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Parallel Journeys::

 black and white copy of Parallel Journeys collage

© 1996 Jonathan Zap  

Parallel Journeys

©2001, 2005 Jonathan Zap


I know I may be exceeding the limits of whatever credibility I have in your eyes, but I feel an intense inner compulsion to tell you about the anomalous experience that occurred to me just last night. As you learned from my earlier email I am now in Seattle where I am continuing my traveling fundraising canvass for the Pinion Mesa Animal Refuge.

I was out knocking on doors, "annoying people in the privacy of their own homes," as Danny, my canvassing mentor used to describe it when we canvassed together for a well known environmental group. It was a rainy evening and Seattle was troubled by a thick fog, a fog that had the mind-numbing feeling of a bankrupt dot com executive lying etherized upon a table.

Canvassing for an animal refuge can be frustrating work in the best of circumstances, but when it is a rainy Friday night, and most everybody is out on the town except elderly, shut-ins, or people so exceptionally rude that there was no place else for them to be on a Friday night except home, waiting, waiting for days, or even weeks possibly, for some canvasser to knock on their door, some dutiful, innocent canvasser on whom they could vent the bitter poisons of a life of sleep and irritability, an incarnation spent in work places lit with florescent lights and a private life that consisted mainly of cable and heavily processed food. A life of that much misery and boredom had to be someone's fault, and that someone very likely was this unwanted person standing on their door step with a clip board. These were the kind of people that were laying in wait for me on this fog-obscured night.


And so, to protect whatever healthy tissues may remain within me, I retreated into my Theater of Memory, a labyrinthine complex of rooms I have created within my mind, while I allowed my waking self to be somewhat cloaked and etherized, shrouding myself in that trance-like dissociative state that we canvassers call "auto pilot."


Auto pilot allows the canvasser's body to go through all the motions of canvassing, while his spirit body is off doing something else, such as thinking about a troubled romantic relationship, or wondering if there was anything to the end date of the Mayan calendar---December 21, 2012. And it was actually this last item that I happened to be thinking of as I opened the chain link gate of a run down house with an infinitely bland early Seventies look to it. When I listened to inspiring guests on the Art Bell show, 2012 would sometimes light up in my mind like fire works on a clear summer night. But now, after a couple of hours of walking around in the rain and getting dissed by the few people that were home, I was starting to have doubts about a lot of things, and I wondered if 2012 might not turn out to be a big, fat wet cardboard dud like Y2K.

But just as I had that doubting thought my eyes were dazzled by a striking synchronicity. Just above the door of this house in the dull gold of brass numerals was the address---2012! I stopped for a moment and felt shock reverberating through my body. No, it wasn't a devastating shock like a lightening bolt, it was more like the static electric shock you might get walking across a thick carpet, but lasting a moment or two longer. And then a moment after the shock registered, a skeptical inner voice offered an entirely plausible prosaic explanation. Subliminally, or, as the President of the world's supreme and only super power would say, subliminably, I had seen the large brass address numerals and that had acted as an unconscious catalyst to my scattered thoughts which had alighted on the Mayan end date only seconds before. But this was even more of a synchronicity in a way---only now the meaning had reversed itself, for this version of it deflated 2012 into a parlor trick played on me by my own unconscious to deliver a shock that would at first seem miraculous, but would moments later be revealed as a mundane case of unconscious influence.

Anyway, these were the dissonant, somewhat darkly toned thoughts cascading through my mind when I knocked on the door of the 2012 house. After I had already knocked on the door I noticed several visual clues that I probably shouldn't haven't knocked. My mind had been so caught up in the Mayan prophecy issue that I had failed to notice the most obvious and classic signs that a highly conservative, elderly person lived in this particular house. The stoop was covered in threadbare astro turf, and window sill shelves held dusty knick-knacks of the sort where a ceramic Eiffel Tower might stand next to a puffy, large-eyed plastic child whose outspread arms held a little placard that read "I love you this much Grandma!"

Sure enough, a gaunt, elderly woman in a shabby bathrobe opened the door the three inches allowed by the security chain and stared at me. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she stared at me with a look of uncomprehending irritability that teetered right at the edge of senile paranoia. There was a hearing aid in one ear, but something told me that the batteries had been dead for a long time.

Her appearance may sound unprepossessing, but her face was ground zero for a deja vu shockwave. My mind reeled as auto pilot delivered the opening line of my canvassing rap,

"Sorry to bother you, my name is Jonathan and I'm doing a fund raiser for the Pinion Mesa WildLife Refuge---"

"Mr. Johnson from the what?"

" From the Pinion Mesa Wild Life Refuge."

" I don't need any wild life. I'm on a fixed income."

But I was no longer listening to what she was saying, because now I knew with absolute certainty where I had seen this old woman before.

It was in the Winn-Dixie supermarket in suburban Fairview, Maryland in 1965. It was the second day of a week long visit with my cousins when I saw her, an old woman who happened to be a perfect copy of an old woman I had seen in the Associated Supermarket on Kingsbridge Avenue in the Bronx just three or four days earlier. Even though I was a child I understood immediately the significance of what I had seen. It was that shattering, archetypal moment when you see the flaw in the matrix, when you see that you've been had, that things are not at all what they are trying to seem. Somehow I had always sensed that a lot of people, probably most people, and possibly even all people were what I called "extras" or "walk-ons." They were people somehow contrived to fill in crowd scenes, to take up most of the empty space on subway trains, to mutely walk down sidewalks holding lumpy plastic shopping bags in the hot sun. But if you looked at their eyes, if you looked close, there was no one there, they had those empty glass doll's eyes and everything about them was mechanical.

I had always sensed this, but until that moment I had never had absolute proof of the deception. But what was I to do with that proof when I was still a small child? I continued down the supermarket aisle doing my best to hold up my end of the great facade, because I was afraid to confront the deception. If I were to call it out, if I were to have shouted at the top of my lungs in the supermarket that I knew it was all a great deception--- I felt that I would bring down a great evil upon myself. I sensed, correctly I believe, that the powerful will behind the great deception would not allow me to expose it. If I were to step out of line there would be immediate and devastating vengeance visited upon me. In my mind's eye I saw the supermarket lady emitting a piercing, high-pitched scream, and when she did so all the other extras would stop whatever they were doing and also emit the same high-pitched scream. I would be the only one not making this scream, and they would quickly circle around me, and engulf me.

And now here was this old supermarket lady again, but her physiognomy, her apparent age, was a perfect replica of how she appeared decades earlier. So much had changed in me since I had last confronted her, and the fearful accommodation of the deception that characterized my childhood had been replaced by the will to know, the will to see through the deception no matter what the cost. I stared into her eyes in a way that let her, and everyone, know that the game was up, that I had seen through the great deception, and was not going to accommodate the illusion for even a single second more. Instantly, the old woman, the walk-on, dropped its facade. The senile old woman's scowl disappeared along with the cataracts and there was a high pitched ringing or humming in my ears. I couldn't quite hear what was said to me, but I knew I had been invited into the house and stepped into a living room whose only illumination was a black white television with a test pattern on it.

And then I had that acutely embarrassing sensation you get when you realize you have been way off in guessing someone's age, or perhaps have even mistaken their gender, because I saw now that the old woman was not actually the supermarket lady, or even an old woman, but a pale school boy with large, sorrowful grey eyes. He wore a white button down shirt, narrow dark tie and grey trousers and his neck was weirdly long and elastic. His style of dress seemed to be that of an English school boy from an earlier era. There was an uncanny intelligence ,as well as sadness in his eyes. Automatically I asked,

"Are you interested in helping endangered wildlife?"

"Yes, we are." He had a slightly British accent and spoke in a manner that was confident, formally polite, but also deeply sincere and humble. His tone and answer were so unexpected I wasn't sure what to say next.

"You are?"

"Yes." he replied with the identical tone---sincere, confident precision.

"You want to help endangered wildlife?" His manner unsettled me, and I was lapsing into redundancy.

"It's the main reason we came here." This last statement puzzled me into another silence. I replayed it slowly in my mind,

"It's-the- main-reason-we-came-here." He sounded so sure of himself, but I couldn't quite get a handle on what he meant.

"Follow me please." He turned and gracefully, almost elegantly, motioned for me to follow. I followed him out of the darkened living room and into a long narrow hallway. We turned a corner and now there was a long wide corridor of polished brown marble, magnificently decorated with Persian rugs of deep colors and intricate patterns. Crystal chandeliers glimmered in the high arched ceilings. There were beautiful cabinets of mahogany and beveled glass that were filled with what appeared to be antique nautical instruments---sextants, astrolabe, chronometer, ship's compass, globes of various kinds, a complicated apparatus of gears and spheres of precious stone that was apparently a simulacrum of the solar system. I followed the boy down the long corridor, and into a room that looked like the private study of a Nineteenth century English gentleman. There were floor to ceiling bookcases filled with leather bound volumes of fine, old, hand-bound books of the sort with marbleized end papers, and gilt titles. There were draperies of wine dark velvet, and a chandelier of fine, old crystal. The boy motioned me toward a comfortable chair, while he sat behind a large desk with an elaborately carved oriental dragon motif. On the desk was a single object, an exquisite mechanical clock, a "grand complication," I believe they are called with numerous hands and dials that showed phases of the sun and moon, and God only knew what else, for this clock had alchemical symbols or glyphs where one expected to see Roman numerals. The clock was housed in a crystal bell that revealed a whirring galaxy of gears, jeweled bearings, and other tiny parts in complicated movement.

"Would you care for something to drink?" The boy motioned to a small marble topped serving cabinet on which there were glasses and a prismatic decanter of amber liquid. I assumed it contained some costly brandy, and wasn't sure about the legality of accepting alcohol from a minor.

"It's non alcoholic." the boy seemed able to read my mind.

"Well, in that case..." He carefully poured me a drink, and handed me a glass tumbler of the amber liquid. It tasted golden, fragrantly herbal, like a mixture of sparkling cider, currants, maple syrup and cinnamon. It's effect was warming, relaxing, enlivening in a way that was more like an elixir than a stimulant. This seemed magical and uncanny, until I remembered that nowadays, exotic, herbal concoctions could be found in every corner store. I took another sip of the drink, and put my clipboard filled with animal photographs on the desk.

"So, how long have you been interested in helping endangered wildlife?" I asked.

"Oh, a very long time," he replied. "It's only in recent years that we've allowed ourselves to intervene." This seemed an odd, even weirdly grandiose thing for a school boy to say. But his manner did not seem to suggest pretentiousness, so much as a world weary, poignant sadness.

"What kind of endangered wild life are you interested in?" He looked puzzled by my question, and his eyebrows arched quizzically.

"Your kind of course, and all the other kinds of wild life in this realm, because it's all endangered isn't it?" This was an odd way of putting it, but I knew what he meant. I had often been struck by the irony of talking about certain endangered species, when really the whole planet was in an ecological crisis, and almost every species, besides cockroaches and bacteria, were somewhat endangered.

"Are you interested in volunteering to work with the animals?" There was a long moment of silent eye contact, he had a boy's face but his large grey eyes seemed so old, the moment of eye contact seemed to stretch on and.... then there is a complete lapse in my memory, I guess this is what some people call "missing time," because I found myself opening the chain link gate of the 2012 house... I knew I should leave, I remembered what had happened until that moment of eye contact with the boy, but there was just a blankness inside about any transition. I closed the gate and walked down the street feeling a bit stunned. It felt like I had been in a hall of mirrors, and there was a sense that I had been hypnotized, or put into some kind of trance. And my questions to the boy, when I reviewed them in my mind, did not quite make sense, it was as if I was not getting what was happening to me. Had I been in shock or somehow put into shock? I also had the feeling that the supermarket lady was pulled out of my own memory. There was a feeling that I had been tested, or evaluated, and that the test had all been various forms of simulation and illusion.

I looked in my clipboard for my map so I could make a mark where the house was, and I discovered, that in the clear plastic envelope where I put donations, there were now seven very new-looking hundred bills that I had never seen before. Whatever illusions or manipulations I had been exposed to, it had at least been a very successful night of fundraising.


II.


Several months had passed, summer had turned into fall and I had returned to Colorado, but was still canvassing for the Pinion Mesa Wildlife Refuge. It was a dark and windy evening, autumn leaves swirling around my feet, gusts of wind almost throwing me off balance as I came around a secluded cul de sac. I noticed that lights---pink and blue lights, were reflecting off the white vinyl siding of a house I approached. They could have been Christmas lights, but Halloween was only a week away, and Halloween lights are usually orange. The lights shimmered and moved. I drew closer, till I stood beside the house....But where are the lights coming from?

There was a field behind the house and I saw glimmers of light out there, but the wind blowing in my face seemed to blur my vision and what I saw looked like a ring of sparklers seen through fog or colored glowing smoke whipping around in the wind. I walked between the houses toward the field fighting a fierce head wind. And then I saw it, and seeing it caused my mind to shatter. I know that "mind shattering" is something of a cliché of expression, but I actually felt it shattering, shattering like a bone china tea cup falling ten stories onto a floor of polished, black marble. My mind shattered into blankness for a moment or two, and then it staggered to its mental feet and made a crazed and wobbly attempt to explain to itself what it was seeing. I thought for a moment or two that I was witnessing the birth of a tornado, a tornado that was pulsing with ball lightening, or luminescent plasma or aurora borealis, or... But, no, no, this was outside any known category, this was a shockingly anomalous vortex, a vortex spinning with furious speed, but its spinning was more than spinning, it was like looking up through the eye of a tornado, but it was a tornado not of wind, but of luminous, scintillating filaments, and each of the filaments, which seemed to have no beginning and no end, twisted and spun each along its own axis, like glowing strands of double helix DNA hooked up like plumbing rooter snakes to invisible turbines spinning and whipping them around the tornado. Twisting, spinning, spiraling filaments of light forming a pulsing funnel, a funnel that folded back and in on itself again and again as if God, the father, were pulling back his foreskin again and again during a cosmic multiple orgasm.

Air rushed away from this singularity, and the resulting winds blasted me nearly off my feet, but I could not retreat from it, it had a furious, ecstatic energy that drew me with an inexorable certainty like a moth hurtling itself toward a thousand watt bulb. In my whole body, the awareness dawned that I beheld a portal, a wormhole vortex of spinning, vibrating, hyper dimensional super strings. No, it was not an hallucination, not a flashback, not something that Stephen Hawking could hallucinate while having a wet dream on sixty-four hits of blue Sandoz acid.

The Universe, the Matrix, was having a kundalini crisis, and I knew that this crisis was, for me, an opportunity. I knew that my finger trembled above the reset button, that I trembled at the threshold, the event horizon of a hole torn open in the the Babylon Matrix, in the fabric of space-time itself. This was a hole that I had to enter or my whole life would forever be bound in shallows and in miseries.

I can remember the wind blasting me, color and light exploding before me, into me, and then...blankness, silence, a slight wind fading off into the night, and I stood in a field, a field of sage brush and high dessert grasses, and it was the same field I had been in, I knew this somehow as a certainty, I was in the same place, but there were no houses, no street lights, nothing man made. It was still Colorado, but it did not have the name Colorado, it was just a high desert land that was and had always been, untouched by man----white man, red man, not any kind of man....

Above were clouds drifting in silvery moonlight, and far above the clouds what looked like a distant aurora borealis of pink and blue lights receding into the darkness of space. The field was a mesa of sagebrush, grasses, here and there were boulders and pinion trees, and everywhere silence, stillness, vastness, the night air empty of human sound, empty of a single human thought besides my own.

I knew in my whole body that I was still on the earth, but this earth lived and breathed and dreamed untroubled by the nightmare spawn, the human species, of which I was a part now set apart, an alien presence standing there in my blue nylon parka. My metal clipboard was gone, but my camera/utility bag of black, weathered nylon was still buckled to my waist, and I felt it as an alien artifact, a thing of weird polymers, lenses, plastic, chemicals, electronics, extruded into a world of organic virginity. (others seem to have had experiences of this "green world" see A Splinter in Your Mind)


I scanned the moonlit mesa, turning slowly to see the whole horizon, and when I came back to my starting point I saw that a figure now stood a few paces from me, a boy with large gray eyes. He stepped forward and I saw that he was the boy, or what had seemed like a boy, when I had met him several months ago in Seattle at that house---the 2012 house.

(Disclaimer: I'm trying here to convey my encounter with an actual interdimensional being. To do so, to be able to language it to you, I inevitably have to alter things, but I am trying to do so in a way that captures the truth of the encounter.)

"Did you send that portal to me?" I asked. Instinctively, I felt that in this encounter I needed to be proactive, to engage this strange being and not merely react to him.

"Yes, I did." Graciously, the boy paused and maintained an alert silence for many moments, sensing that I needed time to absorb this. I needed time to absorb a great many things, but I didn't need very much time, because time had slowed down as it can in the presence of great danger or great power. But maybe I need to slow down this narrative, and be more forthcoming about what encountering this boy, entity, or whatever was like.

I knew that I stood before great power. This boy was not a boy, not necessarily anything I could fully name, but whatever else he might be, he was certainly a highly intelligent and potent being, endowed with an array of magical powers. Although I couldn't fully name what he was, the word "elf" flashed into my intuiton, and I knew that word applied to him, but he was not, this is so hard to language, he was not an "elf" in some fairy tale sort of way, no, he was the biological type---elf---shockingly revealed to my direct bodily perception. When you see a spider, or a bannana, you don't have to think a whole lot about it, your body is able to register such easily recognizable biological forms on a cellular level. Similarly, when I encountered this being, I registered him, or, let me be more exact, my body registered him on a cellular level as a a potent being, shimmering at the edges of his cloaked fields with concealed magical powers of shocking intensity. Encountering a being that is potentially higher than you on the food chain is something that you will register on a cellular level. Your body knows what sort of power you are facing long before your mind does. I got such a feeling last Saturday when I was out at the refuge making eye contact with Kristopher, a Siberian tiger I met as a tiny cub, who is now 650 pounds of full grown healthy young Siberian male tiger who, when he rears up on his hind legs, towers several feet over my head. That's a force to be reckoned with, and I can feel that on a cellular level when I draw close. The air around Kristopher crackles with nuclear potent tiger energy. Being inside the new tiger enclosure with Indigo and Violet, who are brother and sister adolescent, but very potent, young tigers, blindingly fast, powerful, deadly if they want to be, and it's a feeling of there, but for the grace of God, go I in one piece. And especially the grace and good will of these two particular tigers, or, in this case, there but for the grace of this particular being, who, fortunately for me, seemed to be benign---no, that's not quite right, registered on a cellular level as benign. With Indigo and Violet I felt somewhat vulnerable, but with him I actually felt energized, empowered, my own energy field expanded in his presence, and the reason should be obvious, he "vibrated" (that's starting to sound New Agey, but what else can I say) with such high energy, was so potently conscious, that he shocked and expanded my awareness and my energy field. Time slowed down around him, and perceiving him, my cells registered the physical presence of a higher biological , and perceiving that shifted my assemblage point, shifted the core of my being. And we should all be both aware and wary about the fact that encountering a very high energy being, a physical or nonphysical entity that has real power, is a very precarious, often highly dangerous moment which will, at the very least, alter us forever.

It would be very reasonable for you to ask why I didn't register such a profound shock when I had first encountered this being in Seattle, when he was dressed like a British school boy. One answer is that I wasn't as shocked then because he had heavily, heavily cloaked himself during that encounter. He did not cloak himself as a deception, but rather out of consideration of my frailty. He had a benign, prime directive sort of sensibility, an inborn gentleness, that guided him to use the least amount of power that would still accomplish the intervention. Also, I realized after my encounter in Seattle, though I didn't mention this in my earlier account, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have, that from the moment I had encountered what seemed to be an old woman, I was very gently, but very potently, put under the influence of a spell, a benign spell,that had the effect of putting me into a kind of trance, a trance that was like a general anesthetic, but which allowed me, in a slightly disembodied way, to be aware of what was happening. This spell was done purely for my protection to prepare me, I now realize, for this new encounter in which he was still cloaked, but revealed far more than earlier, and he had manifested a portal, a highly energetic portal that had shifted me to a green world, an earth that was completely organic, and the shock of encountering the portal, the shock of finding my body, my incarnation, shifted to another realm, still the earth but another realm, was a double preparation for the third shock wave, the revelation of his energy, and without the anesthetic spell. What also helped greatly to prepare me for this encounter was the fact that it was not my first encounter with a highly energetic, powerful being in possession of magical powers. It was also not my first encounter with an interdimensional traveler. But that would have to be the subject of another story, and I'm sure you are growing impatient for me to return to my narrative.

The few moments he gave me were long enough, for they were a few moments of slow time, time in which my awareness expanded ,and I understood that I could not be so passive this time, that I had to engage him as an equal, just like I engaged the tigers as equals, though at the same time staying very awake to the inequalities of our capabilities. It was time for the most direct questions possible.

"Who are you?" I asked, and he responded formally,

"I am an adept of the Vehrillion." When I write that out, it sounds like an almost obnoxiously cryptic answer, but what is hard to convey is that although he responded to my questions verbally, there was also a level of telepathic communication going on, and somehow I knew that the Vehrillion was an inner circle or order of alchemists, or occult initiates, who had advanced to the highest levels of what we would consider magic.

"For now, call me Jeremiah."

"Jeremiah, why did you bring me here?"

"I brought you here to see life forms that coinhabit your realm, that feed in your realm, yet they are hidden, and unknown to most of your kind." I knew what he was referring to, again there was this telepathic overlay to what was spoken, but I had to ask, had to have it spelled out.

"Do you mean the mind parasites?" (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites, Vampires )

"Yes, that's exactly what I mean. You have done well compared to most of your kind in becoming aware of them, and seeking to be vigilant about them. Your will to be vigilant about them is part of what brings us together here at this moment. You and your kind need to see what feeds upon you, you need to behold the feeders, to bring that which manipulates you, and harvests you, out of the shadows, and into the light of awareness." The implications of his words were chilling, but not unknown to me. Still, he was silent for a few moments, giving me time to absorb the impact of his words which were a powerful confirmation of a dark possiblity I had long been aware of. Jeremiah's grey eyes were focused on me, they were highly alert, but not intrusive, and he was calm and perfectly patient, even gracious, in every look and gesture. A light wind moved across the mesa, stirring sage brush around us.

Jeremiah lifted his left hand, palm facing the night sky, and there was a cobalt blue sphere hovering about ten centimeters above the center of his plam. It looked like a sphere of the highest grade of blue sapphire, about four centimeters in diameter, except that it had an internal luminosity---it was an energy source, and it was alive, the way a cell or a star is alive, and the feeling of its aliveness was calm, clear, aware. This is hard to language, but the optical precision, clarity and beautiful midnight blue color of this orb were also its energetic properties, which were also the qualities of its aliveness and awareness.

Jeremiah held his hand steadily allowing me to look into the deep blue depths of the orb. "Think of this as medicine." Jeremiah explained, "An, orb of blue sapphire elemental, manifested through the Vehrillion. To behold it is to have it with you. Behold it in your imagination, see it in your mind's eye and you also partake of this medicine, for its manifestation is what you call nonlocal. Here you behold it at a point of origin, and that has a particular power." I felt its power, a power of clarity and vision. "I see that you are wearing four items of silver jewelry. Keep looking at the orb, and at same time look at these four silver objects in your mind's eye." This request seemed to come from left field, but I did as he said, and saw these objects which I had worn for many years. One of the four was a ring with a small cabachon of amethyst, and I also wore an amulet that had a large purplish black star sapphire.

And then I knew why he had called my attention to these objects. I had chosen them for a purpose I didn't fully comprehend until that moment. They were designed, like tuning forks, to resonate with, to pick up like accurately tuned antennae, certain energies that were connected to the energy of this orb. And these were energies that I needed to protect me from the mind parasites, or feeders, as Jeremiah called them.

Jeremiah took a step closer to me and gently brought the orb near my body and I felt parts of me light up and vibrate energetically, these effects are too hard to language, but had everyting to do with chakras and energy meridians. Jeremiah brought the orb near the silver objects and they hummed in sympathetic response. "You, and your silver objects, will now resonate more strongly with this medicine, even after you cross out of this realm. The silver objects will offer you some protection, but keep them within your energy field, do not put them aside or let others handle them. You live in a predatory realm, but if others try to take these objects, or this medicine from you by force or deception, by direct or subtle means, it will work against them, for it is medicine that cannot be stolen, it can only be received as a gift, and only the worthy can recevie the gift.... You are going to need this protective medicine because when you see the feeders they will know that you are seeing them, and they will not like that, they will most likely try to swarm you at some vulnerable moment. I am marking you as under a special protection they have learned to respect. When you sense the feeders, see the blue orb in your mind's eye. And tell others of your kind to do this if they find the feeders trying to overwhelm them. They may also summon and manifest the orb of Vehrillion sapphire elemental which is hidden, but available in your realm.

Jeremiah fell silent for many long moments while the orb floated above his palm, the stillness of the mesa all around us. The blue of the orb was so deep and I was drawn into clear depths of sapphire. It was a gift of energy and awareness to behold this elemental orb and Jeremiah seemed to be encouraging me to draw as much energy from it as I could.
I'm not sure how much time elapsed, for a time there was just the blue orb and in the background Jeremiah and the mesa. And then Jeremiah asked very gently----the telepathic overlay very expressive of the seriousness of the choice,

"Are you willing to look at the feeders?" And suddenly I wasn't so sure if I was willing. I sensed the edge of the abyss, but I knew my life only allowed for one possible answer and I willed myself to say,

"Yes."

"Then look down." said Jeremiah.

I looked down and saw that which unraveled me for several long heartbeats before I was willing to let what my eyes scanned enter my mind. Attached to my body, coming from my body, through my body, was a broken lattice of dark filaments, undulating filaments like a broken spider web spun of black spider silk moving, undulating chaotically like the tentacles of a sea anenome. (All of this is so hard to language because such a density of weirdness was presented all at once, and there were telepathic and intuitive overlays that made what I perceived all too apparent, while word based descriptions can only present fragmented slivers.) And I knew that each of the filaments was a kind of nerve cell, shadowy black neurons with infinitely complex dendrites and interconnections with other threads of tissue. I must call it tissue because it was alive and intelligent and.... parasitic, virulently parasitic, a vampiric web or neural net or brain, only the neural web was the vampire, and it was highly aware of me for I was its food source, its host, and it continually reconfigured itself to create networks, new interconnections to draw off more vital energy, and I felt the blackness of this shadow web, dendrites and axons of black spider silk moving and undulating, and also pulsating, but it was a weirdly horrifying inverse arterial pulsing, and suddenly I comprehended the horror of its pulsing rhythm, it was the antiheart beat of my heart beat. This pulsating lattice of tissue was a capillary suction pump, it beat in perfect counter rhythm to my heart beat because when my heart pumped blood out it sucked in, not blood, but vital energy, and for a moment it was not clear if I was merely tissue, an organ inside of its body, or if it was a parasitic tissue that surrounded my body. Something about the light absorbing blackness of the filaments made them tendrils of energy suction and also rendered them invisible to ordinary human eyesight. At certain nodes of the web, a nexus of dendrites formed a densely entangled concavity, a bulbous thicket of black nerve tissue and inside these were pale worm-like parasites, and these worms had the pale, silvery luminosity of a hungry moon, a sterile moon whose only light was reflected from a host energy source on which it drew. These moon worms were part of a complex and delicately counterbalanced parasitic ecosystem, an ecosystem for which I was now the sole food source.

The equilibrium of this ecosystem had been shocked, even shattered by my displacement to this green realm and the web of parasitic life undulated in a highly agitated, chaotic state. It was a broken lattice, its outer edges were loose filaments, spindly neurons whose outer dendrites had been yanked off so that only loose dismembered axons, waved in amputated torment seeking to be reconnected, reconnected to the larger web, the planetary matrix of tissue which they had been so densely interconnected to before I entered the portal. I had displaced to a green realm, a realm not infected with this vast network of parasitic tissue, so all that I saw was the broken remnant of the web that had closely surrounded my body and somehow survived crossing over. This was but the smallest part of the mind parasite matrix that had always harvested my energy, its perpetual suction a hidden, insidious taxation of my every pulse of life energy, but now it lay before me shocked and vulnerable and I almost felt (weird as this sounds) pity for it. It was torn asunder from its planetary matrix and unsure of itself, chaotically trying to reconfigure itself to cocoon around me perhaps, tightening its embrace of the host to conserve its one remaining energy source.

My mind almost unraveled as I gazed at this alien life form, for I was seeing that which it is not permitted to see, and it was a singularity, like the time when I was ten and mauled by a dog and I saw muscle tissue, purple and pink veined, the inside of my body on the outside, and perception came in time-slowing shock waves.

Then my visual perception blurred for a moment as color erupted and it took a moment to realize these were Jeremiah's hands moving with blurred speed, and his hands projected flames or jets of multi-colored energy. So fast they moved and with surgical precision, and I knew exactly what they were doing, they were freeing me, filament by filament, from the matrix and the feeling was ecstatic, euphoric, as a billion hungry little mouths were removed from my skin, a billion points of constriction and fear that I had no idea even existed, because I had never before been freed from their insidious suction.

I felt my energy field blossoming, my awareness, my being was spinning outward, dancing and singing into the mesa, a glorious emergence as parasitic cobwebs vanished into the high desert night. My spirit celebrated, rejoiced, but I felt I could not go fully into the celebration, I had to seek the forbidden knowledge because the hungry web still thrived on my earth, the predatory realm that I inhabited with six billion of my brothers and sisters. I saw so many of them there going about their day gazing downward, many with spirits broken, for above them was a dark coagulated sky, a planetary vampiric matrix above their heads, above them on the food chain, and their suffering spirits were like nodes of nourishing energy inside this dark brain, a network of parasitic intelligence inserting its mind into all of us, harvesting from us a rich diet of fear, pain, hatred, jealousy, addictive passions, lethargic indulgences. And I realized at that moment that we have been the deceived host of this metaparasite since at least the dawn of history. We need to break loose from this devouring cocoon, but to do so, we need the clarity of the Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental to cast light on the vast, shadowy mind, the planetary matrix of hungry black tissue. And this was why Jeremiah had sent the portal, he had removed me to a pure, uninfected realm so that I could see the vastness of the infection and be a witness to my kind.

As I stood there on the mesa a terrible vision flickered into my mind. I saw the gleaming Twin Towers and I knew this was early on the morning of September 11. The Twin Towers were still perfectly intact, but surrounding them, massing and swarming around them, were pulsating masses of dendrites, entangled concavities of hungry nerve tissue and I knew that the matrix had sent great masses of suctioning tissue to this particular place and time because it knew what was coming, a great, exploding feast of dark energy, a feast of terror about to erupt and I saw dendrites, insidious tendrils of its will perfectly interfaced into the puppet brains of the terrorists so that the matrix actually looked out at the gleaming towers through the eyes of the terrorist pilots, but with its will and ravenous hunger, and it craved with sexual frenzy to rupture those towers, to pop them, to tear into them like a starving, rabid dog tearing into hives full of golden honey, only here the honey was fear, and blood, blood vaporizing in the fiery combustion of exploding jet fuel and as the towers collapsed there was a frenzy of feeding, an imploding vampiric orgasm suctioning blood and terror that pulsated the whole planetary matrix in waves of multiple orgasm.

My whole being trembled as I beheld the Godhead of evil, the face of the archparasitie, the Medusa whose hair of snakes was some early vision of these neurons and dendrites of pulsating evil, but mercifully, I was also seeing this event through Jeremiah's mind and I saw that the matrix was actually being caught in its ravenous greed, in its need for vampiric orgasm, and was revealing itself, revealing the web of evil so that the host was being awakened to its peril, an awakening immunological adaptation was gaining power and the dark matrix itself was imperiled.

A deadly battle was ensuing, the hungry mind of the matrix asserting its dominance over the host, its right to draw blood, its right to feasting explosions, vampiric orgasms of mass terror, but the host was awakening, individual nodes of consciousness achieving glimpses of the shadowy network. And when I had these realizations, a matter of heartbeats, Jeremiah pulled back the veil, the terrible visions dissolved and it was just us standing in the silent mesa.
I took in some deep breaths, feeling the stillness, the peace of the mesa, so removed from the boiling strife, the virulent, predatory infection of my home world.

"We have given you this vision and the orb of Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental so that you may share these gifts with our kind, share them through the web of thinking machines you have so recently manifested. The sleepers must awaken and see the feeding web, they must find the mind within themselves that is stronger than the web mind, the mind of freedom, of energy, of love."

Jeremiah raised his hands, it seemed a gesture of blessing, but also a gift of energy, a bestowal of awareness and I felt myself intensely, powerfully alive, felt myself and Jeremiah as very alike, magically empowered beings gazing out at boundaryless horizon shimmering with interdimensional portals. I knew somehow that we shared some common ancestor, and I wondered if some ancestor of Jeremiah, some early proto-elf might have been born into constricted, parasited mortal, human form, a human mutant who had somehow developed enough energy to break free of the matrix and become the first elf. Was Jeremiah a messenger from the evolutionary future of my species? Could the elves, this race of changelings and interdimensional travelers, immortal and magically endowed, be the higher form, the new species that homo sapiens, bleeding and bedraggled was struggling toward, struggling through webs of clinging, infected tissue suctioning us greedily, striving with all its dark will to hold back the day when we too become like the elves and join those who await us in a greener realm, a realm where the road goes ever on and on and many paths and errands meet....

As I stood and looked at Jeremiah under the moonlight his form shimmered for a moment and then altered. He appeared differently now, but I knew it was still him, it was the same essence, only now I sensed that he was more fully revealed, he was allowing me to see him in his physical body without cloaks or guises, and I knew that, for Jeremiah, this was a gesture of ultimate trust.

He was somewhat taller, his hair was longer, the color of dark gold and his eyes were gray-green and intensely alive and aware. His eyes had the depth of one who has survived many sorrows, and the far-seeing quality of one who sees through many veils. Overlooking his slightly pointed ears, Jeremiah, as a human type was comparable to an exceptionally graceful, androgynous adolescent, but there was none of the temporary look of human adolescence. His body had a completely finished quality, a radiant vitality that seemed beyond mere youth, and a type of charisma that was uncanny. He was clothed in what seemed like dark velvets, mostly green and purple and he wore a cloak of similar material that seemed to blend with the night. His clothing was loose and comfortable and left his hands, neck and face exposed. And here there was a shocking incongruity in his appearance----his skin was slashed with fresh scars, they seemed pink and in a healing phase, but there were so many of them, long twisting lines as if he had been slashed from head to foot with knives. I felt a shuddering certainty that his whole body was scarred in this way, and sensed these wounds as a glowing lattice of pain. Somehow, the perfection of Jeremiah’s elf body had been slashed with mortal scars, and the incongruity of these wounds cast a shadow of vulnerability on the preternatural beauty of his kind.

Jeremiah gave me a few moments to adjust to seeing him before he spoke,

“Since you have had the courage to see the feeders, it is only right that I lay aside all disguise and appear before you as I really am. The wounds you see are a small part of the price I had to pay to earn my passage, to make the crossing to your realm…” Jeremiah was silent for some moments. “I have also had to encounter the feeders, but in a different form, a form that preys upon the elves. What you have seen are like the strands of a web or like the drones that serve a hive. But at the center of the web is a spider, deep in the hive is a queen… We may need to talk more of these dark matters tonight, but perhaps in more comfortable surroundings. I have prepared a small camp not far from here where we can make a fire and have something to drink.”

Jeremiah gestured for me to follow him. It was a gracious gesture which came mostly through the eyes. He had a way of speaking through his eyes that was both eloquent and highly effective. As we walked through the mesa I wondered if Jeremiah needed things said aloud. I had the feeling that speech was for him a primitive custom which he kept up for my sake, a gesture of polite respect toward the accustomed ways of another kind. We walked silently, but I could feel that cessation of talk was no break in our communication. Jeremiah was aware of what I was thinking and feeling. It did not feel intrusive, it felt natural, more natural than what I had ever felt before, so that now, when I walk down the street with a friend and don’t know what he’s thinking, that seems so strange, a shocking omission and blankness that seems weird, artificial, almost like a punishment. I was aware of Jeremiah just as he was aware of me. Once he had appeared in his true form something opened up, a portal in the form of a shared space with another entity.

Sharing awareness with Jeremiah altered me, for one thing it profoundly shifted my experience of time. Time slowed around him, and eye contact with him made permanent alterations in my sense of time and reality. Mostly I became aware of how much more we could be, how much more we will be one day. But I also sensed from Jeremiah an awareness of how much we are something intense right now. He saw human beings as survivors in a realm of amazing trial and hardship. He viewed our kind with respect and a kind of horrified fascination, like we might view Siberian tigers, eyes glowing amber in the night as they fed on a half frozen wolf carcass in a desolate expanse of frigid tundra.

You see, when Jeremiah dropped his guise I became aware of many things at once. The nature of our relationship became completely transparent. I knew that Jeremiah was alone, the “we” he had referred to in Seattle was a guise, and in actuality he had traveled on some terrible solitary journey, a great crossing, to get to this realm, and his separation from his kind and his world was probably irreversible. I knew that we were allies, and I felt his need of me, for his destiny required of him that he build a bridge between his kind and mine and he needed me to build that bridge. And I knew these things in this completely transparent way, no thoughts needed to lead up to realizations, it was simply and naturally apparent that we were allies, that each of us had pursued a difficult quest, but these quests had intersected and were now become parallel journeys.

The walk was longer than I expected, the mesa seemed to go on forever, walking across it in the moonlight, night winds sweeping by us, time unfolded in a way I had never experienced before. As we walked my understanding of Jeremiah, and my understanding of myself grew. The mesa felt so empty of human chatter, this whole realm did, and Jeremiah’s essence was the clearest of signals in the open night air.

We approached a rock formation, giant sand blasted boulders of red stone surrounded by desert plants. The curvilinear contours of the red stone emerged, grew out of the high desert expanse and through Jeremiah’s awareness I felt the deep indigo light around them. This was a power spot, a place of great medicine, and in the center of this crown of red stone was a fire ring created with ritualistic perfection, a circle of precisely fitted rocks with a teepee of dry sticks at its center. Beside the fire ring was a cloth bag, almost hard to see, of the same velvety, self-camouflaging material as Jeremiah’s cloak.

Jeremiah lit the fire, an arc of energy from eyes and fingertips, and we sat beside it, its orange glow pulsated with warmth and sparks flew up and disappeared into the high desert night. Jeremiah reached into his cloth bag and produced a beautiful flask which he handed to me. This flask was an artifact of another realm and of an unknown material that looked like polished bronze but was some light weight, impervious ceramic with the adamantine quality of some very hard gemstone. The cap of the flask was inset with a beautiful cabochon emerald. Jeremiah gestured with his hand in a drinking motion.

Carefully I unscrewed the emerald cap and brought the flask to my lips. The liquid that flowed into my body was…. it would almost be an understatement to call it a magical elixir, it filled my body, every cell with elemental colors of light, radiant nourishment, a chorus of voices of colored light , the harmonizing energies of elements, gemstones, stars coursing through me, transforming me as pure vitality and color energizing my core vibration. One sip of this elixir was more than sufficient, and I carefully screwed the cap back on, feeling the deep green medicine of the emerald, and passed it back to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah looked into the fire but I could tell that he was looking inward, looking into memory, and this recollection was an act of great courage.

III

“There are some crossings that can be made only by remembering what is hidden. And there are others that can be made only by drinking deeply from the waters of forgetfulness.” began Jeremiah.

“And so it was in a state of deep forgetfulness that I awakened on the darkest of nights. For a while I stared at the shadowed forest all around me , as if making sure that I had truly left the dream time. The folk of your world, and many of mine too, seem to have an inborn certainty that when they awaken from sleep they will recall their identity and life experience after a groggy moment or two. Most never stop to think how precarious this process is, that there is no guarantee that they will awaken, and if they do, that they will recall the same identity and life experience.

Sleep and dreaming are quite different for those of my kind, but for all of us it is a journey, a journey that alike our waking journey is uncertain of outcome. When I awoke I recalled fragments of my dream journey. A darkness had haunted my dreams and I knew that I had battled a dreadful adversary, a fell creature of hideous power and form which I could not recall except in dissolving glimpses of pale yellow hating eyes and insectile tissues----slick membranes, claws, antennas, and jointed stingers. It should have puzzled me that my recall was so fragmented, since for those of our kind dream journeys are as real as any other, but for some reason it didn’t.

I had slept beneath a large willow tree of great age and its long leaves surrounded me like a protective canopy. The flashes of twisted battle I recalled from the dream time were calmed somewhat by the willow and the fragrant darkness of the forest. It was a clear summer night and a warm breeze whispered in the dried leaves upon which I had made my bed. In the distance were the rounded peaks of the Green Mountains.

These sights and sounds and smells were so familiar and reassuring, but I felt disturbed, felt a wrongness in things that I could not quite define. I knelt beneath the safety of the willow tree. Beside me was a familiar cloth bag and resting on top of it a beautiful silvery dagger engraved with intricate symbols and runes. Its handle ended in a large round cabochon gem, a sapphire that reflected moonlight from midnight blue depths within the stone.

I picked up the dagger and felt how familiar its heft and balance point was to my hand. I knew this object, and yet I could recall nothing about how I acquired it. I knew the cloth bag, and yet was not sure what it contained. My head swam as I realized that I existed as an island of awareness in a vast sea of forgetfulness. It was as if a dark, heavy curtain had been drawn across all the lifetimes I had experienced before I had fallen asleep beneath the old willow tree. But although I could recall nothing of my personal lifeline, I was able to draw upon a recollection of general knowledge. I knew all the principles of the alchemical art we call the Vehrillion, and I knew all the history of my kind and our world, Emeral.

A potent spell of forgetfulness had been cast upon me, I realized, and I endeavored to discover its origin and undo its power. I took several deep breaths, stilled my mind, focused my awareness within and summoned a portal, a gateway that I could pass through and travel to the place of memory. This portal is part of an inner alchemy similar to what you call Theater of Memory. It is a practice from the third level of the Vehrillion that allows us to experience our memory as a landscape through which we can journey and explore the remotest reaches of any of our lifetimes. When I passed through the portal I found myself on a familiar stone pathway. This pathway leads up to the great walls that surround my Theater of Memory. A hidden doorway in the great walls, that only I knew how to access, would lead me into the interior depths of memory.

As I traveled down the pathway I came upon an unexpected sight. A dense forest of grey trees with entangled, thorny branches blocked the way. There was a sinister, uncanny look to this obstructing forest. The trees and branches were all as grey and porous as old bones, and as I stared at them they seemed to feed off the energy of my gaze and become thicker and more densely entangled. I was profoundly shocked. This forest was the manifestation of a spell of terrifying power, and could only have been wrought by someone who had advanced to the highest levels of the Vehrillion. And even someone who had such a degree of ability would need a personal knowledge of me, for I am an adept of the Vehrillion and there are many counter measures and levels of defense in the mind of an adept that should have prevented a spell of such penetration.

I needed to find some trace of the maker in the spell. If I knew the origin of the spell I would have a powerful lever to displace it from my mind. I took a deep breath and summoned a form of optical alchemy that allowed my visual awareness to draw to a fine point of observation, like a looking glass resolving the energy of the sun into a slender beam of intense light. I focused in on one tiny point of the trunk of an individual tree. The porous bark resolved into a network of ridges and valleys and craters. My awareness focused still finer until it beheld the chambers of dried grey cellulose within the sponge like interior of the tree. The walls of cellulose resolved into long, thin filaments, weirdly undulating silvery grey ribbons floating in the darkness of space. I focused still deeper and beheld a single filament and saw that it was actually a long flowing sentence composed of spidery runes with intricate silver lines. The sentence was obviously a spell, a spell of great potency that had an odd familiarity. I focused deeper to study the glyphs and symbols hidden in the lines of each rune and the subtle syntax of their arrangement. And then, with a shudder that almost broke my concentration, I realized that this spell was of my own creation, a spell of self forgetting woven at the seventh level of the Vehrillion. A spell of self forgetting at such a level was forbidden magic, considered an act of self immolation to be avoided except in a situation of ultimate peril, a situation in which self disclosure threatened the lives of others.

I withdrew the intense focus of my gaze, but remained in Theater of Memory, standing before the densely entangled grey forest which I now realized was a defensive boundary of my own creation. What terrible danger would cause me to cast such a potent spell of self forgetting upon myself?

I walked along the edge of the forest looking for some tiny clue that I might have hidden for myself. Soon I came upon a tree that felt differently than the others. It looked barren and porous grey as all the tress did, but I sensed that it was charged with greater power. I felt a hidden depth, and studied the tree closely. Near the center of the trunk was a carved rune, weathered and scarcely visible, but still discernible as a Rune of Inner Vision. Surrounding the rune a roughly circular area of the dry, grey trunk had the faintest iridescence. Slowly, tentatively, I raised my hand to touch this iridescent part and instead of dry wood my fingers encountered a soft, very fine dust. The dust scintillated and dissolved revealing a dark hole in the center of the trunk.

The tree hole was dark and very deep and I drew forth my awareness to travel into the dark space and see what was there. I traveled down what seemed a featureless dark corridor until I beheld a faint light which fell upon an old wall of grey stones with an arched door at its center. The door was made of thick, dense wood with iron hinges and lock. Above the arch of the door there were runes carved in the grey stone. The runes composed a spell of vigilance and awareness. Within the spell, the rune of inner vision had been tilted at the angle of activity so that it meant, "Look within."

I decided to act on this suggestion in a literal way and resolved my gaze toward the lock and key hole. My awareness passed through the key hole and there I beheld, suspended in a dark space, an old parchment scroll tied with a ribbon of dark, green silk. On the outside of the scroll was a single beautiful rune, an illuminated rune drawn in red, green, black, gold and violet ink with spiraling designs of great complexity. It was the Rune of the Sacred Quest.

Recognition shivered through me. Although I had not consciously thought of it since awakening, and still could not recall any detail of it, I felt the quest implicitly in every particle of my being and knew that it had been my guiding star for a journey that spanned many long lifetimes. I felt the great joys and terrible sorrows of the quest and my whole being stirred and trembled at the sight of the rune that represented it. Within the complexity of its design were the dark, curling lines of powerful opposition and the glyphs of dreadful adversity and fell adversaries...”

Jeremiah paused for a moment in his narrative and looked searchingly at me. “I know that you also have experienced the darkness that rises up to resist those who undertake the quest. I have heard it said that among your folk the dark force is so potent that black magicians among you would actually use the sacred word, Quest, to name the most mundane and trivial items, the most inferior mass objects of the old Earth factories. They degraded and obscured this sacred word of power so that people could not even name it in their minds. And it is said that the shadows in their minds were so thick that they performed such dark magic without the slightest notion of what drove them to it.

But you are a living witness to this realm. Is it true that their sickness is so great that they dare use the sacred word Quest in this way?”

Jeremiah’s words jarred me into painful recollection of a lifetime that seemed so far away. But it was true, I did remember a time when suddenly the word “quest” began to appear on the most weirdly inappropriate objects---minivans, bank cards, plastic shopping bags. A revelation dawned in me and I glimpsed dark magic working and hiding itself within the vast banalities of my world. For the dark force, banality was the most corrosive acid, the heaviest bludgeon and the most perfect camouflage.

“Yes, it is true.” I replied to Jeremiah’s question, and he looked at me with compassion. We stared silently into the fire for a few long moments before Jeremiah returned to his narrative.

“For a time I gazed through the key hole at the Rune of the Sacred Quest, allowing myself to feel its power and import in my whole being. When I felt ready I performed the spell of opening that I knew would unroll the old parchment scroll that bore the rune. The green ribbon slipped off and the scroll began to unravel with an ominous slowness. Waves of fear ran through me as I realized the reason for the slowness. The Quest required of me something so terrible that I was being given time to prepare myself so that the shock would not unravel my mind.

I beheld a finely drawn map. There were spatial runes indicating directions of travel, and time runes that indicated movement backward in the stream of time. The scroll unrolled some more to reveal my destination and I beheld the rune of the place we call “Old Terra” and that you know as “Earth.” My whole being shuddered as images and words descriptive of Old Terra and the ancient primate ancestors of the elves replayed themselves from the lesson books of my childhood. I saw pyramids in the desert, great sailing ships in a green ocean, cows being killed with a bolt gun in an animal slaughtering factory, geese flying in formation in a stormy sky, a human cybernetic organism, a thermonuclear bomb bursting over a large city.

Old Terra. My mind reeled as I considered what it would mean to journey backward to this ancient world of darkness and mortality. Horrible images of primate madness flickered into my mind from the histories of Old Terra. I saw moving pictures of a crowd of many thousands of humans standing before a single very distorted looking male individual. He had the eyes of complete possession and wore a harshly evil black rune in a field of white and red. Flags and banners bearing the same marking of dark power rippled behind him. I could see that this male human was a type of alchemical lens, a lens that focused the crowd’s energy toward hate and evil hallucinations. The faces of all the humans were the faces of flesh-colored marionettes and their eyes burned with possession.

I saw more faces, images of a later time, a crowd of humans in a banquet hall. They wore costly fabrics and perfumes and their pockets were filled with slender machines of plastic and silicon. They had cunning eyes, and faces adorned with subtle cosmetics. Spells of deception and power were woven into their every glance and spoken word. Amidst an array of glass and metal implements they sat at tables of white linen and dined on the cooked tissues of their fellow mammals

My heart wavered as I felt the immense shadow of Old Terra conjuncting my path. While my resolve trembled the quest scroll continued to unravel and I beheld runes that indicated that there was a single portal of crossing into Old Terra. In all of Emeral there existed only one aperture that permitted one to fall backward through the stream of time and descend to the shadowed lands of Old Terra. The scroll unraveled further and I beheld a rune of such dark significance and fell power that for a time a dreadful blankness over took me.

I overcame the blankness only to feel stabbed by cold terror. It was the Rune of the Demiwraith.

Demiwraith. All of its fell names cascaded through my mind like falling knives--- Demiwraith, Viealetta, Flesh Spirit, Enemy of Infinite Form, Archparasite of the Elves.

Demiwraith. The shadow of the evergreen world of Emeral. Bringer of death, hate, madness and despair. Long had we known that when the ancient primate ancestors had passed away their darkness and disease had not passed away with them, but the dark web had remanifested itself as a singular entity of indomitable power---Demiwraith. No one could know its form, for its form was legion, and no one could know the extent of its powers. Six of our kind had been brave or foolhardy enough to venture into the Valley of Shadows and enter the Cave of No Escape beneath the mountain. But none had ever returned to tell their tale. Each of the six had thought to rid our world of an entity that fed off our energy, limited our growth and curtailed the bright hope of our evolution. Some believed that these six champions had been deceived from the beginning, that it was the Demiwraith who all along had been the secret source of their heroic aspirations. Ambition, it was said, was the nectar that lured them into a deep web where they would be parasited and consumed body and soul.

We did know of the Demiwraith that it had devastating powers of mind pressure and manipulation that could act on one from any distance of space or time. Certainly it was the supreme master of the black art of Kundebuffer---the ability to derange the mind of a victim to the degree that love and truth could be perfectly reversed. The history of Old Terra was riddled with evidence of horrific Kundebuffer attacks. Ancient primates would take on the name of a great prophet of love and then devise and execute the most monstrous deeds---inquisition, war, genocide. They would create intricate systems of belief and law that would twist and repress the human spirit from every angle, and yet convince their victims that they held their only promise of salvation. And these vast systems of Kundebuffer could reign for hundreds, even thousands of years, for the Demiwraith spun webs that encompassed all of history.

The Demiwraith would even reveal itself to its victims, but so intoxicated were they by the mind-warping ethers of Kundebuffer that they would think themselves mighty champions fighting a supreme devil they called “Satan.” And in the blind insanity of their fury they would burn other primates alive, and repress and torment them in a thousand thousand ways, until they too were possessed with the madness of Kundebuffer and did the same to others.

When some would glimpse this insanity the Demiwraith would spin new webs of Kundebuffer and convince these primates that prophets of love and beings of evil were merely insane hallucinations. It led them to believe that soul, spirit, will and love were all just superstition and sentimentality. It would mind-pressure them to believe that only objects and death were real, and that consciousness itself was an accident, or an automated illusion. And this new Kundebuffer was so powerful that its victims would be possessed with a ravishing death hunger and would devise great engines of war and killing weapons.

These and other terrible realizations raced through my mind when I beheld the fell Rune of the Demiwraith. The Quest Scroll unraveled no further and I knew that my journey of many lifetimes could only continue by facing the Demiwraith, and passing through the portal that it guarded into Old Terra.

I had seen enough. Slowly, I withdrew my gaze from the key hole, withdrew from the darkness within the tree so that I stood once again before the dense entangled mass of the Forest of Self Forgetting. I turned back on the stone path and walked to the shimmering portal of my Theater of Memory and passed though it, returning to my body that still knelt beneath the protective branches and trailing leaves of the old willow tree.

My body shivered and trembled as I knelt beneath the willow tree. Rather than engage inner practices, I felt it was best to struggle to my feet and take the first step. The first step toward the Valley of the Shadows. Only by taking action could I address my fears. If I allowed them a voice within my mind they would ask a thousand questions and express a thousand doubts for which I had no answers. There was no answer except to follow through with the quest.

I focused my attention on my body and my immediate environment and prepared to break camp. My fear was still present and I felt it wanting me to turn inward. But I had looked within as far as my gaze could travel and seen the resolution I had made from my true will. The resolution had been made when I remembered things, knew things, that were now protectively hidden. Reconsideration would be meaningless, and perhaps that had been part of my design when I had locked away my Theater of Memory.

I took up my cloth bag and dagger of silvery metal, and before leaving the protective shadow of the willow tree I cloaked myself, engaging spells that would allow me to travel with great stealth. The forest where I had slept overlooked the Valley of Shadows and after a short walk I found the long and winding path leading down to its misted depths. There was a reluctance in my muscles so that even though I descended it felt as if gravity resisted my every step.

When I reached the damp floor of the valley I felt something deep under ground waking up and becoming aware of me. I didn’t want to name what I knew that something to be, but I felt it, felt it as a hot nucleus of evil beneath my feet, a throbbing appetite so powerful that I could feel its pulse beneath hundreds of feet of insulating soil and stone. I felt it in the cells of my body, a primordial feeling that animals, even insects, can recognize. It was the feeling of being prey. My body, my blood, my life energy, was food approaching a vast and insatiable hunger. And I was not just any food, but the juiciest morsel to come this way in many long, and thirsty ages.

The sense of the Demiwraith’s pulsing hunger beneath the soil was too horrifying to contemplate. To still my fears I focused all my attention on my body and the immediate environment. I engaged my awareness with my muscles, breathing and movement so that I walked in a way that flowed with the rhythms of the night and the valley. My stance was fluid, but alert, and in this way I walked along the Valley of the Shadows until I stood at the foot of the Dark Mountain.

The Dark Mountain glowered over me ominously, a massive and desolate presence that made me feel the smallness of my body. I approached and saw that about forty feet above the base of the mountain was a huge funnel-shaped indentation that terminated in a dark orifice. An icy dread crept over my heart as I recognized this as the entrance to the Cave of No Escape. I knew the danger of hesitating at the brink of a dangerous crossing, so I immediately began climbing up to the funnel. It was all dark rock and crags with harsh angles, and moisture from an unseen source left the rocks wet and slippery. They had an almost oily sheen beneath the cold light of the moon. Long years of training in the various arts of balance and movement contained in the Vehrillion made the climb an easy task for my muscles, but cold fingers of paralyzing dread grasped at my quavering heart.

As I grew near the dark orifice I heard distant wailing sounds, but could not discern if they were made by any thing within the cave or were a trick of the wind that flowed through funnel and aperture. I paused for a moment, remembering something. From beneath my shirt I brought forth the alchemical amulet that I wear on a chain of Elvin silver-steel. We call an amulet of this kind a Navigator, and for an adept of the Vehrillion it is both a talisman of many virtues and a tool of many functions. Like other of our quest objects, it is nearly impervious to the elements, but if it is removed from the living energy field of its bearer it loses all its virtue and function. Engaging the energy of the precious stones on my Navigator in a long remembered sequence, it began to radiate light. I adjusted the color and focus of the light to suit a subterranean environment. The luminosity of the Navigator was not merely practical, it also lightened the heart and heartened the spirit.

With renewed purpose, I crossed the dread portal and entered the Cave of No Escape. There was no floor beneath me, but a jagged vertical shaft. Water dripped and the rock was slippery but the shaft was so narrow that extending my limbs was enough to control my descent. Foot holds and hand holds abounded, though many secure positions had to be gained by allowing jagged points of rock to press against my back and other parts of my body. As chilling water dripped beneath my clothing, the bruising pressure of these rock points was like being chewed by teeth of dull stone.

I descended a considerable distance and the shaft began to swell outward so that my limbs could no longer extend across it. One foolish move now would mean plummeting. And when a foot hold I tested loosened a chunk of rock, I waited many long moments before I heard the sound of its impact echoing back up the shaft. I increased my vigilance, jamming my fingers into cracks and using all my senses to feel the underlying structures, the fissures and weaknesses in the rock before I trusted it with my weight. And in this way I descended, like a fly walking backwards down a steep wall.

When at last I reached the bottom of the shaft my hands burned and were covered with abrasions and bloody marks. But those of our kind heal very quickly and minor injuries of this sort did not dismay me at all. At the bottom of the shaft was rock and gravel over which flowed a thin surface of icy water. The temperature had dropped considerably with the descent and the moment I stopped moving I felt the chill steal over me. A couple of feet above the floor of the shaft was a tiny opening that was the only possible exit. I had to remove my bag and push it ahead of me to squeeze through the opening and into the roughly horizontal tube. Cold water flowed along the bottom of the tube soaking me and I had to engage an ancient practice called fire-breathing to heighten my life energy and keep the core of my body from becoming too chilled to function. Slowly, I pushed my bag and crawled on my belly over jagged rock and gravel. The tube descended, spiraling like a giant corkscrew, and I had no choice but to keep crawling forward, allowing it to take me where ever it would.

The corkscrew became narrower, and getting through it was certainly no task for those who fear closed in spaces. After a time I came to long for another vertical shaft, that no matter how treacherous, allowed me to stand and expand my limbs. There was no way that even the most well trained body could back out of this tube, so I kept squirming forward relentlessly. My mind became blank and I became a crawling thing of meat and bone caught in the deep bowels of the earth.

I lost my sense of the passage of time and could no longer guess how long it had been since I had begun my descent. But then I detected a change in the sound of the water and in the flow of cold air about me. The tube curved around some more, and I saw there was an opening where the flowing water fell vertically. For a moment I wondered if my distressed mind had summoned a mirage to comfort itself, but soon I had crawled forward and come to the opening. There was a sheer vertical drop and I took out my Navigator and adjusted the focus and intensity of its beam and surveyed what was bellow me. I beheld a high domed space of rock and glittering stalactite, and far below was a dark lake of inky blackness. There was no way to climb down, and no way back, which left only one possibility----to allow myself to fall through the opening and into the lake. I probed it with my senses and the beams of my Navigator, and felt reassured that it was quite deep. If I were deceived and shallow water covered jagged rock I would certainly be crushed, but desperate choices are made somewhat easier when there is absolutely no alternative. With some contortions, I managed to tie my bag to an ankle. I crawled forward and performed a practice that allows an adept of the Vehrillion to slow the perception of time, and heighten all the senses so that as I plummeted I would be able to finely adjust my diving form.

I pushed myself out of the opening and plunged through the cold air. Moments later I shattered the still plane of the dark lake and submerged a score of feet into the icy water. Rising to the surface, I swam toward the nearest shore. I was shivering and soaking wet, but all of my clothing was made of a sturdy survival cloth that shed moisture very quickly. I maintained slow time so that I could respond in a splintered second to any attack.

The lake still rippled from the shock of my impact and water continued to fall from the opening far above, but otherwise there was perfect stillness, and silence. While I waited for my clothing to dry I performed powerful defensive spells that manifested as shimmering fields of energy. These energy fields shielded body and mind from penetration by foreign objects, energies or thoughts. I sensed that the Demiwraith was well aware of my exact location, but no longer did it feel like a hot nucleus of evil pulsating with appetite. Instead, I detected the shadowy coolness of powerful cloaking fields, and sensed about me an attitude of a highly observant waiting.

I did not engage any cloaking at all since I was here to summon the Demiwraith. At the outer boundaries of my shields I detected the most subtle and devious telepathic probing. Such probes could only be devised by one who had a deep understanding of the energy fields of our kind, and I wondered, once again, about the six who had come here before me, and if they had employed the very same strategies that I was playing out. I adjusted the outer boundaries of my shields so that any thing, energy or thought projected at them would find its energy converted to the corona of reflective energy surrounding me.

I focused the beam of my Navigator and surveyed the large domed space. There were a number of openings into antechambers, alcoves and corridors of hidden depth. As I surveyed, I felt the available area of my memory summon details of the life stories of the six who had come before me. The resonance of their despair and suffering permeated the air, and I wondered if this emanation was a remnant of their spirit energy, or a subtle device of the Demiwraith. It is true that none of the six had reached any where near the levels that I had in the Vehrillion, but I also knew that if I attached an iota of pride to that fact I would quickly join their fates. Deepest intuition told me that the Demiwraith was an absolutely indomitable foe. What the quest scroll revealed was an absolute resolution to encounter the Demiwraith, and some how to pass through the portal that it guarded. But I did not intend to defeat or slay it, and I sensed in my whole being that it could not be defeated in its own realm.

Completing my survey, I decided to move to one of the larger antechambers. I preferred to wait out the Demiwraith in a space that had fewer entrances. I walked along the shore and climbed the gently sloping bank that surrounded this part of the lake like an amphitheater. I entered the antechamber. It had a high arched ceiling like a cathedral and icicles of crystal glittered in the beam of my Navigator as I examined the interior. Besides the opening on the lake side, there was an interior opening that was smaller, but still large enough to admit even a creature of gigantic size. I felt that it was most probable that the Demiwraith would appear through this entrance rather than expose itself on the shore of the lake.

I stood in the antechamber in what we call the Artemia Stance, which is a posture that is relaxed but also very alert. My first perception of the approach of the Demiwraith was a strong odor of ammonia, and this olfactory perception was followed by the sound of a billion scurrying creatures. Like heralds or courtiers at the head of a royal procession, a wave of albino insects entered the antechamber. They scurried forward with military-like precision and quickly covered every surface of the antechamber, as well as the arched ceiling, though they stayed well clear of my energy shields. The tiny creatures seemed to be of numerous species, some resembling minute crabs, others seemed like arachnids, and there were great boiling masses of centipedes and millipedes. The anteroom had become a living white cathedral, when a massive form moving with the springy, stealthy grace of a tarantula appeared through the inner entrance. My mind reeled at the asymmetric complexity of its form. Pale insects moved all over it, so that at first I thought its body composed of myriad tiny creatures. Its head was enormous and tear drop-shaped, with the small end terminating in a kind of face with two glittering black orbs for eyes. It was a face, and yet not a face. It was immobile, expressionless and translucent like a large blister in the shape of a face. The whole enormous head was translucent, covered with blue veins, and seemed almost liquid, like an egg yolk, while its body was an armored hybrid of insect, arachnid and crustacean components. Everywhere it bristled with asymmetric arrays of claws, coiled scorpion-like stingers and moving ventricles. But its most hideous and disturbing feature was the corona of chaotically moving hair thin red antennae which surrounded its face. Besides the dense corona of antennae around the face, a sparse distribution of the hair-like red antennae covered its almost liquid skull.

I remained in the Artemia Stance and kept my breathing slow and regular, my muscles poised, but relaxed. I sensed that the Demiwraith was examining me, searching for betrayals of nervous tension, the little edges of fear it could pry open to invade my mind. Insistent telepathic signaling pinged at the surface of my energy shields, but I refused to let it enter. A telepathic link to the Demiwraith was far too dangerous. If it wanted to communicate with me it would have to be through the ancient device of audible speech. The Demiwraith’s glittering black orbs tried to pierce my shields with bursts of intense mind pressure, but the projected energy only made them shimmer more brilliantly as the energy was reflected. There was a hissing sound as of steam escaping a valve as voice passages , unused for decades perhaps, were cleared and readied. A voice, cold and cutting like a razor emerged not from the mouth of the sort of face, but from a large aperture on the flank of the body.

‘Who is it that comes here to disturb the rest of Viealetta?’

‘One who seeks only to pass through the portal that leads to Old Terra.’ I replied in an even, neutral tone.

‘Only?’ replied the Demiwraith with a hissing sneer. ‘How dare you use such a term to describe a privilege which is denied to you and your kind.’

‘Who denies it?’ I responded. The answer was obvious, but I decided to adopt the mocking, arrogant tone of an over confident warrior. I wanted the Demiwraith to underestimate me, and make inaccurate assessments of my strengths and weaknesses.

‘I deny it.’ responded the Demiwraith, ‘And I punish unto death and beyond any who question my authority. Would you like to see your six little friends? They too thought to defy me and I still squeeze sweet drops of nectar from the suffering of what little remains of them.’ The Demiwraith turned and raised a flap of its pale hide. Within the translucent tissues of its body was a sight, the horror of which nearly destroyed me. The mutated, shrunken, degraded forms of the six were inside it, artery like tubes attached to every orifice including eyes, ears, mouth. They had become fetus-like organs within the body of the Demiwraith. ‘I keep them around for old times sake, but I’ve sucked on them so often they’ve gone rather stale and sour, while you seem so fresh and savory. Would you like to join with me now? I’m hoping you’ll say no, I’m hoping you’ll resist to the last, there is nothing so sweet to me as that kind of sport.’

‘Nothing seems so sweet as what we can never have.’ I responded mockingly. ‘But if you need someone to play with you I will try to be as entertaining as possible. All I ask is that we move in the direction of the portal that leads to Old Terra. Keep moving in that direction and I will be delighted to let you chatter on and on. Just please don’t be a bore and attempt to travel in the wrong direction. That sort of falsehood is immediately apparent to me.’ This last was not a bluff, for we have a truth-saying alchemy called the Rune of Truth that allows us to detect blatant falsehood.

‘Ah, now that would be an amusing journey.’ Replied the Demiwraith. ‘What I will enjoy most is the denouement where you beg to join with me like your six little friends. So, yes, I do pledge solemnly to always lead you toward the portal you desire. It will be a most succulent diversion. Prepare yourself, however, for it is a long and difficult journey, and I must rest now, refresh myself, before we set forth. I suggest you do the same.’

Immediately following this suggestion a thin milky film covered the glittering black orbs and with mind-numbing speed armies of albino creatures raced over the surface of its body and into and out of numerous apertures and ventricles. At the same time strands of spider silk appeared to blow out of a thousand points of its body and before long the scurrying armies of creatures were invisible beneath a white cocoon that covered it like a royal canopy of white silk.

I stayed in the Artemia Stance, aware that thousands of tiny eyes were tracking, and somehow recording, my every breath. While my face and eyes remained impassive, my mind raced through many vital considerations. My life, I understood, depended on my being as opaque as possible. A single careless word or gesture could reveal quirks or qualities which would allow the Demiwraith to register my personality. It was clear to me that it favored the psychological attack, it had as much as said so, and if there were any telepathic leakage points in my shields, or revealing nuances in my words or movements, it would immediately uncover vulnerabilities. It was obvious that I had sealed off all my personal memories, even from myself, to deflect this sort of attack.

And what was happening beneath its canopy of spidery white silk? I didn’t believe for a moment that it needed rest. Probing with all my senses, I detected a furious metabolism that had raised the temperature within the cocoon to an atmosphere of high fever. Myriad tiny creatures served as an army of robotic surgeons under precise telepathic control. Extensive surgeries were being performed, whole areas of tissue excised or reconfigured.

I shuddered to think of the possible reasons for this metamorphosis. No doubt it was reconfiguring itself to attack me more potently, but it had plenty of time to perform such an operation while I was struggling through the cave and waiting in the anteroom. Did this mean that it had registered me, and was reconfiguring itself based on what it had perceived of my vulnerabilities? Or would it periodically transform itself just to keep me off balance? Possibly this was the standard strategy of a creature long known to be a changeling.

I replayed every word we exchanged, but gained little insight. It was a masterfully opaque manipulator, and what it did reveal it do so blatantly, as a measured thrust in its attack. It had agreed to lead me toward the portal, and when I tested this statement with truth-saying alchemy I found no falsehood, the Rune of Truth did not flicker or change hue. But trickery of all sorts was involved, or perhaps it didn’t need trickery, possibly it wanted me to pass through the portal. I could only assume that there must be some chance for me to succeed or I would never have resolved to undergo such a descent into the underworld lair of the Archparasite.

I allowed the speculation and analysis to go on for only so long. I knew that I could not allow restless thoughts to tumble through my mind continuously, for that would only exhaust my spirit. In times of great trial, those of my kind, especially those trained in the secret arts, are able go without sleep, food or drink for very long periods. Even so it was to my advantage to obtain a certain type of rest. I quieted my mind, kept my senses alert and my shields up. My eyes were open and I could respond to a sudden threat with lightening speed, but core parts of my being were allowed to sleep and recuperate.

Partly awake, partly asleep, I remained in the Artemia Stance for some time before I heard the sound of a billion insect mouths devouring the cocoon. Gaping holes opened in the silken canopy, and soon all trace of it had dissolved. Armies of tiny albino robots scurried away with quantities of removed tissue which seemed to still be alive. Before me stood the reconfigured Demiwraith. It had greatly reduced its size and complexity and had become far more primate-like in form. Its body had two main segments. The one that faced me was fashioned in the form of a naked female primate, pale and hairless. Its face still had the large glittering black orbs, and hideous corona of red antennae, but was now an expressive, personal face with puffy cheeks and a mousy look of fear, confusion and anxiety. It was short and shaped a bit like an ancient primate fertility doll with pendulous breasts and greatly exaggerated reproductive organs. One hand had ordinary stubby fingers, and the other was not a hand but something that closely resembled the coiled tail of a scorpion. This was the primate-looking segment of its body. The other, larger segment closely resembled a headless albino spider. It was attached via a thick flexible stalk at the base of the first segment’s spine so that it suspended the primate form a few inches from the floor. The spider legs could move it swiftly backward or forward while the primate portion always faced me, its soft flesh jiggling as its arachnid locomotive platform moved it about.

‘Sire, what is it that you require of me? I want only to serve you.’ Spoke the new Demiwraith. Its tone was mousy and obsequious, as if it feared some dreadful punishment for any slight transgression.

‘ I hope you are amusing yourself with this puppetry, Demiwraith. You know very well what I require of you, take me to the portal.’

‘Oh sire, why do you call your poor servant, Lianna, by this terrible name, Demiwraith?’

The tone and facial expressions were the perfect semblances of a nervously servile creature. I also found that I had begun to automatically register this new form of the Demiwraith as female, even as my mind recognized that this was pure subterfuge. I wanted to minimize communication until I had more time to analyze the psychological warfare that was behind this new form and manner.

‘Since I am your Sire I command you to take me toward the portal that leads to Old Terra without further discussion.’

‘As you wish, Sire.’ With the help of the flexible stalk, the primate form made a submissive curtsey, and still facing me, the spider legs carried it rapidly backward and through the entrance at the back of the anteroom. It moved swiftly with its multiple legs, and I had to struggle to keep up with it as we moved quickly through a winding stone corridor.

As we traveled, I studied the transformation and speculated about the effect it was supposed to have on me. The puppetry was very effective in many ways. Although my mind saw through the deception, my body still registered this new form as female and as different from the Demiwraith I remembered before it vanished into the cocoon. I still had ancestral primate instincts that stereotyped various body types and tones of speech. The Demiwraith was side-stepping my mind and convincing parts of my body that it was female and submissive. But then there were was the jarring incongruity of the scorpion tail hand and the spider segment of the body. These elements seemed designed to awaken archetypal primate fears of devouring genitalia and the even deeper instinctual mammal fears of biting and stinging creatures that crawled on the ground. The only consistent theme was that it exploited and revealed my animal ancestry and the degree that this ancestry still conditioned me. But the paradoxical incongruity of its soft, female, passive elements and the frightening invertebrate elements showed its mastery of the black art of Kundebuffer. By mixing powerfully dissonant biological forms it threw my bodily intelligence off balance. Part of my body interpreted this form sympathetically as a submissive primate, while another part interpreted it as a dangerous invertebrate.

As I studied the subtle power of this manipulation, I recognized a shocking flaw in my own strategy. I had attempted to hide any trace of my personality by adopting the consistent tone and manner of an arrogant, over confident warrior. But the Demiwraith could surely see through such a simple subterfuge, and since I had adopted a perfectly consistent persona, I had given it a stable frame of reference. The slightest deviation in tone or gesture from this contrived persona would reveal volumes about the underlying personality. These betrayals would be apparent only to a discerning and attuned observer, but I could have little hope that the Demiwraith was anything less than that. It seemed more probable that the Demiwraith was a great deal more, that it carried within its cells the entire history of primate fears and frailties and through its hideous absorption of the six it had intimate knowledge of the vulnerabilities of elf body and spirit.

I considered whether I could better camouflage myself by adopting a random assortment of persona when I communicated with the Demiwraith. But since this was an obvious abandonment of my previous strategy in favor of its mode of Kundebuffer manipulation, it would mean that I would be crediting it as master, and diminishing myself to the role of imitative disciple.

I decided to forgo a conscious strategy for the present. Instead, I would respond spontaneously as the need to communicate arose, trusting that intuition would serve me better then a conscious plan. I did not have long to wait before the Demiwraith tested me with maddening Kundebuffer dialogue.

‘Oh Sire, I hope it is not disrespectful to ask you this, but do you really want me to lead you to the portal or have you just tricked me into this dark space so you can have your way with me once again.’ I wanted to show that I felt under no pressure to respond to such nonsense, so I ignored its question for a few moments. I considered making no response at all, but I suspected that it might not continue to lead me toward the portal if I refused to engage its favorite game.

‘I’m disappointed in you Demiwraith.’ I said shaking my head in mock sadness. ‘I had heard that you were a creature capable of lightening change, and here you are right from the start doing exactly what I expected, the old Kundebuffer trickery. Is there no way you can at least rework this ancient routine to make it more interesting?’ The Demiwraith stopped moving.

‘Oh Sire, it confuses and frightens me so to have you call me that terrible name and say such strange things I cannot understand. It makes my poor head too dizzy to be able to lead you. Please Sire, have mercy on poor Lianna.’ The Demiwraith was adamantly refusing to break character and showed me plainly that if I did not play along that it would refuse to take me to the portal. I decided to play the part it indicated for me, but with a sarcastic exaggeration.

‘Oh poor, dear, Lianna, please excuse my frivolous jokes. I know you only wish to serve me, dear, so I won’t torment you with further discussion. I’ll leave your poor, little head free to concentrate on guiding us to the portal.’

‘Oh Sire, you know if you want to have your way with me you need only ask. There is no need to mock me with such a joking tone.’ The Demiwraith still refused to move, forcing me to recognize another demand---I must not only play the part, but do so convincingly, even a facetious tone was enough to create an impasse. I didn’t like this last demand much, and for a time I made no reply. How far could I let this play acting go? If it demanded that I play a part more and more convincingly I would be giving it a potentially powerful lever to twist my mind with. But each moment that I kept silence might also reveal weakness, showed hesitation, indecisiveness. To cover this I resolved to extend the silence and see if I could force it to make the next response. Silent moments stretched long and uneasily as I studied the glittering black orbs and the chaotic, rippling of the corona of red antenna. The Demiwraith broke the silence.

‘Oh Sire, these strange stares and silences make me feel so vulnerable. It feels as though you are undressing me with your eyes, though you can see that I have shed all my garments as you desired. If you want to enter me you know that you have only to say so Sire, you know that Lianna can deny you nothing that is in her poor power to give.’

‘Yes Lianna, there is one thing you can do for me. It is simply to continue leading me toward the portal. And please indulge Sire in one more kind service and refrain from conversation as far as possible, as my thoughts are else where today.’ I kept my tone carefully sincere-sounding. The Demiwraith, apparently satisfied with this victory, curtsied and began moving again.

Its spider platform allowed it to walk so nimbly over the jagged rock floor that I could scarcely keep up. After a long time moving rapidly through a maze of stone corridors I was forced to ask it to slow down. I was loath to reveal a physical limitation, but I knew I would exhaust myself if I tried to match its furious speed. Keeping my shields at such a high level of defense was too taxing for me to keep up a racing pace.

‘Lianna, Sire would like you to go at a slower pace.’

‘As you wish, Sire.’ Said the Demiwraith, and now she began to crawl at an agonizingly slow pace.

‘Thank you for slowing, Lianna, but this pace is too slow. Could we try a moderate pace?’

‘Oh Sire,’ she replied with the most convincing exasperation, ‘I so much want to obey you, but your orders are terribly confusing.’ Now she raced ahead and then abruptly slowed, raced, slowed at random intervals. Once more I was being successfully conditioned. If I tried to use my role as ‘Sire’ to control her actions, I would be made to regret it. It was better for me to go along with whatever she wanted me to do.

We went on in this way for quite some time. With each twist and turn of our dialogue Lianna took on the role of a poor, abused slave and to get any sort of cooperation I had to play the role of a cruel tyrant. After long and weary travel through huge stone tunnels, we entered a long, dusty passage not quite high enough for me to stand erect and I had to walk in an uncomfortable, crouched position.

A couple of seemingly contradictory intuitions battled in my mind. Although truth-saying alchemy revealed that the Demiwraith was leading me toward the portal, I was sure that it was using a needlessly roundabout way and taking a sadistic delight in drawing out our journey. But I also had a strong intuition that the Demiwraith, unpleasant as it was to deal with, was not showing me its fierce side, and that it had no resistance to my passing through the portal, but actually desired it for some reason.

After traveling some distance down the low, dusty corridor, I realized that I had to insist that the Demiwraith give me some time and distance estimates on our journey. Mostly I had been avoiding any sort of questioning, but there was an important tactical consideration here. By forcing me to follow down a corridor where I had to walk bent over, the Demiwraith had intensified the war of attrition on my body by several notches. I knew that energy could not flow through my body properly with my spine so contorted for a long period of time. Eventually I would start to project leaky shields and become vulnerable to telepathic attack.

‘Lianna, tell Sire how long this corridor is, and estimate the time it will take us to cover that distance.’

‘Oh Sire, poor Lianna has trouble understanding you when you talk in such a weirdly calm way, I’ve grown accustomed to your usual angry manner.’ This statement instantly decided me that I was done cooperating, and I sat down in a comfortable position on the dust. I knew exactly where the Demiwraith was trying to take me with its Kundebuffer conditioning. It would demand an ever angrier tone from me, and I would have to accept the potent Kundebuffer of play-acting an ever more sadistic Sire. That was completely unacceptable. The Demiwraith had successfully discovered a lever that ultimately would twist and distort my mind.

‘Sorry Demiwraith, but game’s over. I will not play Sire any longer, and I will not follow you another step unless you draw a map of our exact route here in the dust with correctly scaled distances. Show me where the portal is.’ Lianna stared at me for a moment and abruptly her mousy expression dissolved and a new face of the Demiwraith appeared.

‘How boring of you to take so long to ask this simple question.’ The Demiwraith spoke in a voice so altered that waves of shock coursed through my body, forcing me to realize how deeply it had conditioned me to expect the Lianna puppet. Although closed memory rendered no details, I had studied a great many primate artifacts including the moving picture films of the end times, and this background allowed me to register this new voice as the husky, hoarse accent of an older primate woman who had endured decades of that strange primate addiction known as ‘cigarette smoking’. She had the feeling tone of one who had led a life of base pleasures and dissipations, but whose body had soured to a state where excitements were beyond her grasp, and even greedy lechery had faded into a vast and bitter boredom. Her face scowled at me with disappointment and disgust. ‘Who knew that little Elf boys have become so dull that such a simple game would have to be drawn out to such tedious, fatiguing lengths before you would see through it.’ She switched voices to grotesquely mimic my last statement in the high pitched voice of an annoying child, -‘Show me where the portal is.---Did it never occur to you how I could be leading you toward the portal no matter which way we went? Turn that stupid light off little boy and I’ll show you the portal.’

Warily, I dimmed my Navigator and allowed the corridor to go dark. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I beheld a faint glow coming from the albino spider portion of the Demiwraith’s body. Within its translucent tissues there was a tubular cross section of living light, a pale ring of fiery sheets in undulating folds like a tiny aurora borealis. Its luminosity was pale and lunar like the shimmer of a hungry moon.

‘Behold the portal to Old Terra that lives only within me.’ said the Demiwraith. To be sure I engaged truth saying alchemy, but I already knew there was no deception. The Demiwraith lived off the negative energies of Old Terra and to continue to feed in this new time and place it needed a portal that flowed backward through the stream of time. The portal functioned like a digestive intenstine with hungry mouths on both sides. And what better place for such an intenstine-like aperture than within its own body where it could be directly energized by the fermenting hates, fears and desires of a whole primate covered planet. And what hidden place could be better protected than within the hideous tissues of its own body? For a moment I wondered, as it wanted me to, if I were not dull-witted to have failed to consider this possibility. But then I glimpsed something I wasn’t supposed to see. It was as if I had seen through an open crack in a door that was quickly pulled shut. I saw that I was surrounded by an intricate lattice of potent spells. Some spells were long and woven together like an encircling web. Other spells hung just outside the web like powerful magnets capable of misdirecting attention with great precision. Wary as I was, the Demiwraith had tricked me into underestimating its powers.

‘You see the portal you desire.’ The Demiwraith’s husky voice had become sultry, and darkly seductive. ‘Now little boy relinquish your shields and remove your garments for the only way to Old Terra is to pass through me, and I allow that privilege only to the most beautiful and succulent young flesh.’

I felt the black orbs glittering at me, and the Demiwraith’s excited metabolism heating to a feverish intensity. I lit my Navigator and saw that a long pink slit was opening along the length of its rapidly transforming puppet torso. My mind and heart quavered with terror. Is this how I would join the fates of the six? But the sacred quest demanded I pass through the portal into Old Terra and there was only one way to do so. I could not hesitate at the brink of this terrible crossing.

I dimmed the Navigator and with shields still up I removed my clothing, stowing it in my cloth bag which I tied to my ankle as I had done before diving into the lake. I hoped that the Demiwraith, in its state of great excitement, would either not notice or care about such a detail. Then I performed a time alchemy to slow my perception of time so that with hyperawareness I could sense every nuance of change that occurred between heart beats. Finally, with an involuntary shiver I relinquished my shields and trembled to feel that only the air on my naked skin separated me from physical contact with the Demiwraith. No longer did it bother to hide its voracious appetite which I felt as throbbing waves of heat on my naked skin. My Navigator was hidden in my bag and I had no light source, but those of my kind can still sense the shadowy outline of things and sudden movements even in complete darkness. Struggling to overcome a fear too dreadful to name, I stepped toward the Demiwraith. As I did so its head loomed up and the corona of hair-like red antenna shot outward and lashed my naked body. Blinding flames of white-hot agony tore through me as flesh-dissolving acids in the antenna cut through my skin and allowed the antenna to suck greedily at my blood. I dove through the slit-like opening and into the body of the Demiwraith.

There was a shocking reversal of sensation. The Demiwraith had so tuned its body chemistry that the flaming agony of acid-cut wounds was neutralized and replaced by fluids streaming through my wounds that produced sensations of blinding, shivering pleasure that nearly extinguished my mind. I knew that if I didn’t act instantly my will would dissolve and in one more heartbeat I would forever be enslaved by this parasitic womb. I swam forward and into the portal.

Immediately I fell into a non place, an ether-like limbo of horrible suffering within the portal that was removed from physical time or space. My identity merged with the culminating death moments of countless primate lives that were being extinguished in states of absolute Kundebuffer to be food for the Demiwraith. I lived for a moment in the body of a primate female who watched impassively, paralyzed with despair, as uniformed primates put her on a metal plank to be slid into a gas-fired oven. I lived through the final moments of countless suicides and withered on numerous steel beds penetrated by plastic tubes and machinery.

And then there was a sensation of plummeting, I fell backward into space and time, tumbled through a dark sky and landed in a high desert of red soil. I was near the entrance to a canyon, great buttes were in the distance and there was a scattering of dusty green desert plants and reddish boulders. My body and mind were shattered and bleeding, but I had passed through the portal and now lay somewhere on the surface of Old Terra.

IV

My body wanted to writhe in pain, and my mind reeled in shock, but I knew that all my available energy and will had to focus on one thing---coagulation, for I was bleeding from a hundred different wounds. I gave all of my attention to my wounds until I was able to stem the flow of blood. This took precious moments longer than it should have, and much of my life energy spilled onto the red soil. From a thousand planes of intuition I knew that many of my powers had been diminished or lost as I fell so terribly wounded to this ancient world. The Demiwraith had drawn my blood from a hundred deep lacerations and my body was feverish from poison and infection.

But however fragile my state, I had survived the crossing, the sacred quest continued, and I knew that this was a blessing. Although I had no time to dwell on it, I also perceived that my memory had been restored, the spell of self forgetting I had imposed on myself had unlocked itself as I had crossed over and survived my encounter with the Demiwraith. My mind was capable of solving problems of immediate survival, and my ravaged body was still able to take actions. As soon as the bleeding stopped I untied my bag which had survived the crossing attached to my ankle. Here was another great blessing. I immediately put on my Navigator and felt it stabilizing my energy and heart rhythm. Removing a flask from my bag I took a small drink of the medicine you just sampled, which we call the 'Vehrillion Elixir.’ In the whole history of this medicine it had probably never found an elf body so in need of its restorative effects. Gratefully, I discovered that it had retained much of its potency. Healing energies rippled through my body, fever and infection vanished, wounds closed but did not altogether heal. My mind became clear and still.

I looked about me and saw that I had landed in a place of great power. Canyons and buttes of red stone stretched out in desolate moonlit vistas. All about me were medicine plants, the potent desert plants of the high desert----sage, agave, yarrow---to my eyes they were fringed in blue electricity. Towering buttes rose out of the desert like giant lode stones charged with planetary energy. The desert was intensely alive, and its heart beat with a rhythm as long, slow, and powerful as the rhythm of the most ancient mountains. I had arrived on Old Terra, but in a place of power, a high desert that generated its own dimension like a red planet. It lived utterly apart from the primate collective, a place of the dream time shrouded in primal mysteries.

I allowed myself a long moment to behold the beauty of this world before returning to survival tasks. The bleeding had stopped, and wounds had closed, but my naked body was covered with blood and I shivered from shock and the cold night air. From my bag I removed a loosely woven cloth and put a few drops of the Vehrillion Elixir on it. I wiped blood from my skin. Every movement had to be paid for in pain, the lacerations were like strings of fire whipping around my whole body.

I put my clothes on and the soft fabric comforted my skin and protected me from the cold, desert night. I put the hood of my cloak up and drew it around me. The cloak reflected back the warmth of my body and I sat down, covering myself with it as if it were a small tent. Once I stopped moving, I was able to detach from some of the pain. I took a number of deep, slow breaths, closed my eyes and focused my mind inward. I summoned a navigational alchemy, a type of far seeing that stripped away all the surface detail of where I was, and revealed points of power that glowed from various parts of this world.

I saw that when I had fallen to Old Terra my spirit had been drawn to a land displaced, a vast high desert inhabiting its own time stream. Looking beyond the high desert faces came out of the night, the faces of spirits who were linked to me in this world through strange patterns of destiny connected to the sacred quest. They were faces of metamorphic primates, primates who were part way on the path to becoming elves. One of these had almost become an elf, a boy who lived in a green, wooded place some hundreds of leagues away. He was on his own journey that was not for me to disturb, but he was deeply connected to my lifeline, a root soul. And I sensed you, sensed your will to connect to my kind.

And that is perhaps all I should tell of my story for now,” said Jeremiah, his eyes glimmering in the firelight. He put some more wood on the campfire and seemed to be giving me some space to ask questions or say anything I cared to say. But I had been so affected by his story that I wasn’t sure if I had a thousand questions or none at all.

“I think you should ask as many questions as you need to.” said Jeremiah. His face glowed in the light of the camp fire and I was startled once again to see how young he looked---sixteen or seventeen at most, while his eyes had a depth of awareness that transcended any age. But despite this strangeness I felt perfectly comfortable with him, and felt that I could ask him anything.

“This terrible creature, the Demiwraith, why do you think it let you through the portal?”

“I don’t know, I keep wondering about that myself.” Replied Jeremiah. “Possibly it didn’t expect me to be able to resist the pleasure creating chemicals it had secreted within its body, an ultimate, metabolic Kundebuffer that I only narrowly escaped. But I have a feeling there is something more to it. Even the passage through its body seemed designed as a test, with an opening provided if I were capable of passing the test. For a few moments, after I first landed on Old Terra, I realized that I shouldn’t assume that I had passed the test, what if I were still in the Demiwraith’s body and it were capable of simulating my whole perception of reality? It was a horrifying thought, but I had to consider it, and I performed a number of tests, the details aren’t important, but I was able to know that I was not experiencing a simulacrum, I really was on Old Terra.

Since then I have had a vision of the Demiwraith as a harvester of primate energies. In the vision it was manipulating its crop to achieve a precise type of decay, a delicate fermentation, but the process was destablizing and in the scales of its calculations I was a medicine, a new ingredient to stir up the chemistry of fermentation. In the vision I saw that there was a slight and precarious chance that the Demiwraith had overstepped, that if I could connect with some of the proto elf spirits in this world, that I might act as an unexpected medicine. Once I saw that I began to think differently about the Demiwraith. Everything, even the darkest things, are part of the way, the great design, what some of the ancient primates named the ‘Tao’. We cannot expect to comprehend all the paradoxes and strange relationships, we can only assume that the Cosmos is unfolding as it should even though this be in ways fantastically different than what we want, or think we want. The Demiwraith is the Archparasite, and seems the adversary of both primate and elf life, but it also seems that evolution requires adversity and suffering. If a parasite forces its host to become more conscious to deal with the threat, than from a greater point of view it is more a symbiont than a parasite. Certainly the Demiwraith is a highly intelligent, creative, metamorphic creature. So perhaps it evolves as we do, or we evolve as it does, and that suggests a hidden symbiosis.

In my case, at least, I intended to encounter the Demiwraith, and the quest required that I pass through its body to make the crossing to Old Terra, so for me the Demiwraith fulfilled a purpose. I am also wiser for my encounter with the Demiwraith, though it cost me in many ways too, cost me more than the scars that you can see. But for the six, and for the primate lives I witnessed in the portal whose suffering seemed only to serve as food for the Demiwraith, this is a deeper mystery, one I don’t want to explain away just to put my mind at ease. Still, things are not always what they seem, and the cutting edge of the black art of Kundebuffer is to make parts of the great design seem utterly black and pointless. But we can never be sure enough of what we think we see to know that it is all black and pointless. Did those lives I witnessed in the portal all dissipate into ethers of suffering to feed the Demiwraith, or did they pass through the portal and become something else? I do not know. Did the six really become part of the Demiwraith’s body to be slowly sucked dry and assimilated? I don’t know that either. The Demiwraith wanted me to think so, but the Demiwraith is a puppet master, a genius at Kundebuffer deceptions and misdirections. It is a metamorphic changeling and more than capable of contriving its bodily tissues to create a horrifying illusion. Perhaps the six also passed through the portal and arrived at earlier points in the history of Old Terra. Certainly there have been reports from the distant past of Old Terra that others of my kind had been seen by primates, but would quickly vanish once observed. We always assumed that these reports were visions of an evolutionary possibility, distant echoes of the future. But these are just more possibilities I can’t be sure about.

I also cannot assume that all seemingly dark things are ultimately helpful illusions, and that underneath everything is all pretty and wonderful. I simply cannot see enough of the grand design to judge the Cosmos and say that there should be daisies and amethysts, but that there should not be spiders and cancers. There are some that say, among both your kind and mine, that things are exactly as they should be and that one need do nothing but contemplate, meditate and accept. Perhaps they are right, but when I contemplate I become aware that I have a true will to follow the quest, and that will seems to be as much a part of the great design as anything else. So, for me, acceptance means following my true will even though there is so much I cannot understand like the Demiwraith, and maybe nothing that I can fully understand.” Jeremiah looked at me and smiled, his face lighting up in a way that lightened my spirits. “Well, I’ll be surprised if that wasn’t the most round about answer you’ve ever gotten to a question about the Demiwraith.” I felt heartened by Jeremiah’s attitude toward things, he had a way of putting things and a manner that was reassuring and unpretentious. My usual anxious disposition was calmed by his presence and I felt confident enough to ask the most troubling and difficult questions.

“Jeremiah, you called the realm that I come from ‘Old Terra’ and you’ve refered to human beings as primates, and have described them as the ancient ancestors of the elves. But I know nothing about this phase of