The Promise of the Labyrinth: Book Two of The Road To Remembering

By Roberta Dawn McMorrow

In the second volume of Roberta Dawn McMorrow’s THE ROAD TO THE REMEMBERING series, Leo, Conan and Inanna find themselves in an isolated paradise canyon with a crazy shaman who is determined to further their spiritual education. Meanwhile, a group of children and teens who have survived the Three Days of Darkness follow their own path of awakening in coastal California that seems strangely to mirror that of The Three.

Is there a Fourth of the Prophecies among them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781446785942

Book preview

Two Years Ago

She calls to the empty sea around her in a ragged, scratched-raw voice.

"Take me, dammit! I’ll be your human sacrifice. Allow this sea its due!"

She bobs, drifts on her back, and riffs, in and out of consciousness.

Her parched, exhausted brain clears for a moment. She doubles over. Laughs at her exaggerated ramble.

"Human sacrifice? What a friggin’ drama queen."

She gulps seawater for the hundredth time this day. Immediately her guts twist. She vomits. Croaks aloud, "Damn! Yeah, okay, smart-ass body. Go ahead. Revolt against my wish for a glorious ending. It’s an honest reaction!"

She tries to deliver her once-raucous, enter-into-battle war cry. A high-pitched screech is all she can muster. She coughs up ocean brine and human disgust.

The sun, at its peak, beats close and relentless. Its flare pierces her salted eyes.

She had known what was true before the first boats launched: she would be alone in the sea. She who’d carried children aboard escape vehicles. Had found the lost oars. She who’d hot-wired boat engines, shouted directions, loaded provisions and whispered courage, would only in the end have her wits and physical strength for protection.

Not an ounce of her feels self-pity. Even as pain shoots across her chest and spasms her back. Even when her roiling stomach protests its starvation and seawater deluge.

She half-swallows throat-searing bile. Retches in briny, dry heaves.

She rolls over and floats face down. Rolls onto her back again and swims in a circle with her one good arm. The other having been pulled out of its shoulder socket hours before. Gauges the time of the set closing in and drags her injured body over the swells to prepare for another monster wave.

As the island had split, then crumpled in slow, painful pieces into the sea, she’d roused young and old from restless sleep. She had grabbed someone’s teddy bear and someone else’s blanket. She’d launched boats off rocks and promised she’d be on the last pontoon. No worries, babies, she’d chirped in her best cooing voice. I’ll be there. Silently she’d admitted, Impossible. She had kissed goodbye the golden-tanned lifeguard who’d captained the boats. Allowed him to believe she would be right behind him. "Keep them alive!" she had screamed to him over the crash of waves and relentless winds.

As the final stretch of island shore had been swept up in the tsunami whitewater, she’d dived into the sea, wearing the false comfort of a vintage life preserver and a size too-small pair of fins. The preserver had been torn away in the ocean’s violent churn. After an hour she’d ditched the useless fins from her bleeding feet.

Now, three hours of partial delirium later, her bloodshot eyes watch the next wave build itself high enough to block half the sky. She observes it casually. She doesn’t see it as a threat. Every fiber of her body, skin to bone, stings and aches and begs for rest. Her lungs refuse to expand.

She tilts her forehead up to the blinding sun. Laughs.

Her godmother’s ebony face flits across her mind. The woman’s eyes are fierce, and her honey-thick voice admonishes, not your time, baby girl. Surrender? Unacceptable. Too much work left to do.

No, Godmama, this time you’re wrong, the girl in the sea dry-rasps to the beloved woman who raised her. Nothing left. Coming home to you. Tell the sea gods to … swallow me whole, mama. Bring me to African heaven.

The wave builds, three, four, five stories high and then begins to break.

"Come get me!" she screams at the white, clean sparkles of light that dance at the crest of the deadly wall of water.

What the fuck?

She strains to focus on a widening whirl of moist wind speeding towards her where sky meets sea.

A waterspout.

The silver, swirling dervish appears to drop from the atmosphere above the wave. Directly above her and in her line of sight.

A mirage? No. An omen. The devil’s death spiral.

Her mind is dimmed from sea and salt and the relentless sun. In her clinical interior voice, she coolly diagnoses that she’s verging on blackout.

She tells herself that the spiral she sees forming is wind and ocean and nothing else.

Killer twist! Grant me a quick death. 

In the underscore roar of wave and angry sea, she hears her godmother’s voice again.

Not your time baby girl. Keep faith. My hand is on your back. My heart beats in your heart. No surrender. More work to do.

The girl in the sea blinks back salt-water tears. Dry sea-salt on her thick eyelashes weighs her lids into tight slits. Too weak to clear them, she squint-stares, unsure of her perception.

The waterspout grows to a mini cyclone and descends like a high velocity projectile from the cloud-free sky above her. At the center of the silver twist, a flash of threatening dark cuts a path.

Not water.

In her semi-conscious state, the tightly wound twist appears to her like the dark brown thumb and index finger of an unseen giant.

Reaching for her.

The image pierces the wave crest immediately above her.

Delusion … she babbles. Dehydration … oxygen depletion, the medical science part of her brain tries to inform her.

But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. Unafraid, in a final effort to offer herself to the gods of sea and sun, she arches her back and throws her chest up in submission to the fingers of the giant.

She closes her eyes and whispers, "In honor of righteous endings."

The fingers do not care for her surrender. They obey their own invisible master and pinch the front of her white tank top. Like a sea bird plucking a fish from the water, she’s lifted, weightless, no longer struggling, above the foam and roar of the tsunami.

Then all goes dark.

Prologue

In the forever heartbeat of the Universe, there are times of destruction and times of new beginnings. On the razor’s edge of Light and Dark, angels and adversaries dance. Elements, and the spirits of elements, rise, fall, construct and deconstruct. Endlessly.

In that falling apart time, my beloveds, when your ancestors were children, the vicious forces of fear they called The Grand Illusions, sucked up right-intention and right-action.

Distracted the masses.

Deluded the populace.

Cowardice hid behind the arsenal of over-armed, fearful populations. Those without faith, built walls where only bridges could save them. False leaders planted the old poisons: bigotry, prejudice, caste and exclusion, where only the deep roots of compassion, equality and truth could bear the fruit of healing.

The grip of patriarchal systems played out in corporate power that left the very few in charge of the many. Entitlement was hidden behind veils of what they called exceptionalism. There was nothing exceptional about it. Or them.

Consumerism kept regular people attached to empty promises; encouraged forgetting.

Most people at that time had no trust in greater meanings. Or higher powers. They didn’t give thought to the Seven Generations. Not the seven who came before and not those who would come after. Instant gratification was the holy grail.

The binding grace of One-ness, the deepest blessing of Sacred Source, was shunned as "just another ism." The true and only law of the Universe, interdependence, was ignored. In its place the rages of separation, the lies of greed and control led to more fear, and more suffering. Denial and delusion, your grandparents taught us, were the drugs of choice.

Cults of death cultures tore earth’s abundant gifts limb from limb, root from root. Fear does that to humans, separates and poisons once responsible people. Critical thinking was replaced by branding, marketing, commercialization. By false realities, shouted on global platforms run by selfish interests, fueled by fear, while feeding their own greed. The Grand Illusions danced in wanton celebration of Earth’s disharmony.

The Earth’s defenses weakened. Viruses and bacteria previously unknown leaked from under melting glaciers, escaped from the confines of the world’s burning jungles and from cages of precious beasts held by the unrestricted gluttony of man. The pandemics that followed were undeterred by quakes that ripped the earth’s crust. Or by the tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, erupting volcanoes that bore entire civilizations away as if they were the cardboard homes of paper dolls. 

In the simple complexity of nature, there were forces that endured, however. A few brave eagle’s nests still crowned the last trees standing barren. There remained individual, steadfast, blue-veined glaciers. Tiny, silky webs of jungle spiders could still be found in the silence of the last quiet places even as the Earth revolted.

The creator gods of the Universe sent generations of tree whisperers, animal advocates, and keepers of the coral reefs to teach the remaining population. New prophets of balance, equality and justice were clear in their purpose: Renew responsibility. Practice empathy. Guide the Earth back to what is true and real.

Souls called the Chosen who Chose of the Prophecies were re-born. They came to live the promise of The Remembering and to inspire the seven generations yet to come. There were no loud, colorful splashes on celebrity sites to announce their arrival. No hucksters inventing truths on social media. They came quietly, guiding and instructing with the consistent, devoted message of unequivocal caring. Their words were heard by fearless soldiers of unity. These spiritual warriors and the children they birthed were told, "The time of redemptive renewal will come. Trust. Faith. Courage. Our work together will call you forward. Remember. Become."

Tasked to Remember, they recalled the ancient frequencies that connect species to species. To the networks made from the algorithms of the known and unknown Universe. Drawn together, they studied and searched the questions in the physics of dark matter. In the wormholes that connect space-time dimensions. They learned the beautiful inevitability of interdependence.

Children were born to them whose ears weren’t clogged by screeched lies of fear and separation. Whose eyes weren’t blinded by ignorant veils of illusion, delusion, denial. These new souls were the descendants of the Giants, the Rishi, the Star Nations of time forgotten.

And so, the story of The Chosen who Chose unfolded.

Children, I tell you this now because I am the last of those who knew The Three who became The Four of Prophecy, and the promised warriors gathered with them. You, children, are descendants of those who renewed the promise to be faithful stewards, and not owners, of Earth.

As sure as the Halfling goddess was there for them, She is here for you.

Our time remains critical! The future, if it is possible, can only be realized through you, who are the promised legacy of those few who followed the Daoist Way, and the Good Red Road, and the Essenes who taught Jesus; of those who practiced the lessons of the kingdom of Shambala and the Iroquois Nation; of those that spoke the devotions learned in Auroville and Plum Village: only right-intention, uninfluenced by the Grand Illusions, can lead to right-action.

Who among you dreams of unity and dynamic peace? Who will fight to heal the destructive lies of separation, greed and selfishness that destroyed the Earth? Who among you will pass the torch of Courage, Faith, and Trust? Who among you have the determination to Remember and inspire the Becoming?

Grandchildren, you are the future your grandparents made possible. Their story, the one I tell you now, lives through the choices you make. You are the living legacy of the Seven Generations that came before you. You are the genesis of the Seven Generations yet to come.

The promise of the spiritual warriors, the Chosen who Chose, is realized in you.

The Universe waits to see who among you is true to a transformation so powerful it can shapeshift suffering into strength — and rage into the joy of commitment to serve all.

Source and the Creators wait for your answer.

THE CAMP

Chapter 1

Leader Girl

T

here is no night that Leader sleeps perfectly curled into herself. 

REM sleep, she mumbles under her breath as she makes her nightly third round of safety checks of camp. REM. She tosses the term around in her mind. Dismisses it. Whatever. Naming it isn’t going to help me unwind. She couldn’t sink into rest, let alone undisturbed slumber. Even if she’d ever learned how. Vigilance, she reminds herself, is what rules night. Or for that matter, day. Rest when I die. Which, under the circumstances …

The sun hides most days, driven away by the debris of the endless winds and fires sweeping the planet. Night comes early. Vigilance is the one reliable, effing partner. She’s preached vigilance so often and so consistently she doesn’t dare say it aloud to her brood again, tonight. Someone would moan with boredom.

Squeaks for attention bloom in small voices around her. Leader bends down to fuss over the camp’s children. She counts the heads sticking out of sleeping bags. Most are so young they are tucked two to a bag. Other small bodies are rolled into blankets and wrapped like hot dogs in buns. Every night someone makes that same tired joke, and every night the littlest kids laugh as if it’s the first time they’ve heard it.

She pretends to be strict over last drinks of water and final good-night hugs. "Isn’t this your third tuck-in and cuddle? And, One more drink of water, and that sleeping bag will be drowning in pee."

They think she’s hilarious.

Damn! Maybe I should have tried a comedy career, she whispers to the teens who are tending to the many night duties.

"Uhhh … your current audience’s average age is probably eight. Poet gives her a wink. And I’m not too sure you’d attract the stadium-size audiences you did in the old days, doing whatever it is you did in the old days."

Leader grins and shrugs. Then she takes a roll call of all the teens responsible for community decisions. In a deliberately loud voice, she asks them, Hey, do you think a second night of deer feast is called for? Poet, Guardian, Watcher, Preacher, what do you say?

The teens play their part and keep straight faces. While the sleeping bag brigade reacts to her words, and choruses, Say YES! Say YES! The calls continue until Leader holds a finger to her lips. Silence is then instantaneous.

Rubbing her chin with an exaggerated frown, Leader considers.

Hmmm, have to figure this out. She pretends to take a measure of variables. Asks the group of teen guards, Have the campers earned such a privilege?

The four sentinels have gotten good at hemming and hawing, feigning a serious assessment of Leader’s question. They shake their heads ponderously.

"Absolutely not, Leader."

"What? Two nights of partying like rock stars? The kids will be so tired."

And spoiled.

It’s too much work!

One of the teens warns against bellyaches from two consecutive nights of fresh meat. Another says the kids shouldn’t stay up too late.

A chorus of little kids’ voices rings out in predictable protest.

"No, not true!"

Nuh-UH!

"’S’not t’woo, Lee-duh!"

Poet, in her exaggerated Southern Belle drawl, points out a critical detail. "Well, too much of a treat, and I won’t fit into my bikini for the summer! When Leader raises an eyebrow, Poet adds in a whisper, That is, if there ever is a summer again."

Bikini? Leader quietly counters. The only cloth left to use would be diaper scraps. They’re brown-stained, but hell, the spots could pass for polka dots, I guess. And the holes in ‘em might just send some poor California surfer dude into a myocardial infarction. Imagine, after he’d survived the tsunamis, and all.

Poet snorts her laughter as Leader turns back to the campers.

Well … I think I need to count to ten, to decide.

Breaths are held. The little campers’ excitement is barely contained. Leader exhales, her face contemplative, drawing out the anticipation.

"Since tonight was our first real feast in months … Okay. We will have a second night of feasting."

The kids are ready to erupt in whoops of joy. But they all know — even the babies — to wait for the signal.

"And you know why I’m saying Yes?" 

Preacher announces, Can you give me a drum roll?

A chorus of voices, including the squeaks of one-year-olds and the deep thunder of Preacher himself, reverberates in a replication of rumbling drums.

Because … Leader waits for quiet to return. "You are fantastic!"

The kids twinkle their fingers in the air in an ecstasy of soundless cheering.

I’m very glad to see your hands in the air, Leader continues, because I take that to mean you also agree to help make deer jerky tomorrow! And to forage for wild herbs to flavor the meat! Overriding a small voice that starts to ask a predictable question, she goes on, "Yes! Everyone helps. Everyone must help. She scans the campers as if she’s grabbing every set of eyes. Do you think you’re still babies?"

A unanimous, No!

Good! Leader smiles. Neither do we! She looks out over the assembled campers to address a large, shaggy boy looming at the edge of the circle. Right, Guardian?

"Yes, ma’am! Or, I mean, no ma’am."

Giggles erupt from the campers at his loyal-soldier response.

And then a bold child calls out the request of every night. "Tell us a story, Leader, please!"

Leader shakes her head. No! she says firmly in her precise and perfect Oxford accent. Absolutely no more stories tonight. It’s time for sleep.

"Puh-leeze, Leader! Just one more!"

Silent applause follows this plea. And, "Yeah, please!"

Tell ‘bout the brown fingers that picked you outta the sea!

Yeah, tell how waves tried to gulp you up!

Little voices spring from mounds of blankets close to the fire.

"Yeah, Leeeduh! Tell dat!"

Leader purses her wide lips into a flat line. Not tonight. Her tone unequivocal. It’s much too late now. Too much deer and dancing.

Moans and more begging.

"Puh-leeze!"

Tell how Guardian found you!

Yeah, tell ‘bout da little guhl with de dot on her forehead!

"Yeah, tell that part! It’s my favo-wite!"

Leader pitches her commander’s voice an octave lower. "Not tonight."

It’s final. She’s serious. From the youngest to the oldest, they know every mood-cue in her voice.

A communal hush descends.

Leader waits for the crinkles of sleeping bags and last grunts to subside. Then she turns to the dusty, sunburnt teenage boy who had led the drumroll. His round eyes seem to float in his baby face above a solid, broad chest and no discernible neck.

Preacher, Leader nods. Say the words.

He leads the children in The Lord’s Prayer. The campers follow aloud in quiet voices. They are pleased with themselves that they remember big words, although hallowed becomes hail-old, in some murmurings, and others intone King Kong instead of kingdom come. And no one under ten years old has any idea what a temptation is. But they are very sincere, nonetheless.

One of the six-year-olds whispers, as some little person does every night, Preacher, say the ‘now I lay my head to rest.’

YEAH, say that one, Preacher, asks another child.

And the large boy gently obliges.

Leader bows her head as if she believes in such devotions.

When Preacher finishes the prayer, a unified "Amen," rings out. But a mindful hush quickly follows. Leader doesn’t need to remind the campers of the need for careful quiet.

The tall girl crouches over her herd of children.

You all are fantastic! she whispers. "You caught your voices in midair, snap, that fast, like the words were a silent swarm of jungle fireflies."

The ruffle of pride from the sleeping bags is obvious. Any notice from her, especially a mention that their skills may be up to her very high standards, is a thrill.

What’s a firefly? one little girl whispers to a bedroll mate. Dat a funny bug?

Leader winks to Preacher and makes a mental note to explain fireflies. And wonders to herself if she should talk about their probable extinction. Truth is necessary … but not as magical as living lights on flying wings.

The myriad daily questions of the children, youngest to oldest, seem boundless, endless. Leader can’t allow herself to feel overwhelmed by tonight’s queries about fireflies or deer meat.

Yup! She smiles. Poet will tell you about them tomorrow in camp school!

The strawberry blonde slaps her a high-five and makes twinkly fingers to the kids.

I will add it to my curriculum, she drawls.

The constant debates in Leader’s own mind are demanding and complex, and she wishes they, too, could be answered in the confines of a makeshift school. But they cannot.

Straightening up, Leader directs the first-round teen sentinels to their posts. There are different placings each night.

Stealth, she reiterates to them quietly. Humans are night creatures as well as day-walkers. We mix up assignments for safety.

Leader nods to Guardian, who strides solemnly to his assigned place. Several inches over six feet tall, the late-teen boy, almost a man, is stick-thin. His wide, straight shoulders make his denim jacket look ironed and placed on a wire hanger. His aquiline nose, situated at an angle on his brown, pear-shaped face, juts straight out from a high, broad, forehead. Leader thinks there’s something regal, dramatic, in his saturnine good looks. She notes that Guardian’s hair has grown two inches past his chin. Its length is clearly causing the inherently shy young man additional embarrassment. In the commotion of the last few weeks, their one hair scissor disappeared.

As Leader watches him stride toward his post, he drops his head and pushes his shiny dark hair behind his large ears, only to have it disobey and spring free.

Guardian is the closest in age to Leader, in the camp. Like her, he’s drawn to night’s singular silence. Unlike her, it’s the time his personal demons are likely to haunt. Leader intuits this.

She turns to Poet. Take the post across the camp, tonight. Across from Guardian.

Poet winks at the young man as she ambles to her position, blowing him a kiss and crooning, You and me, sweet boy, stayin’ up all night together.

Guardian blushes. But he manages to give her a red-cheeked nod of acknowledgment.

Lordy, how I love teasin’ that boy! Poet whispers to Leader in her melodious Louisiana inflection. "Told him he looked like Abraham Lincoln himself with that scraggly beard and his long hair. A backwoods hottie. Thought he’d pass right out when I said that."

Wit and irreverence are natural to Poet, along with exceptional kindness, trailing her like exposed personality vapors. The willowy, freckled girl tends to answer questions about her age with, "Sixteen, seventeen years old? Who the hell knows or cares? I’ll be an ingenue forever, anyway."

Leader shakes her head. Poor Guardian. Hard to be so stoic!

Poet chokes on a sharp laugh. "Ha! Well, it takes one to know one, dearie!"

Leader scowls until Poet sticks her tongue out. The camp commander tilts her head down and pretends to double-check Poet’s weapon, not wanting Guardian to notice their shared giggle. Then she winds her way across camp, around and over the sleepy children, to check on him.

Keep the fire going. Keep it low, she instructs, as she does to every sentinel, every night.

Guardian responds with another of his paramilitary nods.

Poet, overhearing, salutes her. "Yes, ma’am!" As if Leader is issuing orders for the first time.

No one worries details will be missed. Whatever discipline they hadn’t learned in the months before they found Leader, she’s drilled into them ever since. And no one takes the training for granted.

Satisfied, Leader lifts her rifle above her head to signal the third guard, a teen girl with long dreadlocks tied in a top knot straddling the branch of a twenty-foot olive tree. Petite and lithe, Watcher can climb any rock or tree with a gymnast’s spring. Leader can’t see the Indonesian girl’s face, behind the camouflage of foliage, but she catches the glint of a wide, polished knife that telegraphs her response. Got your back, is the message. Rest.

Leader smiles. Then she climbs her own favorite tree. She’s heard this genus called Valley Oak, or California Oak. Personally, she likes the term used by an old cowboy friend who’d lived in the quiet valley over the coastal mountains. Spirit Oaks, he’d said. With mistletoe hangin’ off ‘em in winter, and the way they disappear and re-appear in the fog, that’s the right name.

Her tree’s trunk is charred black from the fires that had swept up and down the California coastline, but it’s otherwise healthy. Several thick branches stretch high enough to provide exceptional lookout points.

Leader fashioned Spirit, as she has named her tree, with twists of dead branches to hide her and her weapons cache, yet not impede the possibility of quick action. She ties herself to the thickest branch with an old bungee cord, her back pressed to the trunk, and stretches her long legs in front of her. She checks her sheath for the knife strapped to the outside of her left calf. Secure. Next, Leader unbuckles a smaller hunting knife on her forearm so that it’s available for a rapid throw. Good. She tucks her AR-15 into the shallow hollow directly behind her head, then swivels her shoulders to satisfy herself the rifle is ready if needed. Perfect.

She stretches. Yawns. Rubs a calf muscle that’s been sore all day.

Where the hell are we going to get more bullets? she wonders for the thousandth time.

Her central nervous system quivers. Twinges of energy tingle down her limbs. Her eyes burn from too little rest. Small muscle spasms scream for attention. She’s aware of her body’s complaints but has no plan to heed them.

She takes deep-lung breaths and hums a Nubian lullaby that promises mystical dreams, taught to her by her African godmother. Godmama. Leader scans her visual memories of the woman, as she has night and day, since she left Africa. Since she left her godmother behind.

She lingers longest on the image of Godmama tracking lions through the African bush without ever leaving her medicine-smudged hut. Godmama could tell Leader, minutes before the girl struck out before dawn, where the hunting would be good that day — and where it would be too dangerous. She’d tell Leader how many men to take with her into the jungle or bush, or over the river, or across the mountain. Where wild game hunting might be good. And where territory might be bad. Godmama would simply have sensed it.

Godmama’s hut was home to the countless lost, found, escaped and prophetic dreams of many souls, alive and dead. The dreams rested in her. Searched for her. Trusted her. Her godmother was as much a Western scientist as was Leader’s mother and as is Leader. No! Leader thinks now. So much better than me. Yet the woman was also the mganga, the dawa mwanamke, the medicine-woman of her tribe. A mystic and healer who could conjure up the souls of the departed. Godmama was as comfortable in the mysteries of the ancient ghost worlds as she was in any modern research lab.

She had told Leader many times, "Walking the razor’s edge between provable science and what can never be proven is my true north. Find your true north, Goddaughter. Name it, call to it, respect it, live it, and the miracles and magic will find you."

True north, Leader hums to herself now. She is a well-practiced meditator. Whether for spiritual needs or for planning a hunt, she easily courses her breath through her lungs to her limbs, from heart-mind to cellular consciousness. She slips into familiar territory.

Leader envisions a golden thread rising from the tip of her tailbone and winding up her spine to the top of her head. Godmama taught her the secrets of the thread, how it contained the vibrations that coursed through all things, animate, inanimate, sentient, insentient. How it wove the entire continuum of past-present-future across all known and unknown dimensions of space-time. And connected her to the ancestors who called to them both.

The thread, once released, moves of its own accord into a gliding, shimmering infinity loop. In her mind, Leader weaves the figure eight until the one pulsing light becomes a series of countless symbols, replicating one another.

When the threads form a perfect cocoon, she places an image of herself in the center of the swirling symbol.

For several minutes, Leader breathes the vibrations until she feels her nervous system calm. She’s safe and whole within the nest of golden energy. In this secret space she relinquishes human need for attachment to people or place. She exhales her constant hyper-vigilance and her self-imposed demands of responsibility. Only within the spirals of gold is she beyond harsh reality, past the avalanche of questions without answers.

In this time-suspended moment, Leader hums herself into the altered state where lucid dreams, and almost-sleep, await.

In the supplicant inner voice of an apprentice medicine woman, born to serve, she humbly asks for her dream. She focuses Godmama’s African prayers to the ancestors who were guardians of lions and roamed jungles as panthers and cobras. To those who flew at night as dark, silent owls and in daytime as noisy, fuchsia-colored parrots. She asks the Keepers of Mysteries to deliver her into the secrets of her recurring dream and into its embrace of comfort.

Her heartbeats slow to an inner metronome, a rhythmic tempo that opens her dreamscape.

Chapter 2

Lucid

The girl is running. The same girl, dark-skinned, black hair. Magenta dress. She’s running.

Is she … me? Leader waits two heartbeats for an answer.

Trust your inner knowing.

Her throat clutches, hearing Godmama’s instruction. For the millionth time she wishes the woman would materialize next to her.

Me. I’m running on huge building blocks. Platforms. Same as before. Planks? Yes. No. Thick … not perfectly flat … not lumber. Not steel or iron. These are made of … what?

She’s determined to stay lucid, and not succumb to the sleep she desperately needs. Not until she can solve the mystery. Leader has had variations of this dream since the last night of the Three Days of Darkness. She doesn’t know why this scene, with its odd symbols and paradoxes, repeats itself. It’s enough that it provides private escape and relief from the realities of each day.

She allows the ambience of the scene to draw her in. Leader senses that the frequency humming along the surfaces of the mysterious planks is the same that crackles through her own body’s sensitivities. But she wants to remain a disciplined, lucid-dreaming observer.

Long hexagons, tetrahedrons. Thick, rectangular pieces of … what, exactly? Are they some sort of building materials?

The same as they always do in these dreams, the planks lay themselves down in front of the girl in the magenta dress to create bridges, platforms, ramps. Like open scaffolding. It’s an enormous structure of iridescence, varying in color from icy white to silvery blue, and in places the hue deepens to a deep cobalt. Is there no ceiling? Or floor?

She sighs into the undefined but glorious shape-shifting light. Eerily beautiful, as if it floats fully formed in space. Is it scaffolding for a cathedral in the sky?

The structure builds itself spontaneously. The planks cross, re-cross, connect and assemble. It’s like a glassy, ethereal game of Chutes and Ladders. Bridges upon bridges hook themselves together. Shapes suddenly vault higher or plunge down below her field of vision. The three-dimensional pieces speed ahead to build the next foreground. It’s a nonsense-maze of complex geometry. Criss-crossed beams pass and attach through steamy air, unsupported by any obvious foundation, into the vast, empty space. 

The whole scene feels strangely familiar to Leader. Why? She loves the tingle she gets here of mystery and secrets and a challenge she can’t name. As if there’s a dangerous challenge in the air that is also seductive. She laughs to herself. My favorite combination of unknown factors.

After another slow ten-count meditation breath, a second girl joins the magenta runner in the dream. There you are! Two of you. Same as last night. Leader’s heart swells with warmth.

When she had first been able to sleep, after the Three Days of Darkness — after forty hours of joining the other teens of the camp in scavenging for water and purifying it, cleaning debris off the kids, taking care of small wounds, and digging up what was left of their root garden — it had been minutes before dawn, and this dream had been but a disappearing wisp of misty mysteriousness. Yet it had left her feeling there was a message of promise in it, even then.

And again, on the first full night back in camp, too exhausted yet to question their survival, she’d been happy to be pulled into the dream. She’d felt intensely drawn to the figure of the magenta-clad girl as the mist had parted on the beams of the structure. Each night since, this vision has come to Leader. Though she understands dream study and hidden symbols and how to interpret them, the images in this vision feel like a gift, a respite. She wants to immerse herself deeply in the lucid experience. She’s rarely known such comfort in her eighteen years of life as she tastes in these dreams.

Tonight, the magenta girl’s black hair is falling loose and heavy past her waist. She balances barefoot on the highest bridge of the structure as the second girl enters the picture. This other is the same height, and wears the same sort of flowing, loose-sleeved gown, but her skin and hair are fair, and the fabric of her dress is a shimmery light silver in a diaphanous material. Both girls’ gowns float around them when they move, catching soft winds as they tread the scaffolding. The young women are equally fast and agile. They run and skip across the beams, teasing one another forward, leaping to a higher or lower beam, balancing without a slip or wobble. Between them there is a laugh, a challenge, a friendly competition.

The magenta girl pauses, turns towards the dreamer as if she sees and acknowledges Leader, and welcomes her attention. Then she shifts her gaze back to the silver girl, and both take off running again, the planks laying themselves down in front of their every step.

Where are they? They’re not lost. They know this place. Do I? Is this a dream metaphor? Are these bridges here to remind me that right now, today, I am between worlds? Or — is it possible this actually happened? A past life, maybe?

The source of the misty steam rising from below the two girls is another mystery.

It seems like a cavern or canyon, or maybe an abyss. If they fall, who will catch them? Is this the danger I feel?

She wants the girls to stay vigilant. Know the Darkness as you know the Light, Leader’s Godmama had taught her. But never stare too long into the abyss, or you risk becoming trapped by the Darkness as easily as you are illumined by the Light.

Leader has studied her own dark temptations: where, when, and how her hot rage overwhelms her cool judgment. No one, Godmama had constantly reminded her, is free from the delusion that the monster outside of us is worse than the one inside us. Wisdom begins with awareness of our own darkness.

When the magenta girl leans too far toward the danger below the scaffolding, the silver-dress girl stops, calls to her with a laugh and a teasing wave to move forward, not down. Her companion takes a lingering look into the heat from the abyss, then straightens and starts to run again.

For a brief moment, Leader thinks she sees the silver girl’s eyes meet her own before she turns and leads the other on a leap across a bridge.

Do you see me? Leader asks.

The girl in silver smiles over her shoulder, long blonde hair clinging damply to her back through the steam.

You know our names, Leader hears in a feather-light foreign language. Leader speaks six languages fluently, and picks up dialects and tribal tongues easily, but this one takes her by surprise. It’s ancient, she thinks to herself. A lost language.

Do I know your names? she asks of the girls, of herself.

They do not answer, but continue to run.

She wishes for more. More of this feeling, this caring. Knowing someone is watching out for me while I watch out for her. Hand on your back, baby girl. That’s what her Godmama used to say. She feels it now, Godmama’s hand. The solid, sweet warmth of her touch, the assurance of being seen, acknowledged, and loved. 

We are in this together, Leader whispers to the running girls, now, in her dream. She won’t allow them to stare too hard into the abyss. She knows the temptation too well. It’s the darkness in me that seeks Darkness. Pull me from the edge of my own abyss. I will do the same for you.

She’s startled to hear the silver girl speak directly back to her in response. She speaks in the voice of her own Godmama as she’d last heard it in the real world, shouting over the roar of a plane engine as Leader was scuttled onto the flight taking her away from them.

Those brave enough to enter the abyss will be given wings to rise above it.

Chapter 3

Labyrinth

She gasps and coughs in her sleep. Hot tears sting her eyes. She breathes a lung-searing heat that rises from below the mystical dream construction. She stares into the scaffolding. And understands.

Labyrinth! That’s what this is. She feels she knows this place. It’s as if I’ve really been there. The depth that I cannot see — is this the abyss that Godmama spoke of?

She hears, Earth’s inner sanctum. Transformation. Or death. Choose.

Who is speaking? The words are known to me!

Leader is a well-trained researcher and explorer. She’s undaunted by mysteries. The more complex the problem, the