The Mystic

Chapter 3 ~∆~ Skydancer - Return Of The Sky Mage

Chapter 3
~∆~
Skydancer -Return Of The Sky Mage

The rosy warmth of dawn filtered into the immortals cave, a dancing shaft of delicate light shifting the darkness within. I sat cross legged on my silk cushion bed. The wood of the fire, full of spark and life the night before, was now a lulled pit of warm embers. My body felt grounded in stillness within this sacred space, but my mind felt like a drum beneath the surface, ready to rupture into a thousand unknowable notes that I could sense lay on the path before me. My heart pounded with anticipation and the quiet hum of fear and hope. I could feel the weight of the moment upon me like an ancient cloak of fate that had slipped itself over my soul. This wasn’t a story in an old manuscript, a tale of old that I could read for hidden clues to the lost knowledge and secrets of the past while sipping a cup of coffee. I was now in the story, a story that contained the unspoken secrets of the impossible, and every cell of my being felt it.

The yogi sat across from me, his posture perfect yet relaxed, the lines of his face carved from lifetimes of contemplation and knowledge as though he were hewn from the bones of the earth, and yet, he still held the smooth radiance from the evening before. I glanced up at him, shifting my gaze from his face to the light spilling into the entrance. His eyes were open but his gaze seemed to be somewhere other than the cavern. He had been sitting there in Samadhi meditation before I awoke. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and with quick movements, I braided my long hair into a smooth, loose side plait. I watched him, stealing glances, as he sat unmoving. I was sure he could not see me looking at him. I leaned from side to side in a cross legged stretch, keeping my eyes on him for any sign that he was following me, but his eyes remained still, unblinking.

I looked at him closely for the first time. He was an immortal, and I wanted every detail etched into my mind. Each line on his face fascinated me; they were symmetrical, and he was quite beautiful yet not a wrinkle marred his skin. He looked as though he were in his late twenties or early thirties. His skin was a strange reddish brown. I looked at his chest and noticed how long his sternum was. His hair, trailing around him on the cold stone floor, gave the appearance of a naga king sitting within his brood. So strange and beautiful was this immortal; his countenance captivated me. Everything I had ever wondered about, he likely knew the answer to. There he sat, a living book, master of the secrets I sought. His eyes, green glassy oceans filled with a cool inner star struck glitter, gazed off. I wondered what it was that his mind perceived. I stared a moment longer and then, suddenly, reached forward and waved my hand in front of his face. He didn’t move.

Although I had mastered my asanas of Yoga as a child, I had always found meditation boring. I wasn’t concerned with relaxing my mind; I sought the key to immortality. His eyes held the glimmer of a thousand forgotten stars, and whatever he was doing, I wanted to master it.

This was different from the meditation I had witnessed before. This was mastery of the functions of body and mind, and as a Yoga master, I was astounded by his stillness. Then, all of a sudden, a thought entered my mind: He knew who I was and who I would become.

There was a pause then. I felt it hang in the air; it’s hard to describe in words, a silence, yes, but more, a vastness suspended in animation. In that glimmer of a timeless moment, I knew both visually and on every level who I was and what I was here for. And then, like a wave receding back into the ocean, it was all gone. I stared down at my crossed legs and tried to recall what I had known, but it had diluted back into the ocean of ignorance in my own mind, an ocean that strips away memory as though it had never been. I realized this knowledge existed, but it was locked away from me. I did not have the means or the know how to retrieve it. Instantaneous frustration, almost fury like, rushed through me. I took a long breath, and then I felt him looking at me. I looked up. My eyes met his. The immortal had returned.