Making the righteous humble

My trip to Minkata was postponed as were my wanderings in general. I received an e-mail from home and had to return. It was joyous being amongst my family again but I felt somewhat distant, moreso than usual.

Every night without fail I would dream of darkness, not the dimness of an unlit room or a moonless night but the all consuming lack of anything amongst the stars in the fissure. At first it was just an aberant nightmare but the more often I had it the more familiar a feeling it became, not just from repeated visits in my dreams but from memory. I have become  convinced that it is the same darkness we are pulled through when we link. For the most part we are unaware of it, so brief is our sojourn in the void, but I remember it vividly now.

Perhaps it is all the linking I have done over the last four years, counting it all those small half seconds of consuming darkness add up.

I’m returning to Relto tonight, my book is already looked out.

The only thing worse than being in the void is being away from it.

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The Cavern

Now that I have done what I felt called back to do, I must admit I considered leaving again. I was starting to creep myself out. But I decided to visit the cavern again before I left.

I randomly ended up in the UO neighbourhood, the Bevin style ‘hoods are just as I remembered (not that I expected them to have changed much in only 6 months, not when they have stayed the same for centuries.) Spoke to a few explorers one of whom was particularly nice.

She informed me of all the news ( I had been deliberatly avoiding it on the surface) from the last few months. A LOT has happened. It was the events of November that particularly caught my attention.

 In some ways what hashappened validates a lot of what I thought and, I suppose to an extent, what I saw.

Don’t feel like such a loon anymore, although I suppose others would still be dubious if I told them.

 Regardless, lots to think about. I’m going to stay a while.

I never did figure out Minkata.

Stargazing

I’m standing by my decission. I enjoy the company of the stars. There is no cold or warm winds from it, I don’t think there is such a thing in the fissure. But I’m convinced that if you lay down on the ground, you know get real close to it and listen for a while, you can almost hear music. It is faint and distant but I think it definatly sounds like music, maybe even singing.

The Star Fissure

I have done it.

I returned the pillars, I played the game Yeesha laid before us years ago now. But I did not enter the fissure.

On the moment before I had the courage to leap into the wound on my Relto I decided against it. I just couldn’t. It felt as if, up to this point, I had been working on auto-pilot, going through the motions which I knew far too well. Then when I stood there ready to jump the string pulling me along stopped and I just couldn’t jump.

 What would I get for it anyway?

Yeeshas hollow “<insert name here>”-thanks?

A page of Bahro magic?

A link home?

Honestly I don’t need her thanks, I did it because it was the only thing that it seemed like I could do.

I have yet to use a single one of those pages of hers, the idea seems distasteful for a reason I can’t quite comprehend yet.

And when I want to return home I can always just jump through the fissure itself, but I still will not visit. I will leave the star fissure were it is.

Holding a Soul in your Hand

I have completed the journey a few times now and each time I become more accutely aware of what an odd experience it is having Bahro Pillars in your Relto. The Journey is really just a two step process of sneaking a soul out of a prison. You move it piece by piece out of the cave in the starfield, that void between Ages, and then once it is all in your Relto you start moving it piece by piece into a cave in D’ni. When that is done a Bahro is freed.

 But for that middle section of the transfer, you essentially have an alien soul tied to your home. While there the pillars always manage to look both out of place and yet right at home, both alien and familiar.

 Maybe it is just my greater awareness of what I am doing, maybe it is my awareness of what happened in May, but whatever the cause the Bahro soul feels particularly alien today. Like a ghoul in your living room.

I think of all the Bahro I have freed over the years and I wonder what they are doing now.

Relto: The gift and the call

I arrived back in Relto, my home and ‘base of operations’ while in D’ni.

Perhaps I should explain my decission to return first. I have been avoiding the cavern since June of this year but I found myself thinking of it with increasing regularity. Even when not overtly on my mind, thoughts of D’ni were never far away.

 In some respects this is understandable; after seeing such wonders it is hard to return to the mundane, however it was something more than that. In many ways it reminded me of ‘The Call.’ That inexplicable and somewhat unnerving pull to D’ni. I’m not sure how many of the new explorers will recognise the sensation.  These days Relto seems to be pulling people to it directly rather than waiting for them to come on their own, how it does that is rather a mystery.  But that ‘Call’ is what I heard again, only it was different this time, similar but not the same.

 So I returned and my Relto was bare, as if it had ‘reset’ itself.

 I took one look at the Neighbourhood Book and decided that what I really wanted more than anything else was to take the journey, D’ni can wait.

Blog Update

I’ve figured out how to get an internet connection going and so this is the first chance I’ve had to create/update a blog since my abrupt departure.

So I will post copies of all the paper journal entries I’ve made to date and then try and update the page as I’m going.

Any questions, feel free to leave comments or reach me in cavern.