Eferon carried her pitiful body to the top of the cliffs. In his anguish, he screamed at the sky. Then, taking his sword, he hit the earth with such power that it trembled, and cracked. Right across Enanti, the crack snaked rapidly through the ground, shearing trees in half, and sending huts tumbling into the void. Eferon himself, began to fracture in two. Wind whirled around him as he was cloven clean in half. He fell to the ground, dead. From one half of his broken and lifeless body arose a great swirling rush of ashes, which formed into a vortex, then coalesced into a vague shape of darkness. A second swirling cloud rushed upwards from the other half of his body, rising high into the air, and then falling as coloured petals on the land on this side of the crack. As they fell, they settled on the ground, forming rich clumps of sea pinks.
The crack widened, and the sea roared in. A new limit to the land was anointed by sea pinks and erigen, which kept vigil over the growing strait. Part of Enanti was being carved off, drifting further and further out to sea, carrying Eferon’s prone, split body lying next to that of Quella. And above them both loomed the haunting cloud of dark ash, moving and swirling with menace. Soon this fragment of the land had disappeared from sight, somewhere far out to sea. Out of sight, but not out of severed memory. That land is now known as Tenebro, or the Shadow Realm. It is where the Shadow Beast reigns. It is from there that the attacks are launched that have ravaged Enanti. And it is there that he holds Alette captive.
24 years ago
Shame
I often wondered how much Vi and Paul knew about what had happened to me – what they had been told. They never spoke about the loss of my family, yet I knew they knew all about it, which cast a question mark over whether they simply treated my rape in the same way, or whether they just didn’t know.
I found it very hard to accept that they might know something so private about me. And if they did, then the fact that it was never spoken of made me feel dirty somehow, ashamed.
In the first year or so, with my limited understanding of how these things worked, I had a vague fear I might have become pregnant, and then be found out. Whenever I showered, I would press my fingers to the pulse in my stomach, and chill with dread as I wondered whether it was my own heartbeat, or that of a child. After a year and a half, I managed to convince myself it was no longer possible – and set about firmly banishing any thoughts or memories of the incident from my mind. And the mind is an astonishing thing. Right through my teens and early 20s I would have been genuinely surprised to be told that it had ever happened. I had worked so hard to disassociate from that event that even being shown CCTV footage of it would barely have convinced me of it.
But now it did come back to me sometimes – in sharp flashes of memory that made me wince. The blanket I had thrown over it all was starting to slip off.
London: the present
Lost
“Do you know what Vi said to me?” I whispered, so low that Claire nearly missed it. She waited for me to continue.
“When I had been with her a few months, most of them spent at boarding school with Marni, she came into my room one night after I’d had a nightmare. I wanted to tell her about my dream; I needed her to know what I had seen. I started trying to tell her. She stopped me. Not unkindly – she isn’t unkind – but she stopped me, and just said, ‘The war is over, Eve.’
“But it isn’t, is it? It’s never been over. I knew that then, because I felt the pain of her words, the pain of not being seen. But I suppose I’d forgotten about it over the years. Kidded myself that, yes, my war was over. She must know, I thought. It must be I who am wrong. She must know, because she is the one looking after me.”
Dream
Room
I was in a small, white room. Every time I opened the door, the people outside were speaking in a strange language that I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t talk to them, so I kept going back into the room. But then I realised that, as I was alone in the room, I couldn’t talk to anyone at all.
London: the present
Punishment
Another Friday night, another nightclub. I pressed my painted nails into my palm, fists clenched, as I made my way through the pulsing crowd on the dance floor – following him outside. Adam was it? Or Callum? I hadn’t quite heard it over the throbbing music and the alcohol coursing through me, but it didn’t matter; it made everything easier. He hadn’t even asked my name. And if he had, he wouldn’t have been given my real one. That was something I kept out of it.
He paused ahead of me and looked back, sending me a wink, checking that his luck was still in. Of course it was. He wanted me – and that was enough. I couldn’t expect anything more.
“Taking your time there, honey? Come on.” He reached out his hand to stroke down my arm. I shuddered at the contact – part revulsion, part compulsion – and smiled back at him.
“You don’t give much away do you?!” Adam/Callum joked. “That’s OK. As long as there is one thing you are giving away tonight, I’m happy.”
I felt the familiar wave of disgust wash through me at his comment. That was all he saw in me. But that was all I was. All I was. That he could see it so clearly was devastating. This is how it had to be. And I stepped out into the cold alleyway behind the club.
He pressed me against the cold metal of the door we had just come through, pushing his tongue crudely into my mouth, grabbing between my legs. He knew there wasn’t any need for further finesse, so he didn’t provide any.
He shifted me slightly to the right, and I felt the rough bricks of the alley wall through my flimsy top. My blood chilled at the echoes of other bricks at my back, all those years ago. I whimpered, and tried to move away.
I think he mistook my noises for encouragement. “That desperate, are you? Come on then.”
So I tried again: “Not here, please; not here,” I managed to stammer out.
“Here is as good as anywhere, baby. It’s not like I’m going to get us a room now, is it? Bit late for that.” He pushed in harder, speeding up. And I let him. Because it was easier that way.
And all I could see as it happened was the faces of those soldiers. And all I could hear was their laughter.
It didn’t take long. Almost like knocking back a shot, the build-up was always more of a pull than the event itself. He, satisfied and looking pretty cocky right now. Me, devastated, and mind awash with more than I could grasp hold of. I felt cheated – I wasn’t sure of what. I had wanted oblivion, and had only got some scratches on my back, and a dark heavy feeling sitting in my stomach. I leaned over to one side and retched.
Enanti: the present
Oracle
“What do you think? Will it be soon?” Raul looked questioningly at Minerva as he awaited a response from the seer. She closed her eyes and linked herself into those ancient communication channels that she traversed so fluidly.
“It will,” came her quiet reply. “Very soon. I would look for her at the ripeness of the next moon. Things are shifting now, on the move, and it will not be long before she comes.”
Raul tugged his furs more tightly around him. The lengthening spring days still had a sharp chill in their evenings. “And where? Where should we look for her?” he asked.
“That is even clearer to see. It will be one of the deeper, cloudier Shifting Pools. There are only two with the necessary sediment and murk to admit entrance to one who has yet to consciously choose these things for herself. Two with enough depth to immediately link to the subconscious mind over the conscious. And one of those is unlikely – far off in the Hinterlands. You should go and wait at the other – the one in the deep cave on Drumlin’s Hill. That is where she will enter our Lands.”
Raul knew better than to question Minerva’s belief. And more than that, as always, he sensed the truth of what she said as he listened to her soft, purposeful voice.
“It needs to be soon
,” he added in his own quiet voice. “Things are changing. More and more villages are being laid waste. We can’t pinpoint where these new attacks are coming from; they seem to be all around us, moving silently among us. We have fallen back to the forests now, and we are safe there for the moment. But it is only a matter of time. The Craven are on the move – and their numbers are increasing by the day. We need her. And soon.”
“She is nearly ready,” replied Minerva. “I can feel it. She will come very soon.”
Dream
Shadow Beast
The dark mist was filling the room again, suffocating me. The air was dense and drugged, and I couldn’t get enough oxygen. A deep chuckle reverberated around my room, seeming to come from every direction at once.
“What are you?” I shouted into the Darkness.
Another rumble of deep laughter.
“You know me, Eve.”
I gasped. “Yes.” I did. Somehow, I did.
I watched as the dark mist started to take some form in the corner of my room, sucking in shadows from behind every surface. It built and built in density, looming high over me, until I could make out some edges of a form. The shadows overlapped, transposed, adding more and more depth to the Darkness. That vast, dark, horned lizard, raised up over me, sucking me in with its bottomless eyes. He had found me, here in my bed. I’d locked all the doors, but he’d come walking in the night, straight into my head.
He raised himself up, higher and higher, as my ceiling disappeared, and it was just me on my bed, and him reaching up into the night sky – impossibly tall, like a column of pitch cloud. Coming for me.
“You belong to me, Eve. You are mine.”
“No! No!” I screamed, as he reached for me.
The world of dream is psyche yearning for consideration...
We are visited at night, and we get to hear other voices.
They are not ours; we are more theirs.
Dreams are a gift from the dreamtime that opens our vision.
Kathee Miller
London: the present
Unlocking
I have the oddest sense that something is about to happen. Something momentous, something I have no control over, but which feels good, exciting. I’ve no idea what it is, why I’m feeling that – it’s really strange.
Things are shifting around inside, like an army mobilising its troops into position, before…what? I don’t really know, but I get the sense that things are on the change, life is altering, and I need to keep up or I won’t survive. Something is quickening in me, gaining momentum. Sometimes it feels more like something bulging, something I can’t contain for much longer, something wanting to break out. Break free maybe? I feel....well, I feel, I feel…
This other side of me, this person underneath, is starting to wake up, starting to stretch, starting to need some changes made to the room I find myself caught in.
I tried to explain it to Claire.
“Tell me more about that room,” Claire had asked.
“It’s small. It feels really neat, and white, but really small. And there’s nothing in it; just me.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t want to stay in it any more. But I don’t know what is beyond the door. I want to get somewhere else, but I don’t know where. But this room is feeling too small. I feel as if I am getting bigger, and it isn’t comfortable any more. And the door, and the frame, and the handle; they all look as if they are pulsing – throbbing and changing size. I don’t like that. I’m not sure whether I want to open the door, or whether there is something the other side, trying to open the door and get in.”
“That sounds quite scary. What you are describing sounds as if there is some change underway, whatever that may be, and change can be scary. And it is especially scary when you’ve constructed everything around you so carefully, and for such reasons as you have.”
“I am scared. But it seems to be mixed with something else, too; something like anticipation, or curiosity – or something.”
Dream
The field of covered bodies
I had to go on an adventure – through endless fields. I didn’t want to but I had no choice. I was with my parents. It was harrowing, with steeply sloping hills that made our horses lose their footing, and long hedge-lines. My horse was tired. Were we looking for something or just wanting the end?
Towards the end, in a snowy field, I realised I had dropped my jumper. I could just have let it go, and left this terrible place, but I felt a desperate need to find my jumper first. I told my parents to go to the end, that I would catch up with them. Turning my horse around, I trudged back through the fields. Some were like large, high-walled rooms – a little like squash courts.
At the very bottom of a sharply sloping field, I stopped in the corner by the hedges. Looking for my jumper, I pulled the surface of the field aside at this corner, as if it were a sheet. Underneath was a jumble of dead bodies, arms and legs sticking out at hideous angles. I knew they would be there, knew about them, but pretended they were not, and covered them all up again, still trying to search for what I had lost.
London: the present
Drowning
The following Saturday morning, as I floated in the pool while Peter had his swimming lesson in the shallow end, I tried to let the tension flow out of me. I hadn’t been swimming for 25 years. The water felt achingly tender on bruised skin. Marni was sitting on the side, reading, and we were all going to have lunch together after the swim.
I heard the teacher at the other end of the pool teaching Peter’s class what you needed to do to drown. How strange, teaching children how to drown, but perhaps that is the best way to teach them to float. Demystify the process; take away the fear. The more I thought about it, the more it appealed to me.
And as I floated in the water, this was the thought that played in my mind – more of a wondering. All I had to do was to raise my arms above my head in surrender, and exhale. Let my breath leave my body. And down I would go. I would never have done it, never have taken so much away from those who loved me, but it was strangely comforting just to know that I could. It made me realise that every day was a choice not to.
I still wanted to experience the enveloping that only water can give, so I let myself sink down into the water, feeling it cradle my head, and hold me. So still, so silent there. I had a sudden vision of ducking beneath the water with Hugo, all those years ago.
Then suddenly I was violently sucked down, a stream of noiseless bubbles spilling from my mouth on a voiceless scream.
Our banquet of dreams is spread each night.
We can choose to eat.
We can choose not to eat.
Jill Mellick & Marion Woodman
Enanti: the present
A shift of worlds
I abruptly found myself in a cave, damp walls setting up a constant drip. The swimming pool had disappeared. I reached out and touched the rivulets on the dank walls, and their rhythm altered immediately. It reminded me of my own skin after a nightmare. My body was at its peak of alert, and my mind was scrambling. A familiar icy chill ran through me. I know what happens to a mind as it struggles to comprehend a new reality. It is just like a body seeking oxygen, but forgetting to take in deep enough breaths. The mind takes pitiful little gasps, the depths remain unreachable for a time; locked down. A strange duality existed: terror at what had just happened, yet also a sense of inevitability about it, as if some part of me had known that I would find myself here, in this strange place.
Obeying the weakness in my legs, I sat down awkwardly on the floor, but regretted it instantly as the damp iced through me. I remained seated for some time, though, until my mind was able to find another gear. Peering around the cave, I sought some clues. When I had calmed myself sufficiently, I stood and turned towards the area of light to my right. It wasn’t as if
the cave was freezing cold, but the fact that I was already wet made me lose heat fast.
The light stung as I emerged into the open. With my vision starting to clear I saw I was at the top of a steep slope. Scrub and rocks were all around, and stunted trees blanketed the lower slopes. Beyond that, endless forest.
I heard voices, and I froze. Snorts of deep laughter, and then the soft thump of hooves walking towards me. As my vision cleared further, I looked up into the face of a man on horseback. He didn’t smile, but I didn’t feel intimidated.
“You should,” he said softly.
Startled, I searched for his eyes, and backed away. His eyes had the intent glare of the wolf.
“Here, Eve, put this on.” He held out a thickly woven blanket towards me. When I continued to back away, he jumped off his horse, and wrapped the blanket around me himself.
“How...how do you know my name?” I managed to say.
“I’ve been waiting for you to arrive, Eve; we all have. The signs all pointed towards today.”
“What signs?”
“Sit down here, and get yourself dry. You look half-frozen,” he said, ignoring my question.
I remained standing, but started to rub the damp off me, and the life back into my body. I kept my eyes on him the entire time.
The exchange was so strange, and I struggled to make sense of anything that had happened in the past hour. The man spoke more softly now: “I know that none of this makes sense to you. Get dry, and we’ll return to camp. Then we’ll talk.”
The Shifting Pools Page 7