The Seventh Direction

PART THREE: Stalking Violet. Episode 94

                    ["D/A" narrates —A.A.]

"Acceptance with awareness. That's an interesting fourth gift you picked. Lots to work with there, Aces. Same as me and mine. I need to be grateful for anything that comes my way, good or bad, and realize it comes for good reason."

"I love the thicket, Alaya. It's much bigger than I imagined. And that little psychedelic toadstool is so cute. That wouldn't be Todes by any chance, would it?"

"What?" I said. She raised a brow. I remember Toadz disappearing, vanishing the last time I was there . . . after he'd finished leading the band, or the parade, or whatever. "How big was the toadstool, and what did it look like?" Aces set her thumb and index finger about three inches apart, told me what he looked like. "That's him, all right, but way too small." Baby Toadz? Hmm. Maybe he was a she and never knew it? He certainly didn't look to be pregnant.

"Then Grandmother became Lady El again," Aces said. "That was awesome to see! Then she magicked a screen, up in the air, and showed me the lower-Astral plane. It was like watching a movie. A scary one. She said it was just about the lowest, nastiest form of astral she could conger up. Hell, right? But not exactly burning—not exactly flaming—but orange puke-yellow, and lots of it. Boy, it sure looked gross and hot in there, and the way those bodies were squirming and writhing around in that gawd awful soup, and then getting sucked under, and then bobbing up again, different and grosser every time. You should have seen those bodies, Dorothy—sorry, Alaya—heads too large, bodies too small, some of the bodies stuck together like Siamese or tripamese or quadramese twins! It was awful. I almost barfed. But then the screen changed, and I was grateful." She winked at me. "And then on the screen comes a bright round disk, so bright I could only look at it for a second, then I had to turn away. Then when I turned back for another peek, it too was turning away. Then it stopped, and just stood there, profile-like, sideways, so the light didn't blind my eyes. Yeah. I saw what I saw, Alaya, but I don't know if I can describe it. I understood what I saw, too, but telling it is something else."

"You can do it," I said, moving my eyes up from her eyes and focusing on her third-eye.

"Okay. I'll give it a whirl. So, what I saw was oodles of those hot threads of orange-puke yellow-light snaking up from Earth; and right away I got dizzy because . . . well, because it all seemed of such vaster dimension when The Planet got added to the mix. But Lady El took my hand and the dizziness went away. Then what I saw were those hot, orange-puke yellow threads hitting the disk—Cosmic Mirror, she called it. Hitting the disk and bouncing back. Of course, man, there was massive shattering when they hit—not the Mirror but the puke-threads . . . like fiery puke-icicles shattering. And then, then the fragments went beaming back down to Earth, which made me think of Star Trek. Meanwhile, there were these other threads, of bright white light, not snaking up but like arrows that went right through the Mirror, and you could see the arrows moving still, on the otherside . . . up, up, moving up, till they were out of sight. At which point—actually, it was all happening at the same time. Yeah. And that's why it's so hard to describe. And I think the Cosmic Mirror is a two-way Cosmic Mirror, and it really blows my mind! For at the very same time, Alaya, down around those arrows, which are shooting up, funnels this white, particular light; and it too is headed back to Earth! Can't you just imagine what the face of that two-way Cosmic Mirror would look like if you COULD see it face on? I couldn't. Lucky it was sideways. It was SO bright! Do you get my picture?"

"I do, no problem. What else did you see?"

"That was it. The screen disappeared, and then Master Jay appeared."