SAGN: Chapter Nine- The Arath' Mahar free porn video

Chapter Nine: The Arath' Mahar I can't go back, not right now. Maybe not ever. It's just too dangerous. I don't know what it is that I crossed paths with in there. I can't even explain any of the things that I experienced. All I know is that I am more afraid than I've ever been in my entire life. I'm sleeping with my shotgun if you can call it sleeping. I don't even think I did sleep. Every minute since I came out of the aether I've spent waiting for the next shoe to drop and wishing it would, so the waiting at least will be over. Oh, god what am I going to do?-The journal of Cecil Barnes ------------------------------------ Cecil gasped as she half rose from the brick floor of the Florida Room. Her arms had reflexively crossed the fabric of the polo shirt that she was wearing in a protective manner as she rose up to a sitting position. She leaned down over where her legs were still stretched out in front of her and rocked back and forth over and over. Her eyes were still squeezed shut and the frantic rapid breathing that she had commenced upon awakening was starting to make her lightheaded. She whimpered in terror and still doing that, half rolled from her sitting position onto the brick floor and drew her legs up tight against her. "It wasn't real, it wasn't real, it wasn't real," she said over and over again in her deep baritone until it became a senseless mishmash of sounds all crushed together in a verbal paste. A mantra of desperation that she invoked over and over again hoping against hope that it could calm her. When she did calm herself down, when her heart ceased its trip hammer pounding in her broad chest and her breathing ceased it's out of control wheezing, it was all she could do to force herself to pry her eyes open and fearfully looked out of the wide glass of the panel windows that faced her backyard. There was nothing there now. Only the pale fading light of early evening stretching across the lawn and the apparent emptiness of well manicured grass that was attached to the home of someone who was moderately prosperous. Only a couple of hours had passed then she thought. It had been sometime in late afternoon when she entered the aether and she had only spent a couple of hours there before... Before...that...had happened to her. It had to have been early evening before she had managed to get away from...him...and make it back to her body. From the colour of the sky outside the glass it looked to be a little after eight now. There would be almost another hour until it was full darkness out there. She rolled back and felt her shoulder strike something behind her, her head snapped up and standing above her was the dark man looking down at her. She shrieked and recoiled, rolling away and flattening herself up against the wall that separated the Florida room and the main house. Her hand flashed out to snatch the heavy wood lamp that was on the table beside her and when she backed against the wall with it extended in front of her there was nothing to strike. The room was empty save for herself, the cold ashes in the brazier and the sound of her shuddering breathing. She leaned back against the wall, the lamp nearly forgotten in her hands. The ragged sound of her breathing was a combination of the fear response she had just felt and the relief that he wasn't there after all. She lost control of her legs and sank down and felt her back slide against the wood of the wall. As she slid down it, her polo shirt caught against the grain of it and rode up along her back. The lamp fell limply from her hands and she heard the breaking of the bulb when it connected with the brick of the floor. "Oh god," she moaned in her deep baritone, "make it stop." She didn't know how long she remained wedged against the wall, but it was fully dark when she forced herself to move again. Each step through the house was an exercise in willpower. The first place that she went to was the hall closet where she retrieved the twelve gauge shotgun she kept there. She racked the shotgun and started making her way through the house room by room, floor by floor. Each room she tentatively reached her hand into the darkened room seeking the light switch and all the time that she did so she waited in dread for him to step from the shadows and seize her hand. When it bumped unexpectedly against the coat hanging in the laundry room just off of the kitchen she nearly panicked and fired blindly into the darkness when she snatched her hand back. Room by room. Find the light switch, enter, look around and check every place that someone could hide themselves in. When she was a little boy she had excelled at finding places to squeeze in when they played hide and go seek, and she didn't hesitate to check any location no matter how small or obviously unsuitable for concealing someone who had the size of the shadowy man. She shouldn't have wasted her time doing that, but that was reason talking and she and reason weren't on speaking terms just yet. It took her the better part of an hour to satisfy herself that she was alone in the house and even after she had checked every corner she still found herself creeping down again to check other rooms that she had already been in before just in case he had slipped down into them and was waiting for her to drop her guard. She found her phone where she had left it on the end table in the Florida room. Who she was going to call she didn't know, but looking for it and checking it was what she did when she came out of the aether and doing something familiar was calming to her, especially right now. She had flicked on all of the outside lights and the house and everywhere that her homes outside lights could reach were as brightly illuminated as she could manage and even with that she still didn't feel safe. She rested the shotgun over her knees and between constant glances upward to make sure that he wasn't sneaking up on her, checked it quickly. There were too many messages. Normally she got between sixty and seventy messages each day even when she was cut loose from Maxintell like she was today, but there were easily almost three hundred of them waiting for her when she looked at the screen. She started to scan through them but before she could even begin to start getting a handle on why there were so many, the phone powered down completely. She punched the power button to turn it on, but all that it did when it tried to power up was beep at her and show an empty battery icon instead of making its way through the start up sequence. That was weird, she thought, it shouldn't have run out of power at all. It should have a lot more that it could draw on than what it registered as having, especially after just a few hours. She sighed and gripped the shotgun by the narrow part of the stock as she stood up. She stuffed the phone in her pocket and then with the shotgun at port arms she went looking for her charger. The charger was where she left it in her bedroom, for a moment there was a flash of shadow as she opened the door. It had started to swing shut after she left it open the last time she was upstairs and once she pushed the sudden flash of fear down she wedged a shoe against it to keep it propped open for now. She lay the shotgun down on her desk and shifted her keyboard and mouse out of the way to make room for it. She found the charger line that she always left connected there and hooked the phone into it. It would take about two hours for a full battery charge, but she didn't have to wait that long. She just needed enough juice for her to get it to boot up again and then she could deal with whatever was next. Her nose was sore and now that she had noticed it she raised her hand to it to gingerly feel around it. When her hand came away there were black flakes of dried blood dusting her fingertips. She snatched up the shotgun and went into the attached bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. The dried blood had flaked away a good bit already, but there was more than enough still there for her to see where the streams of it had flowed down her face from her nose and coated her chin. Now that she saw it in the mirror she became aware of the swollen bitten flesh of her lips, and oddly enough, more beard than she should have right now. But the thing that frightened her about it wasn't that she was seeing the physical manifestations of the injuries that she had inflicted on her face here in the material world; it was that those injuries didn't look like they had been there for only a couple of hours as she thought they had. They looked older than that. The blood coating her face even dried the way it was, looked anything but only a few hours old. She had a thought flash in her mind and she seated herself on the toilet with the shotgun in hand distance and between keeping an eye on the door leading from the bathroom into the master bedroom, she stripped the socks off of her feet. The wounds that she had received while she was running from the shadowy man were there as well, but they had already scabbed over, even if the scabs themselves looked thin. The blood soaked into the cotton of her socks was hard and black as well and when he took them off, she had to peel them away from where the blood soaked fabric had adhered to the skin as it dried. The same thing was true when she checked the rest of her clothing as well. Wherever her body had registered injury in her naked flight through the woods, it had manifested here as well. This was something that she didn't expect to happen at all. Usually if something happened there she was able to reverse its effects before returning and she had never seen it carry over like this. Other changes had if she left them too long but she had never allowed herself to return to the material world without making certain that any changes that she'd made were reversed. Well, not always but that whole hung like a horse episode was not the same as this she thought. Still what her eyes were seeing here was telling the same consistent story and the dead battery in her phone seemed to echo that story as well. She'd been out of it a lot longer than just a couple of hours. -------------------------------------- Two days, she looked at the clock on her computer and realized that it wasn't a mistake. She had been unconscious for almost a full two days before she had finally woken up. She had gone into the aether on Tuesday after she had gotten that down time from Maxintell and she had not come out of it until Thursday evening. It was almost too much for her to believe. And the only reason that anyone from work was not freaking out over her absence was that she had another day left on the down time her team had earned by beating all of the other sections delivery date. She wouldn't have had even that much time if the suits upstairs hadn't decided that it might spur productivity in the other sections by making it some kind of prize for making delivery first. The truth may be that the next project was still in the planning stages and they wouldn't have been able to shift his team to do very much on it in the time that they had available, but that didn't stop upper management from playing the magnanimous boss. So what if the only reason that they were off was because they had outpaced the production schedule and the powers that be didn't have anything for them. They had already been working one hundred hour weeks as it was, but that wouldn't have been enough justification for the suits; it made them look good they thought and that was all that mattered from a P.R. standpoint. A lucky thing for her it seemed. Without that time off she would have ordinary trouble heaped on her plate as well as the extraordinary ones that she had just been handed. She needed to clean this blood off though, leaving it there was not an option. Now that she knew it was there it felt as if he had marked her now and in some small way perhaps he had. She locked the door to the bathroom behind her and reached for a washcloth. As she dipped it into the hot water she ran into the basin she realized something else as well. Something that she had accepted without even being consciously aware of it. There was no way that she could go back into the aether now. Not without some way to protect herself from what was waiting in there for her. With most of the dried blood washed off of her face, she felt a little better, but as she let the pink coloured water spiral down the drain as she rinsed out the cloth and hung it, she realized that this wasn't going to be enough. She had been lying on a room temperature brick floor for just over two days now and a gingerly applied wipe down wasn't going to do more than knock a little dust off of that mess. What she really needed was a shower. It wasn't that she had been lying on the floor so much as it was the fact that he had touched her. She needed to be clean and there may not be enough water in the world to make her feel that way again. The door was locked true, but did she dare to take one. She thought about it and decided that it could be done if she didn't mind making a mess. She left the shotgun carefully balanced on the toilet so it wouldn't roll off by accident. She made certain that its muzzle pointed toward the locked door and quickly stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. As a precaution she left the shower curtain open and with one eye on the door she gradually laved herself clean. Her feet still stung a bit from where the brambles had torn them, and the hot water of the shower had caused the scabs to loosen and wash off as well. She dumped a couple of towels on the floor to soak up the water that had sprayed out onto the floor and having done all she could here for now she wrapped a towel around her waist. She might have started to just barely relax, but she still had no intention of just walking carelessly into the next room. She cradled the shotgun in one arm and with her back to the wall used her other hand to open the door and let it swing free. The cooler air rushed into the room and she watched in the mirror opposite of the door as it started to clear off the steam produced during her shower until she could see the bulk of the master bedroom in the reflection. There was nothing reflected there that she could see in the mirror, but rather than making her relax, it amped her up instead. She ducked her head out of the room quickly and seeing nothing there she cautiously stepped from the bathroom to the master bedroom. She let her eyes play across the objects there, everything seemed like it was in the same place as when she had stepped into the bathroom to clean the blood from her face, but it still took her a little bit of time to even out from that amped up level of adrenaline she was riding. She closed the door to the bedroom and locked it behind her and then laid the shotgun on the bed with the muzzle toward the door again. She ducked into her dresser and quickly pulled jeans, a fresh t-shirt and a clean pair of boxer briefs and socks out. Once she was dressed she reached for the shotgun again and in the brighter light of the bedroom saw that there was still a black spot of dried blood on her right wrist that hadn't come off when she was washing herself. She rubbed it but it still wouldn't come off and the thing was that she couldn't feel anything like an injury underneath it. There was just smooth flesh beneath that dark spot and when it wouldn't come off she realized that it wasn't blood at all; what it was she had no idea. It didn't seem to be hurting her so she filed it in her mental look at later file and put it out of her mind. -------------------------------------- There was no way that she was going to sleep. Once she had checked the house again, she had retreated to her bedroom and locked the door again behind her. While she was downstairs she had snatched some of her aether research materials and brought them back upstairs with her. Some of them dealt with things that were supposed to dwell in the aether; that's where she had found out that bit about those scavengers. Maybe there was something in there that would let her find a clue to just who or what it was that had done this to her. Maybe if she could do that there might be some way she could keep him away from her. And if she couldn't keep away from him, maybe there was some way that she could keep him from hurting her again. It was a slim hope but as before it was the only one that she had. She felt the sun rising before any light peeked through the window. The windows on her bedroom faced east. When she had been having the house remodelled she had paid for them to install extra large windows, that way there would be plenty of natural light. She wasn't stupid about it though, the glass was the insulated kind to keep as much of the heat out during the summer as technology could manage. Usually if she wasn't just too exhausted to respond, the creeping morning light would wake her, but not today. It couldn't wake her because she had never even gone to sleep. She had spent the night with the shotgun laying in her lap and her back against the wall with the edge of the bed between her and the door. The research materials that she had brought up had kept her occupied as the long hours of night unspooled. She divided her time with one eye on the door and one eye on the page. Her ears were almost swivelling as they strained for any change in the ambient sound around her all night long and as she became aware of the approaching light she realized that even though she knew it was coming she could barely see any trace of it in the room around her. What she had been going over hadn't been as much help as she'd hoped it would be. When she took a break from the books she retrieved her phone from off the charger where it had rested forgotten and cleared out her message backlog. It seemed a stupid pointless thing to do in light of her last couple of days and how she spent her night just now. But as before, doing a stupid, simple thing that was completely trivial gave her an odd soothing feeling and that was what she needed more than anything at the moment. She eyed her journal sitting on top of one of her books. Snatching that up when she was gathering books was a whim too. And even though she had only written a little in there last night between keeping her eye on the door and scanning the book in her lap; again performing that simple stupid comforting little thing made her feel better and that was all that mattered. Her eyes drifted over and rested on the clock beside the bed. It was almost six in the morning. She had been awake all night and she still didn't feel the least bit tired. She had been unconscious for the better part of two days and the problem with that was that she knew that happening had to be in no way good for her, but she couldn't bring herself to step out of the room, let alone the house until there was not the slightest chance of a shadow anywhere around her. Just the idea of stepping into shadows right now made shivers run up and down her back. Maybe not all shadows though. There was one that didn't terrify her and she had no idea what it even meant. A shadow of a memory. That was what whatever she had been speaking with had said when she begged for it to tell her who it was. She had no idea what it could mean. The only thing that she did know was that it meant her no harm. When there was almost no hope at all and she was out of options, something had spoken to her. It had spoken to her and it had done more than that. It had given her a meaningful chance to escape. She looked down at her broad chest and focused on the deepest pit of her stomach. No, it had done a lot more than just that. Whatever it was that the shadowy man had done to her when she was his plaything, whatever it was that owned that voice had countered that too. God, she had never felt pain like that before, she still was having a hard time believing that she had even survived it at all. It felt like he had ripped her open and torn everything that was there out; it felt like the shadowy man had taken something from her. He had reached down into her depths and ripped something free from her and now that the pain was passed and only an awful memory she still had no idea of just what it was that he had taken from her or done to her. If there was ever a thing to be grateful for, easing that shrieking agony was it. Until she felt that, she had never understood deep in her gut why it was someone who was injured beyond hope of healing would beg to die. Oh, her brain knew why, and her intellect could understand the reasoning for it, but until she had felt pain on that scale she had never understood the sheer craving that a person could have for relief; for anything that would end the torment. She did now though. She understood it and she wished that she were still ignorant. She would have to go in to work when there was enough light out that she would feel safe moving around in public. There was no way that she could do what she was going to have to do to dig up the information that she needed to find out about the dark man, not if she had to juggle that with going in to work at the office. If she was telecommuting though, that would make a things a lot more flexible. And she could shift a little of her workload over to the team level as well. She normally took on more than she needed to anyway, so if she dialled it down for a few days she might be able to squeeze some more time for what she needed to do out of what she had to do. Maxintell wouldn't care; she'd done this before and they were happy as long as she delivered. And Raymond was fairly laid back for a suit. As long as the project team hit their benchmarks on time he didn't really care how Cecil managed it. --------------------------------------- Maxintell was located in one corner of a massive industrial park that squatted on both sides of the beltway that allowed the interstate to curve around Stafford without needing to have to go through it. Part of I-71 did go straight through the heart of town and merge with and became part of Main Street, but most traffic passed around town using the I-171 beltway. Cecil passed through the security checkpoint as she always did when she came in to work. It was a short trip from her house near the river walk. The Mill road extension led directly to the beltway itself and it was just a short trip from there to the exit that she needed to get to Maxintell's Stafford facility. The problem with today was that she was travelling with her shotgun on the front seat under a raincoat, with a gym bag thrown on top of it to help conceal the outline. She had debated not taking the shotgun with her when she left the house and even then she had gotten a later start than she planned on. She just couldn't leave without rigging the ward to function constantly and if she hadn't been able to succeed in doing that she might not have felt safe leaving the house empty behind her at all. The guard though waved her through; he was in his early twenties and was contracted through a local firm. He'd seen Cecil coming in and out for the last four years now and barely took note of her at all. That was probably a pretty serious security issue by itself, but the thing that bothered her most about him was that he was unarmed except for a wooden nightstick. Armed guards cost more per hour than unarmed ones and Maxintell had opted for cheap in this instance. Right now what Cecil really wished, was that there was a big suspicious guard there and that he would be carrying a large bore pistol of some kind; preferably one that could make an elephant back up and say not today. He wasn't though and wishing for it wouldn't make it happen. She eased her car into a visitor parking space near the main entrance and made sure that she locked the door; she didn't want to come out from here when she was done and find that the dark man had somehow paid her a visit and made off with her shotgun in the bargain. There were some more unarmed guards manning a metal detector just inside the doors. She reached into her jeans and pulled out her wallet, her keys her phone and a loose handful of change and dumped it in the metal pan they offered her; she left her Maxintell id hanging from the lanyard around her neck. She stepped through the archway and claimed her property on the other side of it and made her way past the reception desk to the elevators. She needed the third floor. Maxintell might sprawl all over the place, but there were at least five floors in some sections of it. She got lucky on the way up, no one got in the small cubicle with her at all. She had the entire cube to herself and if she could luck out and score the same circumstances on the way out she'd be a happy woman. The elevator slowed and stopped. The chime announcing it had arrived sounded nearly at the same time as when the doors opened. Cecil stepped out and started navigating his way through the clusters of cubicles crowded the floor to Raymond's office on the far side of the room. Raymond wasn't high enough on the food chain to rate his own secretary, so the woman who sat in front of his office door wasn't always the same for long. His door was open and she could hear him on the phone. She told the secretary, a brunette in her late twenties this time, that she needed to speak with Raymond as soon as he was done. She asked her to sit in one of the cheap plastic chairs placed against the wall and she cooled her heels for the next ten minutes while Raymond argued and threw figures and in general did whatever it was that he was doing on this particular call. When he hung up he waved Cecil in to join him without waiting for the brunette to check. "Hey, Cecil didn't think I'd be seeing you today. What can I do for you man?" he said rising from his seat to reach across the desk in greeting. "I'm not really here today Raymond, I just needed to clear some telecommute time with you and then I'm back out the door," she said. "Is that all? No problem you got it. How long do you think you need?" he asked him. "Not too long I think," she said hedging a little in her tone. "Maybe a couple of weeks. Don't think I'll need more than that, but I'll give you a heads up if that changes." "Cecil if it turns out anything like the last time you did this you can have the whole month if you need it. Fifth floor was really happy with that early delivery that your team pulled off. Mucho impressed," he said to him. "Nice to be loved isn't it?" she said to him. "Really though I don't think it will be more than that, but I think I'll get a lot more done if I can go round the clock away from everyone else for a little while," she said. "That sounds excellent man," he said, "Way to go the extra mile there. If you're bucking for my job take your time with it will you? You're making me look too good," he said to him, clapping him on the shoulder. "Raymond, I wouldn't have your job on a bet," she said to him "So we're good with this starting tomorrow?" "Course we are Cecil, you just keep me in the loop, okay?" he said to him. "Count on it," she said and moved to slip out of the office before Raymond asked her opinion of his latest secretary. She didn't get far; Raymond came out from behind his desk and started to shadow her. As they both walked out of his office he told the secretary that he'd be back in a few minutes. There was some insignificant chatter on Raymond's part all the way to the elevator and as she waited for it to arrive she felt her jeans start to slip down a bit, like they were threatening to fall off entirely. She reached into her pocket and jingled her keys to cover that she was keeping them from dropping any further. The elevator came eventually and Raymond finished up his rambling. He was a good enough guy, Cecil thought, the problem was that he was a talker and once you got him started he had hard time stopping it. As she stepped into the elevator he leaned back with a puzzled look on his face. "Hey man is your hair darker?" he asked, "Because it looks like it is just a little bit." "I don't think so," she said, still trying to keep her jeans level while hiding it. "Not that I've noticed anyway." "Probably a trick of the light. You know how these fluorescents make everything look a little off. Never mind, you keep me posted if you need more time," He said to him. "Will do," she replied to him through the closing elevator doors. -------------------------------- She exited the building and slipped behind the wheel of her car. The shotgun was still undisturbed under its concealment and she had eyeballed the backseat thoroughly before she got in. She cranked the engine and backed out of the visitor spot and started slowly driving back through the parking lot to the main gate. The guard wasn't any more concerned than he had to be with her leaving than he was with her arriving. Didn't matter though, she had gotten what she needed and now she could get started on dealing with a real problem. There were a few semis' hauling on the road that slowed her on the way out, Maxintell shared the industrial park with some other smaller factories and there were always deliveries coming in and shipments going out. When summer really got going the heat would shimmer in waves off of the pavement and the grass would dry up so that every time one of the big rigs passed it stirred up a cloud of dust. Not many people lived out this way, but there were some that did. Most of the houses were almost as old as hers was and one of the things that she noticed about those older houses was that many of them had either bright blue doors or the steps leading up to the porch were painted blue; either way it was something that she had never seen before she moved here. She'd asked a co-worker who came from this area what was the reasoning behind doing it that way since mostly it seemed fairly ugly to her; a jarring contrast to however the rest of the house was painted. What he had told her when she asked was that it was something that stemmed from Gullah culture. When she asked him what Gullah culture was it had taken him a moment for his mental gears to mesh and then he apologized and told him that knowing that was just something that he had grown up with and he took for granted that everyone that he met would know about it when he mentioned it. The Gullah, it turned out were the descendants of the west African slaves that had remained in this area after the Civil War. They mainly were found around the Sea Islands and huddled around the coast, but many of their practices had spread beyond their own group over the last couple centuries and this was one of them. As his co-worker had explained it, the Gullah believed that haint blue was a colour that was avoided by wicked spirits and by painting the door or the way leading to a house's entrance blue that was a simple, cheap and effective way to bar evil spirits from entering a house. Cecil expected that it must be fairly widely accepted in the area, since she saw it quite frequently, but now she was wondering if there might be something to that belief that could help her now. It was something that she might want to look into just for the reason that it could be quickly done and wouldn't cost that much to do; how effective it would be remained to be seen though. The semi ahead of her slowed to turn onto the access road that would dovetail with the beltway not that far ahead of them. While she waited behind it she started to feel slightly nauseous and wished that the trucker would hurry up and take his black smoke spewing rig out of her way. She shifted in her seat and felt her jeans slip slightly. That was another thing that she couldn't figure out why it was happening either. They had felt a little loose when she slipped them on but that was nothing for her to think much of when it happened. She usually bought her jeans with plenty of room, especially where her huevos were concerned, nothing she detested more about a pair of pants was one that was too tight in the crotch. This though was looser than she expected them to be and as she waited for the truck to get going she didn't think that they felt this loose the last time that she wore them. It had to have something to do with the aether she realized. Everything that had happened to her there had resulted in her being unconscious for just over two full days and she had burned a lot of energy even before the dark man had...done what he had done. It may well be that it had ramped up her metabolism while she was there and this might be a normal after effect of that happening. Maybe if she could figure out how to do it at will she could open a weight loss clinic; in this area alone she could likely make a fortune that way. It was the first somewhat normal thing that she had thought of that had made her feel like smiling since she had woken up and now that she had felt it, she appreciated it even more. The truck ahead of her finally got a clear enough section of highway that he could make his turn with and she was moving again in a few minutes. She snickered at her get rich quick plan for a few minutes longer and even though the diesel smoke had made her much more nauseous than she had ever felt before, she felt better. It was one of those things that she was starting to appreciate more she realized. A moment that meant absolutely nothing could surprisingly have every meaning in the world when you looked at it the right way. She would have thought that riding with a shotgun in the seat next to her would make her feel much more self conscious that it did. The truth was that she felt a lot better knowing that it was there, even if it would be a difficult to use inside of a car; not that she planned on doing anything like that, but she needed to know it was there today. She didn't think about it again until she saw blue lights flashing behind her and had a moment of panic realizing that she didn't have an explanation that might convince whoever was painting her in the patrol car that it was a good enough reason to have a shotgun within hands reach. The officer hit his siren for a quick hiccup of sound and she slowed and pulled to the side hoping that this wasn't going to end up with her needing to be bailed out of the city lock up. The cop it turned out wasn't interested in her, as soon as she moved to the side, he hit the gas and his siren shifted from the high pitched hiccup to a shrieking wail. As the siren faded and the black and white turned out of sight up ahead she let go of a breath that she hadn't realized she was holding and pulled back onto the road to resume her trip home. Even with the rise in adrenaline that came with the sudden start, she also realized that she wasn't really afraid actually and as she drove she found herself laughing again in relief. Something else that was so ordinary to her was suddenly priceless and she laughed about it nearly all the way home. --------------------------------- When she pulled into the driveway she felt herself tense, there was someone moving behind the curtains in the great room. She kept herself absolutely still and left the engine on. There was the sudden coughing of a lawnmower engine catching and then winding up to its high pitched roar that left her nearly ready to throw the car into reverse and get out of there. But before she could do that her eyes caught sight of the work truck that was parked on the opposite side of the street in her rear view mirror and relaxed. It was just Dawn and Richard. She should have remembered they would be here today; they always came on Friday. Dawn and Richard Meriwether ran a combination housecleaning and landscaping company. They were good people from what she could tell and she'd never had any complaints about either their work quality or their personalities. She'd toyed with asking the two of them out socially a time or two and hadn't gotten around to doing it yet. She was considering asking if they would come to the fourth of July party that she was still working out the details with over the phone with her sister and was planning to do that in a couple of weeks so they would have plenty of time to say yay or nay. Right now though she needed another minute or two to let her nerves calm down before she got out of the car. She'd have to get out soon, whatever was in that diesel exhaust from that truck she'd been stuck behind hadn't gone away and her sense of nausea was even stronger now. She killed the engine and slung the gym bag over her shoulder, she draped the raincoat over her arm and picked up the shotgun in the middle with her hand slightly in front of the trigger housing and just over the receiver where the spent round would eject. Whistling loudly so that Dawn would have a chance to hear her she walked up the stone pathway and up the steps into the house. Dawn was coming downstairs when he stepped into the foyer and her eyes took in the gym bag, the rain coat and the shotgun. "Mr. Barnes," she said warmly to him, "I didn't know you were going to be home today. What did you do? Take some time off to do some duck hunting today? Not really the right time of year for that." "Not really Dawn," she answered her, "I'm going to be working from home for the next little while and thought I'd go out and get some target practice this morning." "Sounds like a nice morning Mr. Barnes," she said to him. "My little brother, he does a little guide work now and again so if you want to do some duck hunting you let me know and I'll have him call you this fall before the season starts." "I'll keep it in mind Dawn," she answered, "Right now I think I'm just going to go upstairs and get started on some of what's on my plate." "Well you do that, Mr. Barnes," she said to him, "I'll tell Richie not to make too much of a racket if he can help it since you're working here today." "Thanks Dawn, I appreciate that," she said heading toward the stairs. "And if you would, if you or Richie see any strangers around the place that don't seem right, can you let me know? I think someone was looking the place over last night." "I'll tell him right now," she said to him, "Don't you worry about that none. And we'll let you know when we're finished up so you can lock up proper when we go too." "Thank you Dawn," she said to her and headed up the stairs. It being Friday Cecil had a lot of options right now. While she usually worked from home on the weekends she wasn't held to a hard and fast deadline like she would have been if she had to go into the office. She also could slack off a bit as well and she wouldn't catch any flak over it as long as she was able to make up for it the rest of the week. That would give her plenty of time to dive in and find something out that could explain what it was that had happened to her in the aether. The first thing she did was log into her lotus explorers group and see if anyone had run into a shadowy man as well. There was no one online who said that they had and they asked her about it. She gave a vague answer about seeing someone who used shadows to decorate their aethereal form there and left it at that. No one else it seemed had experience with having changes carry over into the material world as well and unfortunately for her that wasn't a surprise either. She'd been one of the ones pushing the envelope with this and the others hadn't caught up with her as much. Since the lotus explorers forum wasn't much help she tried to do a cross platform search about wards and if painting the entrance to the house blue would make them more effective. That turned out to be more helpful than she thought it would. Apparently some of the more powerful wards would supposedly have that as a side effect if the energy put into them was strong enough. Maybe she wouldn't need to hire a painter after all she thought as she started following up that line of research. She kept at it the rest of the morning and when Dawn called up to her that she and Richie were going to be heading out now she'd learned quite a bit that she hadn't known before. She bookmarked the page she was looking over and went downstairs to lock up behind Dawn. He watched her and Richie get into the truck, start up the engine and pull away. Cecil waved to them as they pulled away and then went back upstairs again. Once she was in the room she laid the shotgun across the bed pointing toward the door that she had just locked and went back to her research. It was pretty clear from what she was reading that she needed a much stronger ward. She hadn't been aware that the one that she was already using actually grew weaker from constant use and if she really wanted to be secure she needed something with more oomph. The problem with that was that a ward with that kind of power needed to be set up inside the aether itself first. It was the primary anchor and without it being done that way she just wouldn't be able to maintain it once it was activated for very long. In that way it was like trying to build a house on quicksand, there was no way that it would work the way you needed it to and if you tried it anyway you were more likely to end up in worse trouble than what you were trying to protect yourself from. As much as the idea of re-entering the aether frightened her if she truly wanted to be protected as much as such a ward could provide her, she needed to do just that. -------------------------------- I can't avoid it, I've looked in every resource that I can track down and all of them point me toward the same conclusion. What I need to do to be safe has to be done in the aether. Only a few days ago I would have been all charged up over the idea of having something new to try out there, but this fills me with nothing but dread. I haven't seen a trace of the dark man since he chose to walk away from me and the really frightening thing is that once he did, all I have been doing every waking moment is expecting him to show up and finish what he started. I'm living almost every waking moment on edge expecting to look up and see him walking toward me and I can't stand it almost. The waiting is drawing me tighter and tighter. I can't even sleep. I started doing ward research and I looked up and realized that it was Monday morning. The entire weekend was spent either in constant digging for more information or scanning the room around me expecting him to step out of the shadows. I have to go in though, if I don't I can't set the ward properly. Everything I've read tells me that and if I can't set the ward properly then I might go crazy waiting for him to step out of wherever right behind me. I have to go in but what if he is waiting for me there? What if he can't reach me where I am and by going there I run right into what I'm trying to stay away from? I have to do this but the chance that I could put myself right back in his hands is almost too much to bear.-The journal of Cecil Barnes ----------------------------------- Sixty hours, that was how long she had spent chasing the information that she needed. Sixty hours straight. No coffee, no energy drinks just fear and adrenaline and even then she didn't know why she wasn't about to keel over. Even if she were exhausted enough to fall asleep, she wasn't sure if she could let herself do that. As bad as constantly glancing up and scanning the room around her was the idea of sinking into sleep and having to face him and what he had done to her there in the nocturnal world was almost worse. No nightmare she had ever had before even compared to the prospect of seeing him again even if it was just an image of him that her mind was showing her. And then there was the chance that he could get to her through that kind of connection. Sleep was sort of like a connection to the aether in its own tenuous fashion. Some of the pages that she had read in her first tentative steps exploring the aether suggested that some hypothesized that dreams were the main way that most people connected to the aether already. That when you dreamed that you were flying that you actually were flying and that everything else that seemed so real was in its own way exactly that. If that were true then she might be inviting him into her home and giving him license to do as he pleased to her when she was at her most helpless if she did that. But sixty hours without sleep on top of however long she had been awake before that seemed too much to humanly bear. How long could you go without sleep? How long before your body would shut down entirely whether you agreed or not? Would you actually start to go insane? How would you know if you even were? She had pulled long working jags before. No one who worked in the field could stay away from that, it just came with the territory. But when she had done that she usually wound down the effort shaking from the too many energy drinks she had consumed. And even then it had taken time for them to wear off long enough for her to finally get to actual sleep and she didn't feel anything like that at all. But the most disturbing thing for her to realize was that she hadn't eaten at all since she had returned from her last trip to the aether. She hadn't even felt the slightest pang of hunger and as for thirst she had in no way drank enough of anything to keep that at bay. She's heard somewhere that if you really had to you could live for weeks without food. They wouldn't be pleasant weeks and there wouldn't be many of them but you could do it. You couldn't live without water though. Four days without was pushing the limit for some people and while she had drank a little she was positive that it was in no way enough to match what it was that she needed at all. There was something that connected what was happening to her now to what had happened in the aether. She didn't know what it was but if she had to go in there, if she had to risk tiptoeing past the lion then she had best only do something like that one time. She might get away with it one time, but she didn't think she would twice. ------------------------------------ I'm going back in tomorrow, there is nothing more that I think that I can find that will make me any more prepared to cast this ward and there are questions that I need to answer as well. Questions that I can't get the answers to while I remain here. The things that I've already noticed are disturbing enough, but this morning I looked up into the mirror when I went in to shower and saw that my hair had turned coal black over night while I was working. I've heard of fear turning your hair pure white but never black. It's also growing faster as well. I just had a haircut a couple of days before my last trip and this morning it was close to an inch long. It's growing too fast and it's not the only thing growing. That black spot on my wrist has spread as well. I didn't notice it until I saw how dark my hair had become and once I saw that I couldn't help seeing that had grown as well. What is it? Right now it's nothing but a thin line extending up toward my inner elbow, but it looks like it's getting wider. I had no idea what it could mean until I stripped off to shower and realized that my penis has returned to the size it was before I made it bigger. It wasn't until later that evening that I realized that I never reversed the changes that he forced on me before I came back. They are still in place there and if they are operating in the same fashion that the ones I made do, then the pace of those changes are only going to accelerate. That frightens me even more than the chance that he may be there when I go in. Because if I don't go in, if I don't undo what he did, I'm going to see it every day in the mirror soon and I don't know if I can nerve myself to do this more than once as it is. It has to be tomorrow, if I don't do this then I may be lost entirely and if I become what he made me in there here how long until I am gone entirely? It has to be tomorrow, it has to.-The journal of Cecil Barnes. ------------------------------- Cecil's hands trembled as she built the fire in the brick brazier. First the shredded cotton soaked with a quick lighting slow burning pitch and then the slivers of hickory around it. Slightly larger slivers some three times the girth of the slivers that would burn first when she touched the match to them and then some smaller chunks of wood about the size of her thumb. Once she had it arranged in the small pyramid she reached for the match that she had set aside. She hesitated for a few seconds watching it waver in her fingertips. Strike it she said to herself. Strike it and get it over with she urged herself, but it still took her forcing her hand to move in deliberate effort to scratch the match down the rough brick and watch it flare into life. She held it over the tinder and let it fall. It dropped from her fingertips spinning end over end until it landed in the nest of flammables clustered in the small pile in the heart of the brazier. Committed, she told herself. The tinder caught immediately and flared into greedy life spreading and consuming all in its path. She slowly began feeding the larger pieces of hickory that would fan the flame into hotter life. A small bellows that she had acquired kept a steady stream of air directed at the hungry flames. The coals began to form and she watched them burn down until all that remained of them was the incandescent embers that glared hotly at her from the center of the brazier. The flat metal plate that she used to heat the lotus itself was scorched from past use; grimy soot had collected at the base of it where fire would kiss it most often. She reached into the plastic bag and took out a double sized pinch of the spicy smelling herb. The research she had done suggested that should be done. You needed a strong connection to attempt what she was daring the danger of aether to accomplish. She let it drop and watched as the wet lump of processed black lotus landed on the pan with a slight sizzle and sat there seemingly unchanged for a moment. Lotus was rarely just lotus, that was the majority of what was there but it was prepared with oils that were both costly and rare; to preserve it and to bring its full potency to bear. Some unscrupulous dealers, when it had been a proscribed material, had mixed lower quality edible lotus with hashish and passed it off as black lotus. While it would have some obvious effect on the user due to what was actually being consumed; it was not the kind of effect that those who sought out black lotus were after. Such a mixture would never allow the user to bridge their conscious mind to the aether; it would just bridge their stomach to the nearest refrigerator. The lotus heated under her eyes and when reached its combustion point it began to emit a soft yellow-gold smoke that twisted and spiraled around her face as she leaned in to inhale it deeply into her lungs. After a few minutes her head began to throb, faintly at first then with gradually increasing intensity as her heart rate increased and blood began to pound in her temples. She closed her eyes and allowed the feeling to increase and continue to spread to encompass all of her body. It was not a highly pleasurable sensation she had been surprised to find out the first time; it was just pleasant enough. If pleasure was your goal then there were other cheaper means to attain it. She felt the shackles that bound her to the material word loosen and then slip free. She remained motionless for a few more moments to let the feeling completely wash over her and anchor her in the aether; she would know it when it came. Every lotus explorer could recognize when it happened to them; it was an individual recognition that came to different persons at different times. She opened her eyes and looked around warily. She was fully in the aether. --------------------------------- As she had realized, physically she was exactly the same as when she escaped into her warded room. The ward itself was pulsating; the golden shimmer of it straining from the additional effort of working constantly was taxing it almost beyond what it could cope with. It was never meant for this manner of continuous use and the strain was becoming obvious. What she needed to do first was to raise the second stronger ward. Once it was fully engaged it would buttress and strengthen this one. Working in tandem they would be stronger together than they could possibly be apart and that strength might just be enough to keep the dark man from gaining entry to her sanctum. This was the most important thing that she could do now. Reversing what he had done to her stood a distant second in importance compared to maintaining her safety. What she needed first was a fire, but not just any fire. It needed to be in a hearth and it needed to be in the center of the area that was to be protected. The fortunate thing for her was that this was an old house long before she had laid eyes on it. The central fireplace in what had once been known as the parlor would serve her need as well as it had served those who had resided here long before she ever called this place home. She stood up from her body and then passed through the walls until she finally entered the great room. The hearth was massive. It was one of the things that had sealed for her the desire to own this home and to make it her own. The recessed interior was built of long rectangular bricks that bore no resemblance to modern ones. They were flatter and the edges were rounded. The years that had passed had marked them so deeply that even the cleaning and refurbishing efforts of the remodeling company that she had hired for the job were not able to remove the deep scorch marks that had scored the surface over the years. Spreading out in a semicircle around the maw of the hearth were the flagstones. Hand sawn sections of dark grey slate that long years of use had polished in places and lining the edges they were framed with more of the same type of brick that made up the hearth itself. The mantelpiece was golden oak that was cut into a single long slab that projected like a shelf out and over the flagstones like a highly polished cliff of wood. As beautiful an example of a fireplace it was, that alone did not make it a hearth. A hearth was the center of the home and that was why this would be the anchor that she needed rather than the other fireplace set that climbed up through both floors. In truth this room was not the original parlor when it was built, that was the room that was presently serving as the kitchen now. This room with this massive fireplace was the original kitchen and the iron arms that could be swung away from the brick to hang pots, kettles and cauldrons above the flames and the coals were what she needed. The first thing she would need would come from the aether itself. A fire. But not just any fire, it had to be a fire that sustained those who had lived there before. The fire she needed would be one that warmed the body, prepared the food and functioned as a bridge for those whom those flames had protected. No fire that she had kindled in this place had ever met all of those requirements. She came close to it and waited. The aether would begin shifting soon and when she saw the blaze that she needed appear she needed to be prepared to do what was necessary. She crouched there and watched all the different kinds of blazes that had heated these bricks flicker before her eyes. Fires built for ambiance that crackled merrily were not what she needed and for a while those were the only kind that she saw there. Christmas fires burning massive Yule logs were closer to what she was looking for but only in the vague sense that they shed warmth and fostered community within these walls for the length of the time they were allowed to burn, but they were not what she sought. They would not serve her purpose here. She found the one that fit her needs as she expected to in an image that almost vanished before she could ground it. A heavy blaze that had shed heat and cooked the meals that sustained the family that huddled around it decades ago. Its warm embers had preserved their lives in the blizzard of 1888; The White Hurricane. Locked in by the heavy snowfall, the family here had relied on the blaze kindled on these very bricks to keep them alive while they hunkered down and endured the cold fury outside of their walls. This one would do for her purposes. She reached into the flames and grasped them. She felt not heat when she did so, but the cold that it remembered. Intense, bitter, killing cold. The heat had long since radiated out when the fire was blazing, what was contained in the memory was the cold that it had raged against. The cold that it had fought by consuming itself to shed the heat that would preserve the lives of those that depended on it; this was a hearth fire, this was what it was that she needed. The cold scorching of the long vanished blaze burned and licked against her palm as she seized it and bound it to the bricks to burn now as a beacon. To stand as a vigilant sentinel against whosoever would threaten any who sheltered beneath this roof and be preserved by its walls. She concentrated on her task until she felt it anchor and once it had she could release it to remain there as her shield and solace. The flames that hovered there burned with a deep indigo. She leaned back from them and cradled her hand. She could feel the warmth that the fire was shedding in her direction radiating out around her. It would burn there and its presence would power the shield she was seeking to raise. She looked down at her hand; the skin had split in places as if she had thrust her hand into actual flames. The skin was blackened and scorched and ichor welled from the charred flesh where it was cracked and the fluid rilled in the hideous grooves the flames had carved in her flesh. If this was a product of a real blaze she would have been in agony now and even looking at it made her feel slightly ill, but the image of the searing kiss was only a representation of the fire itself and she needed this sign that the flame had marked her for the next step in creating the ward. The blaze made her feel comforted and she didn't want to rise and leave it, especially to venture out of her doors as she had to do now. Here it was safe and secure for now; out there was the possibility that what she kindled this blaze against was laying in wait. It had to be done though, the long vanished fires kiss would not remain for very long after this and she would need it to form the ward itself. Four directions, four sigils that incorporated each of the elements as well as the cardinal directions needing to be created to define the boundaries of the ward she was trying to summon into being. At each of them she paused and once she was certain that this was where it needed to be she clawed at her injured hand until the ichor and blood and fluid that welled from it flowed freely. With that brand of ink she wrote the runes that would protect all within the borders that she was claiming now. After each sigil was formed she allowed the fluid to drip onto the aethereal soil itself and sink into it. It smoked as it did so as if a glowing coal had been flung into a snow bank and instead of extinguishing it; the snow instead became its fuel. Each one that she wrote flared briefly into life and then settled into a roiling faint glow. The poem she wrote with her wounded hand stretched and curved around the house. She could feel some of her own life essence departing with it as well, but she expected that. That was part of the price that she needed to pay to form this defense and if it kept the dark man away from her then it was cheaply purchased in her estimation. The last drops fell from her hand and linked the circle. The weeping wounds started faded from her flesh and she saw the connection being made. There was only one thing remaining for her now. To link the older ward into the stronger one. It was the older ward that would inform this one what it should bar from entry; anything that was rooted firmly in the aether and the dark man specifically. She made her way to the Florida room. The center of her ward was there where she placed it, in the base of the brick brazier. It was an aethereal representation of who and what she was that was anchored there as the heart of her protective circle. She looked down into where it lay, intangible in the brick that surrounded it and reached for it. The last of the weeping wound that was rapidly closing bathed the icon that was the symbol of her center and forged the connection between the two. The shivering, shimmering glow of the ward became more solid and gleamed with renewed strength. She felt the power moving back and forth between the two as they were linked and intertwined. It was done. She passed out of the walls and stepped back far enough to survey what she had done. All along the framework of the house, the energy from the protective circle was flowing inward. Where it reached the house it flowed upward until each millimeter of the house's exterior was covered by its mark. When the house was bathed in the touch of the circle around her she saw its edges begin to rise upward, climbing up to form as a slightly oval dome that met just over the ridgeline of the roof. When it met and formed a completed circuit, the dome flared to its full strength and then retreated back down to its anchor points. It would lie in wait now unseen and undetected unless something its template guarded against approached. The smaller ward still lay active around the Florida room but it was no longer the sole line of defense; it was a tripwire. Cecil heaved a deep sigh of relief. There was now a much stronger surprise waiting for the dark man if he came for her and if nothing else she now had a refuge that she could know was as secure as she could make it. For the first time in a week she felt like she might be able to take the chance of relaxing. But there was still more to do before she left. There was the twisting of her aethereal form to repair and reverse. She had no intention of remaining as he had made her into physically for one moment longer than she needed to. She wanted her own body back, not this toy he made of her for his own purposes. To do that she would need her body in the material world. According to what she had discovered if you were to link with that while you were in the aether you could use both of your halves to snap yourself back to what you should be. Her body as it was in the material world was the template since it was closer to how she had been before. It could only be altered slowly when it was forced against its grain as he had done to her. Using that she could unify both halves of her and erase his changes. Maybe it was sorcery after all, she mused as she walked through the wall and wondered how he would look as a frog, but she would call it Alonzo the break dancing chimp if that's what it wanted, so long as she was returned to who she was supposed to be. She looked down at her body lying limp where she had left it and froze. All this time since she had been driven from the aether in terror she had not even seen and truly understood what she was. Separated from her physical form though and looking down on it she gazed in stunned amazement and realized that while the form was male and she had spent the last week automatically doing things in the male way she had always done them; the entire time she had been incapable of even thinking of herself as male at all. Even looking down at her own form, the physical evidence that it was so could not get her to think of herself as anything other than female. No matter how she tried to envision herself as whom she knew she had been the very concept was lacking in her. There was nothing in her that resonated in her mind and the concept of maleness itself as it applied to her seemed murky, ill understood and absent. He took it she realized, that is what he tore from me, which is why it hurt so much. He took the central pillar of who I was and smashed it until there was nothing left of it. He smashed it and then cleared the rubble away so that not even a trace of it remained. She should feel more horror of the idea than she did, but no longer having knowledge of what it even was that was gone left even that feeling hollow and empty. "And he's taken even that from me as well," She said to herself bitterly. Because of his actions she couldn't even begin to grasp the enormity of what it was that was gone. But it had to be something that she could reverse she reasoned to herself. That was one of the constants that she had figured out; rules bent, but they didn't break. Nothing here needed to be permanent. She would need power to do this she reasoned, to rebuild herself from the foundations. When she tried to strengthen the tree to make it denser against him, the voice had told her to stop her efforts because that what she was doing could only be felt in the material world. That action may not have helped her as she intended it too then, but it could be what she needed now. And thinking of the tree she had sheltered in during her escape, she felt strangely, absolutely compelled to look in its direction. Even with the walls between them blocking out her view, she knew exactly where it was. It drew her gaze with the same surety as a compass needle was drawn by magnetic north. The aether flickered and the walls fell away briefly, she couldn't see the tree now in this snapshot, but she knew it was there and looking in a direction unimpeded by the walls that were actually there she felt a need to go there again that she couldn't explain. She shook off the feeling, but it was not as easy for her as that. The desire still lingered now that it has arisen and if not for her fear of traversing the aether she might have given into the desire. She drove it down into herself though and anchored the need to go with the thought that once she was out of the aether she would go then, when she was safer; it helped that as much as she suddenly felt a desire to go there the idea of doing so in the aether also filled her with dread. Later then, she promised herself and turned back to her body lying on the brick of the Florida room. She lay down and sank into it, but unlike when she did that to exit the aether she didn't allow herself to fill up the empty vessel of her body; she maintained her aethereal form intact. She concentrated on shifting herself back to her default form. It should have been an easy thing to do; every time she had made a change in the aether she was able to reverse it with only the exercise of her will, but not this time. This time it felt like she was being resisted in some fashion. For some reason she had a vision of getting error 404 on the screen and wanting to aethereally slam her hands against the keyboard in frustration. She thought about it and tried again. That was what she did. This time she felt like there was a barely perceptible shifting and she thought that this might be all that she needed to do. Once it started it would continue she hoped, but the feeling faded away and when she rose she found her aethereal form was still unchanged. She had no intention of letting the dark man beat her. She lay back down and concentrated anew, but this time she reached down into the resting energy beneath her and began to draw it up into herself. If she could just get it to begin moving in the right direction then it should continue to do so until the changes that he forced on her were reversed. The first law of motion was her ally here. Her form might be at rest now. but she was acting on it and if there were any more of an unbalanced force then what she was summoning, then she had no idea what it could be. It came rushing faster to her this time, like it was waiting for her to call it. The energy gathered in her filling her until she felt that she could no longer hold it without giving direction to what it was that she had summoned any longer. She reached out to her physical form and formed the conduit again. As the energy flowed, channeled through her she concentrated on her physical form and willed her aethereal one to move into harmony with it. She felt something break free, like an iceberg calving from a glacier and felt a moment of triumph. She was certain that she had done it now. She had broken the inertia holding her form static and now it was finally in motion at last. All it took was a long enough lever and you could move the world they said. Well she had access to a lever the size of a world and she intended to use it to balk the intentions of the dark man. She was going to be whole now, she was certain of it. She felt it settle and sink into the direction that she willed it into. She wasn't sure how she felt it, but she did and when she did she ceased to draw from the earth around her any longer. Undirected she felt it hesitate now that it no longer had a direction to flow into and then she could almost see it leaving her body as it subsided back into its resting form beneath her. She sat up expecting to see herself restored and felt her heart fall as her unchanged aethereal form broke above the surface of her material flesh. She had failed utterly it seemed and she had been so utterly certain that she had succeeded. But even the scale of the effort that she could marshal to correct what had been forced on her was just not up to the task of doing so it seemed. She was going to need help. One thing that she was certain of though, when she explained the full details of what she had only hinted about before, she would likely set the whole lotus explorers site on fire. Very few of her cohorts there were as advanced as she was in their explorations, but there were a few. She was a firm believer in the power of combined minds and now that her own effort had come up short she had no hesitation in her about immediately trawling for additional brainpower. She would just have to put up with the inevitable cracks that some of them were pathologically driven to make. Today was a mixed bag she decided. The biggest win was that there was not even a hint of the dark man anywhere around her the entire time she was in the aether. She had been able to set the ward and rig it the way she wanted to, one thing was certain about that, if the dark man did try to test it he might end up doing a good imitation of a musk ox with a two-twenty volt line rammed up its back door when he crossed its boundary. This part though, this was a disappointment, but she hadn't been able to make the level of progress she had so far by letting a setback keep her from coming back for another crack at it later. She'd have to just go back and see what she needed to know to try differently and then come back at it again later from another angle. This had been good for her she decided. Being driven out of the aether the way she had had been a psychic gut punch of the worst sort and after she had forced herself to take the step of going back inside, she felt that she might, just might, be able to face coming back here again with something like the feeling that she had for this place before all of this had happened. One thing was certain though, once she was somewhat certain that she had reversed all of what the dark man had done, she was going to make it her personal mission to track him down and deal with him. She lay back down in the pillow of her flesh and released her hold on the aether. She felt her body moving in time with her spirit and remained stretched out with her eyes closed. This had been a particularly heavy dose of lotus and she couldn't expect to just sit up like she usually did after she came out of it. She felt the movement of her chest as the breathing movement it naturally made synchronized with her spirit and she held herself there until she no longer felt disconnected. She raised herself from the floor and sat up, her right leg drawing back. She raised her hand to rub at her eyes and had to shift the hair out of the way before she could do so. As her eyes opened she blinked at the brightness of the sunlight flooding into the room. She looked down and saw that, contrary to what she thought inside the aether there had indeed been a significant change to her body while she was trying to reverse what had been done to her. The thin black line that had been steadily creeping up towards her inner elbow had thickened and twisted now into a vine like pattern and just in the pit of her inner elbow what appeared to be a small budding had appeared. She tried to twist her elbow to get a better view of it, but it was hard to see clearly upside down. Was that a rose? She wondered, it sure suggested one. Why would this have even done that? Could it be connected to the voice she had heard she wondered? Whatever it was the first thing to do was to get a better look at it, but not until she had looked over the warding outside. If she had done it right then it should be clearly visible. She stretched and shuffled to her feet. The shorts that she was wearing felt tighter so maybe that was a good sign. Maybe the changes she tried to force would flow in reverse instead of the way she had expected them to do so. It might be possible she thought as she opened her back door and went through it. After all she had never been even remotely in this kind of situation before and it was all virgin territory to her. And she reminded herself that she was using her physical form as the template to alter her aethereal form this time instead of the other way around. She looked up at the house and smiled in satisfaction. The trim had shifted into a blue grey green color and the same color now spread over the back door as well. A quick glance around at the front of the house showed that the wide porch ceiling now was colored in a similar fashion as well as the steps leading up to it. Each window's trim and shutters were blocked to intruders by the color change as well and best of all anyone looking at it now would just think that she had arranged for a paint job as a change of scenery and not even think that there was anything more to it than that. She went inside the house and reflexively locked the outside doors behind her. The upstairs bathroom had the best all around light so that was where she was going. She flicked on the light and moved closer to get a better look at the strange marking that had suddenly changed so much. It wasn't the only thing that had changed she realized as she took in the full image staring back at her in the mirror. As she was in the aether so she now was in the real world. She had intended her actions to bring both her material form and aethereal one into harmony once again and she had succeeded in doing so. It was just not a success that she desired; she realized looking in the glass that she had only succeeded in completely erasing every physical trace of Cecil Barnes from the face and form of the woman in the mirror. The world spun around her and faded into blackness. ----------------------------------------------- There is a stranger's face staring back at me in the mirror now. How could I not have even noticed it until it was right in front of me? How could I not have even felt how differently my body moved and not made the obvious connection until it was staring back at me? I even went outside and was completely was unaware of the difference in how I was before and what I had now become. The change didn't even register to me at all and that was the worst part. While I was in the aether I was aware of the changes and maybe that was what made me not notice the differences when I came out of it. It's over now. He's won. I am what he made me into in body and my spirit will not last long I fear. The shock of looking up and seeing it there right in front of me was too much to take and I passed out. Passed out, no that's wrong. I didn't pass out. I flat out fainted. I fainted and when I finally was conscious again nearly another two days had passed while I was out. Why is that happening to me? Why am I losing consciousness for so long and why can't I sleep? I look like he wanted me to look now. How long before I become whatever it is that he has in mind for me to be? I'm afraid that if that is what's happening that I won't recognize it when it goes to far to stop and if I do and I won't be able to stop it, I might be too far gone to even want to use my shotgun on myself and stop it that way. I don't want to lose being me, but I don't know how to stop this from happening now that I have lost so much of who I am.-The journal of Cecil Barnes. ---------------------------------------- Cecil opened her eyes and looked out of the bathroom into the silent master bedroom. She fixed her focus on the late afternoon light that streamed past her curtains and spilled out onto the floor in front of her. She wondered why she wasn't screaming this time, she should be. She had gone beyond an utter failure when she attempted to restore her deepest sense of self; she had eradicated every trace of who she had been physically before away in favor of someone else's vision of who she was to be. Cecil Barnes was gone without a trace and only this woman that the dark man had crafted from the material that he had been remained. And now it was going to be impossible for her to conceal it from anyone who saw her in the flesh. That was the least of her worries she realized. Her problem wasn't that she couldn't hide it any longer; her problem was what others who saw her now were going to do. She couldn't go to work; no one would know who she was. She couldn't hide out here for long; at the very least Dawn and Richard were due back next Friday and they would demand to know what this stranger was doing in the house and most importantly she couldn't leave. This was the only place that she had that was even remotely safe from the shadowy man. She had only one choice, she had to reverse this somehow and laying there on the cool tile of the bathroom floor she had absolutely no idea if that was even possible. She rolled over and tried to ignore the physical feelings of her body in motion. One thing was certain. She wouldn't find out anything by lying on the master bathroom floor. The lotus explorer's forum it seemed was waiting her return with bated breath. Word had spread in her absence of something serious happening to CecilB and that right now she was squeezing every one of their brains to find a solution. Almost as annoying as the immediate disbelief that she was telling the truth when she said she had been changed physically in this way was the even more creepy response that a couple of members had. Those ones sent invitations to private chat rooms that wanted nothing to do with discussing her problem and everything to do with satisfying their own voyeuristic impulses. The only silver lining in that complete waste of her time was that the ones doing that were mostly recent additions or hadn't been that active that long. The ones she wanted to talk to, the ones she considered her peers here listened closely to what she had to say and didn't dismiss her out of hand. A woman who went by the handle Juliebgud was particularly interested in having her detail her state of mind. At first, Cecil thought that her interest had nothing to do with her actual change, but it turned out that she was leaning toward the idea that if the physical was an illusion projected by the mind, then what she should focus on was reversing not the changes to her body but the changes to how she thought. That held a disturbingly amount of merit when Cecil thought about it and she asked her for suggestions if she had any. She didn't then but she did promise that she would see what she could dig up and she would get back to her as soon as she had anything. With that direction of investigation temporarily out of bounds Cecil reluctantly logged off and started web crawling on her own. Sometime in the midst of trying to run down leads that might help her deal with this she stepped back from it and logged onto Maxintell's remote site. She hadn't been heard from for nearly two days when she woke again. She had gone over what they needed to focus on with her team already but it was late Thursday night now and she had to make up for her online absence. Not being able to point to something productive while she was away from the office was one of the surest ways that she could think of to get a visit from someone she couldn't duck. And once they laid eyes on her, then her real troubles would begin; or at least something that she would have considered real trouble before she gained a completely different understanding of the concept. She navigated her way to her online access point and started pulling up what she needed to buy her some time from eyes she would rather avoid for the time being. She found her starting point and got to work. ------------------------------------- Cecil pushed back from the computer screen and stared at it in dull incredulity. Forty hours straight when she only meant to do ten wasn't what was spawning that reaction. The incredibly dense code she'd written wasn't what did it either. She'd done both of them before, but the thing was she had never done them together, not like this she hadn't. By rights what her experience told her she had produced should have taken her nearly two hundred hours of work by itself and she should have collapsed into sleep deprived delirium as well by now. That neither of these outcomes had come to pass was not what caused her reaction though. She had never experienced being able to mentally process and lay out software architecture like this before. It was more like she was speaking machine language rather than hammering out code. It was the cleanest work she had ever done as well in her opinion. She knew, she didn't think, she knew that it would do exactly as it was intended to do without errors, bugs or glitches and that was something that she had never done ever. Human error was always a constant factor. A missed keystroke, a bad line command or just a badly conceived intention for what it was you wanted it to do would be all that was needed to send a project into a death spiral that would consume countless hours trying to track down the source of the problem and start the process of correcting it before it was a nightmare of even bigger proportions. She had apparently done two impossible things when she sat down this time though. She had erased her workload entirely and she had done it in record time. Three things actually, she had done it with zero errors. As she saved her work to a remote backup and logged out she thought again of her idea that being in the aether might be making her smarter in some way, or if not making her smarter it was enabling her to process data in a faster, more certain fashion. This would seem to argue that was the case and right now she didn't want to rock that particular boat since there was at least one part of this change was seemed to be working in her favor. A quick check of the lotus explorer's forum page again yielded her little good news. Most were as stumped as she was over her problems and they had little to add to what she already knew. Online research into topics that might shine a little more light on what she was experiencing here were also petering out. Either she had finally started to exhaust what it was that she could find out this way or she had somehow managed to slam into a dead end at full speed and didn't know how to extract herself from the wreckage. Whatever it was she was pretty certain that she wasn't going to find the answers she was looking for this way and as she stared at the black screen of her computer she wondered where it was that she should be looking for solutions. Unfortunately the first thought that rose in her mind was in the aether itself, but even with her boost in confidence she had no intention of going there unless she absolutely had to right now. She sat in her locked bedroom looking past her now dormant computer out of the window into the still bright light of early evening and wondered what step was left for her to take now. There had to be answers to this somewhere even if for the time being she was still asking the wrong questions. Or was it instead she was asking the right questions to the wrong answer? As she tried to think it through she tried spinning in her chair as she did so. Sometimes just the slow movement of such a juvenile action was enough by itself to redirect her thoughts and jump her mental track onto a possible solution, but she wasn't seeing it this time. Or was she? Somehow, without consciously intending to, every time her chair stopped she was facing toward the direction of the big elm, just like a compass needle settling in and finding magnetic north after being jostled about. She looked through the walls toward the king tree and even though she couldn't see it from inside of the house she knew exactly where it was. She was more aware of it that she was of almost any other thing around her she realized She remembered the sensation of how it felt to have her attention drawn in that exact direction while she was in the aether and realized that was what she was feeling right now was the same as well. And now that she was aware of it she couldn't keep her attention away from it. It was like being aware of a loose tooth, without conscious thought your tongue would be drawn to it to wiggle and worry at it; you wouldn't be able to stop yourself from doing it and only going too far and pushing it out by accident would end that fascination with it. She had to go to the clearing beneath the king elm she decided. There was something there that was part of this and now that she wasn't in the aether it was definitely safer for her to go now than any another time. Dusk was only a few hours away. She didn't know if she would have the courage to enter the forest after dark when the shadows lengthened and swallowed the light, but if there was a time to go then it would have to be now. There weren't likely to be that many people out who would catch sight of her right now. It was Saturday afternoon and most of those who were amongst her more active neighbors were already out and about. The rest were either still at work or focused inward on their own concerns. No one would pay attention to her going for a walk in the woods and if someone did it was more likely that they would be paying attention to what it was that she looked like rather than wondering what she was doing. There was a problem with that though. Now that her physical form had shrank and reformed to match her aethereal one, there was little that she had on hand that would suit her needs as far as clothing was concerned and while she would garner only passing attention in her neighbors were she dressed casually, that would not be the case if she walked out of the house naked. That would be like lighting a torch, blowing a trumpet and walking down the street shooting off roman candles with every step. There was no possible way that it could be done without drawing attention to her under those circumstances. If she was going to do this she needed to find something that would at least do a passable job in making her as unobtrusive as possible clothing wise. The solution to her problem it turned out centered on two things. Elastic and cotton. She found a pair of running shorts down in the recesses of her gym bag that had both a drawstring and an elastic band that would suit her needs in covering her without her looking like a blind clown. The shirt was a little tougher of a solution. Almost everything that she had hung on her like a tent and looking at herself in the mirror the first thought that came to mind was a child that was using her parents t-shirt as a nightgown. It took a lot of digging and throwing unsuitable rejects onto the bed before she found an older shirt that was not so baggy that she couldn't knot it around her midriff in a way that didn't seem too out of character with the physical form of the young woman she now was. Shoes were a lost cause though, even the flip flops that were in the closet were just too overgrown to be of any use to her and as for trying to stuff anything in one of her other pairs of shoes to make up the difference in size that was just not worth even trying. No matter how tightly she laced them, no matter how many socks she stuffed into the empty spaces she didn't think she would even get out of the house before she just stepped out of the shoes entirely so she didn't even bother with them. That may not even be as much of a problem she thought as she pondered just what she could do. A lot of people around here did go barefoot from time to time. Not in the depth of summer of course, the pavement was just too hot to do that then, but this was just the waning of spring so she might be able to get away with it. She tossed the few things that she would need into an old fanny pack that she could draw tight enough so that it wouldn't hang on her like some banditos bandolier and slipped out of the back door. A few houses down there was an empty house that didn't have a fence barring access to the woodlot behind the row of houses. She could slip through there and make her way where she needed to go mostly unseen. ---------------------------------- She was fairly certain that she had been seen by a couple of her neighbors as she strolled out from behind her house and with a forced leisurely stride made her way down the driveway to the concrete sidewalk in front of her house. Her bare feet slapped on the pavement and the warmth that had been transferred into it by the sunny day felt good to her. When she reached the house she had in mind to use to make her way into the woodlot she casually ducked across the yard and walked past the house itself as if she had every right to do so and into the woodlot. She reached the edge of the thin forest a few minutes later and started to make her way through the forest to the elm. As she entered she could hear the faint hooping of a whippoorwill echoing around her. The deeper in the forest she went the thicker it started to become. It wasn't impassable, but it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination open. Some of the smaller thinner trees had been knocked down by high winds from hurricanes past and were still leaning at low angles in places. Fallen leaves had caught in their dead dry branches and the ones that had been down the longest were humped with forest debris. Younger trees weren't the only victims of the wind; there was one particularly large log that she would have to step over to get to the clearing. The tree itself had died and remained upright for a few years before the strong winds had pushed it beyond what the weakened trunk could bear; finally toppling it to fall and lie in slowly decomposing glory across the path she needed to take to get the elm's clearing. She picked her way up over the bulk of the fallen log and stepped down trying to avoid setting her bare foot on any sharp branches that were concealed in the fallen leaves. She stepped down and froze into immobility. Behind her, just inside a slight depression formed from where rain had washed out some of the earth from under the tree, came a harsh brittle buzzing sound that made her blood run cold. The dry whirring sound was as unmistakable as it was heart freezing and the only thing that Cecil could do was wait for the strike of the snake that made it. It was a strike that never came though. As suddenly as it began the whirring began to ease and then it ceased altogether. Cecil held her eyes closed and waited to feel the heavy punch of the snake's fangs impacting, hooking and extending into her flesh to pump gouts of its lethal brew of hemotoxins into her bare unprotected limbs; but the snake it seemed was uninterested in doing so. She forced her eyes to open and looked down by her feet. It was just behind where she had placed her foot climbing down from the log. It coiled there right in the center of the depression. Thick fat coils of muscular spring waiting for the reptile mind that directed them to slash them forward in venomous efficiency. The heavy wedge shaped head rested on the coils and as she looked the forked tongue flicked out and probed in her direction tasting her. It was at least a meter, possibly a meter and a half long. The scales were a dusky yellow with heavy dark vee shaped bands that pointed in the direction of its long rattle. She recognized it even if she had never seen one in the wild before, it was a timber rattlesnake, one of the most venomous snakes in the area and an especially big one to boot. The snake regarded her almost as if she were not even there. She knew that it knew she was there; its initial warning rattle made that abundantly clear. Now though it was not in the least bit threatening. It was coiled and ready to strike, but it apparently had no interest in doing so. The vertical slits of its eyes regarded her intently as if waiting for her to decide what the two of them should do now that it had refrained from punishing her for her intrusion of its space. "Go away," she whispered urgently. "Just go away." The snake immediately moved into smooth liquid motion. She felt the dry smoothness of its scales as it moved over her feet and it took every ounce of willpower that she possessed to not move as it did so. The snake started to head in the direction of the elm and Cecil groaned as it did so. "Oh no, not over there," she said without thinking. The snake immediately changed direction and disappeared into the underbrush and was gone from sight in mere moments. Cecil's heart would not stop hammering and she had to sit down on the log behind her a moment before she lost all ability to stand upright. "That didn't just happen," She said to herself in denial, even though she knew that it had. "I've got to be dreaming or crazy," she said to herself. She looked down at her unharmed foot and decided that it had to be something else, but what it could be that would cause such an uncharacteristic response from such a creature completely eluded her. "What was I thinking doing this?" She asked herself, but that answer was already there for her. She was answering a call that reverberated somewhere deep inside of her. It drew her onwards and she had neither the inclination nor the desire to ignore that particular call. Still a little shaky from her unexpected encounter with the rattler she forced herself to her feet and started picking her way more carefully through the woodlot towards the elm. Just because one of its kind had not deigned to bite her didn't mean another wouldn't. The thick brush began to thin and then clear as she approached the big elm; as she remembered it doing from coming here in the aether this part of the forest was almost unobstructed by underbrush. The dense canopy overhead saw to that. It was not completely barren of ground cover, but neither was there much chance that the plants hardy enough to challenge the king elm would be very successful in claiming much of the clearing for themselves anytime soon. She walked up to its thick trunk and looked upward into the wide spreading branches overhead. She should have felt anxiety over being here again. She thought that she would when she was walking here, but rather the opposite was what she felt. Once she was under the elm itself she felt a sense of safety; as if there was nothing that could really happen to her here, even if what she experienced before screamed otherwise. She couldn't explain it but there it was; a sense of security that came over her and comforted her in its invisible presence all around her. She let her gaze move down from the crown of leaves overhead to the solidity of the tree in front of her. "I'm here," she whispered almost hesitantly and even as she spoke the words there was no expectation of a response in her. It just seemed the right thing to say. ------------------------------ I can't explain just what it was that I felt there. The words came to me and they rang in my head but looking back I can't recall actually hearing any of them. I have to be going crazy. I haven't slept in a week even if I have been unconscious for part of that time. I haven't eaten at all and I've barely drank anything even water. That I'm losing my mind is the only reasonable explanation left to me. I'm hearing things that can't possibly be there and seeing things that didn't really happen and the truly frightening part is that even as I write this it feels that all I'm really doing is denying the evidence of my own senses, but what can you do when what you see and hear and do and experience contradicts what your mind tells you shouldn't be possible? You call yourself crazy, that's what you do, but the thing about being crazy is that sometimes it means that you are saner than you have ever been in your life.-The journal of Cecil Barnes. --------------------------------- "Are you there?" she asked the empty air around her. The only answer to her question was silence punctuated only by the sweet trilling of the evening birdsong, the faint sighing of the wind moving in the leaves overhead and the stillness that came from the trees themselves on the edge of the woodlot blocking and filtering out the sounds of the muffled city around her. She waited for an answer, but none came to her. She asked again and still there was no trace of the voice that she had heard deep in the aether. Maybe she couldn't hear it here she wondered. Maybe the only place where it was possible to do that was in the one place she didn't dare to go into outside of her protective ward. And maybe it was all in her head to begin with. Just an incoherent fixation that was seized on by a mind in crisis as a drowning sailor would grasp at a broken spar. She sank against the tree, almost in the same spot that she had used to enter it and make her escape. Her head fell into her hands, the long black tresses of her hair spilling over them and falling over her bare knees. "I imagined it all," she said to no one in particular. "I must have been talking to myself is all. There wasn't really a voice there at all; it was probably my subconscious the whole time. It couldn't have been real." Even as she spoke the words some deep recess inside her told her that wasn't true. Her sub consciousness might have recognized that what she was attempting to do in the aether was futile, but it wouldn't have suggested that she do what she had done afterward. But how does insanity feel when you are the one who is insane? How would she even know anything was true at all? Was she dreaming this whole time? Was anything that she had even done even occurring at all? "I imagined it all," she told herself again and if that was true then there was nothing for her here; nothing that could aid her and nothing that could protect her. "I wish I wasn't crazy," she said raising her head and throwing it back against the hard bark of the elm in frustration. Her head impacted with and crossed the thick skin of the tree and from there passed deep into the wood behind her. Before she realized fully what had happened she had sunk into the trunk behind her down to her lowest rib. There was a drawing sensation and Cecil felt the remainder of her body swiftly follow in the wake of the opening she had inadvertently created when she entered the tree. Her feet slipped silently past the outer layer of bark and after they had disappeared there was nothing there to mark that she had even been here at all, but a pile of rumpled clothing and a small fanny pack. A root lifted over the physical evidence that she had come and covered it from sight and the silence of the clearing resumed as if it had never been any other way. ------------------------------ Darkness, total and blinding enveloped her. There was not even the hint that light was something that had ever existed; light was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, it was something that had never existed except in her own mind. It was as much an illusion as her limbs, as her tongue or any part of the body that she couldn't feel a trace of around her consciousness. But this darkness was not the home where horrors were birthed. This was true darkness. It surrounded and suspended her and in its clasp she felt no unknown danger approaching. There was nothing here that sought to harm her. This was not like the foul darkness that the dark man had subjected her to in his forge; this was a darkness that shielded and protected her. It was a darkness not unlike the darkness of a womb and floating in it she felt no fear. "Who are you?" she called into the darkness around her. There was not any response and she thought that maybe her mind was just trying to assign meaning to something that was happening in a futile desperation to catalogue it. To categorize and assign it a place in the rational hierarchy that she understood. But that made the least degree of sense of all. There was nothing rational about what was happening to her. The silence remained absolute for a moment that stretched as far as the mind could envision and somewhere in that moment a whisper came to her faintly, delicately as if carried on the breeze. *A shadow of a memory.* The words were slowly spoken, as if the voice making them was barely able to do so at all. "A shadow?" she repeated feeling a surge of involuntary fear leaping inside of her as she remembered the shadowed man and what he had done to her. "You can't just be a shadow. You're more than that I know you are. You have to be." *A whisper of something long passed from this place. The voice of an echo of what once was here and no longer is,* the voice had continued speaking, not taking note of what she said. "How can you be any of that?" she begged. "I don't understand." *This voice was remembered because trees remember, the land remembers; but the voice I speak to you with is of one nearly forgotten. It faded from this world long ago and its knowledge faded with it.* "But I spoke with you then. I'm speaking to you right now," she pleaded. "How can you be forgotten if I can do that?" *You speak with a memory. You hear what those who still hold the memory close to them think that memory would say. But it is only an echo passing down through the generations. The source of the echo faded from here so very long ago. And all its number faded with it.* "No you're not gone. You can't be gone just like that," she insisted desperately. "I heard you before, I'm hearing you now. You helped me before, I need you to help me again." *A whisper helped you. An echo that remembered that a voice that once was helped you. A longing that mourns its absence is all you heard. A reflection of a memory long vanished helped you.* "How can I speak with you if that is all that there is to you?" *The heart, the heart that joins us,* the voice answered. "Are you the elm?" she asked hesitantly. "Is that what I'm talking to?" "I am a nexus of the life that stands in this place. I am the life that you took into yourself. I am the life that is part of you." "Why did you tell me to do that? Why did you tell me to take the heart into my own?" she asked. *You were wounded, grievously wounded, you needed to be healed. Healing you was the only way to help you. The only way to honour the memory.* "I was wounded," Cecil said feeling a tear swell and roll down one cheek in the inky existence that surrounded her. "So wounded. Without you I'd be wounded still. But why me? Why heal me?" *Your touch woke me. What you did in the aether drew and fixed my gaze to you. I have never known that touch, but my kind remembers those that once bestowed it.* "Are there others?" she asked hopefully. *They faded from here, they faded and were almost forgotten even by us the life that remained; until you reminded me of those who Chronos swallowed ages ago.* "I need you," she pleaded. "I need your help. He's coming for me soon. I can feel it and I don't know how it's possible for me to stop him. Please...please help me," she begged. *I have no help to give.* the voice of the elm said sadly. *All that I could do I have done. I have given everything to you to honour a voice silent long before I came to be. There is nothing left.* "There has to be something," she said, "there has to be." ------------------------------------------- A bird was singing. Faint and just a bare hint of melody that split the silence of the pre dawn gloom. She raised her head from the leaves beneath her and looked up to see the faint lightening of the sky that peeked through the trees. The deepest part of the night was past and rosy fingered dawn was stretching out her hand preparing to paint the sunrise for another day. She raised herself up and felt the weight of her body shift off of where her breasts pressed flat against the earth and then that sensation was replaced by the sensation of cool night air bathing them. She was sprawled naked beside the elm and she didn't know how long she had been laying there, at least the length of a night, that much was certain. She shifted her torso up and leaned back with her folded legs gathered underneath her. Dried leaves drifted down as they fell from her and she looked around out of reflex to see if there was anyone here watching her. Near where her bare feet rested, just at the base of the trees roots were her clothes in a huddled pile still damp from the morning dew that had soaked into them overnight. The soft sweet notes of an early morning birdsong echoed around her somehow piercing the stillness of the predawn forest. She had to get back; she couldn't stay out here as exposed as she was. There were too many shadows all around her. She felt the prickle of the leaves beneath her naked flesh and looked down to see her pale naked skin glaring back at her with its almost luminous contrast against the dark leaves scattered on the forest floor. She couldn't go the way she was either she realized and reached for the nearly sodden clothes to pull them on. There was no one awake on the circle it seemed. Not yet anyway. If anyone saw her then they didn't draw attention to the fact that they had. Maybe someone did see her and only thought that she was a new renter that liked late evening and early morning strolls. She stepped onto the concrete of the sidewalk and made her way down the road toward her house. Its dark windows glared out at the street in contrast to the bright illumination of the past few days. She felt something soft splatter underneath one of her bare feet and when she looked down she saw that she had trodden on a worm that had risen in the predawn hours and had crawled out onto the sidewalk in the company of several of its kind. She wiped her foot on the wet grass and tried to avoid stepping on any more of them as she made her way back to the rear entrance of her house. The ward that she had placed started to flare at her approach and then, perhaps recognizing who she was subsided and sank back into the earth. She wondered why it had even done that. As far as who she was the ward should not have activated at all. Cecil unlocked the rear door and before she opened it listened intently. She was feeling spooked again for some reason and she realized as she was listening for intruders who might be waiting inside to waylay her that it was because she was feeling more exposed than she expected to be. That was something that didn't make very much sense to her. If anything she should be feeling more secure. She was well within the boundaries of the ward she had created and if anyone was in the house more than likely it would be intruders of a more mundane sort then what she was trying to protect herself from. She didn't hear either though and relented enough to carefully open the door and slip into the dark kitchen and close the door behind her. Her sense of wariness didn't subside though, for some reason being in these walls, inside the ward felt too confining for her. She reached for the light and flipped it on. For a half second she almost expected that the dark man would be waiting for her inside the kitchen, but there was nothing there but an empty room. Why am I feeling so vulnerable she asked herself but for the life of her she couldn't come up with an answer for that question. The shotgun was where she had left it right beside the door, she quickly checked it to see if it was as she left it and found that it was. She'd really wanted to bring it with her when she had gone into the woodlot, but regardless of her trepidation at being without it she didn't want someone to see her carrying it around in public like that and call the cops. She had no answers for whatever questions they would have for her. She was a ghost. No not a ghost. Being a ghost implied that she was someone before she became a ghost. What she was she didn't even have a word for. Nothing of what Cecil Barnes was could be matched to her that she knew of. And the best she could have hoped for was for them to throw her into a mental ward if they didn't just skip to locking her up in jail for whatever crimes they could hang on her for inhabiting her house and being in a form that didn't match her right to be there. So she had left it behind and now that she had it back in her hands again it didn't comfort her the way it had before. She slowly went from room to room flicking on the lights and checking that things were as they should be. Doing that reminded her of what she had done right after she had escaped from the dark man and remembering that didn't do much for how she felt right now. She did relax a bit when she went into the great room. In the fireplace she could see the anchor point of her ward burning and that eased her mind. What she would have done if she had looked into the hearth and seen empty bricks she had no idea and the fact that she could see it now should have been of concern to her, but she was just too happy to see it there. She made her way upstairs and finished checking the house, by the time she was done the entire structure was as brightly lit as it had been for the past several days. She reached for her phone where she had left it on the computer desk and thumbed it. It came up right away, but what she saw there wasn't right. According to this it was Monday morning and somehow she had lost another two days. ------------------------------------------ The mark is bigger now than it was before I left. I can see clearly what it is even upside down. It's a winding rose stem; it starts around my left wrist and moves around it in loops around my arm as it climbs all the way up to my inner elbow. There is some kind of budding flower there I can clearly see now, before there was only a hint of it, but now it is clearly the tightly gathered bud of a rose. There are leaves and thorns on it as well. Is this something that happened because of what I did when I went into the forest? I have no idea but the only thing that I am sure of is that whatever this means is that it is almost complete now. It's almost complete and the only thing I can think of is what happens after it is. I was gone longer than I expected to be and now something may have come from me doing that. I don't know what that something is, but I still can't find it in me to look at what happened in the woodlot and blame it for this. I don't know what to do. -The journal of Cecil Barnes ----------------------------- There were several e-mails and a lot more texts than she could count waiting for her. Most of them were from work, Raymond it seemed was wondering where she was. The block of work she had done before had been enough to keep their interest at bay, but her lack of contact had been disturbing to him. She had always had a good relationship with him, it wasn't solely based on what she could do, but it seemed from the tone of the messages that he was sending that he was more than a little confused at her silence over the last couple of days. She had no idea what she could tell him, she didn't think that if she told him that she had spent the last two days inside of a tree that he would understand that she was speaking literally. And if he did understand that was the case he probably wouldn't take it very well. It was more likely that he would think that the hours that she had pulled had pushed her over the edge in some way, but then that was small potatoes compared to how much she had changed since she had seen him last. She didn't think that he would believe her then either. She sent him a message letting him know that she had some unexpected personal issues to deal with and that was why she couldn't keep him in the loop right now. She was pushing her luck with that. It was a fragile, transparent cover and would fall over with a strong breeze. What she needed were answers. She needed to find some way of reversing what had been done. The problem was that even if she had put Raymond off all that meant was that she was just buying time on credit that she was rapidly exhausting. As comforting as going to the clearing around the elm had been, it had given her few answers as to how she might be able to deal with the dark man. She had severely underestimated him when she met him. The containment sphere that he had used to capture her and render her unable to even think let alone resist was simple in its purpose, but as she knew all too well; highly effective. The thing about it that she realized was that in practice it was little different from the wings that she had made; both of them had to have been formed from the resting energy of the aether. While she looked for options in her online sources it seemed a little farfetched that something like that would even function at all, but that didn't take into account how the rules in the aether could be bent. As she considered how he could do such a thing she thought of something else. Because of what she had experienced at his hands it was easy to think of him as larger than life. It was easy to think of him as powerful, but what if that wasn't the case at all? It was the rattlesnake that she had placed her foot in front of that got her to thinking along those lines. When it operated within the areas that it was superior in, the timber rattler was incredibly dangerous. It had a potent venom, it's size gave it a great deal of strength to deliver it and the manner in which it struck gave it a great deal of range, but each of these things could be neutralized or countered if you were aware of them. Antivenin could deal with the venom under the right circumstances and however strong it was it could still be overpowered and regardless of how far it could reach with its strike that could be defeated with snake proof clothing and a long stick to keep it far away and immobilize it. Clutched in a long snake catching pole it was helpless and as long as the handler knew what they were doing there was little that the serpent could do to counter it. It should be the same with the dark man as well. He wasn't all powerful, he couldn't be. She had been living on a razor's edge the entire time since he had walked away. As his absence extended and moved into first a week and then beyond, it had to mean some sort of limitation didn't it? She asked herself. It was easy to ascribe how he stayed away from her as part of his plan; he had clearly demonstrated that he had a taste for mental torture during her brief encounter. Now though she had to reconsider that him leaving her alone may be more than just her being played with by him. She thought that he would arrive any second now for days after she had escaped him, but for three times now she had lain helpless unable to do anything and still he had not materialized. Maybe she had put too much stock in the effectiveness of her barrier. Maybe the reason that he had not come was that even though he knew where she was in the real world, maybe he just couldn't come here at all. His accent placed him as either a Stafford native or a long time resident, but that didn't mean that he was here now did it? In her lotus explorers group there were members from all over the world, could he be one of them? Had she perhaps spoken with him before in there? Could it be that the one thing saving her from him was plain physical distance? It was something to consider as a possible explanation. If that was the case then it was still just a matter of time before he came here to finish what he started, but it could mean a limitation and a limitation implied a weakness. The spheres that had proved so devastating to her now that she considered them in a mind not clouded with blind terror, intense pain and utter confusion didn't seem so fearful. It was a sphere, but it may be little more than solidified air that had been held in that form. It may well be that that particular trick might be something that he over relied on as well. What would he do if someone could break them she wondered? Would he just try again? Or did he have other options. Clearly he could pass through objects, but she could do the same and apparently, from what she had just experienced in the clearing around the oak she could do so outside of the aether now; perhaps he could do the same or perhaps not. There had to be something there that she could use, she was sure of it. Now that she could feel her rational mind starting to work he seemed less terrifying to her, but only just a hair less. Perhaps stepping in front of that snake had done her more good than she realized. It had gotten her thinking about weaknesses and one other thing as well. Redundancies. As a software engineer redundancies were something either to be avoided or encouraged depending on the build plan. She had seen him do only three things that were unfamiliar to her when she thought about it. The spheres, forcing her to change this way and whatever it was that he had done that had caused her to be unable to reverse what he had done. It might very well be that was almost all of the tricks that he had. They were effective because like the rattler he struck with little or no warning. She had no idea what he would do if what he was trying to do failed; perhaps he might not be able to do that much at all. It was something she couldn't stop turning over in her mind now that she had latched on to it. There had to be something there she realized and now that she had something to focus on she approached looking for the answer a little differently than she had before. This time she thought that she might have some idea of just how large his Achilles' heel was and if she was right then that gave her cause for thinking that she might have a chance. --------------------------- For the first time in days I think I am thinking clearly. The chance that he might be in the group has made me more wary about sharing information and while I was there it was a much briefer time than before. Instead I've been looking into other things that might have more bearing. The spheres seemed a promising angle but either I don't have enough time or I'm looking in the wrong place. I can't find anything about them that is any better than when I looked for information on them before. There has to be something there that I can use, I know it. But I just don't know what it is. I'm close to something, I know I am but again I don't know what I'm looking for. It's like making those wings all over again and if I can't figure out what I'm missing it might be too late. Whatever it is, I know that time is getting shorter. I don't know how I know this, but I do. Something has changed and whatever it is I can feel it building toward something, something that is coming soon. I need to be ready when it comes and I don't know if I will be. - The journal of Cecil Barnes. ------------------------------------ She was intent on what she was looking at. There was something in the account that she was reading that seemed to suggest something like the dark man's spheres. The person who had written the account said that there was something that was able to keep them from forming but he was very vague in talking about how. She had spent a couple of hours cross referencing and trying to run down another source to see if she could glean something useful from it still. She felt that she was getting close to something. The writer kept saying that it had been turned on itself and by doing so it had been broken, but she couldn't figure out what it was that he meant so far. If only he wasn't so maddeningly vague about it. Of course it wasn't a technical manual, she understood that, but right now she wished that the writer had shown less poetic flair and had just come out and said what he really meant. Before she could start cursing at the long dead writer she felt a shift in the ward around the house. She looked up from the computer screen. It shouldn't be doing that. The only way that the ward could be unstable was if the hearth fire was somehow doused and to do that you needed the key. That was something no one would be getting since the key was tied up in her. It had to mean something else. She stood out and looked out of the window. There down in the street facing the house was a shadowy figure; a figure that wasn't shown clearly by the street lights that were already illuminating the street in Magnolia Circle. ----------------------------------- He's here- The journal of Cecil Barnes ----------------------------------- The dark man stood looking at the house. She hurriedly reached for the shotgun and raced downstairs. It was warm for some reason and it felt hostile to her. She ignored how it felt and shifted her grip to the wooden stock. "Evening, Clever Girl," he said to her from the yard. "So good to see you again, I tell you it just warms my heart to be here." He took off his hat and held it between his hands. "Warms my heart it does. Nothing like being with those who belong to you, yes ma'am, nothing like it. Like being with family it is." Cecil's bare feet pounded on the wooden stairs and as she did she felt her tripwire ward resonating with the dark man's approach. Her own rattlesnake it seemed was starting to buzz to warn the intruder away. "But I think we been apart now long enough clever girl. I still owe you a high ol' time, I haven't forgotten that. No ma'am I have not," he said taking a step closer to her. The pressure from the tripwire ward was increasing, she knew that he was aware of its presence, but he would have no idea of what it presaged. "Oh now clever girl, why you acting so unfriendly now? Didn't I show you a good time before. Let me tell you now, as much fun as that was it don't hold a candle to what I got planned tonight. Yes, ma'am this'll be a night to remember it will," he said to her from the front yard. She felt the tripwire flare into full strength and for a moment she thought she saw him rock back slightly. "Oh I done seen that movie before clever girl," he said to her, "Didn't care for it much the first time. I have to say I didn't, but that don't matter no mind anyhow. A bad rerun won't do much to ruin our special evening. No it won't, besides the show I have in mind is so much better. You'll see. I promise you ain't ever seen anything like it," He gave up the slow pace and started walking steadily toward her front door. One step, two steps only a few more and the real defense would snap into place and the only thing that she had going for her was that it should be able to keep him out. She had an idea of what might work to counter the spheres but it was something she had never tried and it might not work. The shotgun was growing hot in her hand as if she had already fired dozens of rounds already. She could feel the heat starting to radiate through the wood and she couldn't stop to take the time to wonder just why that was. Four steps he was almost there, his next step would be across the threshold. She had a flash of inspiration that made her rush from the window where she was watching him approach. She made it to the hearth just in time to delay it snapping into motion. "Oh clever girl, why are you taking so much time to get ready? You had plenty of time to make yourself up for our date and I got's to say that little ol' ward you got there, well what can I say. I thought better of you than that," he said mocking her. Keep thinking that she thought to herself holding the trap from springing shut. Another step and then another, he was almost to the foot of the porch stairs now. "I tell you it just does my heart good to see all that bright light you have there. Just makes me so welcome it does, knowing that you left a light on to guide me on home now. I was right about you, you gonna be something else, yes you are. But why you being so shy clever girl. Come on out and let me see that clever girl of mine. Come out and play clever girl." His foot was falling toward the first step of the porch stairs now. It impacted on the wood and the heavy sound of it was something she clearly heard just as she released the full ward. "Play with this," she whispered at him. The ward leaped into being at full strength. It lifted him off of his feet slightly and pinned him in the spot that he was standing in. His back arched and his limbs extended in a stiff muscled rictus. His head jerked back until he was looking at the sky and she heard him roar with pain for the first time. Her first ward, the one he had seen before was nothing more than a hollow dome that covered and protected the small area inside of it like the dome on a dessert tray did; this one was not like that one. It may share a dome shape and possess a different color and size, but that was where the two wards parted ways in how they worked. Because it was a hollow dome the first one could be broken through with a strong enough effort and once shattered was useless as a means of protection, but not this one. It was not hollow at all; it was layers of gradually thickening protection that grew denser the further in you were able to penetrate. At first it was easy to enter but step by step, the further that you made it in the thicker that it got until it solidified so much that an intruder was held fast like a fly in amber. Held fast and subjected all the while to excruciating increasing levels of pain, pain tied to the level of their connection to the aether itself. He might be able to shake it off soon, but the deeper he went into her field the more it would constrain him and the more that it would hurt. "You bitch!" he roared at her in the throes of his agony. "I'm gonna make you pay for this!" Cecil wished that she could enjoy seeing him immobilized and paid back a little for what he had done to her, but she couldn't. She was too busy screaming in pain as well. The first wave of it dropped her to the floor and all she could do was shriek as the full weight of the agony the ward held seized control of her nervous system and flooded it with all of the force that it could channel her way. She screamed and twitched trying to get her hands and knees under herself so that she could crawl away from the center of the hearth. She wasn't restrained the way that the dark man was, the ward still recognized her right to be here and didn't impede her, but for some reason it was also channeling the full fury of what it could bring to bear against her. "Problem clever girl?" the dark man said in a straining tone that managed to mock her at the same time. "Little too clever for your own good this time? That happens sometimes, but let me get in there and you won't have no problem ever being clever again," He reached down for the banister and pulled himself down until his feet connected to the ground again. He started pushing deeper into the ward, forcing himself to power through her shell of protection. He knew what was inside of shells; soft tender flesh just waiting to be gobbled up and he was hungry for the taste of it. Cecil scrambled across the floor, her limbs twitching as she did so. The man had said something to her but she was too occupied to pay him any attention. The pain lessoned the further that she was able to crawl from the hearth. It wasn't much less now and it was still raging agony to traverse but it was not as much as it had been right beside the fire. She dragged herself another foot away from it. She had to reach the far edge of the ward she realized. If she could do that she could stay just inside of it and he would have the entire area of it to cross to reach her. She barely made it out of the great room and into the hallway, but she made it. Once out of the room itself she was able to rise to her hands and knees and stay there. As her feet kicked against and disturbed the smooth surface of the hall carpet runner she saw his head break into the front door at the far end of the entrance hall. It pushed through and moved from side to side as if looking for her. His face passed directly over her prone form on the tumbled runner and continued searching. "Now where you hiding at clever girl?" he asked. "Don't matter none anyway. Can't hide from daddy now. And hidings only gonna make it worse. I promise you that." He's blind, she realized when he looked at her a second time without seeing her here. The thought bubbled up through her pain. That's why he couldn't come here before. Somehow he's blind here. She kicked away from the floor as quietly as she could and tried to pull herself into the kitchen at the far end of the hallway. "There you are clever girl. Daddy sees you now. My little songbird is singing a sweet song just for me to hear.Time to end all this foolishness don't you think?" he said as he lurched further into the door. Cecil had no intention of letting him do that. She clambered into the kitchen and felt the pain fall away a little more; just enough for her to shakily rise to her feet and lurch towards the door. Behind her the shadowy man forced one of his shoulders through the front door. Now would have been an ideal time to unload the full set of shells inside the pump action shotgun but she had left it beside the fireplace when she crawled away from it. And even if she had brought it with her she didn't think that she would have dared to touch it. When the pain of the ward hit her, when she had collapsed at first she had caught sight of it where it came to rest after clattering out of her nerveless fingers. It was glowing nearly white hot and she could feel the heat of it pouring off in waves. She didn't see how she could have even laid a finger on it without being really seriously burned, but the thing that she didn't understand was that even as clearly scorching in intensity as the metal was, it had no effect on the round woven rug it had fallen on. If it was truly that hot it would have scorched it, perhaps made it burst into flames, but it had done neither of those things. It had only lain there glowing with savage levels of heat and she didn't dare reach for it. The shadowy man's leg pushed through and he planted his foot firmly on the polished wood of her floor. "Not too long now clever girl," he grunted at her. "But you gonna need a lesson first thing I think. Yes I do. You done gone too far and now you made me have to set you straight." Cecil turned and fled into the back yard and was almost half way across it before she realized that she had fled straight through the door itself without opening it. The pressure and pain were so much less here. She leaned over and held her head down toward the earth, her hair falling straight down to touch the soil where grass did not cover it. She breathed like a bellows, the pain had fallen to manageable levels now, but that didn't mean that she was safe from him. She felt a snapping sensation from inside and knew that he was at last through the door and into her home now. He would have to press through the full area of the ward and he was only a third of the way through at best. "Don't be thinking you gonna get away with this now girl," she heard him shout at her. "Everything got a price to pay and clever girl it's time to pay this piper." She felt her fear of him flare up, it had done that when he first arrived but concentrating on how she was going to use her ward against him had tamped it down; now it was shouting at her to run again. To get as far away as she could. That it wasn't safe here. "And what a payday it's gonna be," he said to her where she was huddled in the dark of her back yard. She took a step back against the edge of the ward. If she stepped out of it while he was still struggling through it she could get far ahead of him maybe. It would take him just as much effort to try to leave regardless of which way he went and all she had to do was step across the barrier here. And if he was blind here in the material world like she thought he was she might be able to get away entirely or at least put enough distance between them as she could. She felt the ward flexing to keep him in place, but she also felt him making slow progress toward her at the same time. Run away then she decided, before he got out here and could get a glimmer of which way she fled. She turned toward the edge of the ward and tried to step over it, but it resisted her doing that. Now that she was trying to cross the border of it, she started feeling the pain of doing that increasing with every step. Panic fluttered in her breast. What if she was still trying to leave as he broke free of the house? What if they were trapped in a slow motion pursuit and she was condemned to be caught by him because she couldn't escape her own protection? There was another bellow of rage seasoned with pain from inside the house and she pushed against the barrier harder. She ignored the pain and step by step made her way to the fence line only a few meters away. The barrier wasn't allowing her to pass through it; it was deforming and following as she pushed it toward the fence. There were only a few more steps separating her from the painted wood of the privacy fence. Only a few steps but they stretched ahead of her like miles. One more she thought forcing her foot forward and leaning outward against the pressure of it. One more she said again to herself taking the next step. She felt another shudder and her head snapped back over her shoulder to look at the haint blue door behind her. The wood was shuddering as he was trying to force his way through it. He wasn't clear of it, but he would be soon. She took another step and reached through the fence grasping the wood from the inside. She pulled against the wood and felt her body finally slip free of the influence of the ward. The pain dropped away as if it had never been and she sighed in relief. The fence was between them now and since she was no longer constrained by the ward she could move a lot faster as well. She moved into the forest and leaned against the oak there, her fingers slipped into it and she realized that there was a faster way to travel then just running from him. She slipped into the tree and reached down into the root network. It had taken her home before, now it would help her escape once again. She flashed along the path underground. She was intending to just follow it as far as she could and then rise up only long enough for her to reach the next root network and keep running, but when she came close to the elm she couldn't make herself continue any further. She rose up inside of the trunk and called out to it. *He's coming,* she thought to it. *I can't stop him and he's coming. What can I do?* she asked. *I have no answers for you.* the elm answered her and in the tone of the words she heard only regret. --------------------------------- The shadow man forced his way through the door, the lashing of the energy it bound him with struck at him from all sides and each movement was a torture that was slowed like January molasses. Oh she was a tricksy one this clever girl, but that just meant that he wanted her even more. She'd have to learn her place first though. She hadn't done that, not one bit, but he could fix that problem once he had his hands on her. He forced himself forward and felt his foot come free and now he stood completely outside of the house again. The weight of the ward she had ringed the building with hung down on him like a mountain and he reached into the depths of himself to gather the strength to punch through it. He could feel a weakened section of the ward in that direction and even with all of it bearing down on him it would be easier to follow the path she had made leaving then to strike out to one of the closer edges. He leaned forward and started following the path she had blazed for him. Cecil felt him break free of the barrier that had been holding him from her. He was free now. He was free and he was coming for her to make her pay for impeding him. She cast her sight around wildly looking for any window to escape though but except for continuing to flee along the root network there were no other options that she could see. She could feel him coming closer to her; he was already entering the boundaries of the woodlot now. "Clever girl, why are you making me do this?" he asked her in a loud voice. "You just push too far and when you do you leave me no choice. No choice do y'hear me girl?" he shouted. "This is on you, ain't nothing else but." Please trip and fall she prayed hoping that he might get injured if that happened. A root hooked over his foot and she heard him stumble. She looked up into the darkness of the elm surrounding her. *Did you do that?* she asked. *No,* it answered her. *That was by your will alone.* *I did that?* she asked incredulously *Yes,* answered the elm. If she could do that then she had an unexpected chance she realized and hoped that she could do it again now that she was aware that she could. She concentrated and bid every root, every vine and every branch that would listen to answer her plea for help. She begged and the forest around her heard and came alive to lash the shadowy man with its fury. She could see him now she realized, by reaching out to the other flora around her she had forged a connection that she could use to see him as well. She could see him and for the time being he could not see her. The vines lashed at his feet trying to ensnare them, branches swung at him to batter and crush, roots rose from the earth to tangle him and thorns sprouted along all that could do so to tear at him with every touch. And for a moment it worked, she saw him stagger beneath the blows. He staggered and started to fall and in that moment she thought she had him, but then a branch passed through him and he stepped free of the tangle of vines and roots that had sought to drag him from his feet. No matter how fiercely she struck at him all that connected with him now passed through as it he was being attacked by wisps of fog. *He is in the aether,* the elm said to her. *You must strike him there as well as here.* *How can I do that?* she asked desperately. *How can I be in two places and in one place?* *You must find a way,* the tree said to her. *Could you stand in my form and move it as I bid?* she asked. *Could you be my hands here while I face him in the aether?*she asked. *This I can do,* the elm told her, *but only if a part of you remains behind. Without that part of you there I would have no connection to do as you ask.* *Show Me.* she demanded. The elm told her what it needed and she focused inward and hoped that she was doing the right thing. She had little time; the shadowy man was stepping into the clearing. The dark man watched as there was a flicker of movement near the base of the elm and then after a moment he saw her step from its depths and stand there with her feet swallowed in its roots. "Oh and there she is! And you are absolutely radiant clever girl. Yes, you are." The naked black haired girl barely reacted to him; indeed she barely turned her head toward him at all. It was as if she were completely stripped of fear and for a moment he wondered what it was that she had in mind. She had already proved more capable than he expected, but all that really meant to him was that once she had been properly broken she would be even more valuable to him. Cecil slipped into the aether the moment she stepped from the tree. She didn't step away from her body but she was separated from it just the same. Around her the aether was locked in the grip of a storm's fury. Howling winds were bending the trees around her while rain hammered down in sheets and lightning crashed and crackled and rumbled across iron grey skies. *The storm.* she heard the elm whisper to her. *Call the storm to you sister, pull down the skies fire. Strike him in both places with it at the same time.* it urged her. She reached upward and outward, calling for the tempest overhead to come down here, to concentrate on this one spot and spend all of its fury. Beneath her she forged the connection with the energy there and drew what was overhead toward her. The winds were rising and the shadowy man felt the first patter of raindrops falling though his form, he looked up and saw that overhead clouds were rapidly piling up, too rapidly. Too rapidly and too coincidentally; this was not natural storm, this was somehow her doing. He looked at her closely and saw her overlay herself. She was standing here in the clearing and at the same time she was fully in the aether as well. He saw her hands hanging limply at her sides and extended upward with her hands gnarled into claws that reached for what was overhead at the same time. He slipped more into the aether and her physical form faded into the background. "Oh I can't be having that now girl," he said launching a sphere at her. It was time to end this he decided, it was getting a little too weird for his tastes and he liked to be the one dishing that out and not receiving it. Cecil felt the sphere clamp down around her and start to compress. "That's enough of that now clever girl," he said to her. "Time to come on home." 'Pressed against itself and it shattered.' That was how that writer had put it when she read about what could be spheres being used in the aether. As it started to squeeze her she thought she understood what it was that he meant. She concentrated and formed her own sphere of hardened air around her. She formed it and with the energy she had tapped into below her feet she linked the two together. Her own sphere began to swell, expanding rapidly outward until it met and ground against the shadowy man's sphere. The two edges met and meshed; the outer one trying to contract and the inner one, the one fueled by the limitless energy she had linked to it expanding outward. One of them had to give and with all that she funneled into it, hers was not the one to do so. The outer sphere bulged in places and buckled in others still trying to compress and hold what was inside it from breaking out and it had no choice but to fail. It sparked and shattered falling away in shards that dissolved into the aether around her. Overhead the storm centered on them and she sensed that what she saw now was mirrored in the clearing where her flesh stood as well. *Strike him! Strike him now!* the elm whispered urgently. She reached overhead and drew down the lightning flashing overhead. The bolts began striking around the perimeter of the clearing. Half a dozen licked downward in the aether and struck at the shadowy man. In the material world her body reached upward in an identical gesture and called the same sky fire down in the same spots; right at the feet of the shadowy man. Pain lashed the shadowy man. It had been so long since he felt it he had forgotten what it was. To him pain had come to mean pleasure. Pain was something that he used on those when he had chosen to mold them and keep them in line until they learned their place. Struck simultaneously in the aether and the material world there was no way that he could shift away from either to avoid the damage as he had with the tree branches earlier. Pinned in place all he could do was stay and suffer the clever girl's wrath or flee from her for now. Another set of lightning bolts lanced down searing him with their flames and setting the wet wood around him on fire. There was no choice. As much as he detested being balked he needed to go before she knew just how much damage she had really done to him. "This isn't done clever girl," he screamed at her trying to pitch his voice to reach over the din of the close drawn thunderstorm. "Not by a long shot." Cecil ignored his words and pulled down as much as she could from the storm overhead. Electricity, raw wild electricity danced where he was and cast the entire clearing into a bright rain soaked blue light. She intended to kill him if she could and as long as he was there she would throw the entire world at him if that was what it took to do it. *Cease sister* she heard the elm say to her. *He has fled.* *I don't want him to flee!* she screamed into the storm. *I want him to die!* *Bridle your rage sister.*she heard it say to her. *Bridle it before you lose control and it sweeps over the mother's lands. Come back to me now. It is safe. You...are safe.* Cecil choked as she suppressed her fury and ceased to beacon the lightning. The storm however was another story. Black thunderheads heaped overhead and water hammered down; a deluge that would not be dispersed once it had been called into being. Cecil matched her form in both realms and bid them to merge once again. Consciousness that had been expanded to bend the elements to its will strove to fit back into the small space that had contained it before. A space that was already occupied. There was no room there for all of her and her actions in falling back into herself were irrevocable. Her mind first bent and then shattered as it tried to accommodate both in the same place at the same time. The naked woman who had summoned and wielded the fires of heaven itself screamed and collapsed in madness to the wet earth beneath her. She lay there unmoving as the water poured down on her limp form. As the thunder rumbled overhead a pair of arms reached out from the tree and drew her limp body close to the trunk. It held her there like a cherished infant and then drew her completely into the depths of the elm's trunk. As her feet disappeared from sight the last of the fires begun by the lightning were smothered and extinguished by the torrential rains and silence broken only by the storm reigned in the clearing afterward. --------------------------------- The Grove, Day Six: 1522 hours Mitch was vomiting into his mask. He had collapsed as well and had barely gotten his respirator off his face in time. He was on all fours and continuously vomiting, the sour contents of his stomach splattering up from the grass to coat his hands and forearms. Jim understood the need. He also had collapsed and while he hadn't been overcome with nausea as Mitch had, his control over his own stomach and its contents was only possible by a very thin margin. For Jim it was more a lack of strength that was the problem, his muscles in his thighs and arms were trembling like harp strings and barely keeping him upright. When Barnes had broken her connection with them all he had collapsed to the ground in front of them and still was barely able to move even now. Singh had fared slightly better, perhaps because as a level three Esper he was more prepared for what Barnes had done than either of them had been. He still looked shaken though, although it was hard to say if that was the result of the mind link being imposed on them in the forceful manner that it had been or what it was that he had seen as it unfolded. Disturbingly M'Tehr seemed to be the most affected by what Barnes had done. She had sank to her knees with both hands locked onto her staff to keep herself upright and even with that assistance she looked as if she would not remain so for long. Barnes was lolling weakly on her throne. She had collapsed against the armrest after she had broken the connection between them all. Her head lay limp on her shoulder and her left arm was extended ragdoll like to where her hand pointed down to the forest floor and moved boneless in the air. Whatever she had done to forge this vision, it had exhausted her and Jim wasn't sure if she wouldn't collapse as well into unconsciousness. The only one who seemed to be coping with the aftermath of what the mind link had wrought throughout the population of their entire group seemed to be Jacen. He was standing in stunned silence on her left hand side and all he could seem to do was look up at her with an awed look on his mobile features. He couldn't take his eyes off of her and of all of their reactions his was the most confusing for Jim. M'Tehr finally did collapse, she slid down her staff and sinking down to one knee she reached for the ground and held one hand there for a moment before moving it back up to grip the staff again. She moved her other hand from her staff and reached out for the throne to steady her. Barnes managed to shift her gaze down at the weakened Hamadryad who was bracing herself against her throne to her right. "I'm sorry sisters," she croaked to the kneeling dryad. "There was no other way. I had to show you, I had to show you all. I needed you to see what I know. I needed you to understand what was locked in my mind. To see that it was real and not just my own interpretation of what was real. Forgive me sisters." Barnes's eyes closed and she fell forward and tumbled from the seat of the throne. Jacen sprang forward to catch her and she fell neatly into his muscular arms. He was not alone in trying to spare her from harm. Thick roots had risen from the earth at the same time and braced themselves against the two of them so as to cushion her fall. Jacen lowered her to the earth gently. The roots that had risen creaked as they withdrew back into the earth. The tips of them coiled beneath her, supporting her small frame as the big satyr rose once he was certain that she was safe from harm. "Jacen," M'Tehr croaked weakly from her position by the throne. Take the Arath' Mahar to her Phar' ador. I will join you when I have the strength. I will take her within that she may recover from the strain of sharing so much of herself with us. Watch over her until I return Jacen, she is everything now." "My Lady I am loathing to leave either of you while you remain in this state," Jacen said to her, he was still standing over Barnes's unconscious form and from his posture he was clearly torn between making a choice over which one of them needed his assistance more at the moment. "The Arath' Mahar is more important than any of us Jacen," She croaked to him. "She comes first, she must. I will recover presently. She is your priority now; she is all of our priority." "As you say I shall do," he said to her. "No," M'Tehr said to him. "As she says. The Arath' Mahar is all that matters now." Jacen inclined his head in a deep bow to her and backed away from her. His hands stroked the length of the roots cradling Barnes and as his fingers left the knot of them by her head there was a lurching sound and new roots began to rise from the earth as they caterpillar walked the unconscious Barnes away from the throne in the direction of the massive elm behind the throne. M'Tehr lurched to her feet and grasped her staff tightly in both hands to keep her balance. She raised her eyeless face and supporting herself as if she were a cripple. She slowly skittered and weaved and creeped across the grassy earth between where she had risen from to where Jim and the others were sprawled in the thick grass. She stopped in front of Singh and even though she did not breathe it appeared as if she exhaled heavily before she spoke. As if the effort to even move that far had taxed her beyond her capabilities and perhaps even it had. "Friend Singh, are you well?" she asked. Singh leaned forward in his root chair and grasped both sides of his head and began rubbing his temples slowly. "Lady M'Tehr, I fear any answer that I could give at this moment would only be blind optimism on my part. But I will recover from today. How long it may take though I cannot say. The Lady of the Grove..." "The Arath' Mahar," M'Tehr insisted interrupting him. "She is Arath' Mahar. The entire Grove network was party to what we have witnessed today and we are as one in this understanding." "The Arath' Mahar then," Singh conceded. "The Arath' Mahar's mind link was so vivid that it will take time for us all to recover from the strength of what we have witnessed today. My companions more so than I since they have never experienced such a thing before, let alone one with such power and clarity. I fear we will need your assistance to return to the gate." "I will aid you friend Singh," she said, "though doing so will tax me greatly today as well." "We are in your debt Lady M'Tehr," Singh said wearily." "No, friend Singh, it is we who are obligated," She replied. "But I fear that I may not be able to accompany you into the open ground at the edge of the Grove. I have not the strength to shroud my appearance now." "It will be far enough," Singh answered. M'Tehr made a weak gesture and Jim felt roots rise from the ground beneath him and begin to bear him away from the clearing. A similar set of roots had sprung into being beneath Mitch's prone form. Singh was able to walk unassisted, but even with his obviously shaken condition he offered his shoulder to M'Tehr as they walked down the straight path of grass that opened directly to the control gate. M'Tehr had stopped short of where the path doglegged hiding who was walking on it. She was still hidden from being observed from past the thick foliage at this point. "I can go no further, friend Singh," she said. "The roots will bear you the rest of the way. I must return to attend the Arath' Mahar. When she has recovered, when we all have recovered we can resume our meeting." "I believe that is wise, Lady M'Tehr. I will await word from you and part for now until it is time to return." "Good parting then friend Singh, and a swift return," she intoned. "Good parting, Lady M'Tehr," he responded. M'Tehr turned about and slowly made her way back into the heart of the Grove. She moved slowly, each step carefully placed and made with trembling strength barely holding her upright it seemed. If he had seen her from a distance Jim could be forgiven for thinking that he was seeing an extremely elderly woman make her way away from them. Behind her the grassy path was erasing itself as the plants that surged forward into the vacated space just as a sea would return swallowing her passage up and concealing what had been visible beneath its green depths. The roots continued to bear Jim and Mitch as far as the edge of the anti-Fae fence line itself and then they subsided into the earth leaving the two men lying still on the sun warmed grass. Singh made his way to the camera mounted on the gatepost and braced himself heavily against the red plastic wall. "Armin Singh, Special Detective, authorization code Zulu-seven-tango-whiskey-three-three-oscar-six-omega. This is a code five-two-kilo. Assistance required," he said into the microphone, his heavy breathing making it necessary for him to pause in places while he spoke. The gate immediately buzzed and one of the men manning the airlock exited a few moments later, the other had taken up a position behind the wall with a clear line of sight and was keeping them covered. The agent who had exited the checkpoint stepped to one side to allow the runed gate to close and secure. He looked carefully in his hard suspicious fashion into the now solid mass of greenery behind them and once satisfied that there appeared to be no threat; allowed his MP-5 to hang from its sling and knelt to examine first Mitch and then Jim. "Do you require E.M.T.'s sir?" the agent asked, his voice muffled by his respirator. "I don't believe that will be necessary at this time agent," Singh answered. "We are not injured, but we will require transportation and a secure location to recover from this experience. I will be accountable agent." "Understood sir, transport is already on the way. I'll contact the Area Command and Control to inform them to make those arrangements immediately." "Very good agent, now if you would be so kind as to do that, I am going to rest here until they arrive. I have much to consider and I am wearied before I even begin." The agent passed back through the gate and as it shut behind him and the sound of the harsh buzzing that announced the magnetic lock was in place again, Singh sunk down into the thick grass and leaned his head forward between his knees. "Singh," Jim whispered his voice little more than a thick croak. "Yes, Detective Brighton?" Singh answered. "What was that word M'Tehr kept saying? Arthmayer was it?" "Arath' Mahar," Singh corrected him speaking slowly. "That's it," Jim said. "What does it mean?" "It's a word the Fae rarely use Detective Brighton, for there is little need for them to use it in their daily speech. The closest meaning to the phrase that we would recognize and understand is sacred forebear." "But what does that mean?" Jim asked. "What it means Detective Brighton is that when Barnes drew us into her vision she drew M'Tehr in as well. And not just M'Tehr, throughout this entire meeting with us, she was channeling the entire Grove network itself. She was their eyes and ears and voice today. They were standing there alongside at the right hand of the Prime Dryad to give weight to the proceedings as observers for the Declaration of Being. By including her in this vision Barnes shared with us, she also shared that vision with every dryad everywhere at the same time. They saw what we saw in every detail and there is no question of who and what she is in the collective mind of the Grove." "What did we see Singh? My God, I can't get the images out of my head and if I try to hold on to them the whole world starts to spin all over again," Jim croaked. "That will pass detective Brighton. What you are experiencing is the outcome of being swept up in a powerful telepathic vision. Something neither your mind, nor that of detective Travers was prepared to experience. The nausea and weakness that both of you are feeling will pass soon, but for the moment you should not try to dwell on what you have seen. The amount of information that we all received moments ago is just too strong for your untrained minds to process. In time the intensity of it will fade and both of you will be able to grasp it without feeling the vertigo that you feel now. As for the content of that vision that is another matter." "What we saw Detective Brighton was the birth of an entirely new species of Fae. What Cecil Barnes did there in her desperation, quite without intention, transformed her into an entirely separate breed of dryad and what she did afterward linked her to the entire land around us. After witnessing such a birth as we did today; there is nothing now that the dryad race would not do to protect her. From today onward, this Grove is a permanent part of Stafford."