Priya Echo's Adventure - Book One Awakening

Episode 14

CHAPTER 40 - TIMECURRENT SAVES THE COLONISTS

After the first one hit, Timecurrent ran from the epicenter of the city, her chest pumping like something hammered by a blacksmith. Behind her the conflagration grew, its crown red with billowing ruffles. Yet another followed, its crimson overlapping with the first. The horrible vagueness of it swallowing a building. Ahead of her, in the newly assembled city, the colonists were reeling. Baby blue hair outrun the worst of it as she made her way to the council chamber. There, in the space age interior, families huddled together for sympathy. “I didn’t hear anything about the asteroids” a colonist spat, scolding those who had overstepped their bounds. It was the captain of the neo-frigate, cooling off after a lost poker game. Incensed, the other man got in his face and rolled up his sleeves. Time put him in slow motion before a fight ensued. “Are you just standing there? I need to get these people to safety. The port is four blocks away. We can make it if we leave now” the patron urged in a gasp of exigency. “Is it that bad, mam?” the captain asked. Time nodded her head to oust his disbelief. “The whole place is coming down. Get your gear and let’s go”. Forming into a train behind their leader, the patron led them out the door. Above their heads, the sky was overwhelmed with streaks of fire, ripping the thin fabric of the stratosphere. A cluster of bombs mangled the city around them. Leaving fresh chaos in their wake. The sight of a dancing fireball engrossed her senses. Filling her every thought with adrenaline. “Step it up” Time hollered, across the inharmonious blistering din. Favorably, they made it past two and a quarter blocks. At once the patron looked up to the sky to see the full scope of nature’s ultimatum. “Hey … those aren’t asteroids!” she belted. Time stopped short in astonishment. They were freaking T-Rex Heads blazing through the atmosphere in halos of flame. Toothy grins pointed to the ground. Razor sharp. “Did they gobble up a galaxy?” Time wondered. At that moment, her heart felt like a guy who had just been punched in the face by another guy on a roller coaster who had just been headbutt by another guy on a better rollercoaster. And it f*****g hurt. The T-Rex head landed in front of them, burgeoning with a marvel of a flame. The people behind her threw their hands on each other’s shoulders. They tucked down as a ripple made its way across the pavement. Time could not look away from the ball of heat, and saw it twist in weird circular motions. RAAA!!! The T-Rex thundered. A head with a body of pure, elemental flame. The dinosaur was complete. It stomped mercilessly towards them. Time could hardly believe her luck. Flecks of inferno spun and escaped from the backside of the beast. It lowered its head and approached them with ease. A primitive with untamed excitement across its face. Time took a step back as a bit of fire spilled from its mouth like drool. She lifted her hands and manifested a time lapse of prodigious strength. Invisible to the others, pristine wrinkles made their way through another dimension. Undulating as her fingers did. Caught unawares, the beast was sent backwards in time, walking back to the swell of its arrival, and reabsorbed the halo. It rocketed up through the canopy of the sky, across leagues of black abyss. Towards another world. Time led the flustered colonists across the remainder of the city. Happily, the port was still intact. With the help of the captain, they all boarded the neo-frigate and glided it out of there. Time relaxed her weary back against a plush seat cushion. A viewing window was to their left. Little zigzags of light across a canvas of black painted their escape. The refugees made it to their seats in one piece, unpacking what little belongings they had. The chair was unnaturally warm for a space-seat. Heating pads melted away the pain. Time fell unconscious and had the best Zzzz of her life.

CHAPTER 41 - CLIVE NUT-PASTE

“What are you doing out here, grandpa?” Clive exclaimed as he discovered the old man rocking on his chair out on the porch. With slender fingers he turned the pages of a photo album. The grandson tipped his head to see the images, each a rosy old photo of people in quaint, old-fashioned clothing on a summer’s day outing. “Sit, Sit. C’mon and look at these pictures. Do you notice anything funny?” Beryu Nemzi Nut-paste asked his grandson with raised eyebrows. Handing him the album, he poked his nose into the page until the goings-on of that transient picnic day became clear. “Why are you all holding wooden hammers?” wondered the boy, then returned the raised eyebrow back at his grandad. “Look over here, and over here. See those balls in the grass, and those little metal half-rings stuck in the ground? It’s a game where you have to hit the balls through the rings … and you win, you see … but people must have forgotten all about it already” the old man joyfully lamented. A sweet memory popped into his head as he gazed down at the picture. That of picnics, and sandwiches made in haste, and a bowl of strawberries that someone would always spill over while they were talking, and not notice until later. “Do you remember that day, grandpa?” Clive asked, instinctively saying anything to break him from his reverie, without the prudence to know he had done just the opposite. “How could I ever forget … There I was. Standing there in that cream blazer. It was just my turn. The ladies were milling about. But I only had eyes for one … hehehe. Waving her arms in front of the ring before I took my shot. I hadn’t done very good up until then. But when I saw my Zanzibar, that blue dress dancing in the wind, what could I have done but make the perfect shot” the elder reminisced as he gripped his knee, squeezing it. “So, you won the game, didn’t you?” Clive asked, already knowing the answer from the anecdotalist would be, and patted him on the shoulder. “Made the perfect shot. Hit it right through the ring I did. They all saw that I won, and I can tell you it wasn’t even close that time. And that’s how your dad was born” he vainly recalled. “How was he born again?” Clive asked very confusedly as he returned the album sliding it into his slender fingers. Beryu leant over once again, looked at his grandson, straight in the eyes, and said, “Croquet, my dear boy. Croquet”.

CHAPTER 42 - THE HONEYSUCKLE

The fussy rains gradually abated and the metropolis was fast asleep. At twelve o’clock midnight the bell tower struck, deafening a patter across the tops of the city buildings. It was the rascal, who made her way along a circuitous route. In all black, she mimicked the night. Narrow channels marked the passage between platforms. They too would be navigated by a body that glided almost perfectly upon them. A glace below confirmed the last nonchalant tourists in their departure from the central park. They didn’t notice the woman, whose wardrobe that day was more risqué than usual. With her right hand she revised an artless scarf that covered her more discernible features. Like stairs she furtively climbed the high rises. Above the thick glassy Atmo, the sparks glowed white in homage to their ancestor. Their presence like uncommon eggshells, caring and fond of all that slept below. Predictable taps from the leftover raindrops fell in disconnected circles around her. They could no longer hold the secrets of the sky. Unoriginal caws came from wet birds huddled on the lonesome brick. A squat ancillary wall. They nuzzled one another with geriatric beaks for comfort. But that was no hindrance to her travels. The rascal made it to the top. A thought of eyes peering out into the dark made her heart skip. But the chill wind gave no answer. It was half past twelve and the guards would be halfway to dreamland. Tiny threads hung out the sides of her fingerless gloves, tailored hastily. She reached for and uncoiled the rope. Between her legs stood a rectangle easy enough to peer through. Etheria’s mausoleum. Its admirable bowels stocked with the personal trinkets of the patron herself. A slender rope danced a little jig as it dropped to the floor. The rascal relinquished her grip of it and hovered there, gazing passively at the glass case. It was like the chamber of a fertile rose. Those that are enshrouded by winter and made like crystals. Yet this was not that. Legendary rays sprouted from their source. The darkness became a conduit for their essence, a roman aqueduct. An exemplar between her fingertips. “And what do you think you’re doing?” Etheria politely quipped as she ripped the scarf from its bearer. A rascally smile swept across Snow’s face, “I just think it’s pretty”. Etheria c****d her head ever so slightly, “You want to steal my soul-point power because you think they’re pretty?”. Snow nodded in agreement. In relation to her sister’s eyesight, her butt was slightly higher than her head. The rascal waved her arms like a human powered flying contraption. “I want them. They look like stars”. The big sister crossed her arms, “Oh yeah, like you’re going to make marshmallow smores and be back in five minutes. You’re not even wearing your nightgown”. The girl timidly mouthed something in reply. At that moment Etheria was finished. Her long black hair grew to prodigious lengths and she grabbed the intruder, throwing her out the window and several miles across the city. Below her chest, the soul-point hummed with ambient energy. The richness of exploration leapt from its surface, filling the room. Etheria stood there, her chest pumping. Her eyes following the path of undeviating light. A sailor surveying the room and its regions.

In the early afternoon of the following day, Etheria and her son Honeycomb Man rode on a mat of burning roses through the sky. The air was kind that day and the clouds were supple. Etheria pointed below and they picked up Snow for the excursion. Etheria sighed as her sister laughed playfully. The wind granting her hair sentience, its ivory heft subdividing into filaments. Looking at her sister, she sparkled with the power of the dissolving snowflake. Honeycomb Man scooped a cloud ball and threw it at her for sport. At the end of their journey the mat descended onto a fertile grassland. A depression emerged among the grass as they alighted. The three of them were kindled in rousing emotion for what awaited. It was the very spot where the void eye moon seed planted itself. “This will make her more accountable,” Etheria thought, considering the progress her sister had made. Those refugees she sheltered in her inner realm. The battles with the eclipse beings. Dissolving Dazin’s army. It had all made her stronger. The man went on ahead, forging a path through ankle-deep verdancy. Ferns drifted from mountains over the hills in captivity to the air. The fun-loving sun had warmed the earth, and made the countryside all aflush with herbal fragrances. Inflorescence sheltered a hill from the simmering heat. Hope seemed to guide the wind as lines made cursive through the grass. They stretched into the distance, to the bounds of land. A flock of doves tore apart and messily ate a rindless honeydew. The light made their feathers vaguely green. Among the wild horses, a stallion got to its knees to bathe in a pile of lunar dust, throwing its head to and fro. Its neck was ideally muscular. Honeycomb Man admired this sight. His back was ahead and clear to his mother. It was implausibly orange. The sister relished a joke from her whispering nephew. Etheria sighed as her chest became flighty. It must have been the sultry waves. They made her sweat. Beads that would share the glamor of the afternoon. Still the multiplicity of grass fanned out. Its purpose unaccounted for. Its reaches unclear. A wealth of many quivering things. In her heart, nothing could postpone a beat. “Let’s stop right here. Take a look. It’s the Jellyfish Flower” Honeycomb Man exclaimed, throwing his arms out as bars against their progress. Etheria stood with coherent understanding. It was his job as the protector to keep them at bay. Higher than them, the translucent petals drooped. Organs jostled inside, and its blossom was like an apparition. Quickly Snow fell on her butt. Her son smiled, knowing they had all failed to witness the jellyfish bees. Like the flower, they were see-through. Jaws chittered as they saw the uninvited guests. Some had bioluminescence like the relatives of the deep. “Don’t go near either of them,” Honeycomb Man warned. “And why are we here exactly? I thought you said you were going to give me your power” Snow whined. Matryoshka inner realms vibrated with annoyance. The elder paced around the stubborn mademoiselle, “You might think that our empire is strong, but its power is only as good as its people. Rather, it is more like this delicate flower. It gives the bees sustenance. For what it lacks, it relies on defenders. It needs them”. “And what do you mean?” Snow insisted. Her face was now cool to the touch. The elder stared down and waited calmly, “Right now, Snow. I need you to swear to uphold your part of that exchange. Use your abilities to protect the realm. It will be the fight of a lifetime. You will have to face enemies. Grapple against darkness. It will be restless and unkind”. For what her sister lacked in authority, she made up for in energy. Scrunched up in that tight little package. Layers of rippling atmosphere. The soft veneer covering fathomless halls of power. A vital frame blinking with light. And above all, Echo’s eyes. A hint of velvet. More piercing than the iris that they trod upon. “I will protect it,” Snow answered. Hearing it, the elder reunited with motion. She looked to Honeycomb Man and gave a knowing nod. The latter did his thing, causing the jellyfish bee to buzz down and sting the fertile earth. For miles the hilly grassland gave way to honeysuckle. Snow got to her knees and whirled around for the thrill of it all. Picking them up with a wicker basket made of ice. It would last until sunset. Etheria stood there in plain shadow, her arms by her side. A memory unfolding. Smoke and flame. The untamed void eye and its vines. Cities demolished by the crackle of velvet lightning. Those ropes tearing through structures. It was better to be subjugated than wild. It braced her for a second, then faded away.

CHAPTER 43 - SORTJIM AND CARAMEL

Echo walked into the empty room, where two patients awaited, lying asleep on their adjacent platforms. The walls of the chamber were specially designed to subdue phenomenological energy, and it warped her appearance into something that looked … pedestrian. Echo strode over to them, donned in a gray lab-cat and laid her bare cheek against the forehead of the man on the right. As he awoke, she could sense the dream within him fade, its substance dissolve. He opened his eyes and leaned forward, “doctor, that was a good rest, but I am still feeling a little weak”. “Don’t underestimate yourself, you’re making a lot of progress” she assured him, and playfully hit his cheek with her knuckles. The patient retrieved his clothing from underneath the platform and retreated to the outer chamber, where a hot meal was waiting for him. The empress sat down onto the platform and stared into an absent portion of the room beyond the resting woman. Before long, the two aspects of her personality that had stayed hidden for quite some time, blinked into reality. “Certain ideas are starting to appear reasonable, aren’t they? '' Visioness suggested as she made her way towards the patient, and placed her hand onto the woman’s forehead. “It’s not reasonable to act on instinct alone, as you most certainly discovered” she returned. “How can you be so shortsighted after everything that has happened? Half of the Fiefdom is already obsolete. Think on your daughter Phantomess, the patron of the trail. But where is the trail? It may as well be a figment of history’s imagination. When this new process is complete, and all that remains are the islands of the realms, what will you become? Nothing more than something insubstantial, looking out into a white canvas that is the annulment of being, and reminiscing about a horizon that doesn’t exist” Visioness counseled with her merciless, provoking rhetoric. At this Echo fazed back in her memory to a conversation she had with her mother Melina a mere four days ago. “That would be quite unnecessary” her mother replied, in response to her suggestion. “But mother, if I were to enter you, and be reborn into the flesh, I would become more than I am now. And we could have the others follow suit”. Melina stopped short of her work of fixing the aetheric mechanisms within a cloud and looked to her daughter “despite everything you have learned, how can you be so undiscerning? You are not going to die, my daughter, if we were to awaken from the dream, or if we were to perish. You and the rest would not flicker away out of existence. This reaction has been allowed by nature. You would become our legacy”. “We are more than an aspect” Pelfe conceded, appearing at the feet of the resting patient, across from the other. “Then why do you suppose that we do not have the power to alter the finality of the switch. That is what we are calling it, aren’t we? Like a light switch. As soon as this patient awakes, it will dissolve like salt into water” Visioness attested. Echo looked back and forth between the two aspects for a moment, and covered her mouth with her hand for a moment to think, “Pelfe, although you are my aspect now, you were once my sister. Visioness was born as an aspect of my grief. Did you split off an aspect yourself, Pelfe? Perhaps an aspect of hope? Such may cure this asymmetry within me”. Visioness jumped backward and twirled around in glee, laughing, “look at this! We have an asymmetrite in our midst!”. “I think you're missing the whole point” Pelfe groaned, disheveling her hair, “this … polarity switch, if that is a proper term for it, must simply be itself a default property”. “Then the reaction has altered the logic of the polarity switch” Visioness proposed, “It would only be the latter if the Scilysts were asleep, but they are a state that is a mixture of both”. “The ultimate trial, perhaps,” Visioness said with a sadistic grin as she brushed the throat of the patient, “would be to kill one of them, and have the dream persist afterwards”. “My darling shadow, you are a genius” Echo announced, inciting an animated response from Pelfe that was somewhat like interpretive dance. “How can you be so base!” she sobbed. “Not that, what you said earlier, Visioness. That it will dissolve like salt into water. The self-awareness surely does dissolve like salt into water in the liquid of the dream, but there is a way to counteract that. Tell me ladies, have either of you ever had a lucid dream?” Echo queried. “I had lucid dreams of Henry,” Visioness answered quickly. “The golden land is rife with lucidity,” Pelfe added. Echo calmed Pelfe, took a deep breath and began her explanation, “Perhaps there is a route, in the absence of phenomenological energy, to do this. In a normal process, the sleeper is oblivious.. In a lucid dream, the dreamer knows the dream, and uses that knowledge to use it as a sort of canvas. This agreement activates the lucid dream state. Now consider this, that there might be a reflection of these two steps. The third step shall then be called omni-dichotomy, and the fourth step shall be called counterfeit oblivion. After the four steps of the dream reflection are completed, the individual may then perform the fifth step of lucid awakening. Then, through natural means we are moving into the expanded territory of the overarching logic, or are circumventing the logic of the polarity switch. As with a great burdensome task, the phenomenological route is perhaps a shortcut, whereas the natural route is the long tread, requiring sweat and toil and hard labor. The logic of dependence and the polarity switch is given new organization, as geometries with new dimensions may find new ways to connect”. “What a cheap tactic! This dream reflection you propose is just a common inversion” Pelfe admonished. “Maybe it is, but I want to know one thing, sister. Why is it that when we fused, my consciousness was the one that became prominent?”. “This was doubtless a result of the power differential between you two” Visioness remarked. “answer me then, Visioness, what do you think was the consequence of your absorption?” Echo asked. “Perhaps ensuring that when the time is right, there may be a substantial, non-dream child born of you and Sam,” she conjectured. “I have experienced an ever-increasing degree of parenthood. First there was Mar and the generation. Then there was the avatar. Then there was she that came from my body. Then there was she that was born when I set eyes on another. Then there was she that was born of me and a mortal” Echo mused. “Exactly!” Visioness proclaimed. After a long silence, Echo looked back at her and asked, in a gentle voice, “What would you say was the result of the fusion of our halos? Your iris halo and my cave halo? The substance would be combined, and that, without doubt helped in the rituals of the transition”. “That is perhaps an interesting view of my current state … aspect-mother. Was it coincidence that I was drawn to the power of the void eye, and took it for myself? It is of the dust bloodline, and you did inherit the dust-throne. Perhaps there is something you still seek to inherit from the originators, if not their flesh” she said, and almost began to raise an eyebrow with vile pleasure. Echo repressed a degree of her eccentricity, and then replied, “Within my cave then, I can call into being lucid echoes. Then that would serve as a way to phenomenologically accelerate the dream reflection”. “The two of you are getting ahead of yourself,” Pelfe interjected, “there are still unanswered questions …”. “The reflection will equate those perspectives” Echo answered. “What are the risks?” whined her sister. But Echo was in the midst of speaking out loud to herself and the other aspects, “This would go much faster with the spectrum mind wave, but I doubt rider’s reflectant would willingly allow us to exploit it, given the current climate”. Visioness gave a loud cough to gain her attention, “I think our sister was asking, quite politely, what the risks might be”. She stared back blankly at the other two, until Pelfe finally broke through, “Then we will need some better test subjects!”. The very pedestrian, gray coated doctor instructed Pelfe to play the harp, and waves of noise coursed into the well of the Iris Halo, its damp interior dripping with sensory activity. Lucid echoes swathed the patient, making her breathing rise and fall. “Did you get enough sleep, Sortjim?” the doctor asked. She rubbed her eyes and adjusted her wristwatch, “never been this refreshed before”. During the afternoon session, the doctor told both of them about a type of rare grass, florensereya, that only grows within broken egg shells. Such would be the best possibility of curing their hypo-nostalgia-ignorance. By the end of the week, in a joint session, and after instructing them numerous times about the steps, she was ready. Scientific curiosity burned intensely in her chest, so much so that she could only feel the slightest hint of natural emotion. Looking down, the two patients had quickly fallen fast asleep, but by random chance their faces had each fallen to a side of the platform, such that they were facing each other. Echo could feel the edge of her mouth curl into an invisible smile, a small unevenness against the hard mask of her face, then crawled into the moist interior of the Iris Halo, finding within a circle of stalagmites a bed of broken eggshells, and the florensereya growing within one of them. When they came to, the doctor provided the ingredient to both of them, then brought them into her office, printing and presenting both Sortjim and Caramel certificates for their bravery during the long therapy and for overcoming the illness.