Explorations
This blog is a three-part book in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The book is a continuation from Hidden Valleys, Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Part One: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Part Three: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
This story needs to be included here. To some extent this is because it is not enough to point out, in passing, the difference between abstraction, and the abstract - that is, the abstract (with abstraction also within it) as it manifests itself in the form of the oneiric-real worlds that are stories. Stories recurrently are thought-experiments (and the story below can be looked at entirely in this way), but if there has been any degree of success in focusing abstract-oneiric perception they are much more than this: they are worlds of outsights - worlds of views toward wider realities.
However, the story primarily needs to be included because it follows lines of thought which directly continue from the previous sections.
The Far Glade (7000 years ago) 1
She had just seen a glacier-streaked mountain to the northeast. She dropped down a steep slope through the trees, and clambered her way onto a rocky outcrop. Ahead of her, and a little to the east, was the entrance to the valley, two or three miles away, beyond a river hidden in the forest. Everything was dreamy in the afternoon sunlight, and she felt light on her feet, and as if the membrane between her and the worlds of dreaming-perception was now very tenuous, a transparent wall that could be blown away by a breeze.
The glade was there - in a sheltered south-facing place a few hundred feet above the valley floor.
She set off to follow a tumbled ridge to her right, which eventually opened into a wide, gentle slope, a place of monumental beech trees and of misty carpets of violet-pink cyclamens.
She felt everything was right - she had a bright feeling of being together with her path.
This feeling was clear in the sunlight, and in the birdsong, and in the charged serenity of the day. She did not feel uncertain or perturbed - she had a necessary fear of the direction in which she was moving, but far from being unnerved, she felt she was being pulled by joy towards the event. She was about to make the attempt to travel toward the planetary outside. A world of bliss and lucidity - and danger - beyond anything she had experienced before.
A pattern in a tree-stump reminded her of the concerned, somewhat grave face of the Keeper, this new presence in the Dharram Sar community, and as she was thinking about him, a bird flew away noisily from a tree.
She was suddenly wondering about the fact that two days earlier several of the animals she had seen had appeared a little nervous, and about her decision to go to the Far Glade, and about how Melna was faring in her own attempt to cross the threshold, in the First Glade, which was only a day's walk from Dharram Sar. She had one of her feelings of understanding a whole current of intent and events, a current which was vast and transcendental - and so beyond her that she could not hold onto what she had understood. On this occasion the feeling came with a shiver, and although she remembered nothing, and it was vital to avoid worrying, the shiver left a taste in her mouth. She had been told that recurrent flashes of fugitive understanding showed it was time to make the attempt - so what she had just experienced was propitious. But the shiver created a dissonance within her feeling that everything was as it should be.
She noted the source of the experience - the image of the Keeper - but then she returned to attunement, to her awareness of the day. The trees, the karst slope of the hill, with its deep dells, eighty feet across, and its limestone boulders, the sounds of birds and insects. And at each point the easiest path to the wide place of the river was clear, a delineation she flowed across with the attentive touches of her feet. She found her way across the river, jumping deftly between rocks, and then she climbed up through the gorge at the start of the valley, using paths made entirely by deer and boar, meaning she often had to walk stooped down to get through the undergrowth.
Beyond the first two miles the valley opened out a little. She found a place by the stream to spend the night, bathed in a pool, and ate her food, a meal she supplemented with wild raspberries. All of the flavours seemed particularly striking and delicate.
And now, looking at the trees on the opposite, western slope - which she knew would soon be lit up with moonlight - she thought about her decision to attempt the crossing at the Far Glade.
There had been the dream about it, around four months ago. In the dream the glade had been a white glare of sunshine, and she had known that "suffused" was a name for the momentous bliss she was about to experience.And then she was above the glade, and seeing down a long valley to a southward horizon, and just before she woke up a voice was saying "a river of - - - leads to eternity." And as she was hearing the unspoken word in the phrase she both heard the word "tears" and felt that this was not really true, that it was an imposition into the gap.
She had told Galdra - who was her main teacher - about the dream, and Galdra had said that it was love and courage that lead to eternity, and that eternity is a name for fluidly unchangeable, sublime aspects that can be seen in what she called "the sky of the outside." But Galdra had added that sadness - and longing - would also be necessary for the journey
. She had not felt anything negative, either for her or for Melna, about the other glade. The dream had heightened her awareness of how much she had loved the Far Glade, the last time she visited it, three years before, and although she felt she had brought everything available into her awareness, her choice had involved no complex process of contrast.
Recently they had learned that members of the Veloth community to the north had started hunting and killing lions. This was immensely disturbing - because of the beauty and sacred magic of lions - and now she was wondering if a maddened lion had come to the mountains north of the Dharram Sar valley, which would explain the nervous behavior of some of the animals she had seen in the first part of her three-day walk.
The Keeper had recently taken up the idea that there had been a deep-level change in the human world, and that the greater difficulty now being experienced in reaching the worlds of dreaming-perception was an aspect of something which was also being revealed by the northward community's hunting of lions. His perplexed, grave probing had turned itself in a new direction.
But who was the Keeper? He had started using this name for himself at some time not long after losing a thought-test for the leadership of the community to Naedreth, around twenty years ago. Nothing like this test had ever been seen. In the first third of the questions - on sequence and time - the Keeper had been the clear choice, but in the remaining questions - on space, dreaming and intent - Naedreth had spoken her lucidity at a pitch of fluency that is rarely encountered, and the Keeper had faltered miserably, unable to continue, and obviously out of his depth.
No answers arrived, and she sat for a while in silence, watching the bats flickering across the sky, and listening to the cicadas, and the other twilight sounds. Later, in returning to the problem, there was only the idea that Melna being her friend must have caused her to feel worried about her, given that what Melna was attempting to do had a dangerous aspect.
There was an astonishing perfection to everything. The moon had now risen above the mountain to her left, and the tall, riverside orchids were visible in moonlight a few feet in front of her; and so were the iron-vein patterns on a rock beyond them.
She was thinking again about Galdra, and she kept hearing her laughter in her mind. Looking at the awe-inspiring beauty of the night she felt this laughter was some kind of answer. She couldn’t waste her opportunity feeling fear and concern: perhaps more than anything else she needed her joy, her brightness of spirit.
She had climbed onto the ridge to the west of the valley. It was a cloudless, hot morning – unusually hot for the mountains. The ridge had taken her higher, to an upland of crags, interspersed with silver birch and pine. The sky was a serene vastness - a diaphanous beckoning. In the face of the forests and the violet-tinged blue of the sky she felt a call that she knew she could not refuse.
A breeze kept rippling through the hem of her robe. In her day-focused, anticipatory state the feeling this gave her was very striking. It did not make her think of a man’s concupiscent touch: it was more like the playful swirl on her robe of a female friend, saying of the fabric “isn’t that beautiful.” At the same time it intimated a sexual bliss, but one without any threat of imposition – a bliss that was somehow ethereal and impersonal.
Sometimes the feeling was like tiny creatures pulling her forward – as if mice and voles were tugging at her robe, urging her to reach the glade, and make the crossing. At one point she saw a hare, and looking into its cool appraising eyes, she wondered if the image of the tiny animals was indulgent pathos, but a moment later she felt this was not true, but that she needed to be poised and aware of what was around her.
For a moment she saw down into the next valley to the west, a precipitous world of deep, narrow gorges, a part of what protected the glade. High above the valley two buzzards were rising on thermals, spiraling upward a hundred feet apart. She followed the animal-path for another hundred yards, and then started down the slope to the glade, which was in a wide saddle of land between the upland area of the ridge, and the tall mountain to the north.
The circuitous path took her through very thick undergrowth – down a slope that was around six hundred feet high - and along the top of a low spine of rocks that ran through the forest in an arc and deposited her to the north of the glade, about two hundred feet above it, and a quarter of a mile away.
The portentous quality of the sky was drawing her toward it. Without having any difficulty walking she was now in two worlds at once. She was in the forest, and she was surrounded by citadels of splendor that seemed to be as immense as the milky way, and were a lucid sentience; they were worlds of feeling, and of secret auroral configurations. She knew she was seeing the depth-expanses of light, and that this was a doorway to the oneiric world of the planet. For a moment she saw from - or as - the planet, and perceived the human world as a tiny web-work within it, and she saw the dark threads of something within and alongside the human world, and knew why Sharasta and Verrin had disappeared, and why Naedreth believed they had been permanently trapped. And she knew in that moment that she must not be caught by sadness, because it could destroy her - and she returned to the bliss of seeing the world of light.
She arrived in the glade, feeling she was stepping into its sunlit openness as an insubstantial world of delight, rather than as the solid body she had believed herself to be. But she knew she must not throw herself blindly into the insubstantial – she must go toward the lucidity of the planet, and she must go with the entirety of herself.
The glade was a south-tilted oval of grass about two hundred feet long, and a hundred and fifty feet wide. It was surrounded by tall beech trees, and from one angle it was possible to see a small rock outcrop three hundred yards to the southeast. But from where she was standing – at the centre of the northward end – her view of the sky beyond the trees was unobstructed.
To her right she could see a jay on a low branch of a tree. As she looked the bird flew a few feet into the air, and then stayed hovering for a moment, looking at her, before flying away, with a bobbing flight, to the glade’s opposite end. At the last moment it soared higher, and disappeared between two trees.
She was sure in this moment that the glade had always been a place of crossing for birds and animals, as well as for humans, and that she was on exactly the same level as them – she was a being with only a limited amount of time to cross as many of the thresholds of existence as possible.
For a moment she felt the sadness of death, but then taking its energy with her – through the thought that those who had gone down in the fight would want her to travel forward – she returned to the thought of the bird. And suddenly she remembered being a fifteen year old girl running down a mountain pretending to be a bird, and laughing. In her mind she leapt as she ran, and became airborne – and she stopped herself. She could lose everything by being swept into a dream. Instead, with this mood of laughter and joy she returned to concentrating on the sky and the trees.
And then she became utterly filled – suffused – with the day through all her senses. She was an ethereal body-shaped space into which the day was pouring, with its sunlight, its currents of air, its trees and bird-calls, its scents of grasses and forest flowers. She became an unimaginable sexual ecstasy – a woman’s bliss at being lovingly and forcefully taken for the first time by her lover, but even more rapturously intense. This perhaps lasted a very long time – in some other dimension of temporality – but then she was aware of herself a second later as both a bright emptiness filled with a sunlit breeze and particles of pollen, and as a female body, with her breasts and clitoris blissfully aroused.
But instead of yielding to the submissive thought of being sexually taken, once more she let herself go toward the day.
She was floating two hundred feet above a sunlit upland, a rolling, high terrain of gentle rocky ridges, and of land-glyphs made of crags and buildings – and other constructions- which seamlessly blended into fluidly intricate patterns made by shrubs and occasional trees. The atmosphere of the terrain was compellingly beautiful: it radiated calm, otherworldly warmth and lucidity. She knew she could continue on her journey by willing herself to float upwards and by focusing on the sky, but she didn’t even consider the possibility. As she very gently descended in a long lateral flight – her movement was sideways, to the right, and she was floating upright but tilted a little toward the ground – she found she was above a ridge covered in white-stone houses and courtyards that seemed to be a mile long.
For a moment she was surrounded by a gently spinning dodecahedron whose surfaces were transparent and whose angles were made of thin metal-like filaments of energy. It seemed that someone had just been telling her things about crystal formations, and she was at a parapet of house set into a mountain, and was about to go back into the room – and then she snapped out of it. She turned herself to face her direction of movement, and saw a courtyard sliding a foot below her. She willed herself to be floating extremely slowly, and then there was a kind of visceral electrical click, and she was back facing in the original direction, standing on the tiles of the courtyard.
The buildings were only one storey high, and many of them seemed to be art-works, or structures for climbing plants rather than houses. To her right were three lemon trees, and there were large areas of flowering bougainvillea and jasmine. Here and there on the walls there were delicate, intricate mosaics – mesmeric abstract patterns or animals. In front of her there was a ‘room’ leading to a view, it seemed. It was entirely open at its two ends, and in between there was a sparse, delightful mosaic – in tiny violet tiles – that extended across the floor, two walls and the ceiling.
She had taken a few steps forward, but she now returned to the very centre of the courtyard. She scanned her surroundings carefully. There seemed to be no threat. Having turned in a complete circle, she checked all of her objects. Her robe, her spiral wrist-band, her bow, her quiver of carefully feathered arrows, her bag with everything in it, her dagger in its sheath. Everything was there, and seemed to be unchanged.
A shadow of a tree reminded her of the Keeper. And she felt a second jolt, as if she had become a little more solid – a little more attached to the ground.
She scrutinized all of the mosaics – and in particular one which showed a lynx – and she was astounded by them. The mosaics and the entire place had an unmistakable atmosphere of lucidity and of bright, unfettered love. She felt somehow that her outward journey had been interrupted, but that it was necessary and valuable to be in this place. This was surely one of the adiaran worlds – a world beyond and alongside her own. And she was sure that in itself the place and its surroundings posed her no threat.
Adjusting the straps of her bag she walked forward into the mosaic room toward the view of the valley.
The horizon was a hill two miles away, across a shallow valley. Everything was bathed in sunlight – and the sweeping, fluid spaces of bushes, rocks and trees were a bright enigma, an inchoate, achingly beautiful arrival whose lucidity was beyond her. She had seen this from above – and had seen a lot more – but now she had attuned herself to this world, and the land and the sky were affecting her as a feeling that instigated shimmerings of dream-like images.
She put her hands on the parapet, which was made of a white stone that glittered with particles of quartz. As she did this knew she had a series of flashes about her life until then. She saw how the current of the outside had kept drawing her away from the relationships in which she had embroiled herself, and how it had been her own fear and addiction to attention that had been involved in the embroilment, just as much as it had been the desire-to-control and resentment of her lovers. And she saw the way in which Galdra and Naedreth – and many others, including her lovers – had kept showing her the outside.
This was a Reach – an adiaran world – and as she looked toward the horizon she felt an extreme longing for something that this world looked toward. She felt this longing, and she began to focus on the sky. But then a moment later she experienced a shudder of fear. She sensed that if it was not the time for a leap - that it would be dangerous to call attention to herself by opening herself up to that extent. Looking nervously behind her, she remembered that she had been attacked a moment after she had arrived in this world.
She knew she would have to become matter-of-fact in her behavior, and move briskly from one object of attention to the next. She went back to look at what she had originally seen as another mosaic – in fact it was made of clouds of inlaid violet tiles, set into white marble, and with wire-thin filaments of inlaid metal running in complex lines between and through the clusters of tiles. She took in all four of the surfaces of this diagram, and then immediately went back to the balcony and up a flight of stairs to the roof of the building.
She went across a stone walkway, and looked into a series of rooms that opened onto a roof-top courtyard. Each room had a bed in it, and other pieces of furniture, but they were dusty, and felt as if they not been used for some time. Across a second walkway there was another building, which culminated in a short tower or belvedere. Three rooms she saw on the way were apparently in use: they were clean, and had small, striking sculptures in them. Standing outside one of them she called out, loudly, with a bright, friendly tone to her voice, but there was only a faintly echoing silence in response, a silence in which she became aware she was hearing a nightingale.
As she went up the stairs to the belvedere she reflected how little she knew about her situation. She had spoken to only two people who had been with their whole selves to a Reach, and the places they had been were not like this.
At the top of the tower she looked out toward the low line of hills to the east. And through a slight haze she could just see the flat tops of taller hills, or mountains, many miles further away. Directly to the east was a steep-sided valley, with trees growing on the valley floor. A little to the south of this she could see a thin plume of smoke, apparently coming from somewhere out of sight, beyond the top of the escarpment.
She paused, and listened to the birdsong. The bird was close, singing in an evergreen oak in a courtyard below her, and it was releasing a bubbling, exuberant series of melodic calls, the highest of which were shimmering with energy. On a wall below her she could see a thrush breaking a snail on a stone.
She sat down for a moment, facing west again, and recalling the inlay-mosaic – a diagram that she had not been able to understand, but which she was sure now was an expression of an intent to travel into the outside.
something
There and then gone, and then –
Six people, women and men, in a room on a hill, the room open to the south. She was one of them - and she was all of them, unimaginable comradeship-bliss of being on the edge of the long awaited escape -
She was back again, it had been a flash, and she knew nothing about it – and yet it had made her feel that that had been her real life. Feeling she needed to keep moving forward, she walked down the stairs, found her way out of the buildings, and set off in the direction of the plume of smoke.
She was half-way up the slope, and very aware of the ease with which she was moving. It was not that she felt she was dreaming – it was that her breathing and movements were preternaturally fluent. The lightness of foot she was experiencing was a lightness of her energy in relation to the planet, rather than the result of her ordinary body being elsewhere.
She felt a kind of calm urgency, because it seemed that her two bodies were becoming so focused that soon she would simply take off, and cross a dimensional barrier. As she left the line of ridge-top houses she had put on her green flax-thread cap, to prevent the solar energy from affecting her ability to choose the moment.
She was now orientating herself with the thought of the dream-outsight on the belvedere. Her initial idea in preventing her onward movement had been that she wanted to explore this world, together with a fugitive feeling of something that needed to be resolved. But now she wondered if she needed to be here in order to meet up with others. Perhaps she and Melna were about to meet. But although in the momentary vision she had very intensely known all of the others, she afterwards had felt that she did not recognize any of them, which meant that if she knew them she had only encountered them in forgotten experiences during sleep. And it meant that Melna was not one of them.
Near the top of the hill she stopped to look back. The river from the valley was a green curve of bright water surrounded by trees on both banks. It swept to the north before passing the far extremity of the low, mile-long ridge, capped across its length with white buildings and trees. The river was a place of birds. She had seen a white ibis, and herons, and birds of many other kinds, some of which were new to her.
But the most striking enigma of the view was the town - on its long, thin ridge, like a barge floating on the land. It was silent, and no motion was visible. The trees contrasted with the white walls, giving an impression that everything somehow was complete – and the whole town felt like a natural counterpart of the ridge on which it was built. The feeling of graceful intelligence was only heightened by the tall aqueduct that swept round in an arc from the hill to her right, beyond the narrow valley, and went across the river, arriving after this high bridge at the northern tip of the line of buildings. The town made her think of a sleepwalker whose eyes were open, but who was unaware of their surroundings.
She heard a woman’s voice calling out to her, and spun round, finding herself looking at a very old, but vibrant-looking woman wearing a green robe, and coming towards her with nimble movements. She stopped a few feet in front of her, smiling very warmly. Her eyes, although set it in a wrinkled face, had the sparkling, light-hearted quality of the eyes of a teenage girl.
“I heard the birds” she said. “And I was sure someone new had arrived, by the tone of their calls”.
“I’m Dara” the woman continued, “and I can see that we don’t have much time – you are passing through. Your energy is very lucid, although you are a little shadowed by something.”
“My name is Kalessa” she said. She wanted to know about the woman’s last statement, but held herself back.
“Do you – live here?”
“I did live here once, and I have never entirely stopped living here.” As the woman said this she gestured that they should start walking, and they set off toward the top of the hill.
The woman set a fast pace.
“You should meet Gion as well, before you go. It’s about two miles.”
She wanted to know more, but the woman started to ask her about how she had come to be there, and the intelligence and warmth of the questions caused her to put aside her concern about what she was doing. She concentrated on placing her feet on the rocks of the summit – they were not on a path – and on giving as precise an account as possible.
The woman had not heard of Dharram Sar. At one point she named the place she had come from – a community which was known about in the mountain-valley town, but which was around a thousand miles away.
There was a moment of silence as they stepped across some rocks. Listening to the surrounding quietness brought her back to one of her questions.
“Why are there so few people here?”
“There were more, once. There was a time when the escape-lineages were stronger. And maybe they will soon be stronger again, although that does not look to be the way the tide is moving. But everything is ready here for more communities to escape. And one day you may live here yourself for a while.”
They had gone up a gentle slope, at the top of which Dara had pointed out her house, a small, lovely-looking building, tucked snugly into a dell, not far from where they had met. A wisp of smoke was just visible, coming from the chimney.
"The smoke is from my kiln" Dara had said.
They had then dropped down into a wide, but deep gully with large expanses of bare, smooth rock. The way in which the light reflected off this rock gave her a feeling of dreamy exuberance, and she felt obscurely that it was only Dara's probing questions that were keeping her attached to the ground.
Suddenly she remembered being by the lake in the Dharram valley, and seeing the Keeper. And there had been a flash where what she saw was a man desperately trapped, but where the most horrific part of the situation was that the man was no longer aware of the trap, and was taking its walls to be the nature of reality. A moment later the Keeper had seen her, and she felt that the obvious sexual desire in his greeting had helped to distract her, so she had never fully grasped what she had seen. She knew that the libido of sexuality and power was inseparable from what had happened, and yet now she could see clearly that the Keeper's entrapment consisted of his depth perception - the attention of his spirit - having been locked to engagement with a miniscule aspect of the world. He had called himself the Keeper because he had attempted to understand the origins and structures of the community's sorcery knowledge, on the basis that new, turbulent events in the surrounding world required a more thorough understanding, and a keeping of records. But in laying everything out on his line of time he had stopped fully practising the disciplines of escape to the outside, and had been trapped by the line, no longer able to see that time is thought, or dreaming.
They came round an angle of the gully, and she found she was seeing a small man - perhaps he would be four feet high - inside a sphere made of two thin wooden circles, and the man was propelling this sphere around a large, relatively flat expanse of rock, perhaps eighty feet across at its widest. There was a narrow crevice of a dry watercourse, and the man, with great skill, was sending his sphere apparatus across this obstacle.
"This is Gion" said Dara. "And you musn't go yet. You have understood what needed to be understood, and yes, now it is time, but hold on to the thread of my voice, and of Gion's movements, there are some things I want to say, to attune you for the immensity in which you are about to travel, and to help you when you come back."
Everything was becoming light-and-energy, or rather she was seeing it as the light-and-energy it had been all along. Gion in his sphere had become a rolling ball of white-violet light, a warm and intensely strong presence, rolling itself across a terrain of light, which was shimmering with tiny transparent fibres, or filaments. If she focused on these filaments she saw they were pulsing with violet, green and pink lights, in the form of dots of energy that were travelling through them.
The others. Five of them around her on the hill, three women and two men. The indescribable bliss and lucidity of being them as well as her, and the even greater bliss of knowing they were about to do it - they were about to cross the threshold. What was happening was like an attuning of perception to an incoming message, in the form of final instructions for the escape.
"Yes" said Dara. "Remember that in the strongest sense you do not need to come back, not now, and not at any particular time."
Gion was now in front of her, in a different form, a huge bull-like man, with the smile of a woman. He glowed at her, his eyes shining with immense warmth. For a moment there was a twinkling, very male quality about his smile, but then this smile acquired the quality of a warning.
"Remember also" he said, "that when you have utterly let go, and you have gone through to the other side - it is then that you must focus yourself with your ordinary-world attention, looking for a moment at one thing, and then for a moment at another. Be aware of the intent of what is around you - but look at discrete, contained objects, in order to be contained yourself."
She was with the others. It was about to happen. She could see with her whole body, she saw Dara come round in front of her, a young, sparklingly attractive woman, and Gion went round and stood on her right, so she was seeing him with the right side of her body.
"If you come back" said Dara, "a task is that you should detach the Keeper from your community, by waking him, or by removing him - by any means that do not involve hatred or violence. He has ceased in his attempt to escape, and his knowledge is an obstacle to both freedom and lucidity. This task will help your community - and will help you to return to the outside."
The outside. She was with the others - she was the others, they were all each other. The outside. YES. The spirit-energy ocean - and the three directions, the places in the feeling-intent immensity of the cosmos. Last moments, bliss beyond all belief. They had done it!!! -
A scuttering of images, in one of them she is seeing a thousand miles of terrain from above, an area to the east. In another she is outside a house in a community to which she has never travelled, and she is about to fight for her life, against someone in a state of rage who wants to kill her - it feels like an anticipation, and there is someone telling her she has to be capable of this fight. And there is the memory that she and the others have been somewhere in another part of the galaxy with beings from three other worlds - she knows the direction of these worlds, one above, one to the east, and one beneath her in the stars on the opposite side of the planet - and that they have shared states of being in a communal heightening, a deep, intensificatory communication.
She hears - or is singing - a song, to a tune she knows already, though the words are different. It expresses everything she feels.
I wish I could be the ocean
all the time
She opens her eyes. She is in the Far Glade, lying on her back.
When she closes her eyes again, she has an image of six men in the First Glade, surrounding Melna. They are horror, they are there to kill Melna, and to attempt to take her power.
She is jolted upright, seeing it happen. Her legs buckle under her, and for a moment she crouches on the ground, a wave of sadness hitting her. She is sure that Melna is dead. She is sobbing.
She gets an image of herself as an injured animal, and she stands up again, and looks carefully around her, reaching into the forest with her ears, and with her whole body. She feels no danger. Something has gone wrong with some of the people in the Veloth Valley community, where they have started hunting cats - the power direction of knowledge has been taken, not the direction of love. But this awareness about the other community is from a separate source - her perception tells her she is safe.
She is very thirsty, and her vision is a little blurred.
She realises she can remember nothing about what had happened in the cosmos-ocean, and nothing about the others with whom she had travelled, apart from the fact that she had known them better than she knew her friends. It now all seems disconcertingly as if it had only been a dream - everyday reality was asserting itself, seamlessly covering the gap in existence. In front of her a thrush was hunting for worms, and two orange-brown butterflies were twirling around each other in a mating dance. Reality now seemed as if it was this - and was the Keeper, and was whatever was wrong in the Veloth Valley.
The thought of Melna came to her again, and more tears started pressing into her eyes. But maybe it had not happened. She felt in her heart that it had, but the tides of conflicting feelings and thoughts were becoming too strong, and she knew she had to walk.
She checked her clothes and belongings, none of which showed any evidence of having been beyond the glade.
All she could remember was the images before she woke, and the song - and her experiences in the adiaran world. The feeling came to her that now she belonged to the group with whom it seemed she had just travelled. And it struck her that even if these people did not exist she no longer really belonged to Dharram Sar. She was choosing to believe they existed - these people who she could not remember.
She would find berries on the way. She thought carefully about the terrain, and adjusted the straps of her pack. Then she set off toward the river.
* * *
Copyright Justin Barton 2015
