Gamori

Part 14

 Seldom, but always with fondness, do I think of Sindar Pesh.

I have taken to documenting my oneiric travels. With a shard of amethyst I have crossed the Astral Ocean to other shores. Language, I have discovered, is a surface phenomenon; when sojourning as a projection, the vocalization of an unlearned tongue is effortless. Actions involving literacy, however, remain mysteriously elusive during these forays.

In a place called Araby, which is not on any map, someone who is and is not Jezrin told me that in the folklore of her people there is an entity called a qareen, a double who resides in a parallel universe.

Through the amethyst I have encountered several of Jezrin's doppelgangers. One of them, Sharon, keeps urging me to go and see a practitioner of a bogus form of divination called psychiatry. Neither this charlatan nor the flimflam of his late master, Sigmund, can alter the fact that I do not wake up in the city of Birmingham in some "united kingdom". No, I arrive there. Always I truly wake up here, in the Nexus.

Here I do things I dare not tell Sharon. I do what must be done. Product is packaged, orders are filled, and some people simply disappear: poof! The dreams of succubi and babau are smuggled from Mer-Kadesh to Vindazag. Blood flows on the docks. Strange cargo is is moved from Vindazag to Portsgate. A crate is opened, a coffin is unpacked, and a customs official is partially eaten by something that has not walked in an age. Records are burned. This is business!

The one who owns my life and heart exists here, inside a dodecahedron of lapis lazuli, not an amethyst shard! Never a shard! The daughter of Three-Sighted Gamori may do with me what she will, but if I can elicit a snicker, or her coffee eyes glimmer with amusement, then my beleaguered, itinerant ship can gently sway in the harbor.