I am confounded and awed, and somewhat eager to alter its course to reach the lazy river made of sunshine and cozy afternoons where time slows down enough to give us comfort, where reality feels solid again, as if it had never changed. So many thoughts, so many people, conflicting interests intruding upon my life, I don’t even know you, go away! Who are you? Something inside my consciousness asks, and I can’t be sure it’s me, if there is such a thing.

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless?

My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way.

The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used to.

The ocean air carries a lot of moisture to the islands, which traps warm air under its cloud cover, but tonight there were no clouds, and the sky was full of stars, which felt close enough to touch, and looked so brilliant.

We can no longer imagine a sky so bright with stars that even on a dark moon it illuminates the earth enough to see its every detail, cast in cool hues.

I looked at Denise and almost didn’t recognize her: she had a light blue halo in her hair, and her demeanor was so serious it made her look wise beyond her years.

I always thought my life would be like the novels I liked to read when I was a teenager, where the heroine’s life was a constantly unfolding drama, replete with emotionally charged moments and anchored in the importance of her actions, where every meaningful event was anticipated well in advance and everything turned out more or less as planned.

Finding you was supposed to be a glorious professional moment, and I daydreamed of basking in the glory of compliments and approval, and savoring the pith of a prestigious career which would be undeniably earned.

And then I found you.

There is nothing more disorienting than a dream come true: all your struggles, your planning, your entire focus, is thus brought to its end.

Nobody thinks through what they want to do with that fulfilled dream, because unconsciously we don’t believe it would happen.

It never looks like you planned. It feels so alien from your cherished vision you can barely recognize it and it changes you, in ways opposite from what you’d expect. It opens you to the sudden revelation you do not know what you’re doing, and you didn’t when you were sure of your goals either, and the terrifying clarity that life is not what you thought.

There is an entire obscure half to life, one we avoid, forget, overlook.

You can’t overlook it in the northern realms, not during winter, when the nights are long, and where people sought refuge underground to escape the harshness of the weather for centuries.

The dark half of the year, finding refuge in the earth, embracing stillness, these customs have been abandoned a long time ago, and because they became unfamiliar, they make us apprehensive.

There is power in this dark half we avoid; it has its own laws, its creations, its wealth of stories told by the fire during the months when there is nothing to do other than cozy up and wait for the sun to return.

The dark is the keeper of stories, songs, and magic. It is the place and time for contemplation and refining thought. It affords freedom from distraction and a cocoon inside which one can turn one’s gaze inwards.

Magic and mystery thrive in the dark half of life, because the latter is endlessly patient, focused and unswayed.

Refined thought requires silence and solitude, while wisdom is gained away from distractions.

Night falls quickly in Orkney at the end of October, and we drove quietly past the lochs and the stones to reach the Storytelling Centre, braving a bone chilling rain that promised to turn into ice soon.

We advanced through the darkness in silence, lulled by the rhythmic motion of the windshield wipers, like the last two people on earth, who reached the limits of their familiar realm and dared to venture into uncharted territory.

After a while we lost track of time and distance, immersed in an inky darkness whose substance was uniform, unmeasurable, and thicker than molasses, and which closed behind us as we passed through it, like the depths of the sea.

The passing of time is a measure of change, and it does not apply to a medium that stays the same, which shows no sign of differentiation or movement.

In the blackness of that night we were outside of time itself, traveling to another dimension maybe, I couldn’t tell.

The sunshine was warm and hazy at the equinox, brushing the grassy knolls and the tops of the stones and sparkling on the lochs.

I know you’ve been here so many times, Fiona, that’s probably why I can’t keep away from this place, and here I am again, at the Stones of Stenness, waiting for the equinox like I’m expecting something to happen.

Spend enough time at sacred sites and you start believing in their magic.

There is a still power in the stones, subtle, like tides, which quietly overtakes you before you take notice, and you find yourself immersed in it, dazzled and bowing to its authority.

You came here at sunrise, with Jorunn, carrying baskets of honey cakes and root vegetables, hoping to entreat the spirit of Orkney and appease the wrath of Gore Vellye, whose fury strips the land bare and disappears whole islands.

It’s cold already, and you are walking against the wind, wrapping the warm furs tight around your body to keep out the chill.

Jorunn walks behind you, respectful, and it takes a moment for me to understand when did this role reversal happened, and then I see the signet ring on your finger, your symbol of authority. You are no longer a person, Fiona; you are the seat of power, a keeper of the royal blood your mentor took an oath to honor and defend with her life.

The clashing of swords was overwhelming, the sky filled with dirt and thunderheads. There I saw them in the lightning, riding their winged horses with their hair in the wind.

In the middle of the battle I saw you too, Fiona, and couldn’t recognize you, as you rode across the field looking very much their equal, cutting a wide path through the enemy troops like a scythe through high grass, with far-reaching, terrifying sway, looking ageless like an idol, and just like it unable to feel sorrow, anger, or hurt.

Your face still lingers in my memory: although it looked young, your eyes were wise and hard, just like Jorunn's. Even in death, she was with you, her courage, strength and fearlessness watching over you.

We have been blest to live in peaceful times, and never experience such a scene, not to mention take part in it, and it was so shocking and terrifying to me I can’t draw breath, Fiona, to see a child like you bear down on the battlefield swinging that giant sword of yours that looked too heavy to lift, like a vengeful angel riding a horse of fire.

I spent some time on the pier after our parents left, watching the cruise ship get smaller and smaller into the horizon until I could barely make out its contours.

Denise sat by my side with uncharacteristic patience and said nothing.

I didn’t realize how different I was here until my old life visited, and brought all of its patterns and details with it, but I am two people, Fiona. Two people, with two different families, lives and interests, hundreds of years apart.

They coexist in perfect harmony, barely touching each other, my lives, and neither one can relate to the other, and I’m content with that. I have been since I can remember.

These visions of you that scream loud from my blood have an existence of their own, coherent and continuous, a true story, or history, that could have happened, and that makes sense.

There is an extraordinary emotional purity in the stories you unfold before my eyes, even in the face of unspeakable cruelty and such little worth assigned to human life: there is pure untarnished joy, and lightness of being, and the willingness to offer oneself, to give all of oneself, to an ideal.

Orkney takes great care to protect her ancient treasures and history: they are revealed, not discovered, and usually only when she allows it.

Violent storms have uncovered many of the old sites, stripping away the topsoil and vegetation to expose millennium-old constructions that had been sleeping beneath the ground.

I wanted to show mom and dad the enchanting beauty of the islands and figured going to Sanday together to explore its wild nature would be the perfect way to do it.

Protests emerged immediately and subsided just as quickly when I explained the island was part of my research, since it is the site of an important Viking burial site.

In truth, it was the incredible beauty of nature, rather than the workings of man, that called me there.

Concealed by the rocky hills near the ferry dock, Doun Helzie is a place that time seems to have forgotten, with its lengthy stretches of beach hugged by pristine waters, a mesmerizingly blue color, almost glowing against the snow-white sands.

As the ferry approached Kirkwall, I saw them from afar, waiting on the dock with bright smiles on their faces.

“Guess who’s here?” I nudged Denise.

“No!”

“Oh, yes.”

“They don’t trust either of us, I take it. At least we’re dining in style tonight.”

“Do you ever think of anything other than food?”

“Not right now, no.”

“My beautiful daughters,” dad embraced us effusively. “This is how much effort a parent needs to do to get any news from his children.”

“Leave some for me too,” mom interjected, waiting her turn for a hug. “Are you eating well? You look thin.”

“Which one of us?” I asked, hopeful.

“Never you mind! Let me look at you! Oh, my God! You’re so tan!”

“We spend a lot of time outdoors,” I explained.

“And flourishing! Orkney suits you. This place is beautiful, you must take us everywhere! I want to see the cairns.”

“Rose, you know we’re not staying long. We’re on a cruise. If you can believe it, your mother convinced me.”

‘I’m sure she did,’ I thought. ‘And one that stops in Scotland, no less.’

We celebrated the white nights in the streets of Kirkwall, so filled with music and laughter, and I played my ballad, as promised, encouraged by an accommodating and enthusiastic audience.

Denise was bursting with pride and kept urging me to put on another show in Eau Claire when we arrived back home, and wouldn't let up until I said yes.

I felt guilty in the morning for having so much fun and neglecting my studies, and thought I should take the papers I had begun to see in my dreams back to the Heritage Society and see if I could find more.

The council members were busy organizing the yearly trip to Eynhallow.

Every time I think I learned the ways of Orkney it surprises me again. Listen, kindred, listen and learn, for I’ll tell you the story of the Holy Isle.

Eynhallow is the tiny heart of the archipelago, tantalizingly close to the mainland, always in sight but rarely accessible, even though it lies a mere five hundred feet from the shore.

I was lucky to have Denise with me, otherwise my Maeshowe experience would have held me back, Fiona, because the cairn of Cuween was much smaller, much darker, much more ominous, as it is fitting for a fairy knowe inhabited by spirits from a non-human realm.

The experience of entering the earth is only romantic in theory.

In practice it involves a lot of hyperventilation, scraped elbows and knees, controlled panic attacks and a feral drive to get out of there as quickly as possible.

We didn’t bend over; we crawled in, against my every survival instinct, we crawled into the darkness of the earth, tightly cradled by corbelled stone slabs supporting what I can only guess was crushing weight from the dirt mound above, with barely enough space to turn around, careful not to bang our heads on the sharp stone edges.

A strange elation overcame me, not panic, rather excited trepidation, the anticipation of an unusual journey outside normal reality, a visit to the realm of the dead.

It’s not a physical journey one engages in here, I understood somehow; the constraints are intentional, the tight straightjacket made of stone is supposed to restrain all the movements we take for granted, and the dark silent space dampens the senses too. How else are you to understand the stillness of the body in death, what it’s like to exist in a state that no longer allows for the perks of the living?

We are social creatures, and we don't want to stand out, so we will give up almost anything just to be accepted and partake of the huge game that is society and master its many levels.

We’re not all that different, my sister and I: while she pretends not to experience things she can’t explain, I keep mine to myself, neatly placed in their appropriate containers, lest they risk contaminating my very rational and scientific mind.

I store them in the area of my mind that has to do with spirituality, the mysterious, which we researchers like to talk about but don't really take seriously.

The same area which houses the intriguing article you read last week at the airport while waiting for the plane to board.

It tested the limits of what a reasonable person is allowed to believe, which was a bit daring for a scientific article, and that was exciting, like a guilty pleasure, but not as consequential as the tangible laws that explain why an aircraft can fly, or the extensive studies you did for your own paper, which you’re about to present upon arrival at your destination.

I didn’t want to wake Denise the next morning, between the beer and the late night I knew she’d be in a rotten mood if she didn’t get her beauty sleep, so I snuck out as quietly as I could, to get a cup of coffee.

The streets were already filled with music and dancing and the rhythms of the drums, the festival atmosphere rushed me in the middle of the street, and carried me along with it, even a recluse like me.

Life unfolded in all its joy, Fiona, and it looked so effortless, as if all its tribulations and cares were nothing but another performance at the festival.

I had a sudden insight into the lightness of being, which my sister seems to understand so well: you just don’t think about it, you get up, go out and live, that’s it. No expectations, no reservations, no past.

I always thought of living in the now as some sort of gimmick people who have no plans like to pass for life philosophy, and I’m a little embarrassed by that now, when the collective life of Kirkwall flows through me, making me part of everything.

The rhythm of the drums induced some sort of trance, muffling the other sounds and sharpening my hearing and I got a little lightheaded from the bright light and the sounds, so I grabbed an outdoor table at the corner cafe, ordered an espresso and closed my eyes to clear my head.

The green meadow was quiet. There was a large crowd present, but no one made a sound, standing on the grass in a circle, in the light of the torches, waiting.

You are standing in the middle, wearing the white dress with green ribbons, and you have fragrant white flowers and green ribbons in your hair, very thin ribbons which make it look like that of a non-human creature, like an undine or a selkie.

Your mentor waits for you by the tallest stone, standing poised for the ceremony, and all your council is in attendance, dressed in festive attire and donning wild flower garlands.

Is this your wedding, Fiona? I can’t see the groom, they’re all women. Some rite of passage, maybe?

You walk across the circle of grass with slow ceremonial steps, as if in a trance, your eyes affixed on the top of the tallest stone, perfectly aligned with the moonrise of the solstice, and only then I realize it must be night, but it’s still daylight, and although the giant moon already rose above the stone, casting its long shadow towards you, the sun is shining too, casting your shadow towards it.

The two shadows met, and you walked inside their joint corridor of darkness, while young girls in white dresses threw flowers at your feet.

I always see your hair braided, Fiona, and I didn’t realize how long it was. It is let down now, and trails behind you like a train.

You walk alone, barefoot on the path of grass and flowers, while the moon rises quickly in the sky, and the sun finally goes to rest, and daylight dims to twilight, but not really darkness, because the moon is so huge and so close it bathes everything in its silver light.

I had promised Denise I’d come to all the rehearsals, not knowing how many they were going to have. Three hours in, watching the same performance fragments over and over, I was on the verge of losing my mind, and my bum was numb from sitting on stone.

“How much practice could you possibly need for an improv performance?”

“That shows how much you know about theater,” Denise commented, annoyed by the interruption, and turned around to face the cast. “Let’s take it from the beginning of the dance again.”

Oh, God, I don’t think I can take another repetition of this dance.

“I know what you’re thinking, Ethel.” My sister hissed at me through her labored breath. “If you have no appreciation for the arts, why don’t you prop up that boulder? It’s about to fall.”

‘Fall where?’ I thought, bewildered. We were in the middle of the street, and everything rested securely on its stone pavers.

My sister ignored me and started her dance again, a very agitated choreography set on absolute silence, which was supposed to engender the emotional waves of a Wagnerian opera, but with no sound at all.

I couldn’t sleep, and neither could Denise. The sun woke us up when I had barely slept three hours. As for Denise, she had made up her sleep deficit during the day and now was sharp as a tack.

We drove to the stones of Stenness with the rosy glow of dawn behind us. The midnight sun bathed our shoulders and put haloes around our hair, and when we got out of the car in the middle of the wilderness, it compelled our silence.

We walked in silence for a while through this fantastic landscape, where the stones felt like a natural land feature, like they’ve been there forever, carved by the storms and the winds.

“Come on, Ethel! Not fun being old, eh?”

I was born two years before Denise, a detail she never forgets to highlight when she deems it relevant.

“See you in two years, Denise. I’ll remember to ask you then.”

“This is awesome!” My sister started running up the gentle slope, twirling and dancing like an ancient priestess entranced by her deity, charged by the monoliths. “I am the goddess of Stenness! I bid glad tidings to all the little people.”

She looked it too, a young goddess, one with the land, dancing with the grace of a willow branch.

“Dance, Betty Lou! Don’t be a stick in the mud! Dance with me!”

I wondered if there was any sort of protocol when talking to ghosts. Is one allowed to call on them? Or is that considered too forward and one should wait to be acknowledged first?

It seems rather rude to disturb the peace of an entity without the consent of the latter, especially when their home base is always overrun with people.

Denise adamantly disagreed, saying Mr. Sinclair obviously enjoyed the company of the living and he’d be really disappointed to find out we came to the cathedral and didn’t bother to call.

Unfortunately for my sister, our friendly guide seemed to be otherwise engaged; besides, the church was filled with the living, anyway.

I’d stopped keeping track of the calendar in Kirkwall, my independent research schedule didn’t seem to find any usefulness for it and didn’t realize we had come to the cathedral on a Sunday.

The service was almost over when we arrived, and we slid into one of the pews as quietly as possible, careful not to disturb the ceremony.

The familiar chants lulled me into a soft reverie as my eyes wondered, taking in the austere details of the Romanesque architecture, and I was startled when the soft voice behind me, a voice rather recognizable now, whispered from very close by, “I told you, young lady: second pillar on the right.”

Upon returning from Birsay the following morning, I found Denise sleeping across the doorway.

“You forgot to leave a key,” she looked at me cross, but relieved I returned before it started raining.

“The landlady could have let you in. Why didn’t you ask her?”

“She’s out of town. How was your trip?”

“Uneventful,” I didn’t elaborate. How was I to tell her that, cliche as it sounds, my journey to Birsay had been more interesting than arriving at the destination? Once there, I couldn’t think of things to do, walked around for a couple of hours and headed back. “How was your day? Did you have fun with your friends?”

“And then some! Do you know people think your Fiona called out to you so you can find her bones and lay her to rest? They think you are a white lady who walks between worlds. Neil said that if you go to the Maeshowe cairn during solstice, she’ll talk to you then.”

I didn’t mention seeing Fiona when I visited Maeshowe, not to my sister, not to anyone else. Except the young man, the tour guide who dragged me out of there before I made a total fool of myself, nobody paid enough attention to notice anything unusual.

It wouldn’t have been Denise if she didn’t change our plans at the last minute, based on the schedules of her new friends. Two days she’d been in a foreign country where she didn’t know a soul and she already made friends, promised to help them set up the stage for their Avant-Garde play and left me flopping in the wind.

Strange how one can still get distressed over being excluded when one left home for a solitary pursuit and went far away from the familiar places and people in order to find oneself.

I put on my best face for Denise’s benefit, and picked a destination to give her, annoyed more by my own reaction than my sister’s predictably harebrained schedule and arbitrary choice of activities.

“Are you sure you’re not mad at me?” She gave me her loveliest smile, attached to a guilty cat's gaze. “Promise me you’re not mad at me, Louise! I hate the thought of leaving you here all by yourself.”

She only called me Louise when she wanted to get on my good side.

“Denise, you weren’t supposed to come here in the first place. I’ve been here alone for months now, remember? I have work. And plans.”

“Ok, if you say so.”

She headed for the door, then changed her mind.

“You know, you could still come with us! I’m sure everyone would love to meet you and they could use another pair of hands.”

“Thanks. Pass.”

“Ok. Just call if you change your mind.”

“Denise! Go!”

My sister surprised me and came to Kirkwall two weeks early, loaded with goodies from home like a female Santa Claus, to help me get in the spirit of the festival, she said, although it’s more likely mom sent her to check up on me and provide her with the precious details she thinks I don’t want to share.

“Where is my instrument, Denise?”

“Oh,” she mocked. “You wanted that? Won’t your dead crush disapprove of such frivolities?”

I see you dancing around the fire, Fiona, giddy like a child, and carefree. What on earth gave you that lightness of being when your life was so dark and perilous?

“No,” I replied. “No, she would not. Give!”

She reached into her duffle bag and pulled out my ukulele by the sound hole, all tangled up in a knotted mess of cables and undergarments that instantly elevated my blood pressure.

“How could you shove it in your bag like that? It’s a miracle it got here in one piece! I’m starting to remember why I never let you touch my stuff!”

“Relax, it’s a ukulele, not the Holy Grail,” she faked giving it to me and quickly pulled it back. “You don’t get it unless you promise me you’ll play it at the festival.”

“Denise, I only know ‘Over the Rainbow’ and I’m not playing that.”

You get mixed up in stories and legends and soon you can’t distinguish them from facts anymore, because history and legend are uninterrupted threads twining through the fabric of time, and the events’ meanings connect across centuries, as if they are all a part of a greater whole we could see if we lived long enough. How long is long enough, Fiona? Although I shouldn’t ask you, should I?

In all the times I dreamt of you, I’ve never seen you old, my princess. I can’t see past that fateful day whose menace prompted you to pack all your power and will inside a gull and set it free. You looked so young it broke my heart, but I don’t think you died that day. In fact, I think you never died at all.

Hodr of the mail coat lets the halter of the arm hang on my hawk-trodden hawk-gallows;

I know how to make the pin-string of the shield-tormentor ride the gallows of the spear-storm.

The feeder of the battle-hawk enjoys the greater praise.

The florid poetry of your ancestors reverberates in the halls of the Gods, making you smile across centuries, fair child of Norway. What are you smiling about? What is it you’re not telling me?

I stopped by the church yesterday and the mystery of the black tombstones was explained: the graveyard experienced a massive fire, yet the church was unharmed, not even a speck of smoke or soot.

I bet you’d be asking yourself right now, Fiona, how does one set stone on fire, and you’d be right. The priest couldn’t explain it either, hence the miracle designation of the phenomenon. It happened so long ago no written records of it remained, and oral history can be very imaginative in these parts. It’s hard to separate truth from fantasy after all these centuries.

I’ll make a record of my notes and organize them later, I don't want to forget the stories I heard, which, although they may be unbelievable to most, are still too fascinating to ignore.

Legend has it a beautiful young maiden, which strangely matches your description, used to sneak out at night and come to the cemetery to meet her beloved. The affair went on for years, and the maiden’s parents started to worry when she turned away every suitor that knocked on their door. Why, she was turning twenty and she was already an old maid, right, Fiona?

It feels like everything in Orkney is made of stone, meant to last forever, and that includes the old stonework of Saint Magnus’ Cathedral.

The structure is Romanesque, and austere, with heavy, sturdy pillars built of red sandstone masonry, the kind it takes four people to surround, a strange stone forest again, built by the hands of men.

I returned to the cathedral because the heritage society documents suggested it housed more human remains than that of the saint, and when I saw you playing with the bones, Fiona, I thought this could lead to new revelations.

The most remarkable feats of humanity often come from its most wicked inclinations, and these triumphs start with bloodshed and sorrow, but life is brief, and so soon these tragedies are forgotten.

Betrayal, martyrdom, assassination, lust for power and wars, all the things that governed the lives of people in those older times, seem trite and insignificant when viewed through the lens of history, but the cathedral still stands, now aged nine hundred years.

And the Cairn of Maeshowe.

And the Ring of Brodgar.

And the happy underground homes of Skara Brae.

You sent me a dream when I was a child, Fiona, one of those weird dreams you don’t share, especially at that age, when nothing matters to you in the world, other than pleasing your parents.

I couldn’t forget it, though, like I can’t forget any of my other dreams about you. Those dreams, they feel so real! So real! Like a second life unfolding, independent of this one.

In the dream, I saw you standing in front of a green mound, smiling; it was summer, and you wore a white dress, held around your body with green ribbons. You had ribbons and flowers in your hair as well, and a torch, lit in the middle of the day, and I couldn’t help laugh at the absurdity of illuminating daylight, but you didn’t get upset, you smiled and signaled me with your other hand to follow.

You turned around, and I followed, and as I did, I saw you were dead, merely a skeleton wrapped in leathery skin, but somehow I felt loved more than I ever did in my life before and since, and realized I didn’t care, you didn’t scare me in that state, and strange as it may sound, you were still beautiful.

The four-day festival was approaching the end, and after my friend’s departure I figured I’d better head back to Kirkwall and see if I can find more puzzle pieces for my study, but I just couldn’t face the stones again. Not yet.

I headed north instead, not really sure about the destination, and followed the road until it reached the shore.

Living on an island offers one the unique experience of being bound by a circular water line: no matter what direction you travel in, you are soon stopped by the edge of the sea.

This makes some people feel closed in, in ways that start wearing on them as time passes, but for the true lovers of island living there is no greater comfort than the sight of the sea, and its effortless proximity always puts them at ease.

The sea gives life, and it takes it. Brings riches and bounty, reveals and conceals what it chooses and keeps jealous guard over her secrets.

For four thousand years the village of Skara Brae was just another green bluff battered by the whims of the sea, until 1850, when a deadly storm stripped the grass and the topsoil off the ruins of a stone settling, perfectly preserved by the sand for millennia, a time capsule of Neolithic living.

”You shouldn’t leave Stromness before you visit Hoy,” the lady at the front desk suggested with a motherly demeanor which tried to restore my sunny outlook on life, now sunk by the sudden circumstance through which I found myself alone again.

She smiled encouragingly, and pointed towards the pier, to the approaching ferry.

“Hurry up, now. If you rush, you can get there before it leaves.”

She nodded approvingly in response to my befuddled expression, and I obeyed her suggestion without too much mental struggle.

There were only a few people on the ferry, braving a fog so thick the contours of Graemsay Island, which we almost brushed on our way to Hoy, were barely visible.

As I entered the mist, the world as I knew it stayed behind: its joys and its pains, the music and the laughter, the plans and dreams. A different place awaited at the end of the fog, and the other travelers, veiled in the mist, looked like shadows, sharing a ride with me in Charon’s boat to the island of the dead.

This realm beyond the mists you approach in silence.

Nobody talked.

We walked quietly, a distance from each other, to respect our solitary retreat, instinctively following in each other’s footsteps along the wooden path snaking through the eerie wilderness towards the giant monolith of Dwarfie Stane.

Life looked a lot cruder in the harsh light of the morning, even though the festival performances continued through the day, and the city was bathed in the unmistakable humid scent of spring.

I met my new friend in the lobby and we walked through the narrow streets, sometimes so narrow a person could barely pass through, braving the rain and listening to the music in silence, like an understanding between us, and ended up huddled at the cafe on the pier, hungry and tired, looking forward to a toasty sandwich and a hot cup of coffee.

“So, you’re not going to ask?” she said, eventually.

“I wouldn’t know what,” I replied, still awkward about hijacking a perfect stranger’s time to satisfy my curiosity.

“What do you know about the stones?”

I started reciting the historical and anthropological data and the scientific opinions regarding the details of the sites, and she stopped me with a curt hand gesture.

“No. Not that. What did the stones tell you when you were there?”

I stopped, not knowing how to respond to that, hesitant to share my intimacy with the untold story of this place with someone I’d just met, but who, obviously, could read it on my face like in a book. I answered, eventually.

“How did you know?”

“It’s written all over you, girl. Do you speak to the Old?”

“The Old? What is that?”

The entire city was caught up in the preparations for the Folk Festival, so I had to postpone my visit to the heritage society, whose normal hours were restricted for the duration.

I gave myself the excuse there is nothing for me to do anyway, so I might as well drive back to Stromness and enjoy the performances.

I stopped at the Stones of Stenness this time, Fiona, trying to find a reference we share. They are 5000 years old, and they must have felt just as old in your day as they do in mine, timeless.

There was nobody else there, just the silence, swept by the wind, and I had this eerie feeling of stepping out of time altogether, into a “different” space I couldn’t understand.

I ended up back at Saint Magnus’ Cathedral, with my nose buried in the old records, strangely comforted by the smell of old ink. It is amazing, really, the church’s archives go back centuries! After a few hours of being fully immersed in the lives and the trades of the people of old, you forget what century you’re in; you lose track of time altogether.

Marriages, home deeds, conflict resolutions, old public announcements, the births of children.

This is what time really looks like, reading the birth announcements of people who passed out of existence centuries before you were born.

Seeing their aspirations, hopes and heartbreaks, the bitter and the sweet displayed together like in a painting, equalizes their significance and turns them all into the same substance when watched from a distance.

The car trip to the Brough of Birsay led me through treeless landscapes, shy and soft in the sunshine, and filled with the bright smiles of wildflowers, a poem in white, rose, purple and green, laid down as scenery by a benevolent god.

I stood beside them, with the wind in my face, trying to remember an older time, as if I’d been there before. But maybe those were your memories, Fiona, not mine. Maybe that’s what the stones are for, repositories of memories, remembering the fingers of all who had touched them.

I was looking for an excuse to go to the other side of the island, and it was interesting to learn your family tree had spread some of its roots there.

The ancient burial customs of this place exercise a strange fascination on me, like a spell cast centuries before I was born.

I used to see this sea wall in my dreams. You can’t imagine how weird it feels to look at it in real life! I’m not really sure I’m awake right now, Fiona. There is an elusive threshold of weirdness and serendipity past which we stop believing anything is real, a madness of sorts, a sweet, addictive madness.

Ever since I was awarded this research grant to explore your life and times, I'm in disbelief, constantly questioning what I'm seeing in this taffy-like reality that shifts and changes its colors with the slightest tug.

I half expect to see you on that wall, as I did so many times in my mind, with the wind playing with your hair and your sights set far away, while you silently call on the mist.

My parents thought me irresponsible for picking anthropology as a field of study, not easy to make a living at studying dead strangers from a thousand years ago, and this last research project really set them off, because, as they said, just like a soft cow pile, the last thing I needed was another bucket of water.

There are things we don’t talk about, and they weigh heavily on our souls. Who decided they don’t matter? Life is like virgin land. It only surrenders its bounty after we drench it in our sweat, tears, and blood.

People squander their lives, energy, and purpose as if they don’t value themselves enough to live for real, instead choosing to take a backseat and yield the spotlight to some higher power which, based on the results, doesn’t care about them too much.

While I’m writing to you, Fiona, I’m gazing at the same moon you watched from afar in your distress centuries ago, hoping for the miracle that never came, the one that would have freed you from your fear and pain. This moon is like a symbol of unanswered prayers. Some wishes are granted too late, aren’t they? I wonder if God works this way, if all the questions that are left unanswered are in fact processed in a much slower and more permanent frame of reference, in God’s time.

For some, this is a metaphorical musing. They don’t know how lucky they are, the innocents, to live their lives in real time, and not in retrospect.

The authorities of Yavapai County had been looking into by a series of disappearances, going all the way back to 1965, when the leader of an archaeological team, Jack Mattingly, vanished without a trace from the excavation site.

His disappearance was followed by several others, seven people in total, all males in their fifties, sharing an academic background.

The police investigation into the missing persons cases has been frustrated by a series of natural phenomena, possibly related to an anomaly in the local magnetic field which rendered electronic equipment and even old-fashioned compasses useless.

The investigating team ventured as far as they felt it was safe into the undeveloped terrain, but had to turn back eventually when they couldn’t get a clear satellite view of the area due to unusual atmospheric activity.

Gwen dragged her feet through the desert, walking behind No. 5 to the tequila barrel, when she noticed what looked like the corner of a trap door barely covered by dirt.

She stopped to get a closer look and by the time No. 5 noticed her absence; he was too far to stop her from sweeping off the dust to uncover it.

“Hey,” she waved at him. “Hey! Over here! I found something.”

“Leave it alone, Gwen, it’s getting late, we need to get back.”

“It’s a door!” She said emphatically.

“We don’t have time for that now, come here.”

“Might be important! What are you talking about? What if it’s provisions, or tools, a clean change of clothes? Help me open this,” she started pulling at the handle in vain, because the solid metal door was very heavy.

“You won’t be able to open that. It has an electronic lock and you don’t have the code. Leave it alone,” No. 5 engaged in a failed attempt at persuasion.

“You know what’s inside?”

“We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“Is it a secret government facility?”

“No.”

“An alien artifact warehouse?”

“No.”

“A nuclear bunker?”

“No.”

‘That’s pretty,’ she thought when she picked up the little transparent pebble. Its deep red gleam looked spirited in the bright light of the sun; it felt warm to the touch, and despite its heaviness, reminded her of amber.

She sat down on one of the flat rocks at the end of the white pebble path to study it at length, turning it on all sides, trying to figure out what it was and how it got there. It wasn’t larger than an acorn and if she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought it was beach glass. Or a gemstone, maybe? Was this place an abandoned gemstone mine at some point, and if so, was that a ruby? She quickly abandoned the idea, because the tactile experience of the material was all wrong for it.

The little gem tickled her palm, and she giggled, fascinated by this strange interaction with a mineral, which felt intentional, somehow, like a conversation between equals.

Their little silent talk made Gwen smile, and as she sat there, communing with a rock, she didn’t even notice No. 3 standing there and watching her with a look in his eye that wavered between awe and dread.

“Would you say she passed?” No. 4 asked No. 5. They both evaluated Gwen with critical looks, like project managers running through a punch list at the end of a project.

“I don’t know. What other tests do you think we could run?” No. 5 replied. “Call No. 1, he might have some logical routines to run her through we didn’t think about.”

Gwen smiled, insecure.

She was feeling very self-conscious in the face of this evaluation process, which made her feel like a product.

“What’s up with you guys?” She said, eventually. “Pass? Pass what? Is this some sort of test or something?”

“That looked very natural, didn’t it?” No. 4 turned to No.5. “I sure couldn’t tell. How about you, No. 1?”

“I don’t know,” No. 1 came closer and stared uncomfortably, as if he expected some standard reaction.

“What test?” Gwen raised her voice, and they all stopped and looked at her.

“The Touring test, dear,” No. 4 replied, kindly.

“Hilarious,” Gwen brooded.

“I definitely couldn’t tell,” No. 1 smiled, relieved.

“Congratulations, team, we got lift-off.”

During her morning walk, Gwen was surprised to notice one of the large boulders behind the house, in the place where she usually gathered the eggs every evening, was missing.

Its empty spot looked unnaturally hard and flat, and upon closer observation, Gwen noticed, to her great bewilderment, that it was a poured concrete foundation.

“Oh,” No. 7 spoke from behind her, “I see they finally took it for repairs. I thought they were going to put that off until it completely crumbled.”

“Who’s they?” Gwen asked, feeling like she’d just fallen on her head.

“The tech crew, of course,” No. 7 mentioned.

“But,” Gwen whispered, suddenly embarrassed, “I thought we were here alone, all that talk about being lost, not being able to find the way back, all of it?”

“I’m sorry, dear, we thought you were the new actress. We’re not supposed to get out of character. We never suspected…”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“We’re filming a reality show, Ultimate Survival. You must have seen it, it’s been running for a very long time, very good ratings.”

“A reality show?? I’ve been stuck here forever!”

“They stretch these things as far as they can, at least the popular ones. This is season thirteen.”

“What do you mean, I don’t understand,” Gwen mumbled.

“Well,” No. 6 responded, “we know you went to Sunday school at some point, and have been taught this. Rejoice, you were chosen.”

“Chosen for what?” Gwen jumped to her feet.

“Just chosen. How lucky are you?” No. 1 joined the conversation. “Why aren’t you happy?”

“Is this improv? Is it?” She looked around for a telltale glance. “Are we veering off the Greek tragedy sensibility and venturing into the fantasy genre?”

“Gwen,” No. 4 approached her, with his usual kindness. “Please believe them. They are telling you the truth. Don’t you wonder how this,” he gestured broadly towards the surroundings, “all of this, is even possible?”

“Of course I wonder! That doesn’t mean I’m going to entertain preposterous beliefs to fill in the gaps.”

“Preposterous? Isn’t this your faith?”

“The Revelation is supposed to be allegorical, not literal.”

“And you are so sure of this because, what, you’re educated?” No. 7 mocked.

“For one, there’s no way y’all are angels.”

No. 3 stood up and left, visibly offended.

“Ok, class, remember what we talked about, everybody must stay together now, we’re going to visit the archeological dig, you can take pictures for your scrapbook but always stay on the path,” Mr. Deerfield raised his voice above the unruly group who moved around him, agitated, like a tiny Lilliputian army.

‘Breathe, man,’ he told himself, already baking in the unforgiving desert sun. ‘Just breathe. We’re all going to be fine. All you need to do today is bring all the kiddos back home in one piece. She’s crazy, and she’s going to end us all one day,’ he directed a sharp arrow of bitterness in the school principal’s direction, the daring spirit who saw fit, in her infinite wisdom, to send him to this devil’s armpit with eighteen nine-year-olds in tow to gawk at rocks.

“Jack, are you listening?” he raised his voice a bit more to impress on the habitually hyperactive youngster the importance of paying attention to his words.

“What was that?” Gwen lost her footing, surprised as she was by the unexpected appearance.

“Just keep walking, you’ll be fine,” No. 7’s usual rotten mood soured further, if that were even possible.

Gwen didn’t want to get him started and have to listen to hours and hours of ranting about idiocy generously seasoned with phrases in languages she didn’t understand, but the sight, if real, was too shocking to leave unanswered.

“If I didn’t know any better, I swear I saw…”

“Oh, shut up, will you?” No. 7 turned around, with his usual curmudgeon persona proudly on display. “Let me guess: you think you saw an alien,” he mocked, mercilessly. “Boo-hoo!”

The smoke was so thick Gwen couldn’t gather herself enough to understand where she was at first. She could feel the gentle touch of her guide’s hands on her shoulders, but she was still deep inside an inner world she couldn’t bear to leave.

The contours of the house, so familiar to her by now, began to dissolve, putting her into a deep panic, no doubt enhanced by the effects of her ‘traveling’ tea.

“Gwen,” a voice as if from very far away enticed her, “you have to come back now, return to your life, to those who need you.”

‘Who is this and what on earth is he talking about?’ Gwen tried to gather herself. ‘This is my life,’ she watched, with increasing anxiety, how the thick walls of the house kept melting and morphing and changing colors.

‘I’m high,’ she thought, calm. ‘I must have ingested some of that toxic looking green brew somehow,’ she continued her musing, aggravated her psychedelic experience was so humdrum.

“Listen to my voice, Gwen,” the discarnate voice insisted. “Find the door. Look for the door.”

“Do you believe her?” Jen whispered to Ted, eyeing the young woman with the gaze of a skeptic. She’d been a ranger for fifteen years, and during this time she’d heard her share of tall tales, although, she had to admit, not one that could hold a candle to this gals’.

Really? That was the best lie the woman could come up with? That she got lost in the desert and spent an untold number of years living with a mysterious philosopher colony?

Even as feral as she looked, with matted hair and dressed in dubious rags, there was no way their rescue had spent more than a week in any place lacking the trappings of civilization: she didn’t look malnourished, had no signs of physical trauma and, honestly, she didn’t look old enough to have spent many years anywhere, not to mention the wilderness.

“Where are we on Act II?”

“We’re still considering options.”

“Do I need to remind you it’s two months to curtain? What options? We need Act II!”

“And do I have splendid news for you! We opened it to the public and sponsored a contest, which was very well received. We have thousands of scenarios! I’m telling you we should do this more often.”

“You opened it to the public!” The director got instantly aggravated. “So every Tom, Dick and Harry can opine? What for do I need you, then?”

“Don’t get upset,” the playwright didn’t react. He’d been working with the director for a long time and knew the latter could be a bit of a primadonna. It didn’t phase him. “We have to stay with the times. Have you seen the social media trends? Everybody is into live, interactive content now.”

“God forbid we’d have professional standards!” The director was on a roll. “Call aunt Millie! I’m sure she has a story. We’ll make a movie!”

“You know it’s not like that,” the playwright defended his argument. “We need passion, fresh thinking, different perspectives.”

“Whatever possessed you to do that?” No. 6 asked Gwen, with an appalled look on his face. The storm clouds had started gathering on the horizon, darkening the sky in the middle of the day to a dusky, stark intensity.

Here and there thick ropes of lighting put out a spectacular display, made even more impactful by the contrast with the gloomy background.

“Do what?” Gwen replied, and the puzzled expression on her face confirmed she had absolutely no idea what the fuss was about.

“You broke it!”

Gwen looked around and wondered what she could possibly have broken in a landscape which consisted entirely of rubble.

“I don’t understand!”

“What’s up?” No. 1 climbed on top of the flat boulder where Gwen had retired in search of solitude. To anybody else, she would have looked like she was meditating, but not to him.

They were sitting cross-legged, a good height above the desert, and from their elevated viewpoint, they enjoyed the beautiful panorama of it at dusk.

Gwen put a long pregnant pause between the question and the answer, one which, to be sure, would have garnered applause in any theatrical performance, and then declaimed, with the pathos only afforded to the young.

“What is the point of all this!”

“Meaning alert!” No. 1 yelled at the top of his lungs, loud enough to reach every eardrum within range. “Gather round, everybody, we have an emergency!”

“The point? Of this?” No.5 mumbled, irritated because he was woken from his afternoon nap. “Whatever gave you such a silly idea?”

The next morning the room was an appalling mess: every object in it had been moved from its place. There were empty cups and glasses everywhere and above it all, the chickens roamed, agitated and making a racket.

‘It’s not even Tuesday,’ was the first thought that popped in Gwen’s head, and she examined it with detachment, surprised at how different one’s habitual thought patterns became to fit the context.

That connecting Tuesdays with chickens was not in the range of thought processes sane people accepted proved to her the psychological normal was not a matter of clear mental standards, but a majority rule: you're normal if most of the people think like you.

“Who ate all the bread?” a voice, which she recognized belonged to No. 8, boomed over the chaos.

“Sorry,” No. 3 sheepishly confessed. “That tea can build quite an appetite.”

‘What happens if whatever you intend to convey is so foreign to your fellow humans nobody resonates with it? Do you not say it, then? And if you do, does it have any more meaning than a nonsensical poem?’

Life doesn’t give you time to actually look at it except during extraordinary circumstances.

It’s in those gaps, those experiences that don’t fit, that you see its inherent strangeness.

You notice then that things are never clean cut: the laws of physics have exceptions, moral imperatives have exceptions, even life and death have exceptions.

One doesn’t see that when things are normal, whatever that means, within the range of possibility, and one forgets that very unlikely outcomes are well within the range possibility as well.

We understand freedom as the ability to control our fate and we’re so proud of our marketable skills, our net worth, our physical attractiveness, our fitness, in every sense of the word, and we fail to see the gigantic mechanism we’re locked into, the much larger drift of social dynamics that runs our lives and to which we blind ourselves to maintain our illusion of control.

When all our social ties are cut, when we’re thrown out of humanity and denied the facilities of civilization at first we’re overwhelmed by dread.

“How did you end up here?” she asked No. 5, in a daze, realizing the inappropriate nature of the question before she had the time to call it back. It was no business of hers how these men ended up in the middle of the desert, enacting classic tragedies in the original Greek, and she would have been offended if they questioned her choices.

In fact, she wouldn’t have known how to answer such a question. People always like to believe they have reasons for doing things, and were they to explain themselves, they would gladly volunteer the logic of their circumstances, but that’s all self-delusion. We all make our choices before we even think about them, and fill in the blanks with reasons after the fact in order to explain them to ourselves.

Thankfully society gives us a pass on explaining our emotions, because we’d have a bear of a time shoving those into a logical frame.

“Sit down,” No. 5 ordered, “you’re late for class.”

‘What class?’ Gwen looked around and saw everybody was sitting in a semicircle around the speaker, ostensibly to attend class.

“Just sit!” No. 5 rolled his eyes, displeased by the time wasting.

No. 4 and No. 1 scooted over to make room for her. By means unknown, someone had produced a notepad and a pencil, sharpened to a fine point, and the two implements were now getting passed around the group until they reached her.

“What exactly am I supposed to do with these?” she whispered towards No. 4, trying to disturb the assembly as little as possible, but the latter looked annoyed by the interruption and didn’t answer.

She sat herself quietly between the two numbers, notepad in her lap.

“What’s the class about?” she leaned over to whisper in No. 4’s ear again, undeterred by the latter’s cold shoulder.

“The afterlife,” he answered curtly.

“The what?”

“Shhh!”

“Do you have anything to contribute?” No. 5 asked her directly, trying to put this class disturbance to good use.

“I believe I do, yes.”

The crickets were loud in the night air, Gwen never realized there were so many insects in the desert, and their combined noise was loud enough to pierce through the gasps of the fire and the monotonous rhythm of the conversation, slowed down by the smokes and the tequila.

No. 4 wielded a stick with which he kept poking at the fire, absentminded, and he looked as if he had retreated into a world of his own, the world behind his eyes, to ponder on the mysteries of existence undisturbed. He smiled a sibylline smile into the distance, which made Gwen think that world of his, behind his eyes, must have been pretty wonderful.

“Why do you say you were The Library?” she asked abruptly and regretted disturbing his contemplation the moment the words left her lips.

He turned around to face her, the smile still lighting up his face.

The purpose of the serenity path finally made itself clear a couple of mornings later when Gwen woke up very early to find No. 1 meditating at its end, perfectly at peace.

One would have assumed he was watching the sunrise, but a closer look revealed he was gazing way farther than that, through the sunrise into another reality, shielded from perception by the limitations of our senses.

An even closer look revealed he wasn’t even there.

His animating force was still occupying his body, breathing his lungs and beating his heart, but his consciousness was not there, that which made him who he was, the unique personality impossible to mistake for another.

Gwen daren’t bother him in that state, which, even from the perspective of a detached bystander, looked like a deeply intimate experience.

She just sat on a boulder, a short distance from him, watching him blend into the surroundings with the grace of a tree, or a cloud formation, breathing with the morning breeze roused by the first rays of light warming up the rocky mesa.

“I appreciate your discretion,” he whispered, as if from a dream, “but I need to let you know I’ve been aware of your presence the entire time.”

He opened his eyes wide and all his spirit rushed back into its shell, bringing him to full attention.

The next morning Gwen awoke to a sustained but orderly shuffling of boots, bags and paraphernalia and watched in bewilderment how the seven were quietly preparing for what looked like a military campaign.

They looked serious and none of them was speaking, which rose Gwen’s anxiety to panic levels. She didn’t dare ask what they were doing.

No. 5 spoke eventually.

“Are you coming?”

“Where are you going?”

“Fishing.”

“In the middle of the desert?”

No. 5 pointed to the creek in the valley. Its waters looked murky and ochre after the rain, and raged, powerless, against their banks, carrying dead sticks, straw and debris.

“What could possibly live in that?”

“Catfish.”

“I don’t know how to fish,” she hesitated.

“Suit yourself,” No. 5 replied as he walked to the door.

When Gwen was awakened by the chill of the desert night, she found herself in an empty house, dead quiet except for the eerie clinking of the bead curtains.

The quiet of the desert reaches beyond silence; it preempts the emergence of sounds, like an anechoic chamber.

In the desert, one only hears two things: the wind and total silence.

She tried to go back to sleep, but her three nights in the desert had conditioned her to a different sleeping schedule. The empty house felt creepy at night, with no light and no sound, almost like a tomb.

“Welcome, light of the Sun, the fairest/ Sun that ever has dawned upon/ Thebes, the city of seven gates!”

‘What in God’s name is this racket?’ Gwen jumped out of her made shift sleeping accommodation on the couch to watch a glorious sunrise accompanied by what sounded very much like an ancient Greek chorus.

“Sophocles,” a soft voice replied, so close she could feel its breath on her ear. She jumped off the couch and turned to face her morning companion.

“Antigone,” he clarified. “We haven’t been introduced, I’m No. 8.”

“Gwen. Whitman.”

“Hard name to live up to.”

She mumbled, feeling ridiculous to introduce herself to an element of the set of natural numbers, and couldn’t resist her curiosity.

She’d been walking through the desert all night. She figured it was better to walk at night, despite the cold; at least she wouldn’t get fried to a crisp in a place with no shade.

One could say Gwen was experiencing an existential crisis and was trying to find herself, even though she was only twenty-four and the middle of her road was so far into the distance she wouldn’t get a glimpse of it for another couple of decades.

Regardless, she was indulging what she perceived to be her dark night of the soul, college behind her, unappetizing options in front of her, sensitive, idealistic and over-educated, the perfect symbol of her generation.

The meeting room of the Council Hall was filled with the electricity of anticipation but eerily quiet, as if the solemnity of the event muffled the usual banter and pleasantries. A request for a full plenum from Mrs. Eberhart was a rare occurrence, and even if quite a few of the ladies of the Circle knew what the meeting was about, they were still somewhat nervous about the details.

Mrs. Eberhart stood up and walked to the podium, waiting the customary minute or two for the room to settle down, a pause completely unnecessary now, given the frozen silence.

“I have had the honor to lead the Village Council for many years, and as such, was entrusted with the responsibility to uphold its laws, a duty I fulfilled with the utmost respect and of which I always strived to be worthy. It is unfortunate that our devotion to the law led us to results that sometime defy its very spirit. No justice is served when children are held responsible for things they have no control over, or can even understand, or when the brightness of our human spirit is overshadowed by fear.

The following Wednesday Giselle showed up at Lucille’s house for a nice cup of tea and a lengthy demonstration of her new embroidery pattern. The table in Lucille’s drawing room got covered quickly with bits of yarn, several types of canvas, scissors and pads of paper covered with sewing motifs, wristband pincushions, thimbles, cups and saucers, a teapot, a sugar bowl, a plate of cookies, still warm, and two tablets, one of which was Giselle’s, finally restored to proper functioning.

After a few hours the crewel technique was mastered and Giselle left, tablet in basket. She picked up the pace when she was out of sight and headed straight to the Council Hall where she interrupted a meeting in progress in order to whisper a few words in Rosemary’s ear, a feat unheard of in general and quite incredible coming from Giselle.

“So,” Lucille said casually, “I hear that our safely guarded secret school is the talk of the Village!”

Mary looked at her with genuine bewilderment.

“Giselle told me all about it yesterday over a cup of tea. Oh, by the way, could you ask somebody to figure out how to make this work? She left it with me to get looked at,” Lucille pulled the tablet out of the basket and set it on the table.

“How did she find out about this?” Mary asked, and a fleeting flash of fear shrouded her eyes.

Lucille forgot about her irritation for a second, when she remembered that the girl was hiding there to safeguard her life. Her previous priorities fell to the wayside for a little while, as she thought of the best way to reassure her niece.

“She listened in on the girls while they were talking in shop,” she said in a much softer tone. “It seems,” she hesitated, “that not every Council member is averse to the idea of all of you learning these things.”

After many months with only an impressive collection of desert artifacts to show for, Rosemary and her team were called back by the Council, despite clamorous protests and, on occasion, veiled threats. Every time she had to go to a meeting, Rosemary got into the habit of carrying around an object or other from the collection, which she liked to parade around the room as a symbol of her righteous outrage.

“There is no hope for the Village anymore. You just destroyed our last chance to uproot evil from our midst once and for all!” she raised her voice in Council, an outrageous and completely unheard of behavior that made even Mrs. Eberhart frown with disapproval. “I warn you! This will not end well, and I’m not going to sit here, idle, while the likes of Mary and her evil mirror mongers destroy our traditions and endanger our children! If you don’t do anything about this, I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands!”

The more Mary delved into the recovery of the database the more she became tangled in the old story buried inside it, almost as if her own memories were finally brought back to life. At times she felt as if she had awakened from a long sleep and found herself in a room she recognized without knowing why.

She had learned enough of the old code to understand that the Que’d held technical instructions, not the story of her ancestors, and she was a little disappointed about that. After all the secrecy and the sacrifices that kept the sacred book from being lost through the centuries, she expected it to reveal the meaning of life, or at least provide some moral guidance for her future. On the other hand, the database was a never ending source of wonder, an entire alternate history her generation knew nothing about. It is said that history is written by the victors, and a couple of centuries ago, as the defeated party, the Scholars’ line simply slipped out of existence, its every trace erased, and only its shadow stayed alive in the folk tales, carried by the vague whispers and half remarks passed down from generation to generation by the few dissenters left behind.

In all fairness, Mary was banished indeed. The makeshift team at the rock mound spared no effort in setting up means to detect her presence, if and when she decided to approach the apparently agreed upon meeting place and look for her aunt. Every day a small group of ladies took it upon themselves to check all the tracking markers, only to notice that their condition always changed. The wind, the rain, the little creatures of the desert trampled them over in their comings and goings, oblivious to the interests and goals of the humans and answering only to the larger scale of nature.

The group spent lots of time in meetings, trying to pick out the artifacts from the random patterns of being, an activity blessed with the same odds to succeed as finding a needle in a haystack. Every now and then someone in the group would single out a detail that looked like obvious proof of Mary’s touch and they made it their main goal to prove themselves right. The more someone else contradicted them, the more invested they became in the defense of their theory and when challenged they took it personally. The contradicted parties abode morosely by the group decision that the artifact was not relevant, but stashed the offending item in a coffer, certain that the truth will see justice in the end. That’s how the camp was blessed with an ever growing collection of sticks, rocks, sand pattern molds made of wax, drawings of quasi-random straw patterns, and even, for a reason nobody really understood, an abandoned bird’s nest.

In the agitation created by the events that surrounded the search for Mary the Circle almost forgot about the cursed poppy experiment, and was only reminded of it when the second generation of plants emerged and bloomed even bluer than the first. Mrs. Eberhart shrugged at the sight of the field donning the color of the sky, irritated that the Council had wasted her time again with superstitious nonsense.

“When are we going to be rid of this curse already?” Rosemary clamored, displeased that the plan she was contemplating in her mind, the one where even the memory of the Que’d was stripped from the Village record and life went on, with industry and righteousness, like it did for her generation, and her mother’s generation, and her grandmother’s, and her great-grandmother’s.

Later that day Lucille prepared a basket of food, like she did every evening, not forgetting Mary’s favorite cookies, fresh out of the oven, waited for the night to fall and stepped out into the desert quietly, careful not to attract attention.

She walked without noise through the soft, powdery sand, under the stars that shone so bright they cast shadows around the dunes and brightened the desert night enough to light her path. She stopped at times, to put the basket down, sighed in response to her thoughts and then continued on her way. She walked for a couple of hours, too deep in thought to pay attention to her surroundings, the way a person who walks the same familiar path is suddenly surprised to find herself much farther along it than she thought she was. At the end of the journey she slowed down and looked around swiftly, and then, reassured, turned at a sharp bend around a dune and stopped in front of a mound of rocks which looked like it had been placed there intentionally, as if to mark the spot.

The cleansing ceremony in the desert came and went with no consequences, which was a little disappointing for Rosemary, who was hoping for some sort of vindication of her beliefs. Weeks passed, then months. The girls were as tired as always, but finally figured out ways to keep out of sight and thus managed to rest at least long enough to prevent themselves from falling asleep in company.

Life in the village continued virtually the same, and if one wasn’t intimately familiar with its daily intricacies, one wouldn’t have felt the subtle shifts in attitude or in the ways of doing things, but the elders were, and so they did.

“May I have your attention, please?” Lucille cast her voice over the audience, and the murmurs and shuffles subsided. “Is everybody here?” she scanned the cave to make sure all the girls had made it inside, safe and unnoticed. When she was reassured that they were all there, she continued.

“Before class starts, I don’t think I need to reiterate the importance of keeping this knowledge to ourselves, at least for the time being. I’m sure the reasons why don’t require explaining.” A soft wave of discomfort weaved through the gathering and quickly subsided, as they recalled the unfolding of events in the Council Hall. “Back to more interesting subjects, if memory serves, Blanche was going to present her study on gene splicing and the effects of introducing snapdragon DNA into tomato breeds. So, without further ado,” she waved her hand, inviting Blanche to the podium, to present her slides to the class.

It’s been said that nothing happens on this earth without leaving traces of its passing. Sometimes those come in material form, through the testimony of even the most mundane objects, other times through the subtle changes in behavior, and taking upon a different way to see the world.

The lessons in the cave didn’t get lost on the girls’ hearts and minds, how can one discover an entirely new world and stay the same? They were more confident in their strange compliance, and completely unafraid. If there was one thing in the world that incensed Rosemary was people not knowing their place. She had held to her position in society and obeyed its every restraint, and she wanted to make sure every member of the generation after her did exactly the same. The fact that her place in society had been quite cozy and comfortable, due for the most part to fortunate birth circumstances and helpful people to guide her way was beside the point, she firmly believed that her life in and of itself validated her right to be were she was, and those who didn’t fare as well did so by the faults of their own conscience.

The cave was sealed at dawn, with a very tired Lucille gazing at the endeavor in a sour mood, irritated by the fact that now she had to walk another fifteen minutes around the hill to the next entrance.

Rosemary directed the activities with almost ceremonial gestures, pleased to have won this epic battle over the Que’d and unaware of the fact that she’d already lost the war. When the Circle was finished dumping large boulders at the entrance of the cave and the large cloud of dust started to settle, the place looked so barren and desolate that even the most acerbic opponents of scholarly knowledge felt a tinge of guilt.

There was something inspiring, something larger than life in that cave with the ancient carvings adorning the walls, and many secretly wondered if they didn’t throw away irreplaceable treasure just to quell their fears.

“Aah, Lucille!” Rosemary pinned her under an icy stare. “How nice of you to finally join us, dear! We were starting to worry that you might have gotten lost on the way here,” she commented, her sarcastic comment well padded by a sweetness that almost made Lucille gag. Since Lucille lived two blocks down from the Council Hall, the insinuation that she might not be all there didn’t escape anyone in the Circle.

“Don’t you worry about me, darling,” Lucille retorted, in an even colder tone of voice. “If I need advice on how tie my shoes, I’ll be sure to ask you. You’re the best resource, all things considered,” she smiled at Rosemary. The latter turned beet red and threw a bitter stare in her direction, sharp as a dagger. Everybody remembered the incident from decades ago, when a young and enthusiastic Rosemary, who was in the running to become the Maiden of the Harvest and lead the produce parade through the main streets of the village, stumbled on her shoelaces, that had come undone, and fell off the wagon, face first in the dirt. Nobody, not even her best friends, managed to banish this incident to oblivion, as they were all reminded of it annually.

Lucille returned after dark, and to her shock, she found the new cave completely transformed: a console had been installed, as promised, but also furniture, personal accommodations and storage modules. She saw what looked like a kitchen towards the back of the cave and set down the basket of food on the table.

Mary wasn't there, and Lucille started to panic, prompting the one in the mirror to provide an explanation.

“There is an underground stream two caves down, Mary got bored and went to get some fresh water. We thought she would be more comfortable if the place looked more like home, do you think you could bring her favorite things from her room? We tried to offer her food, but she seems reluctant to eat it. Maybe it would be best if you brought her home cooked meals for a while, at least until she gets used to our fare.” He stopped for a second, to give Lucille a chance to reply, then, upon noticing the latter seemed at a loss for words, he asked. “How did things go with the Council?”

“Answer him, girl!” Mrs. Gentry prodded a very confused Mary, whose young heart oscillated between shame and terror. “Mary! Her name is Mary!” the lady clarified.

“Who are you?” the grumpy guy retorted bluntly, making Mrs. Gentry recoil with indignation.

“I believe it's untoward for you to address me, given that we're not related, nor have we been properly introduced,” she protested, ready to leave.

“Suit yourself!” the man cut her off. “I only care about the girl anyway.”

“Jim!” the other man protested. “Would it kill you to be nice?”

“She wasn't supposed to be involved in this to begin with!” Jim replied.

“Why don't you go finish what you were working on, I'll take it from here,” his friend recommended.

“Real nice! After all the time I spent slaving over this monitor,” Jim protested, but left.

“Hi, Mary,” the one in the mirror looked at the girl again. “I know how scary all of this must be for you, but I need you to stay with me for a while, so I can explain. You have no idea how excited we all are to have found you, we almost lost hope, we thought someone faked the rumors of your existence. Are there any more people like you in the village?”

“Now what!?” Mary thought.

“Oh, I knew it! I just knew it! It had to be!” Lucille couldn't contain her excitement, and all of a sudden she looked much younger, an echo from the care free days of her girlhood, when, much like her niece, she was willing to take on the world, no holds barred.

“Do you think we can order the mirror to do things?” Mary asked.

“Probably,” Lucille said thoughtfully, “if we knew how... Did you make any progress with understanding the language?” she turned towards her niece.

“Not really,” the girl confessed.

“No matter, we have time to figure out what we can, later, I'm late for the meeting, we'll talk when I come back.”

Lucille and Mary spent the following week trying to learn more about what the mirror could do. There was one aspect of this endeavor that none of them could shake: as exciting as it was to communicate with the magical object, the Que'd manuscript beckoned from the chest where it had been carefully stashed, wrapped in linen and strewn with lavender buds to ward off the moths.

Lucille couldn't let go of the thought that the truth remained hidden somewhere underneath that black water the playful symbols were floating on, the way sunken treasures sleep undisturbed in the depths of the ocean. From somewhere inside that dark water the ancient words of the Que'd called out to her, she could almost hear them, remember them from her childhood, although she would have chastised any person for lacking seriousness if they brought this up to her.

“I think I speak for everybody when I say that bringing this curse into the Council Hall is a disrespectful and irresponsible act one hoped not to expect from a member of your standing!” Rosemary hissed at Lucille, who had just walked in, holding the object of contention.

“Naturally,” she thought, “who else would be the first to find out about the black mirror but our sweet Rosemary! On second thought, I wonder how she knew what I was holding?”

Understanding the old language became increasingly challenging over time, and the hopes of making heads or tails of it diminished, even for Mary, who, despite the unfortunate circumstances of her birth was an unbridled optimist. She spent endless nights, risking her aunt's chastising, trying to decipher the meaning of the fragments they had translated, and it felt more and more like trying to mend an intricate tapestry after it had been torn to shreds, its big picture forever lost.

A puzzle with a million pieces, no two alike, without recognizable match lines, color themes or continuing patterns. As adept as she was at weaving together seemingly incompatible snippets into a cohesive flow, a skill she had mastered early in her childhood, she had to admit defeat after a while: what good does it do one to reconstitute something one can't possibly understand?

The cave find became the focus of attention for the entire village. Their community hadn't had anything exciting to talk about since most of its members could remember, and the discovery of something both fascinating and inaccessible kept everybody on the edge of their seats with anticipation.

Public discussions about mirrors became so commonplace that even Mrs. Gentry gave up protesting eventually. “One can't squelch public curiosity, especially that of young people, it's a sad state of fact,” she thought, sighing with nostalgia for the good old days when even a mention of mirrors or reflections would immediately draw community shunning.

“We're never going to figure this out,” Lucille said, dejected. “Not only don't I know most of the words' equivalents, but I don't understand their meaning, either. Even the short sentences I translated make absolutely no sense to me. What on earth is ‘meta property vr canonical content’? Why are we doing this?” she looked at Mary, exasperated. The girl, as always, donned a perplexed gaze.

The look in her niece's eyes helped Lucille remember that time allocation for this research had been recommended by the Circle, and as such, she didn't need to justify it to herself.

The Circle meeting was quite boring, filled with organizational issues and the usual polite gossip. Lucille found it hard to pay attention to things she'd been hearing for decades, especially now when she was on pins and needles, filled with curiosity over the contents of the Que'd.

She was lost in thought, trying to make sense of the few words she managed to recall from her childhood, words that jumped at her from the ancient writing. For all intents and purposes, the text was as obscure as an abstract painting, and the fact that she couldn't read it saddened her.

Lucille tried to remember what her mother had taught her when she was a child, and was furious at herself for not having paid more attention at the time. She was only four or five and the puzzle of the ancient text seemed like a silly game, but she could still remember some of the nursery rhymes. For what it was worth, none of them seemed to have anything to do with the words she had managed to decipher.

'Great mercy, it's all here! Oh, girl, what have you uncovered!' Lucille thought, turning apprehensive eyes towards Mary, to see if her niece had any idea about the importance of her finding. It only took one glance to ascertain that Mary knew she was holding the long lost copy of the Que'd.

They looked at each other for a while, in a tacit understanding that any knowledge driven from the precious tome will never pass their lips. Finally Lucille decided to comment.

“What a strange thing, you know, with all of this resurgence of the legend of the Que'd, that somebody supposedly saw the old language in a cave not far from here! Why would somebody make up a story like that?” she asked, mostly rhetorically. The conversation continued unfolding naturally, in the third person, touching upon the subject lightly, without emotional involvement.

“What is the Scholars' line, aunt Lucille?” Mary asked, braving her aunt's stormy looks.

The room was quiet for a few moments. Normally Lucille would have chastened the uncouth youth for asking such an impertinent question, but under the circumstances it dawned on her that the spirit of cooperation might bring to the surface details that her niece would otherwise not think of sharing with her. She answered.

“It's our family line, dear. Way back when the Book of Prophecy was written, some of the members of the council were in disagreement, they insisted the Circle had misinterpreted the ancestral wisdom, they persisted in using mirrors, they founded their own school of thought. There they taught their own philosophy, and science, and rules of conduct, which unfortunately were in direct violation to the Council rules, in every way, really. It didn't take the Circle long to declare their teachings toxic, a plague on society's morals and a blatant trampling of our truths. The Circle required them to cease and desist any activities not endorsed by the Council. The more audacious members of the group protested publicly, in the Council Hall, during the plenum meeting, and thus pushed, the Circle, wanting to display strength and cohesion, voted unanimously for immediate banishment of the non-compliant.”

Despite Lucille's constant rebukes Mary became fascinated with the story of the Prophecy and didn't miss a chance to sneak up into the attic and read it again and again, until she learned its unpleasant contents by heart. It gave her a strange feeling, this story about her, written generations before she'd been born, the script of her life. It didn't even make her bitter anymore, just filled her with intense curiosity and a weird sense of control over her own future, for if one doesn't know the script to one's life, however vexing it happens to be, one can't make any sense of its circumstances.

After she was done learning the contents, she started studying every other one of its details, the sumptuous snake skin cover, the dark, purplish ink, the rough pages, thick as papyrus, that made the book heavier than lead. She caressed the rugged surface for the hundredth time, as if trying to read the cursive writing with her fingers. The surface was not even, it had continuous indentations that flowed on the page like text, but didn't follow the well known flourish of the old writing. She looked closer and gasped. Almost unnoticeable (the writer had done a wonderful job scraping off the old content before he wrote over it) underneath the dark purple lettering there was an older writing, undoubtedly the work of a more educated hand.

After the council meeting ended, Lucille skipped the usual tea and cookies and headed straight home. She made a beeline for the attic where she opened an old coffer, covered with a thick layer of dust. Its contents were arranged with great care, like one would for long term safe-keeping, breakable items interspersed with delicate linen and fabrics protected from moths and mildew with shards of cedar and lavender buds.

Nothing in society exceeds the speed of gossip. By the time Lucille arrived to the Council Hall, its usually quiet chambers were buzzing like a beehive. All the ladies were there, a feat that hadn’t happened in decades, and the animated conversation subsided suspiciously upon Lucille’s arrival.

"Why is it wrong, aunt Lucille? What's so wrong about knowing what you look like?" she stared at her aunt, giving the latter the chills.

“Those eyes could keep a person awake at night,” Lucille shuddered, “I can't get used to them, no matter how innocent she is, so help me! She knows, the imp, how could she possibly know?” Lucille looked for a reasonable explanation for the mirror ban, but couldn't come up with anything that stood to reason. The rule had always seemed absurd to her too, but it had never been open to discussion; the council of elders, and council leader Abraham in particular, weren't the kind of people who could be swayed to give up the power and control that came with being the bearers of absolute moral authority. The result of this social dynamic had been that all those who didn't believe mirrors were a wide open door to hell sought their own image if they were lucky enough to find a reflective surface, and said nothing about it, not knowing who to trust. They enjoyed the revelation of their own countenance privately, drew their own conclusions about it and became the wiser for the knowledge. Lucille happened to be one of them.

As predicted, a couple of the most involved members of the ladies' circle showed up at Lucille's door within hours, with appropriately concerned looks on their faces and spelling trouble from a distance. Lucille crushed a few choice words between her teeth and remembered to smile. She sometimes wished that the mores of their society allowed women to express frustration in the same care free and irreverent way men did, but alas, she was a lady, and ladies never lost their composure. She took a deep breath to let irritation settle down, raised her chin and opened the door.

"Rosemary, Giselle, what a pleasure to see you so early! Everything is well, I hope?" she mimicked concern, at the same time managing to point out the etiquette gaffe of showing up at one's house so early in the morning.

Mary arrived home before the break of dawn. She tried to make as little noise as possible, knowing full well that she couldn't bypass aunt Lucille's superhuman scrutiny. The old lady had the senses and instincts of a mountain lion. As expected, her great-aunt was waiting for her in the kitchen, seated at the table with a prayer book in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, in order to press the point that her ailing old body had a very hard time coping with Mary's lapses in discipline.

She hadn't been crying, of course, because she secretly felt that at her age she was entitled to the privilege not to, but she liked to display that handkerchief in critical instances, as a symbol of her grave disappointment. The second she saw the dreaded piece of cloth, Mary knew she was in trouble.

"Stop lollygagging, Mary! The world is not going to wait for you to catch up, it's almost sundown!" Mary's great-aunt Lucille scolded her, as it was her habit.

Mary didn't flinch, she knew how difficult it was for people to be around her, and how much gratitude she owed to the one person gracious enough to take her in. The shocked reaction everybody had when they laid eyes on Mary was a never ending source of pain for the young girl and a great inconvenience for her great-aunt, whose neighbors and acquaintances, people whom she'd known for decades, had started avoiding her because of her little charge. Lucille was a self-assured woman who had worked very hard to assert her authority over the Ladies' Circle, the charities group and the church committee, and this kind of snubbing constantly irritated her.

Jack’s thirst for the interesting and the unusual was never quenched, and since he was so good at making stuff up he decided to put his talents to good use and become a professional liar. A fiction writer, that is. He flirted with journalism for a little bit, but after his own unpalatable experience with revelations and consequences, he decided that this field really wasn’t for him. He did some travel, learned a lot from his journeys, and a few years later, when he had the means, just to put the frustrations of his youth behind him, he bought a piece of land and planted a dome on it, which became his retreat and occasional writing studio. Of course people thought that was odd, but then again, writers get a pass on being eccentric.

“On a happier note, how is your life lately?” Richard tried to change the subject, only managing to add more gas on Jack’s emotional pyre.

“I’m in counseling with a child psychologist, thank you for asking. I got to revisit every second of my life, forwards, backwards and out of sequence, I discussed any and all childhood trauma that I might have been subjected to, I looked deep inside myself to find my true feelings and guess what? I can’t share them, ‘cause they’re the ones who unleashed this lovely medical specialty upon my life in the first place. It appears that I’m defective, Richard, and I owe it all to our enchanting adventure. This situation is almost bad enough for me to give up making up stories.” he threw a quick glance in his friend’s direction, to see if the latter would take the bait. Richard didn’t react. “Not!” Jack cracked up. “And how is life treating you, my friend?” he returned the favor.

“Well,” Richard hesitated to answer, trying to get the flavor of bitterness and defeat out of his mouth. Ever since his life had turned sour, he had this strange sensation that everything he ate tasted like ashes. He gathered his courage and continued. “My mother mourns me like I’m dead, and my father decided to behave as if I don’t exist. I’m a ghost with a heartbeat, Jack, quite an interesting experience, to tell you the truth. You like interesting, right?” he retorted sarcastically.

“I’m just saying,” Richard gasped, struggling to dislodge a large rock from the middle of the border he was trying to define, a place from which the cursed thing refused to budge. “You know, if our parents wanted to devise a punishment for our creative truth telling, this would probably be it!”

“Don’t mess with karma, dude!” Jack said philosophically, suddenly distracted by the fact that digging got a lot easier than it had been so far, and upon further examination he noticed he was shoveling through soft silt. “This medium is completely worthless!” he cussed under his breath.

“Just mix it in with clay, I’m sure it’ll be fine!” Richard suggested, wiping his brow.

“And where do I get the clay?” Jack asked, and then, following Richard’s unspoken directions, retorted. “Since when are you the expert in plantings?”

“Since you made me study them. Hey!” Richard suddenly remembered. “Why is karma punishing me? It was your idea!”

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants.

Richard’s family members, who had never been anywhere near the swamp dome, and who gathered all the information about the mechanical critters through hearsay, never connected the terrifying description of the crawling pan flutes to the innocent looking weather vane their son had designed. They had been around for enough of Richard’s contraptions to cease finding them scary looking, especially after the two versions of Brenda.

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city’s inhabitants.

“It is a living entity,” the biologist replied.

“What part of it, the plant and the extension ducts?” the other speaker replied. “We already know that!”

“No, not only those, everything that it interacts with, the wall, the dome, the wildlife inside it, well, by extension, every person that enters it,” the biologist smiled.

The audience gasped. For months, rumors of the plant being capable of integrating people into its dense network of stems have been circulating, rumors that the factory was very assiduously trying to dispel.

It’s not that people don’t expect life to change, it is the way that change comes about that always catches them unprepared. Sometimes it is as trivial as rain on the day of the picnic that everybody had spent months planning and looking forward to, or as significant as a shift in circumstances that makes one’s life plans lose consistency, but these are things that people usually adapt to, that they talk about with their loved ones, and then, after sufficient time had passed, they put behind them and move on.

Other changes can’t be assimilated gradually, because they just don’t fit in the general understanding of existence, and they put a kink in the smooth passage of time, a singularity of sorts, that divides life into before and after. The reality of the plant belonged to the second category, and no amount of commiseration could make it blend gradually into the fabric of life.

Richard wasn’t the only one who found a way to put the plant/machine hybrid to good use, and as bio-based gadgets ceased to be an oddity, the town was soon awash with them, and they all looked strangely alive, as if nature had decided to grace the planet with a whole new branch of species, all at once. As it happens when life challenges ingrained concepts about what things are possible, it only takes one instance to prove the contrary. The plant had broken the ineffable barrier between organic and inorganic, the four minute mile of life and matter, so to speak, and from that moment on, the rift between the two forever ceased to exist.

It wasn’t climactic, it was barely noticeable, and just like always when life is evolving, it happened in silence.

At times like these he stopped thinking of this large living conglomerate in terms of good or bad. One doesn’t question whether the squirrels or the lions, or the grass of the plain, are good or bad, they just are, and so is the sun in the sky and the snow on the mountains. When you open your eyes to life and see them for the first time, you don’t judge whether they belong or whether you belong. The wholeness of being is a shared experience and it is laid down before you, to provide the fabric and the context of your life.

The plant reached the back wall and went through it, as if it didn’t encounter any resistance, as if the wall wasn’t there at all. It was very strange how the two systems crossed without interacting, like they belonged to parallel realities, or different time lines. There didn’t seem to be a wall cavity where the hybrid pipe penetrated it, and through the vaguely translucent material of the new branch one could actually see that.

Nobody questioned the new development, for more reasons than one, but mostly because after having lived with this constantly changing story for a while, about the plant that wouldn’t go away, people got kind of tired of worrying about it all the time. Everybody acknowledged the wall penetration that wasn’t there and simply put it out of their mind, in order to ensure life as they knew it continued to make sense.

The story of how Richard built a synthetic biology interface between the plant and the machine paled in comparison with the tale his friend concocted for him to supplant it, tale that involved a never before heard of second cousin of his from out of town, the latter's life-long dream to participate in a science competition for school age children that didn't exist, the challenge of a theoretical engine that ran on bio-fuel, ample library time for writing down the research papers, and the justification for building a gizmo whose function nobody could possibly understand.

Nobody managed to figure out how the vine got into the steam pipes, and even less on how it changed itself to survive in such a hostile environment, but the botanists finally managed to figure out what kind of plant it was. It seemed to be a distant relative of the Carolina Jessamine vine, poor man's rope, as they called it, at least that's what it started out as, before it mutated twice and shed its biological shell to evolve into a partly inorganic hybrid.

Despite all the hype around external intervention, alien, divine or otherwise, the scientific basis of what had happened to facilitate the evolution the plant into what it was now was quite self-explanatory, which made the cascading sequence of consequences even more difficult to accept, because, in people's minds, nothing this straightforward should have been allowed to radically change life as they knew it.

“We should, theoretically, be able to recover most of the metal,” the expert explained, without any emotional involvement. “The plant will, of course, have to be destroyed in the process.”

“That's great news!” another person from the audience exclaimed. “So, what portions of the equipment you think might not be salvageable?”

“I'm afraid I wasn't very clear in explaining the situation. It will be possible to recover most of the metals, separately, of course. All the alloys will have to be recomposed. Some of the material will be lost in the melting process, it's unavoidable,” the expert continued, with a calm that put chills through the bones of the audience.

“You mean like, this much iron, this much tin, this much vanadium? In separate little piles?” a voice of despair resonated from the back.

“Precisely!” the expert pointed out cheerfully, happy to have explained himself clearly, and oblivious to the audience's indignation.

“What are we going to do with all the equipment decomposed neatly into piles of separate metals? We need the working equipment, exactly the way we have it!” a reasonable voice protested. “Had it,” he corrected himself. “Whatever!” he gave up.

“The equipment will have to be rebuilt, of course,” the expert pointed out the obvious.

“So, what you're telling me is that this stupid plant has formed one solid block with the pipe distribution system?” the burly guy in the front exploded.

“It's not a solid block, it did however interact with it at molecular level,” the expert corrected him.

“What difference does it make! Do you mean to tell us we can't rip out the stupid plant without destroying all of our machinery? You can't be serious!” his partner of conversation grew more and more irate.

One thing was sure: Richard was terrible at hiding the truth, and the last drop of it was pulled out of his tormented psyche despite his efforts; it came out in painful, somewhat inarticulate blobs as Jack attacked the matter from all sides, placing strategic questions at the critical points of the story, to eliminate the possibility of any important details being left out. After he squeezed the whole truth out of his friend, like one would get the last glob of toothpaste from an almost empty tube, he seemed content with the results, and pondered deep in thought for a while. He had that preoccupied look on his face, the one he got when he was planning something, which was exactly what Richard dreaded.

“I can't believe I'm saying this, but do I have a volunteer who would like to spend some time with a horticulturist and get an understanding of what makes this thing tick?” Groans and protests ensued.

“Please, it's important,” he cajoled. A volunteer stepped forward, with all the joy and enthusiasm of a human sacrifice. After this, the gathering finally scattered and everyone went home, after the customary polite inquiries about children and family events. Richard was relieved to finally see them gone, so that he could get out of his hiding place, which was cramped and uncomfortable.

He found himself rooting for the willful plant, and hoping, in spite of logic, that the research took as long as possible, to allow it to thrive a little longer, the beautiful trespasser. He vowed to do a little bit of research on his own, to figure out if he could take a cutting, or a leaf, or something, and grow it somewhere else, there must be a good location somewhere along that abandoned route where he could plant it and care for it, away from prying eyes.

“Dude! We triggered the silent alarm, the police are going to be here any moment. Drop everything and run!” he said, simultaneously opening the window and jumping out, as police sirens were blaring close by in the neighborhood. Richard grabbed his notepad and jumped quickly after him, making a promise to himself to strangle Jack later, if and when they reached safety again, and fumbled so much to get out of that window that he almost got noticed by an elderly lady who was making her way to the grocery store.

The boys didn't stop to watch as the officers pointed to the open window and canvased the area for suspects, they never stopped running until they reached the woods, from where they walked as fast as they could back to school.

Even the best laid plans succumb to the cruelty of fate. How unfortunate of Richard to have forgotten his packed lunch that day! His mother had prepared it for him, to make sure the boy didn't starve as he volunteered his effort for the benefit of his peers.

The first thing he noticed was that the vine's unbelievable resilience was supported by two basic features: its tension steel strength and its purposeful redundancy. Every one of the twisted ropes it wove around and through the pipes was fed by a myriad of strands coming from different directions, none of which was essential to the stability of the system, but all of whom contributed to it. Much like the circulatory system of an organism, it had minor pathways and major arteries, it didn't leave any spot uncovered and doubled down on itself at times, to create secondary system loops.

If there was one thing that was different about the pipes, was that they looked shinier, as if brand new, and since this was evident throughout the system, it made Richard contemplate the possibility that the energy field, or whatever it was that held the plant around its supports, must have an inhibiting effect on corrosion, which was a blessing in the now warm and humid air, which would otherwise run havoc on metal components.

Richard took a deep breath, and the large hall smelled like the forest, with none of the usual pungency of burnished metal and mechanical lubricants. “How on earth do they keep this place running?” Richard asked himself, flabbergasted by the impossible interdependence.

There was a place inside this knot of metal limbs, a clearing almost, a hollow, from which he could see the entire manifold branching overhead, and when he sat there, on a little concrete base that for some reason had remained unoccupied, it made him feel as if the entire power distribution system was an extension of his person, and that as small and weak as he was, compared to this enormous metal monster, he was its heart, the soul in the machine, the essential component that allowed the whole system to work. Even though he knew the distribution manifold very well, and if he closed his eyes he could see its every detail, he liked to take a walk around and inspect it every time, and then, with the relief of having found everything exactly the way it was supposed to be, he sat there on his concrete base for a while, and dreamed. And, indignity of indignities, that's where he found the plant again, inside his precious, sneaking out between two pressure rated flanges and then back in via an isolation valve.

The walls were made of smooth wood planks, with just a coat of clear stain to protect them, and between the wood finish on the walls and the exposed rafter ties the room felt warm and cozy, like a vacation cabin in the woods. On one of the walls, surrounded by ninja posters, gleamed a very ornate oval mirror, surrounded by a gilded frame, heavily carved. Richard had protested the addition, of course, but it seems there was no room for it anywhere else in the house, and his mother insisted that everybody had to have a way to check themselves before they got out in public, regardless of their gender. Then she went on a tangent about the dreadful state of his hair, commented on the length of his fingernails and sent him to change his shirt, so he decided that keeping that ridiculous mirror in his room was a small price to pay to avoid having this discussion on a regular basis.

He was sure he had seen that plant before, although he couldn't, for the life of him, remember where. It was a nice looking vine too, if one was into that sort of thing. Plants, that is, something his mother always found a reason to coo over, God knows why!

Richard walked around the bend, passed the Belvedere point, without stopping to admire the view this time, and picked up the pace on the old cobblestones of the pedestrian trail that connected the town to the steam plant. Back in the day when everyone walked to work it used to be the principal thoroughfare to and from town, but since they had built the railroad for the commuter train nobody took the long walk along the side of the mountain anymore, and the trail hadn't been used in years.

When you get used to the thought of being endless, a life that spans a few decades feels like a cruel and senseless death sentence, the proof the universe really doesn’t care about you.

It is the ultimate banishment from Eden, to live your fated lot as a frail, naked, scared and inescapably impermanent creature.

If he couldn’t find the ultimate meaning in all the centuries he’d spent wandering through the many splendored versions of reality, what could he possibly hope for in however long of a human life was now laid before him?

It was his punishment, really, to wrap up his epic adventure with the fate of a fruit fly!

There is no planning life if it lasts just one day, and that’s what his life really was, he was just too cowardly to admit it, so he borrowed time from the future and put things in it, time that didn’t belong to him yet, and for all he knew, he might not get at all.

Planning that borrowed time was just as absurd as venturing into a virgin territory with maps of some place else and relying on them for guidance.

The debt of these variances accrued, and he got more and more lost while dutifully following his useless map and desperately trying to bend reality out of shape to make it match his expectations.

Reality didn’t take kindly to that.

He remembered his dream and reviled getting dragged into fake reality again, and acting towards it as if it was real. And even if it was real, he wasn’t Helmuth, and he didn’t know what Inclusion 35B was about. He didn’t choose any of this. Why was he playing along?

“I’m not Helmuth,” he declared.

“Aah, yeah…” his partner assessed him with a critical eye. “Maybe you should sit this one out, my friend. You don’t look so hot.”

“Aren’t you going to take me to the hospital?” he asked, with a shrewd gleam in his eye.

“Not on your life!” his partner didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know what you took, but I hope it doesn’t kill you. This is too important to muck up. I trust you’ll get your act together soon and start behaving like a grown-up. I can’t keep making excuses for you, you’re fifty years old, for God’s sake!”

“Finally, some information that’s not useless! So, I’m fifty then! That would make my birth year…”

Of course he didn’t know what year they were in. Not what year, not what place, not even what reality. Back to start.

In the realities with friends and families, he became Helmuth, and took upon the obligations that came with his persona, but for the most part being just kept churning new contexts and new worlds every day, an endless array of possibilities in every combination of details.

Some worlds were so beautiful and so bizarre he spent days, sometimes weeks, going through the same panel again and again, trying to get back to them, and the quantum probabilities translated as refrains, turning the corresponding lyrics into old-fashioned French poems, strewn with repeating lines.

The largest archive of poetry in existence, which had all written itself, was carefully collected and organized by the only being ever to need order and reason - the human it carried in its womb.

He didn’t ask himself who Jennifer was to him. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, it could be a Roger or a Taylor next for all he knew.

His appetite now gone, he excused himself for a moment, pretending he had to take a phone call and promising to delve into the subject of phase two when he returned, and made his way out the door, relieved to hear the muzak chiming softly in the background.

He wrote the new destination on the panel under the other three and gaped incredulously when he read the composite:

inside the wall

the blue world

duplicates

phase two holographic game

“It’s a language?” he laughed out loud. “Does it read top to bottom or bottom to top?”

Strange, the assumptions we make about unfamiliar things, we automatically dump them in the closest category that seems to fit, without ever looking at what they really are.

But what if this was hell? What else would hell look like, if not as an absence of all meaning? He suddenly felt like a condemned man, sentenced to live his disjointed life outside the bonds of family, purpose and love. However much his now husband might hurt from his jealousy and insecurity, at least he could feel human emotions. He lived a story, good or bad, where things happened because of other things. He instantly resented this man, who was a complete stranger, for loving him and having his happiness tied to his whims. They weren’t even his whims, he mused. Whose whims were they, really? Who decided, when a random door opened, whether it was just another door or it led back to the muzak lounge?

He leaned back in the chair, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible, and fell asleep immediately, helped by the slowly dimming light. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping when he woke up, his head pounding and his mouth feeling like cotton balls. There was a blanket on the chair next to his, neatly folded so the edges aligned to form a perfect square.

Startled by the discovery, he jumped to his feet in a fight-or-flight response that bypassed his brain.

There was nobody else in the room, and after he checked inside every cupboard and behind every door, he had the uncomfortable feeling of his privacy having been violated, even as he had no expectation of privacy living in this space.

He didn’t even know how much time had passed since he first woke up in this lounge, there was no accounting for day or night in this place with no doors, no windows and no clocks, a place he had started to suspect was outside time itself somehow, like some sort of hub where different realities and timelines intersected.

The mind is a strange thing that can twist and stretch to no end and accommodate almost anything, no matter how logically unsound, when caught in the push and pull of human rationalizations.

Who would have thought only a few short months ago that this room, which he could not escape, would become the only place in existence where he could find some peace?

We all imagine we have all our ducks in a row, imagine we know what we could live with and what we could not, and think we’re in control. It only takes one minor adjustment, the slightest thing, a ridiculous detail, to wake us up to the fact that we’re barely one rung above an eating and breeding machine, programmed to stay alive at any cost.

Some people find a savage nobility in accepting this thought, in embracing their instinctual nature, they consider it a mark of courage in the struggle for survival they perceive life to be.

It clarifies their purpose, removes their internal conflicts and sets them free from the agony of moral choices and from the obligation to uphold one’s own standards of behavior in the face of insurmountable odds.

Tragically for him, he was not one of those people.

He looked at it, focusing his attention on its details to remember them later: the design comprised swirling and winding stems with tulips at the ends, so entangled it was impossible to tell them apart.

‘I’m not going,’ he decided, calm, then turned his back to the gaping hole in the wall and went to the bar to fix himself lunch.

A blood-curdling scream emerged from the depths, the sound of a person facing mortal danger.

He hesitated, faithful to his original intent, arguing with himself that this was not his problem and that being stuck in here in this alternate reality hub was punishment enough.

Meanwhile, a second scream pierced his ears, and then a third, accompanied by desperate cries for help.

His protective instincts got the better of him and he walked through the opening, already furious because he knew ahead of time he’d have plenty of opportunities to regret this later, kicking himself for being such an idiot and hating that person, whoever they were, for calling out his guilt.

He barely had time to adjust his eyes to the bright sunlight when he got engulfed in a sea of flashes, camera clicks and loudly shouted questions.

There was so much peace in this state, in this spirit-filled darkness, that he checked himself to make sure he wasn’t dead, because what person feels safe in the forest at night, with no knowledge of what lays beyond the reach of his arms and no protection from the elements?

It seemed, though, that the elements themselves had granted him asylum, him, the unfit human with no knowledge of their workings, the human who nevertheless decided to venture, sight unseen, into their world, and who for some bewildering reason was not afraid of it.

A gentle breeze pushed aside the treetops, like drawing a curtain, to reveal the night sky filled with stars. It was only a moment, no more, but long enough to catch the dark contours of a giant creature not ten feet away from him. He panicked and all the air got knocked out of his lungs like from a popped balloon. He desperately tried to quiet his heart, which refused to cooperate, while he strained his eyes to glimpse that creature in the darkness, trying to anticipate its movements. Hours passed in this state of terrified awareness, during which his body followed its own rules, independent of his reason and will, impervious to hunger or cold, a live wire ready to react to the slightest sign of attack.

See, when one faces chaotic patterns, it’s not their strange and aberrant behavior that throws one for a loop. That is to be expected and bows to logic.

It is the consistency of behavior inside the chaos that can drive a person insane, more precisely, the local, provisional consistency, for one must understand that chaos plays by rules too, just rules we can never postulate, because doing so would inherently contradict their very principles, and which only apply for as long as we expect them not to.

The second we’re locked into a pattern of behavior and committed it to mind, it will change.

The fact that the unfortunate subject is always caught on the wrong foot by the unpredictable substance of disorder, a characteristic he should learn to expect after a certain number of experiments, is due to the intrinsic limitations of the human mind.

In a panic, he jumped and started jiggling the handle in an irrational attempt that actually panned out: the door opened with no effort. He looked at the other side of it, while still standing in the doorway, and he wasn’t even surprised to confirm that it was indeed one of the narrow staff doors leading to the restricted section. A golden cursive marked the door JC. He looked inside again and found it transformed into a closet barely two by three, with an old mop sink in one corner and cleaning supplies stacked neatly in the other. An ironic grin upturned the corners of his lips.

“The broom closet? Really?”

The problem with understanding reality is not that we can’t see it for what it is, it’s that we do see it, but explain it away because the findings don’t jibe with our mental model of what it is supposed to be.

The room was large and not brightly lit, a feature that had obviously been designed to create a relaxing ambiance and induce a meditative state.

Its calming features worked in concert with the soft muzak tunes and the cozy leather chairs, whose generous width and soft cushions cradled the body into a state close to sleep.

On the back wall there was a bar with under-lit glass shelving and strange looking bubbly bottles in unusual shapes and colors. They were all filled with liquids that looked better suited for a chemistry lab than for cocktail ingredients. The dark wood of the bar was topped with a bright white marble slab, streaked with deep green and bluish veins.

Oriental carpets, which looked a little worn but definitely expensive, covered every inch of the floor, overlapping in places, so there was no telling what kind of flooring lay underneath.