Chapter 4 - Vaster Dynasties
It became evident that these extreme states of mental challenge were just the boot camp before crossing the border - and now we were in the final stages of mental preparation. The images crossed all the boundaries previously discussed as the opera of our minds seamlessly integrated itself with our realities. All you could do was to remain calm. Everything was so very realistic.
We encountered this level of entity, which we called ‘hitchhikers’. The incredible thing was that this very experience was identical to the phenomenon I had shared with Jade that first time, but this time I did not experience it alone. Suddenly, one night, Ian felt this presence leap onto his back and he reacted just like I did, pointing over his shoulder and asking us if we could see anything, which in this case we could not. Then we all felt it, like we had been walking past a slave plantation in
They were very powerful and completely unlike my first experience. They were hard and tactile and urgent, directing us with their crazy language and the heat of their bodies. At the same time, I was experiencing the gross magnification of phobia type fears. Spiders and creepy-crawlies were everywhere. I remember thousand of images of scorpions. This scorpion creature was really set on me in fact and everywhere I looked I could see its sting hovering near me. At some point George’s mother walked in and in my abject terror I tried to appear normal. I thought I would sit down on the couch and just as my bum neared its surface, I suddenly saw a scorpion sting and I jumped up, crying out in alarm. Every time I tried to sit down again the process repeated itself. She stared at me as if I was; well … it was very funny.
In later times, Ian and I would reflect that this was probably one of the most terrifying consensual hallucinations we had ever experienced, chiefly because it was the first time that the substance of the trip – the psycho plasma – had been so very dense and strong. The room had suddenly darkened; reality thickening as these five shadowy shapes hijacked us. They had razor sharp blades that they stuck into the small of our backs, blades that really hurt, feeling as though they were slicing through the first layers of our skin with hot immediacy. Wherever those blades pushed we walked and soon we were all goose-stepping around like marionettes, looking at each other obliquely in silent terror.
This ‘physicalness’ is the Hallmark of the Lower Middle Pantheon of the Astral, or as I prefer to call it, the realm of Vaster Dynasties. Though these hitchhikers were not in and of themselves true entities, or components of some older family or established dynasty, they were exactly the sort of entity that would be utilised by these organisations to actualise tasks and missions. Later we would come to know this group of energy bodies as runners. They were a bit like Internet avatars I guess, sophisticated software that had no self-awareness. Of course, our projections onto them created the sense of personality, a technique called ‘homing the intention’, which means that recognising that they have a personality which exists separately from your perception of it gives them more power and weight, ‘fixes’ them into your field.
Anyway we were terrified as we looked around and watched these thin silver ribbons beginning to lower themselves from the roof, spaced about a foot apart throughout the room. The ribbons spiralled like DNA and we soon discovered were crafted from wafer thin blades so sharp that they cut into us without breaking the skin. Between the hikers and the ribbon blades, we had to follow their instructions exactly, as the ribbons parted along the required path. Then the phobias would strike, one after the other - scorpion tails and spiders fangs - but unlike the candy realm and beyond, we could not pull away from these. These creatures ordered us directly into them. Slowly, as we got closer and closer, the phobias would dry up, scorpion stings shrinking and shrinking until we could literally place our eyeballs on the sharpest parts of the sting. Then it would fade into dust and never return. Ever. On a final note, of all the phobias and unreasonable fears, the only one I did not physically complete was spider, due to lack of time, which is kind of a bitch now that I no longer have access and seem to be surrounded by millions of the little fuckers.
And then I met the moles.
Well, actually, there was this guy, a true entity. Up until that point, it had only been Jade and her brother that had truly realised themselves. More and more however, I was entering realms populated by beings of supreme power in my mind. There are places beyond the long gate of hell that are profoundly deep and exotic. Somewhere in there I found the moles, savage black-furred eyeless creatures driving their razor sharp claws through the earth in their thousands, tearing away at the seams of my reality with their great blind, mindless fury.
They terrified me. And as they poured like a never-ending river of black ichor into my mind-state, they were driven forward by a man, a tall man with a long black cloak. Like the other power entities, he had the power to step through the glass/plasma wall of my room and enter in his entirety. He walked slowly toward me across the carpet, completely soundless but for a soft, sickening whisper that issued from the shadows of his cloak. He was the grandmaster of these mole-like creatures, a soul that had fallen from some heaven of light to become the lord of a realm of blind darkness.
He walked over to me and offered me his hand, which emerged from his cloak like a glove made of black seal fur. I thought to myself that he was offering me a parley, an alliance, and in my great fear of the moles I reached out to take his deal. Even then the moles were gathering in their blind thousands and their movements over the ground of their realm created snail streaks of black oil. I took the hand and it dissolved in my grasp like fragile river slime. I will never forget that feeling. It was not the first time that we had encountered entities of true presence and it was certainly not the last time that I would come into direct physical contact with them.
The lower boundary of this massive new dimension of vaster dynasties had to be traversed much like the layers of the Aetheric Plane. The reasons for this were becoming increasingly clear to us. From here on up, a lack of experience and sound mental architecture could be devastating. Dealt with in more detail later on - with the science of chronomics – it can be understood for now as inherent time, which is the body and petrol of astral travel. When you are younger, the body seems to store a greater bundle of this essence but it is quickly used up until all progress becomes slow and measured. Whereas in the beginning I had been able to catapult to the very most evolved levels of the Middle Pantheon, now I struggled to move forward inch by inch. My body particularly was very sickly.
The results of drastically overusing Chronomic fluid could have consequences that ranged at the one end from confusion and nausea to madness, long term psychoses, catalepsy and even a complete collapse of the thinking function. Though I have never personally known anyone to go as far as I did, I have known plenty, including one member of our group, that were irreparably damaged on far lower levels. Certainly, meeting entities required absolute education. Each lesson must be layered one on top the other, like a suit of armour constructed from fine threads of idea, what I would later call the runner body suit or layer of permanent memory. For higher entities, all of their countless lives and rebirths are literally hardwired into this astral armour, giving each their distinctive and unique fingerprint and ‘name’.
So the lower boundary of the middle must be crossed and it is immense beyond conception. I like to call this place the Abyss. Back then I called it the pit. Whereas hell is more like a layer of pre-designed lessons with built in horror effects, the abyss is without uniformity or structure or function and though unlike hell, contains all and more than you would expect from hell. If you cannot survive it; if you have not carefully woven your bodysuit, you will be flattened in the middle realms, or worse still, possessed, by greater minds. That is why Jade had told me to bugger off. While I floated in her beautiful presence, they saw me only as a honeycomb being sandblasted by tornadoes of power.
We will leave the abyss with a mention of a couple of the entities I encountered. I have already mentioned the mole guy, who comes from an aspect of the abyss that can only be thought of as near the bottom. For visualisation sake, imagine floating near the bottom of the deepest ocean trench and seeing countless million cliffs and ledges and platforms that plummet endlessly downward into ever-deeper pitch. Unlike the pit around hell, it is inconceivable that any mind could reach the bottom, without actually becoming the bottom. From this point on, the astral cannot be thought of in terms of size and space but rather cosmic dimension. Creatures with heavy dimension are measured by their impact on their surroundings. By more familiar terminology, they are big.
Unintentionally, I hit the abyss at the wrong angle and went far too deep. As a result of this, my total time there was close on eight months. When meeting a creature down that deep, it feels like you are standing next to a mountain of stupendous power. The entire inner surface of the glass wall could be made transparent and still you would see only a tiny aspect of the creature, even when seen from the perspective of distance. Two of these creatures which I met on a few occasions were called Pick and Skyf, the first nick because it reminded me of a really thick coal miner who had spent too much time underground and the other I think because it reminded me of my ex-school ally. Their two most striking qualities were mental agility that bordered on inert and a capacity for extreme, apocalyptic violence, like hysterical ten kilometre high elephants without brains.
For those few of you who are insanely trying to follow this entire astral journey by the allegory of the subconscious mind, you can think of these characteristics as emerging from deep within the lizard brain, when all men were big and liked to bash things whenever possible. To get lost or damaged down there, would, in terms of the mind, translate much like brain damage or permanent vegetable stupor. I did not escape from any one of these places unscathed, though I emerged alive and manageably sane. There is no doubt that the blunt fury of the attacks down there, where these creatures would run rampant, smashing through dimensions like mobile volcanoes, damaged my acuity and fine perception, which persists to this day. But short of repeating thousands of lifetimes, I had to get through - to move on. Eventually, the abyss is managed when one learns and develops the two most fundamental principles of astral travel, spin and direction. Simply put, in the analogy of the ocean, it is a case of working out which way is up and then heading there.
***
The best way to deal with damage to fine perceptive network skills is to construct ever more complex shells with newer systems of reference. For example, the loss of short-term memory, and the consequential incapacity to find car keys, can be managed by working out systems to remind you. Fine networks should not be confused with cell masses and ordinary thinking however. Most people never even know about these networks. They are like gossamer webs in the upper mind that are very rarely used and in most people soon atrophy. They are vital however to manage heaven.
From the moment I reached the middle pantheon, my lifetime there was limited. In another two years, the relentless strain on my fine perceptive fields – aetheric fields in new age parlance – would tatter them like cobwebs, until at the end I could travel no further than my living room roof. To return to the point, I landed on those shores armed with a perception that was simultaneously fraying uncontrollably and again rich and complex and lucid beyond anything I had possessed before. As the deterioration accelerated, the shells grew in sophistication, beauty and complexity, like a spring flower exploding into autumn’s cold embrace.
I mention this all because from this point on I had entered what I shall call the Astral Proper, which expands from the upper reaches of the lower pantheon to the outer reaches of the highest pantheons, where God has property. It is like emerging from a peasant hovel in the country and entering
Every entity of the middle is defined and differentiated by Lorelei, which manifests visually as the complexity and beauty of the field which surrounds the cocoon of the soul being, made up of infinite layers of function and meaning which are grounded in the runner armour and expand to perform much the same function as a peacocks feathers, or a uniform or a flag. Again, like an Internet Avatar, one encounters all entities as a visual representation that contains the code or protocol necessary to communicate or interact with them. So, to sum, my remarkable powers as an hallucinogenius meant that I arrived with much the same aplomb and debonair presence as I do in normal waking life, billions of light years away on Earth.
***
So there we were, me with my lacy suit of light and the rest trailing along like bag ladies. Rene was also always in power but his field was more like a wasps nest, that was intimidating, on account of the huge length of time that he had spent in the deep abyss. Though we were individually within our suits, the truth is that all of us were in a sort of vehicle that moved through the planes, which very few astral citizens, we hope, could recognise as a human room in 3-dimensional land. Very uncool, a flying bedroom, but it was the only way we could collectively develop the parameters that would keep the tough characters out, much like a shoe separates the foot from air and ground and sharp stones.
Every step of the journey was taking us into perceptive fields containing perceptive architecture and astral persona of increasing power and impact. Citizens – later called Elarien (People of light and dimension) – are by and large uniform in size as viewed by the mould of the human perception. In fact, the more intelligent they are, the closer they resemble us in size and shape and dimension. The most powerful manifestations – described earlier as 3D Hologram view – were as compact and real as a person in the street. Only later, when we encountered the top brass, would they start to grow in actual size, but this was rare.
As the room/vehicle strengthened – the room obviously based in our minds and overlaid on the real room – the differentiation between within and without became more pronounced. This meant that although we could travel higher and further – like a jellyfish in the sea – we could only experience entities of a minimum level of strength and power and the sweet antics of the Mugwots were already almost entirely ancient history. It also meant that we drew attention to ourselves, and attention, within the ultra-dimension of the astral middle, was uniformly experienced by everything and everyone attached to the galactic light computer of the astral. As the months progressed, our brilliant lantern pulled in ever more virulent ‘moths’ and we slowly realised a fundamental notion of astral existence. Chronomic fluid – in even the most advanced entities and orders – is always limited and can be acquired most easily in much the same way as a tick, or a mosquito or a … hell, let’s say it, a vampire.
We had entered the realm of big business, astrally speaking, the domain of the wider dynasties, where everyone was in some way connected to a higher organisation. This was another fundamental realisation: Chronomic energy, if it could not be developed or stolen, has to be borrowed, with interest. After a while, all entities can progress only with sponsorships and then scholarships. The interest is worked out in time of service and must be paid. Some investments are better than others and while smaller firms can be transient, larger dynasties, such as those managing huge religious complexes, can be as confining and limiting as a government bureaucracy down here in 3 Space. Point being, every entity has at the very least a gang. Much later, in higher levels, we would find the permanent entities – like Angels – but for now, the lower realm of wider dynasties was sectioned off into territories, plagued by gangs and lorded over by what could only be described as Warlords. Unlike the flashing bursts of life lower down, these encounters sometimes took weeks to battle and resolve.
***
One night, I arrived at the trip and pounced into the room, dressed in my new, Improved Ninja suit with built-in swirl cloak that could be spun around in shadow to make me look like a bat and small cloud rolled in one. I had hoped to make it completely across the room and into the shadows before they realised what I was, very much like the Jade entity that I had met on my first trip, a sort of shadow with purpose, but stopped halfway as they gazed on in astonished concern. What indeed would be the purpose of the suit at all, there being no ancient castles to scale? Partly it was an attempt to look impressive to the trips but mostly it was that as we evolved and met all the groovy spirit warriors, we started to physically attempt to mimic the grace and athletic prowess of these beings. It was an affectation that would have colossal ramifications.
In an attempt to play down the outfit, which was rapidly beginning to feel like a clown suit, I pulled out my other power objects for the night. By now, the direction and nature of our journey and mythology could be easily manipulated, a fact which I increasingly took advantage of. I had spent the week researching power symbols – ancient Celtic runes of protection - and had found one to suit each personality in the group. In these dense realms, magic and illusion and auto-suggestive sorceries were real fun because they worked and could be seen. In the previous week, we had felt the far-off presence of some gang or other and I now suggested that we protect the room, which we did by painting our symbols on all the walls.
By the very act of wearing the suit and bringing the runes, I had already influenced the nights’ journey. It was no longer a case of bouncing about through upper fairyland in our yellow submarine but rather the business of a bunch of trained astral agents who had clearly and emphatically defined inside, outside and difference, wherein outside could only be considered as hostile and the difference, created by our spells, could only be construed as a challenge. It was a foregone conclusion that the potential, far-away, evil gang could no more miss us than a falling leaf could miss the ground. The phenomena of ‘homing the intention’ produced its familiar side effects. The room darkened, the air thickened and all of the random astral flora and fauna vanished into dust mites.
This was automatically reinforced when our trepidation and anxiety projected richer screens onto the walls, lenses through which clouds of disparate astral organisms would coalesce into enemies with Lorelei, their own style and subculture. This process built with the trip, until the walls were seething with power and prominence and on that night formed one of the innumerable boundary types which sometimes armoured the walls, in this case resembling a sort of dark, Moorish trelliswork. This further definition meant that the evolving entities on the other side could be seen with greater resolution. The walls began to concave with their power, dimpled only where the magic symbols remained strong and immobile.
For the remainder of that evening their power grew until eventually we could make out dozens of beings in Monk’s Robes, their hands hidden in their sleeve folds. They were singing and chanting rhythmically and we soon realised that they were using magic to fight our magic, their voices summoning up great spells and incantations that threatened to burst the walls apart like the ancient town of
At one point, the monks rallied with a massive effort and our spoken words and hand symbols faltered. For a moment, all was deathly quiet and then, as of the final breath of a dying man, a small whiff of smoke broke through the barrier we had made and stole into the shadows, slinking along in spidery silence, preserving its strength for another time. Immediately, the singing stopped and the Monks pulled back, their dubious mission accomplished.
Like all Astral life, their Chronomic reservoirs were strictly preserved and protected. Perhaps they know we were human - entities of actual mass - who made up for what we lacked in evolutionary sophistication by having such enormous resources of raw time that by comparison we battled their tiny spirit veins with vast underground flows of super-heated lava. Of course, we hadn’t invented the jargon yet and thought that we had simply triumphed with our registered Celtic spells. As to the whiff of blue smoke, we didn’t give it another thought.
… For about three weeks anyway. Unbeknown to us, the tiny force lurked and grew in power, soaking in the shadows and bad moods of the world, pulling itself together, perhaps maintaining a microscopic tunnel from our world and into it’s own plane, pulling its spells across in tiny little fragments and patiently reforming them.
The events of the battle of two weeks previous had been weighing on our minds. The path ahead was treacherous, dark and unknowable. We resolved to include not only a bag of good Druidic spells with us but to take actual weapons on the trip. We could not of course dig out the arsenal from our gang days as they would be viewed by all Elarien as being in inestimably bad taste. Ian was made though because he had a samurai sword with cryptic engravings.
In a previous trip he had witnessed the sword becoming possessed by a powerful entity called Grey Mel ken, who had ceremoniously delivered an Astral sword of finest construction and embedded it into the ordinary metal of the mundane. Now it was a power sword, a weapon proper for the upper planes. Ian believed that it was an artefact of untold power that had been hidden on Earth for fear that it would fall to some ancient enemy. The same could not be said for Georges bottleneck staff.
I decided that we would each buy a ceremonial dagger, which would be tucked into our ceremonial belts for instant readiness. I also bought us all some Japanese Cloysan Jewellery, pendants to hang about our necks. They were sacred by virtue of the design, which I claimed to have witnessed in some other plane. With the pendants and other imminent battles looming, it was vital that we reinforce our sense of community - and so we took on a new name, that we might be known soon throughout heaven as the illustrious ‘Guild of Illusion’.
Armed and ready, we decided to board our room and take off again. For the early part of the evening, we were immersed in a pleasant soup of light astral civilisation. During these periods of rest, it seemed that our flying cage grew a thin skein of Candy Realm substrate, from which micro-entities grew like barnacles and if left for long enough, formed fascinating little Eco-systems. Although this substance was found only hundreds of planes below, at the very base of conscious life, it appeared that our living minds could nourish it and protect it.
Another groovy and always welcome property of this syrupy ether was that with it the mind could build infinite prisms and shapes and lenses that allowed the formation of complex images, almost exactly like the eidetic imagery of dreams but with more duration. For example, your wandering mind might see a distant hunter walking through snow and by focusing on the frame – using 3D through – you could get lost in some imagined little story, pieced together from the flotsam and jetsam of your distant memories. It was nice to just play like this, with meaningless dream imagery.
But all too quickly up here, entities would soar past us like great white sharks, silently and invisibly, impacting our little realm like a slammed shark cage and instantly, the fragile flora would vanish, like they had been seared from the side of a ship by an immense blowtorch. That’s how we knew to expect visitors. Even from relatively distance dimensions the Mugwots could feel their furious momentum as it folded through dimensions like a bullet through an onion. That night however we felt nothing because, despite all our mental bulwarks and courageous fortifications, we had neglected to consider one crucial fact. The entity was already on our side.
Things started to go awry when George went to sit in the darkened lounge on the couch. He liked to watch the wormy snow patterns on the TV when it wasn’t tuned in. On the whole, we all avoided leaving the room unless entirely necessary. It was like stepping out of a womb and when there were ‘big bugs’ about, it was downright dangerous. Once Ian had been so nervous that he peed in my cowboy boot for fear of braving the two-foot of corridor that separated us from the bathroom. George was a bit less sensitive and was enjoying soaking in the darkness while he stroked his kitty cat - which purred beside him - and divining for Zen in the meaningless static of the TV.
It was only when the cat leapt from the couch and landed on the carpet that he realised he had been stroking an enormous black panther. The entity was so dense that even from two feet away it looked completely real. He followed it down the passage as it padded slowly and silently, its astral armour now completely reworked in a maze of tiny spells to appear like fur. That was one of the indicators of power in entities. The closer the field could be pulled in, the denser the entity. For the cleverest of glamour shells, they could collapse thirty feet of field into a wafer thin layer that could form any colour or shape. Though he had no idea yet, George was walking behind what was undoubtedly the most powerful independent entity we had ever come across.
For those of you who cannot resist approximating these visions to projections of the fractured subconscious, I urge you to momentarily suspend your disbelief. I clearly remember sitting in the room on the bed and Ian in the middle of the room, nearer the door. George watched the cat push through a narrow opening in the door. From our side, moments before we saw George, we watched this panther walk into the room. It started at seeing us and when George bumbled in behind it, already trying to warn us, the cat spooked and jumped sideways, landing for gossamer moments on the bed, right in front of me, before leaping sideways again, twisting its body so that its feet touched the plaster, as though it were the floor, and with an almost imperceptible sigh, dissolved into the wall, the transparent blue smoke that remained becoming so much plaster.
Before the room had even begun to transform with the heady atmosphere of heavier dimensions bisecting our own in their billions, we were immediately aware of something that we had all privately and independently tried to ignore over the past two weeks in 3 Space. Each of us had had the impression that some invisible smoky force had been coating our lives and slithering into our doings. By unspoken consent, we considered the possibility that we had opened the wrong door. As far as we knew, no human knew about the full might of the Realms, the infinite domains that held all of the Earth like a tiny jewelled fruit, growing in a glade of infinity. And now we had gone and broken something.
We had become so used to living in a protected space and we had meticulously locked up and boarded all the doors and windows. But of course, as must always happen, somebody had forgotten to check the attic. Only in the distant, playful realms of hell and the aetheric wonderlands of the candy realm had we had to wade through the actual fluid itself, in its most dissipated form, capable of at best forming astral stage tricks and providing the energy for devils of such impotence that they would back down from dust mites. Within moments, we realised how much fluid had leaked through when the room was made inches smaller as though a million tiny smoke machines were blowing a continuous moving carpet. We had no idea what to do with the stuff and even Ian was looking dubiously at his sword.
The entity, who I would later identify as being called Kilimien, was an ancient shape-changer, who, like countless others who had thought to overextend themselves in their lust for power, lost its footing and fell down into the abyss. Spent of energy, but filled with age and talent, it had begun the long climb up and eventually, like so many others, chose to invest in one of the dark clans that clung to the upper rim of the Pit. Doubtless he had remained suspended thus, in bitter resentment, performing the mean tasks of the underworld, so far below his former perch. When he saw a room full of massive leaking batteries flying past, he must have uncoiled his every dark hope outward, slave marching his black brothers up to do deplete themselves against our guards. Probably, he didn’t even know we were human.
God knows from what cobwebbed pigeonhole I had pulled that slice of history, but at the time it was as irrelevant as somebody throwing last weeks newspaper through the window. Of immediate concern was the smoke, which thickened and roiled, already scattered with tiny, silvery forms and primordial shapes that had not been since the devils had ruled sway in their immense clouds of chlorine and molten gaseous fury at the beginning of the world. What we had all promptly forgotten, despite our astral degrees, was the nature of this fluid - gathered from the very planes of hell itself – and how it was specifically designed to amplify fear, hopelessness and anxiety.
His first salvo, though already overpowering, had not been designed to obliterate us into twitching comas because it knew that its total resources were finite and it planned instead with meticulous precision and care. The fundamental purpose of any astral battle for dominance is to gather the power fluid of the enemy through ruptures in the body suit. Of all the countless ways to achieve this end, blasting it out through your spine is perhaps the least desirable, primarily because it requires more energy than it gathers and is not by any means certain to succeed. The most popular technique is to coax it out by an opening in the distracted attention, best achieved by creating illusions of fear, guilt and despair.
The smoke stuff was the easiest trick of all, because it ran, grew and evolved on our batteries. Quickly we became separated in our neurotic delusions, our minds compacting themselves into ever smaller dimensions. The smoke thickened, the shapes taking on the contours of grotesque faces and limbs, screaming and fighting in torment as though bound in a net of time from which they would imminently escape. If it could achieve the task of possessing even one of us, he would be able to siphon enough power to escape through our thin defences from the inside and blast a meteor trail into the outer neighbourhoods of the realm of wider dynasties, so to forge a new destiny. As far as he was concerned, he would commit everything to this goal. It was either Dynasty or Die Nasty.
What lost it that particular battle was simply that I suddenly realised that the pillared clouds of demons were in fact in very bad taste and would no more claim my soul than childhood had prevented me from getting older. It was like confronting a university student with a big, scary, red, first-grade reading book; but then, as I am fond of saying: Hell is only endless if you are moving sideways. Like a ray of sunlight I burned through the cobwebs of doubt that were cocooning my team and freed them, scattering the thousands of hair thin tubes which bored into the pores of their skin like fibre-optic leeches. The entity did not hesitate before sucking its energy back against the plaster and pressed ceilings.
The second attack took longer in developing and, despite the feeling that somebody was standing with their nose just touching the back of your left ear, we relaxed in the hope we had triumphed. Slowly, however, the mist began to thicken and darken until it took on shades of a deep, smoky, lava red. Then, in the corners of the room, the cooling magma formed shapes and patterns, becoming streaked with threads that criss-crossed and thickened. Soon, the unmistakable shapes of long, flimsy ribs could be seen running down all the walls with a wet, meaty kind of smell. It was at that moment that one of us spoke up and said what was probably one of the dumber things that had ever been uttered in front of a shape changing pit demon who was using a spell, which unlike the first, relied exclusively on fear produced by collective design.
Wow, what do you think that thing is?’
And so, minds as one, we encountered a creature that was almost exactly like the one in the movie Alien, except that it had grown large enough to eat our room. Imagine being trapped in the spider leg cage of an immense black widow spider that began gradually pulling its legs in, crushing the room. I cannot remember unfortunately much of the next several hours but somehow we survived assault after assault, in every shape and form. I wonder at what point it realised that we were humans, constructed not of a billion threads of virtual electricity but of compacted matter that contained within its every cell galaxies and dormant energies of stupendous power.
I remember clearly the final battle, which took over an hour. All of the other boys had somehow become lost in the folds of other realms and I was left to battle the beast alone. Relentlessly, I applied the crushing force of my will, shrinking it down until it was finally fixed in a single shape in the centre of the room, all of the fluid which surrounded us having been drained into this one creature. Momentarily it became a panther and then suddenly seemed to explode with radiant light to reveal the fixed form of a Gryphon, it’s powerful, golden lion body tensing with bunched power and grace. We locked gazes unflinchingly.
From its feet, these tiny, golden worms spread across the floor in their hundreds and when they reached me revealed themselves to be searing hot, burning into my flesh, slowly crawling up my legs. My concentration however had achieved the sort of focus that one sometimes finds when showing a girl how painless it is to burn a cigarette out on your arm. I would not relent and let slip even for a moment in my determination to achieve victory. Finally, with a tiny, sad snap, the creature began to change forms, dozens per second, shrinking and dwindling until in a last attempt to destroy me it leapt across the room, claws bared.
What followed was quite one of the most spectacular and unexpected visions I had ever witnessed. At that precise moment, but on a plane that ran perpendicular to the one I battled on, Ian had gotten into a fight with some other creature (he doesn’t even remember what it was). The result of it though was that in psychotic berserker fury he had swept out his sword and swung it in an arc which bisected the room, its power such that it cut between the folds in the planes and decapitated the flying Gryphon, which in that moment, I could not help but notice, took on a radiant purity and its hair became tongues of twining flame of all the colours of red and yellow and orange. When I say to you that the dying release of this creature released shockwaves of such intense light and fury that they shattered a million planes as though they were cities of the finest glass, I would be understating the truth.
The planes, which had thin membranes that burned like camera film and melted from the centre outward, were so intimately bound together that the flame continued to spread through all of the dimensions, the dimensions themselves recoiling in horror, exploding away like a billion silver sardines do when trying to form a cocoon of safety around a hurtling shark. In the unfolding catastrophe, their precious interconnectivity - which made possible their endless, transient lives - became a mortal enemy as the power sword of Melken, wielded by the towering 3 dimensional monster called Ian, spread the pure flame of vengeance and retribution through the very seams of reality, slicing through the final essence of a fallen angel who had just happened to leap at me with very bad place and timing.
When the flames reached the walls the cells became bigger and looking down them was like peering down the throats of giant worms, long silvery tunnels connecting this dying entity to hundreds of the ancient, peaceful places he had known before he had fallen to despair.
I had both killed him and set him free.
***
This and similar acts were part of our dazzling ‘appearance on the scene’ and must have caused the same controversy as would the discovery of a nation of mathematical worms in the jungles of South America. All sorts of odd entities began to poke their noses into our affairs, tapping on our boundary lattice as though knocking on a fish tank to see if we would react, shifting through dozens of languages to try and communicate with us. I tried to gain information about Jade wherever I could, almost entirely without success, as they did not know what I was talking about, but from the colour of my field and the elements of her scent, they provided me with enough hints that I began to piece together a scenario which went thus:
Far above where we still roamed, the realm of vaster dynasties housed families of great and exotic power, one of which was clearly the home of Jade, a realm called Loreiciel. But it seemed that unless we could appeal directly to them for sponsorship, which had already been clearly denied, we would never gather enough energy to make the trip.
Inherently understanding this, some of the gangs and entities began to attempt more subtle forms of manipulation, offering to trade us support in return for the investment of our raw energy. Clearly Chronomic force was found in two states, which might be described as Raw and Developed. In us it was raw, which-is-to-say vastly potent but held in potential, like the gargantuan powers of fission frozen in the atom. In them it was actualised, but the process of actualisation had reduced their souls to the faintest flutter of real power, like the second last heartbeat of a dying man suspended forever.
As great as our power was, it was useless for astral travel, as is the skill of writing on its own useless to the construction of a mathematical equation. If they could not however forcibly remove our power, or swindle it from us, they could just as easily ask for it. The unalterable reality of astral culture was that nothing came for nothing and as much as we might enjoy the delusion that they were ‘helping us out’, it did not change the fact that immortality was a serious, measured business of gravely consequential barters, an endless market, trading knowledge for power and power for knowledge.
Instinctively I understood this and was very dubious of proffered hands of friendship – never would I forget the texture of the claw that belonged to the master of moles. Also, I was possessed of a fierce sense of loyalty to Jade and by extension, her people, the Loreicelien’s. I had hoped that by continuous, unaltered loyalty, they might forgive whatever trespass I had committed some twelve months back that had forever severed my connection to that plane. At the same time, I thought that perhaps in watching and observing me, they might be disappointed if I was entirely cold and unable to assist kindred spirits - some of whom at least must be noble in nature - to achieve small victories by virtue of sharing a little of the volcano power in my bones.
By this dumb reasoning I got myself roped into an experience that I rather wish I hadn’t. While surfing the convoluted realities and highways of the astral one night, I came across a place deep down, a realm of smoke and shadow and swampy thought, where battles had been fought and brave, noble beings had fallen to the forces of darkness. There are many such places in the astral, even as there are many such places in the human mind, evident by the fact that so many of our mythologies and tales are set in this primeval, hormonal soup. They lay closer to the abyss, as if heaven was a mighty slope and all things too heavy had been gradually sliding toward it since time began.
The essence of the place captured me because the victims of this ancient deluge of violence were warriors, warriors in the Tolkien sense, with ancient, elfin armour and great silver lances. Or silver lances they may once have been. The terrible tragedy of this battle had forever trapped this army of lost souls in a realm of perpetual mourning and pain. Their armour had become paper thin and blackened by despair, their once proud lances crumbling in their skeletal grasps. Bereft of power, lost in a battle that must have sundered heaven in some unimaginably ancient time, they had been bound together, forever doomed to experience heaven as only a distant star.
So I offered them a hand. This is just the sort of thing that the Loreicelien Guild would appreciate I thought. They had blades and so did these guys. They were part of a grand Blade Warrior brotherhood. I went down there, sinking my mind into the dusty cobweb of this rotten memory and searching through the ghostly feelings until I felt the tiniest pulse of life, as though they had collectively surrendered all of their fates to maintain this one pulsing SOS beacon throughout all the eternities that would follow, knowing as they did that by the unwritten lore of the astral, there would be no one willing to rescue them.
The process unfolded thus: I was made to lie back on my bed - perfectly still – and empty my mind of my entire personality, my entire being, and my every thought. In the centre of my body, I allowed them to open a tunnel, a tunnel that stretched from their musty tomb - through my soul - and onto the distant silver shores of the astral, where each would be released and freed and disassembled into the light of God. With painstaking slowness, they rose one by one and moved through me for hour after hour, their fragile paper husk limbs rasping through my being. My repugnance was extreme and overpowering. I was revolted by their touch and it felt as if I was absorbing their pain and loss and sorrow and despair.
Most importantly, I was aware that I could not move, could not even form the thought of movement, for with the slightest shift of my mountainous frame, hundreds would be crushed and broken, leaving their diseased flakes to float through my body. I could feel their lances and sharp armour like wasp’s legs down my throat, tickling with infinite sharpness. With a sense of fierce duty and noble intent I refused to move and allowed them to pass through me, each and every one, until only at the promise of dawn did the last of the souls cross through and dissolve, with silent, white joy into the chaotic energies of the overworld.
***
One night I encountered all the opinions of the world. He was this crazy guy with a really stupid sense of humour, but he was solid. This was no lightweight entity. He was a citizen all right. I remember that night experiencing a loud explosion or something and I have this distinct memory of the room becoming filled with smoke and in the distance, my monkey mind threw in the sounds of sirens and distant voices. They were Russian voices, I think, or at least the whole scene had a very Russian overtone. I always imagined that I could fluidly understand any language while I was floating around the astral, but I can never be sure. Now, I just manage English.
From what I could make out, this space ship had landed and the authorities were riding around in the dark and smoke trying to find it. Of a moment, the wall cleared away, the smoke and mist flowing freely from my room and onto the lunar landscape to the other side of the wall. There I saw a completely spherical craft, which had sorted of crash landed and was limping a bit on its right leg. A door opened at the top and this old professor pokes his head about, looking more like Einstein than Einstein could have, white hair all crazed about just like a man playing a cartoon character.
He smiled at me and I saw a twinkle in his blue eyes that I will never forget. He was the smartest man I would ever meet, and the silliest in some cases. He had two forms of manifestation, the other being a younger runner body, with a goofy sense of wicked humour. He seemed to dismiss the oncoming soldiers and switched them off like they had been simple beats on a drum machine.
- What are you doing? I asked him.
- I have been watching you, he replied.
I responded to him calling me over and it was as if my mind was detached and wondered over to see what he was about. He showed me into his vehicle and I saw a complete inner sphere covered by thousands of different screens and on each screen I could see myself from a different vantage point, naked and clothed in every conceivable outfit, at different times and places, stretching right back to me gumming my first pen.
He promised to show me how it worked, at which point, I might just add, that I had my first and only Christian trip. For those of you in the faith trade, I apologise for my irreverence. It was quite remarkable actually, that I had not had any visions of God or Satan, considering my long standing feud with Jehovah and his middle class minions. You would have thought that in some overpowering moment my subconscious might throw in the big guns.
The room darkened and rounded at the corners and on the bed in front of me I saw a massive cross - such as those that are mounted on tops of hills - and with agonising drama it slowly raised itself until it dominated the room. Then it slowly receded until it sunk into the wall, leaving only its ghoulish silhouette, the ancient Aramaic word for guilt spelled in wood. From all sides of it, cells began to spread out until all of the walls were overlaid by tiny, organic television monitors.
I turned and as I turned they turned with me, images, messages, thousand of stories playing themselves out, in every part of the world. It came to me that I now inhabited for a moment the strange craft of the old man and that I was staring out at all the issues of the world. This was where the man came to give his opinions, clearly. As I focused on one scene after another, they ballooned out to fill my perception with their relevance and structures and complexities.
It was as though I was standing in the centre of the universe and with a single thought, could unleash the purest symmetries of understanding to these globes of events; that I could work out anything, that my choices here could enable me to reach out and touch the world, transform it. I remember focusing on the issue of economics and for a moment my mind tapped into a place, yet much further away, where a team of highly skilled technicians awaited my contributions.
I saw images of fate and paths snaking out as I flipped through the charge sheet of all useful activities in the world, looking for my place. Economics, that interested me, and by extension, the idea of sustainable societies and the technology that could feed nations by simulating the infinite bounty of the seas. It was my choice, any of it, for now that I knew as much as I did, there would no longer by any need for seriously trying to live a normal life and pursue normal goals.
Interesting that the first and most solid of issues should be a cross. I resolved to work out that particular issue at a later time and with greater leisure.
***
For the first time in years I felt acceptance. Beyond my wildest imaginings, events had been discussed and decisions had been made. After months in the abyss and the bad neighborhoods of the newly ascended - fighting off hordes of disenfranchised cherubs and further back than that, sickening asphyxiation in hell and the domain of my own unresolved sexual conflicts, the first tender moments of joy I had once briefly known now so distant an echo that the echo had an echo - they cut me a break. With the arrival of the old man – His name was Uriel – I had finally encountered somebody willing to let me see something without afterward wanting to eat my eyeballs.
For an absolute eternity I had been experiencing things intent only on making me feel uncomfortable. I had been attacked by everything from flying squirrels with razor sharp fingers to automated trucks covered in spikes that chewed through the walls between dimensions. What had once been terrifying to the mere perception of it now skirted dangerously close to the absurd. And so, with the help of the antics of Uriel, whose wit was so sharp that you could shave your beard with it, and another strange being - a brother to Uriel, called Monten - who was if anything more childish, I followed this entire cycle to its natural conclusion, where the mighty and overpowering was finally reduced to the comical components which make it up. I got the joke.
There I would see this monster from the abyss leaping through the wall, all howling and spitting with matchstick fury and then he would trip over the folds of his cloak and Monten, or Uriel - or both - would tumble out of the ‘monster from the abyss’ outfit. They were there to teach me to ‘hang out’ astral side without making a complete and utter fool of myself. They were going to make such a fool out of me that there was nothing left for other people to work with. If somebody had to attack you with a fear as low grade, say, as a flying, dismembered head, it wasn’t enough to just ignore it. It had to be treated, like so much else in life, with the proper attitude of amusement.
Very quickly, I became used to opening the cage door, in a sense, and letting all sorts of very physical, very potent beings in. When Uriel was in with me, he would show me countless interesting things, like, for example, how a trip was designed and constructed. One time I remember hearing the sudden snarl of a dog and turning around I saw this ball of canine fury, its hair at some point obviously plugged into a wall socket, tearing through the air toward my throat. Uncontrollably, I jumped back, away from the slavering beast.
At this point it jerked in the air, and came to a stop, as of it had been attached to a metal contraption that had found the outermost extreme of its reach, which in fact it had. Actually Uriel was driving the trip and he climbed out the side with a wolfish grin and motioned me over to have a look behind the scenes. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. In the high society of heaven, I had been invited many times to great parties, but none of the hosts had ever been so kind as to take me back to have a look in the kitchens.
And so I walked around the side, while the entire trip, all the facets and facades – and I had never seen this – became frozen in time. It was as though Uriel had reached down to his belt and flipped a switch that put reality on pause, the dog suspended in motion, the moon vibrating at one point in its arc, an arcing ocean wave frozen above a gleaming beach.
- You mean I can drive one of these too?
- Undoubtedly. You just have to know how to make one.
So that was my first introduction to a science that I would later come to call Elemental Animatronics. This is a very big subject – one of my most important downloads – and in fact cannot just be explained. It has to be acted. Sometimes it took weeks of hard, acrobatic acting before you learned anything about a particular principle. Essentially, you really require the devoted services of a qualified Elemental with a vast repertoire of animatrons.
Said another way, I suddenly was made to understand that all the flames and cats and claws and tornadoes and demons I had ever seen were in fact just people acting like flames and cats and claws and tornadoes and demons. They were highly skilled dancers that simulated scenarios with their immense and intricate aetheric weaving skills to produce a state of awareness within which the target was forced to realign their entire perceptions of reality through hallucination.
It is hard to understand why at a certain level the entities shift their responsibilities from an inward direction to an outward direction, why they suddenly employ sophistication, intelligence and forethought as opposed to modes of reaction that are closer to the elemental persuasions of fight or flight. It seems to break down like this:
True entities can only subsist at a certain frequency and those aspects of their energy fingerprints that are found lower down, are as though rays are emitted from the higher entity in widening beams that deteriorate and fragment into entities without cohesion or even more than the residual intention of the source entity. The lowest of the realms, being the demonic and the faerie, are literally populated by dust mites, mere specks of potential that can only even be apprehended if boosted by the massive battery of the brain.
For at least half of my great journey to date, I had only ever met refractions, ghost images, suggestions of bigger ideas and vaster dynasties. The fundamental difference between the elemental and the astral plane of being is as follows: Everything that has a human shape – a bipedal consciousness – or relates to or in any way springs from the human collective mind, including languages, is an aspect of the astral plane. For example, if you see, say, a temple on your travels, you can be sure that you are in the astral plane because you simply cannot erect a temple, or any human structure, in the elemental realm.
By contrast, every single natural occurring substance, material, process or structure that in no way relates to human origin or design - such as wind, animals, fire, feathers, gold or air – belongs to the elemental realm. Anything recognizable by human standards is immediately considered an astral phenomenon. The elemental flora and fauna have a vast range, but a narrow band within which we can interpret them. Faerie and demons are prime examples of this. Though they in essence erupt from nature, we perceive their elemental structure by overlaying our astral filters. For example, Images of anger, which are naturally expressed by fire and lightning, can take on demonic or Deitical characteristics and perceived as one of a myriad of mythological archetypes.
It became clear to me why, for instance, hell had been initially viewed as a grid with perspective, an elementary neutral lattice cut with currents and trends and tides of elemental movement, that, when encountered, shifted my sense of spin and direction so badly, that I ripped down my astral filters and concocted the hosts of strange, dismembered demons and faeries upon the pallet of my emotive imagination. The very bottom of the elemental realm is of course totally free of astral influence as is the upper reaches of the astral devoid of elemental persuasion. You cannot perceive the interior of atomic lattices with human like perception for the same reason that you cannot use your elemental vehicles – such as your eyes – to physically see the crest of heaven.
But for much of both realms, from the bottom of the candy realm to the upper middle pantheon, the astral and the elemental overlap, interacting like salt and pepper, or time and space – two great ocean systems crashing and mingling. The higher the astral entity, the more extensive its range of influence, down across the void and into the Aetheric, which is the most aggressively energized aspect of the elemental. The highest of the high makes their presences felt right down into 3 space and that is why as you surf the ether, you get so many tangled pulses of potential boiling the air around you and making for all sorts of nasty hallucinations. Most important of all, ones direction through these lower levels is directly influenced by the echo tunnels you choose to follow, until, as you learn how to manage that energy frequency channel correctly, you draw closer to the source, homing your intention, finally apprehending not just blasting flames but the very power of fire itself.
And Monten.
Uriel, I am given to understand is originally a very high entity, instrumental to many mythological systems, including being one of the major bigwigs in the angel scene of the world’s two largest religions. At the level I tuned into him though, at that point, he was a big old friendly goofball with all the time and patience in the world to educate me with his vast acts of predatory theatre.
Monten’s origin is not very clear to me. I have never heard the name but his visible memory points to a tale about entities from a clan which is monstrously old, perhaps ever older than Uriel, but by some convoluted quirk of legend remain permanently young and sprightly, the very epitome of youthful vigour and enthusiasm, with their suggested purpose preservation of the old memories.
Or something like that.
Like Uriel, the level at which I then downloaded Monten, he was really just a naughty kid, seemingly unaffected by the infinite pattern of ages which went to produce him. Together, they were at best worse. Quickly I began to retrospect, sifting through my encounters like a fishermen going over his net after a hard days work. Pick, Skyf, certainly the Pecker man, probably Kilimien the lost soul and possibly even that brother of Jade’s; they were all played by one or other of these two clowns.
That’s why they laughed so much. If they had been playing the part of Kilimien and the Scorpion character, it must have been hilarious to watch us dance around from imagined flames and heated worms, knitted from the very fibres of our own nerves. If at any point, we had known that it was simply a case of going around the side of the trip and seeing all the complicated mechanical operatus that created the special effects, we could have reached in and ripped out one of these two guys and given them a good collar shaking. But alas, we were confounded by the sheer weight of our own sense of self importance and would settle for nothing less than ancient battles and heroic deeds.
Uriel and Monten, their great star nets slowly drawing us up with the ludicrous and macabre until eventually we could stand on a stable platform and they could truly express their talents with awesome acts of tomfoolery.
They have always been my favourites. I did not include Jade Sildarien amongst the earlier examples for the simple reason that she is one of them, an Elarsan, which-is-to-say permanent citizen, or starseed. Like Uriel and Monten, not the acted but the actor, not the jade flame or the waterfall or even the Japanese princess in the garden, but all of them combined and separately expressed.
Like the elemental realm of the previous chapter, I cannot begin to explore it properly here or recount even a fraction of my experiences – Indeed the abyss, which took over nine months to traverse, was summarised in about twenty seconds. Nor can I introduce you to its infinite citizens and all the friends and enemies I made. Instead, I give you only the most tenuous architecture - a spider-web palace – that must suffice to express the understanding of the lower middle astral in its cardinal principles and laws. It is less important to see a million daisies than to comprehend the value and nature of the species.
***
One fine evening, everything changed once again, the final transformative experience of the lower realm of wider dynasties giving us the keys to leap the barrier of consciousness from the ganglands of the collective mind and into the heartlands, where, suddenly, massive expanses of Chronomic real estate become still and open and empty. Like the empty tracts of feudal
The weeks preceding the onset of the first part of the experience of the transformation had been growing very quiet really. The room was flying along but it was as if we were in the deepest ocean, the normally vast bounty of the sea given over to a sort of aquatic desert populated only by extraordinary turtles and ghostly squid and the thrilling rarity of one of the true monsters of the deep, vast, peaceful creatures like cities of smaller beings which constantly filtered the endless flecks and aspects of the overall, the meta-plankton if you will. We were far too high for even the most resilient of Mugwot energies and mind-barnacles to cling to the streaking fast hot surface of our chamber. Indeed, the purity and lack of pressure created the constant awareness of how very far it was to fall.
When it happened, at about a third of the way through the evening, it was dull fishing indeed but there were still a fair quantity of random life forms zapping around in their weird configurations that remind one of those glowing, ridiculous looking fish that exist only in places in the ocean where the sun is not just a distant memory but in fact the sun has never existed at all. If you had to ask one of those fish what the sun was, they wouldn’t even understand the question. The analogy in this case is of course only diametrically relevant because these creatures have the opposite problem, which is to say they have never heard of darkness. When it happened though – the familiar planar shift – these critters did not just idly wander off in peace, but vanished as if they had been unmade, sucking themselves into non-existence fast enough to leave only a wake of sound catching up with itself.
Through years of experience I immediately adjusted my perceptive grids, looking for the most tell-tale clues of the coming presence, the most notable of which of course is the boundary lattice, which organises itself into a picture code of criss-crossing struts and layers. But this was to be no normal shield we would acquire – used primarily to bicker and squabble with the astral proletariat – and did not possess the regulated uniformity of the crests of noble families. Oh no, this boundary guard dissolved instead into overlapping fluorescent duck feet prints that within seconds covered the surface of the room, including floors and ceilings.
And then came the flying squad, the paramilitary upper astral shock troopers. I had experienced this phenomenon before, though it was unimportant to the narrative at that point to relate the experience, but I think I might stray here a mite to describe. The area is firstly flooded by what you will later come to know as Maurelm runners, sleek, ghost-like, energetic humanoids flashing from every access tunnel of the astral, bows of steel humming with wasp like intensity, the occasional splatter of light refracting off the smooth, silky skins of their swivelling blade systems. Their job is to lock down and guard an elemental/astral interface gate, wherein the room is no longer a vehicle but rather becomes a juncture, a meeting point between planes.
As such, they cross over into our world not as echoes but as as close to being three-dimensional beings as they can be without being the actual guys that they are opening the gate for. In other words, they actually bump into walls and cupboards if they are not careful and the stations they swarm to occupy are not in localised concept space but rather in 3 space, the world of ledges and roofs, and telephone poles and tall cupboards and especially up in the corners of rooms, where they stretch a scintillating sort of net from one facing wall to the other, creating a platform called a Flet, which from underneath bends lights around it so as to render itself almost invisible. Within seconds, the whole 3 space neighbourhood, including the trees and rooftops of other buildings, becomes a complex of Maurelm Runners, moving in harmony with the extraordinary skill of packs of sardines or flights of birds with razor tipped wings.
And then, invisible regiments locked into formation, three entities dropped from three newly formed apertures, like inverted ice holes in the roof and landed, sweet as silk with attitude, on the floor. I did not even have time to notice the alarming solidity of their body suits, for within a fraction of a second, they fanned outward, two to left and right and one leaping bodily into the top corner of the room, their forms already lensing with animatronic lattices as they appreciated the security of this tiny juncture so deep into the elemental by indulging in astral artistry. Wherever they moved, leaping off walls and from one precarious surface to another like spider monkey lizards, they left these fluorescent duck prints, which remained for seconds before dissolving. In a flash, it was apparent that I had seen this marking only once before, on the stone staircase at my very first trip and my life-changing encounter with Jade.
I had not dared to hope in these two long years since I had last seen her that she would – or could – return into my type of space. If not her, it was somebody like her, but manifesting in the most high frequency form possible, a new thing for me. In moments a gamut of colourful, coordinated hallucinatory images and scenes filled the outer space of the room, as though the astral had inverted inward to our protected space. I cannot remember most of this phase of images but I do remember something to do with history - possibly feudal fifteenth century – and pirates swarming elephantine oceans causing havoc and general mayhem. I remember something about a medieval village with dwarfs and ales and thugs and especially thieves, swift-footed mercurial pickpockets with tiny, slitting blades and long, sly fingers.
Those of you that are clairvoyant will understand that these visions are merely attempts to express complex emonotional ideas and through my recent training I had come to the same understanding of the protocol. Whereas before, I would have tried to follow the story of some ancient pirate or war or whatever, I could now instantly rely on certain assumptions. The more detailed aspects are why, for instance, the story delayed – chronomically focused – on the image of the pickpockets or the dwarves or why pirates and not Naval ships. The strongest resonance was the pick-pockets, which meant that the animatron circus wanted to communicate either its purpose or origin as being related to thievery or skill or even the gypsy spirit; you get the idea.
Of much broader and more fundamental importance were the assumptions that - this being a co-ordinated fanfare – it was almost certainly a façade steered by some Elarien trip driver, which meant that I would have to move fast enough to catch them side on; The other vital clue and assumption of course was that the show combined an historical setting with a farcical and dramatic overtone, which could only mean my two friends, the illustrious Uriel and his hysterical sidekick Uriel. The moment I realised this, I saw the angle through the layers of trips and there, sure enough, was the concentrated frown of Uriel, his face covered by a pirate mask and in his hands two flat paintings of cardboard cut out ocean waves which he had been swaying up and down to simulate the sea.
And bang, the trips vanished, the trappings of history and high sea romance dissolving into the broomstick handles and door hooks and book edges and gauze curtain shreds and all the other non-essential elements that make them up. Just like that – none of this lingering paper fluff or transparent sandwich wrapper business. All gone, reality abruptly white and clean and simple and sane like newly laid snow, the very air crisp with arctic clarity.
Except of course for the two solid shapes standing in the middle of the room, wry grins and convoluted flaps of battle weaponry, not even giving the hint of disappearing. I could have left that room and gone to work and come back and they would still be there. Finally, after an arduous pioneering expedition through the expanseless depths of the overmind, I met the boys in person. They greeted me softly, with a series of sounds that amounts to ‘hello’ and reached out in turn to grasp my hand in the warrior grip. It is an extremely disturbing experience, I might just add, to meet a spirit with a strong right-armed grip.
- Hi guys.
- Nice to meet you, they chorused, the peculiar nature of ultra dimensional sound making it sound as if they were whispering across a long distance, as far away as yesterday or tomorrow perhaps.
- What’s with all the hoo-hah? I said, or something like that.
- We cannot stay long. Chat personally another time perhaps. They said.
And what’s with all the hosts of runners and presidential bodyguards. Surely you guys don’t warrant that sort of ceremony when you can simply fend off all enemies with the razor edge of wit and the tangled shield of bad planning? I most certainly did not word it like this but that was the general gist of the question.
- It’s not for us. They said. We’re just here as guides and translators.
- Well then, who, I thought? And then I remembered; A third blade warrior had landed and vanished with such consummate skill as to erase itself from my memory.
- Who is it? I asked anxiously.
- Perhaps, said Uriel, the question should be: Who is she?
As you will by now know, I cannot possibly express the power and poignancy of that moment. It took me to the foundations of my self, threatening in a blast of repressed anguish to burst the walls of my temperament, to crumble me with grief and loss and love. And I had never, ever seen her like this, not a mirage in a darkened corridor or a faraway princess poster girl, but simply a real person, with no guise or glamour or deflection.
- Hello Shane. She said – although actually the word she called me was more like Ahhrien.
- Hello? I thought. Of all the grand, fucking inadequate pronouncements to make.
- Calm yourself, it’s not easy for me to stand here, especially not with your blasting, uncontrolled, volcano energy. She more or less explained.
- This can’t be true.
- Don’t do that either, or you’ll dislodge me. Just accept our few moments together. There is a lot we have to communicate. Better you don’t ask questions until I am finished.
I nodded dumbly and then had one of the most extraordinary experiences to date – She took my hand in hers and led me to the armchair where she bade me sit and then lowered herself onto my lap, so that her weight and the creases of her armour and weaponry pressed into my flesh.
Is my weight okay? She looked concerned.
Fine. I replied, completely and utterly bewildered and incapable of reasonable conversation.
Yes, okay, the angles of this juncture are not too severe. Good.
She lifted her hand up toward my cheek, palm up - as though to stroke it - and I will never forget the following experience either. I focused on her arm and unlike the phosphorescent transience of most astral phenomena; the image did not blur but clarified in great deal. It was the first time I had seen the marvelous armour up close and definitely the first time I had witnessed the underside of the armour, which I would later understand to be the most sensitive, private and protected part of the armour.
- You know that what you see here is a secret of Loreiciel (explained later) and must be guarded with great care.
In response to my instant auto-emotive response of confusion, (What wasn’t I allowed to share with the world and what was okay?), she projected a strange image, which has always stuck to me. It basically flashed to me the bonnet of a highly polished car outside some grand, university style gothic black gates. In the reflection of the bonnet, I saw images and components of the school, so called surface interpretations or perceptions. What I could see reflected off that polished chrome surface I could relate in my story to the world but on no account was I to describe the view directly through the trellis of the gate itself. Take that as you will; I hope I’ve kept to the security protocol in this story.
That said, I will try and describe a little of what I saw. There are two surfaces to the armour, being the inner and outer guard. The heavier blades and shield plates are on the outside of your elbows and shoulders and the tops of your hands while the inner guard, that part of the armour which is not generally exposed to attack, is made up of rings and links which anchor the substrate of the armour. Most clearly I remember the undersides of her fingers, with about fifty or more tiny rings running up the length of each finger and culminating by almost seeming to be embedded into the finger tip. I also remember the wonderful symmetrical woodland designs and crests that coated every inch of the steel in infinitely complex hair thin crosshatches of colour, like semi-transparent kaleidoscopic tattoos invoking all the names and houses and natures of the vaster dynasty of Silsan.
One more thing I will note as an afterthought, but this is a secret – in the astral sense of the word – and we will go into later at greater detail when we explore the Domain of Loreiciel itself. That is the so called signature petals, which lie on the underside of the right forearm and look like lotuses of wafer thin coloured steel which spin constantly into themselves. They serve the same function as a repository containing your passport, social security, bankcards, drivers’ licenses, personality model and life history rolled into one, as well as a host of other functions. That I noticed any detail at all is pretty amazing considering that my soul’s journey to boundless love had just landed in my lap. Truth is though that I could kick myself today for not studying the intricacies of what was for all practical purposes an alien artifact a foot from my nose.
After that brief, tender interlude, the spell vanished as she stiffened and came lightly to her feet, the texture of her skin - tattooed like her armour in faint, intricate marks and whorls – creasing into a concerned, almost regretful smile and then, with a snap, as if I had not waited two long, lonely years of anguish for her coming, the warrior mask was back, emotions unreadable.
She stood to the side, head bowed, as from around the corner of my room advanced a tall, powerful warrior in seal-black armour. I felt his thoughts erupt through my mind with stunning force and clarity. He first referenced back to the fateful day that the warrior with the star on his cheek had appeared and then quickly to that later moment when I had concluded that maybe it had in fact been Uriel in Drag, as if to say: No, that was me and still is me and I am not even close to being a joke, or even having a sense of humour. Then he flipped his hand up like before, only this time I could see all four fingers and once again wondered with a chill at the curious, interlocking cork-screw finger blades, each finger differing in blade design and seemingly all of them designed to not just slice but to somehow mangle the target, or scoop our veins or nerves or something equally horrible.
So… that was no stage costume, after all. As if in response to my thought, three more tall, striking warriors walked into the room to come up behind the star guy, who I would later know as Kaiel, the most lethal of Sildarien’s brothers. She had not one brother, but four, which by quick calculation meant at least thirty-two unique and bloodthirsty claw blades with my name on them. I turned to Jade, who was looking nervous and a little concerned, as if urging them to compassion. What happened next was that Kaiel stepped out in the centre of the room while the other surrounded me and delivered a message, which I will not attempt to dictate as it was received but rather paraphrase for better and clearer understanding in 3 space speak:
Against all reason and probability – and despite our efforts to dissuade you from this course and pursuit – you have reached the heartlands, the domain of Loreiciel, the realm of angelic life. I must say first, that despite my abhorrence for the perilous danger you and your kind represent to my sister and our way of life, I am impressed by your determination. Now you are here and there is nothing we can do – her scent is meshed into your signature petal and with it, shreds dragged from all the members of this house. I will not try and persuade you to turn back and even though my brothers and sisters might give you a warmer welcome, I give you a final warning.
With that said he thrashed his hands out to create an intricate illusion that filled a portion of the room. I can only describe it to you as an image of a three-dimensional spiral that coiled inwards from multi-directions to stop at a point. That point clearly represented me and the spirals somehow described time or years of my life, like the spiral age marks in the trunk of a tree.
That is the length of your life and the time you may possibly share with Sildarien.
He turned to his sister and nodded, and she, with the greatest reluctance drew forth a Loreicelien bow, with its compound layers of metal struts, knocked an arrow over a metre in length … and fired it directly at my heart.
At the last moment, the arrow diverted and started to swiftly follow the contours of the spiral, the centre of which was now placed on my heart, the arrow flying so fast as to be invisible and the contours so shallow that only a great length of time – or a sudden deflection – would find that steel tip in my heart, slain by my souls definitions of love.
That arrow is your final warning and the same scent, which holds her to you, holds the tip of its death to the centre of your life. If you harm her, ever, or bring this house into disrepute, no matter how distant in the future, that arrow will surely find its mark.
Then he turned without a further word and headed down the long, black tunnel that led to their jump ship or whatever you call it, tiers of Maurelm runners closing in behind him like razor blade smoke. The other brothers and Jade lingered for a moment longer, looking at me, two of the brothers disturbingly familiar somehow. With a shrug and a nod they turned and from them came the final message of departure which read something like:
Welcome to the club. See you on the other side.
With that departing message came the faintest hint of familial affection and for a second I realised how I had succeeded. Kaiel may have blocked me with unreserved ferocity, but at least one of the other brothers had come to my aid, giving me the final sponsoring assistance that I had needed to fly so high. In that, they had opposed each other and I was reassured by this secret support.
Finally only Jade remained and her face was a mask of sorrow.
You must give up this quest for me. It is causing much pain to my family and will eventually drive you mad.
But we have done so well, finally …
No! Give it up. This season I am to depart to a new life and a new fate. I cannot explain in to you now but I wish that you would listen to me. Please, for the sake of my soul, make this our last meeting.
Can we not meet one more time?
My family will not like it. It is a family matter and it would cause distress.
Tell them then that it is not honourable to part without explanation. I closed my eyes in fury and sadness welling up in my throat, my hands clenched to the sides of my head.
She turned, walked slowly away - her shoulders slumped - and for hundreds of square metres around my house, squadrons of light forms spun inward, whirling around me with bewildering speed and grace and symmetry. The last of them dissolved into the warp-gate and closed it behind him so that, in a moment, the simple darkness of a quiet suburban life in an Earthen neighbourhood snapped into place as though it had never been disturbed.
Countless sleeping, restful minds, completely unaware that for a few, unmarked moments, the very power and fabric of heaven itself had come down amongst them ….
posted by Count Lorel at
2:15 PM
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