A SHUDDER WENT through him. He was lying on the floor of the cave. It felt warm against his back. The stone pillars rose high above. The room was dimly lit, the torches extinguished, and he wanted to sleep.
“Thank you, Nathaniel. We saw everything. You have shown us the beginning.”
He got up and looked around at the faces watching him so earnestly. “This dreaming is endless,” he said, and despair ran through him.
Marn reached out and touched his shoulder.
“Not a dream. A memory.”
Nathan laughed, in spite of himself, but he heard the hoarseness in his voice.
“Right. My memory. I don’t think so.”
“He looks like Hernot,” said Erav.
“Yes, he does,” Naliv agreed. “You are living through a world you did know once, Nathaniel. This is what we wanted. You will show more of this to us and we will learn what happened.”
Nathan moved close again to the stone markings and lifted his hand to touch the spiral rings, but stopped and let his arm fall to his side.
“So now you’re telling me I have just entered some kind of past life?”
“No,” Marn said. “There is no past. Everything is now. That is the point.”
“That is why we can change what was,” Naliv said. “If we know where to go. If we find the place where it started, and step back before that, and alter the events that led to it, and so prevent what has happened to Elaimat. It is as I have said, how we can remain whole, restore what was.”
“Wouldn’t that erase the world I've just seen?” Nathan felt the pressure in his head expand. Their words confused and worried him. He wondered for the first time if he was going mad, and the dreams were the signal after all of an accelerated progression of the anomaly’s effect on his brain. Waking or sleeping, it was all the same. He was going to lose.
“He needs our help to calm him. He cannot take us back with him if he is so troubled,” Marn said.
“He cannot go back to his own world, either, in this state. Nathaniel,” she said, taking his arm in hers. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
As always when she touched him he felt a wave of energy. The room dissolved around him. He had the sensation of moving but they were not running this time. He heard in the distance the faint tinkling of wind chimes.
“Here we are.”
The light had changed. It was overcast but bright. They stood on the edge of a garden. He saw paths of white quartz leading in several directions, shimmering under the clouded sky. Somewhere nearby was the sound of running water.
“Choose a path. We will walk there,” Naliv said.
Marn and the others were gone.
“Where are we now?”
“You are inside the city now, Nathaniel. We are in a part of Elaimat where we create our gardens. Each path changes all the time, according to whoever comes here. Right now, the one you choose will be the one we follow. You will create it as we move through it. It will soothe you, and bring solace.”
“Is that why you come here? For comfort?”
“That is not our need. For us, this has always been a place to explore our capacity to create something beautiful. It is, for us, a kind of schooling. All of Elaimat brings us joy. For you, it will give balance. It will help.”
“I don’t see how,” he said.
A gust of wind came up, and once again he heard the chimes. At the same time, he felt a pull toward one of the paths.
“There,” he said, in spite of himself.
“Remember, I am with you, but what we see, all of it, belongs to you.”
He stepped onto the quartz and once again felt a surge of energy, only this time it rose up through his feet.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Do not think about it,” Naliv said. “Just feel what you feel. Nothing else.”
What did he feel? Lost, and broken. Adrift. Empty. That was a truth he knew, in a sudden insight. He took another step and the path stopped. Ahead of him, unrolling before him without end, was a plain of desolation, barren of life, a gray and brown wasteland.
“You are doing well, Nathaniel.” Naliv’s voice seemed far away.
He took another step. This wasn’t what he wanted. Then he saw that the rocks strewn over the landscape seemed to shine in a peculiar way. He moved closer to them. Each one had streaks of silver in it, thin strands that were in motion. As he watched, the intensity of the color increased and the flow of the streaks accelerated, until the emptiness before him pulsed with flashes of brilliant light.
“Give more to it, Nathaniel. You will see,” Naliv said.
He felt her words pressing against his head. He didn’t know what she meant. What he did know was that something had changed. He looked out onto the landscape and its beauty took his breath away. The barren ground was filled with shimmering rivers of light that flowed out from every rock. They merged in the distance until the plain was a sea of illumination.
“What has changed, Nathaniel?”
He turned around. Naliv stood near. With a start he realized they were once more in the garden, and for a third time he heard the wind chimes.
I don’t know, he wanted to say, but he did know. He felt lighter, as if something deep inside him had surfaced and been erased, something that had been part of him for too long.
“Grief. It’s gone.”
“For your wife and your child?”
“Yes. No. At least, I mean there’s more. Something else. Behind that.”
“Perhaps something from long ago, before you were born, from another place, before your world was.”
“You mean the shaman.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why would I feel grief for the shaman?”
“We will come to the garden again, Nathaniel, if we can. It is good for you. It is Elaimat’s gift to you. The least we can do.”
The paths lay before them again, still luminous under a sky that had turned to dusk.
“I don’t understand,” he said, turning to her. She was gone.
YOU ARE READING
The Magic Hour
Mystery / Thriller"It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming. There were neither windows nor candles, and he could not make out where the twilight came from, if not through the walls and roof." -Childe Rowland "T...
