True Immortals

That’s what she didn’t say. What she said is just as interesting: “I hold the powers equal and let chance decide.”

It would seem that “The Eldest” makes a habit of voluntarily surrendering her power of choice to random chance. As one could call “random chance” the uncontrolled free choice of the universe, this is most assuredly a form of spirituality. It is perhaps the first form of spirituality I have ever encountered that I can respect.  – Stephen

This is the last installment. I’m doing this so badly. It looks silly written down. When it happened it was anything but.

“I, Yahahhna, this I command to you: Speak my name aloud in your world that is not in the world. The other may then find my name, and then find you. Or they may not find my name, and not find you. Some of them are your friends. Some are not. Both friends and not friends live where the trees are cold, and old and soft and high. I will not choose sides, but hold the powers equal and let chance decide.

“But this I do decide: You will leave here, for I am here. You shall not follow me. You shall not study me or search me. You will go. Go far from here, and live.”

She touched my face for an instant, then swirled away with all her escort. It seems like years since then. And there are words in my head, though I don’t know why, since she didn’t say them. “The darkness and the light, they need each other.”

I don’t know what this means. I hurt. But I obeyed her and left the city instantly. — Flyss

Time to take a stab at what she said. This is nothing like word for word. And I don’t know how to convey the power in her voice. But I’ll do what I can.

She said something like this:

“You are looking, yes? You want to find. You, and the others you talk to without seeing. You look for hints, and clues. You follow.  You track.  You hound the shadows of some who are great and some who are small, some who are kind, some who are cruel. But you find me. I am kind and I am cruel. I Yahahnna, who cares and who has passed caring.”

That’s not right! I can’t render it. I also can’t render how she shifted between smiles and frowns, dark looks and kind looks, just like she did that night in the car.

After she said something much different from what I just wrote above, she  turned her face away and stared at this water below the bridge.

She stared down for a long time. Then she saw something, I don’t know what, and snapped back to me.  She said, ”I, Yahahhna, I do not decide. I hold the powers equal and let chance decide.”

It was much more beautiful than that.

(Continued in the next post.) – Flyss

I said she spoke to us, but it’s complicated.  She did speak in words, in a voice that combined every accent you could imagine. But she also spoke without words. I don’t mean anything psychic. I’m talking about her face. I lost myself in it.

My mother has an expressive face, and so does Meryl Streep, but this woman has a face like a book of stories.  Not like those amazing Navajo elders with wrinkles so deep you can get lost in them.  She doesn’t look any older than me. (Well, she does look older, infinitely older, but not physically.) So I don’t really know how her face says so much.  But it does. And I’m a little confused about which parts were in words and which parts came across the other way. Strattera is a little clearer about it, but she’s going to tell her part on her own.

I do remember the words coming across in something not exactly normal English, which I suppose must mean I heard her speaking, because face-stories don’t have grammar. Though maybe my brain is adding a style to her non-verbal speech because of who she is.

Who she is.  I don’t know who she is. She never said she was the eldest among women, like Kate envisioned, but I’m going to think of her that way. She said her name, and I think it was Yahahhna (name changed.) She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met, or imagined meeting.

No, that’s not true. I imagined a tiny bit of this in a flash when she looked at me from a car the other night, and then also when Kate posted her vision-poem.  Back then, I said I got a feeling  the woman in the car was protecting me. I don’t think so anymore.

Well, not exactly.  She is protecting me, but I dare not count on it. God, though, all those things I thought about, like tunnels and GPS trackers and the Bounty Hunter, it all seems so trivial. I’m sure I’ll get back to them, but just now it’s all too trivial.

(Continued in the next post) – Flyss

On the far side of the bridge, bodyguards were positioned way out into the darkness. But now they were moving aside, letting someone through. We couldn’t see who it was, but the desire that had pulled me there switched on again, aiming that way.  The ripple came closer, traveling up onto the bridge, until the security near us moved away too, and someone in dark clothes and wearing something like tai chi slippers came through them.  She had a funny way of walking, planting each foot definitely on the ground before the next one lifted. She wore a veil over her face, violet and lacy. She came up to us and stopped.  She looked up at me, and looked further up to stare for a second at Strattera beside me. Then she parted her veil.

Kate’s intuition had been brilliant, as usual.

She was perfectly young, and she was as ancient as the Grand Tetons.  She was beautiful, and she was ferocious. So tiny and so terrible: Not terrible as in evil, but as in awe inspiring, like an earthquake or the ocean or a woman giving birth.  She scared me to death and I wanted more than anything in the world to live around her forever.

Yes, she spoke to us.  But I’m exhausted and I need to go to sleep and recover from the effort of writing a hundred versions of this.

(Continued in the next post.) — Flyss

I still have no idea where to begin. I’ve written a hundred versions of this and deleted them. Strattera says I should just hit “undelete”42 times and use that version.  So I will do that.

There’s a river that runs through the city here. It used to have gold in it, long ago, but now it’s fenced in tight and tamed. There’s an old railroad bridge across the river that’s been turned into a pedestrian path, and we went walking over it last night.

On the other side of the bridge, there’s a skateboard park that’s usually so full of skater guys and skater chicks showing off their tricks you can hear the hiss of the slick little wheels a mile away.  Not this time. Usually, there are a dozen bicycles a minute racing past, teenagers shouting “on your left” with enough warning time you can  freeze in place and hope they don’t clip you.  No bicycles last night. No one walking their dog. No police. No cars. The streetlights were even off, most of them, except for one that flickered 10 seconds on and 10 seconds off.

We walked across the bridge toward all that nothing, and I tried to do what Kate said, trust my instincts, only I was having trouble doing that because my instincts disagreed.

I was scared to death. I already knew this was ten times more dangerous than closing up on the Bounty Hunter (though looking back I realize it was more like a million times more dangerous.) I also knew that I’d never felt so awed, or aching. Strattera was no help because she used to be in the military and so she kept looking around and at all the possible threats, which she saw better than me because I was wearing the handy blinders I keep around for just such moments.

The bodyguards (or secret service, or security detail, or whoever they were) acted like Venus Fly Trap spines, letting us go forward but not backward. We walked deeper in. Every wriggle took us further onto the bridge. When we got to the middle, the spines closed in from the other side too and we were trapped. We waited there, looking out on the old tamed river flowing up into the middle of the city, big huge guys in suits behind us and in front of us, patient like they are, with those wires winding like ivy up one side of their necks to their ears.

(continued in the next post) — Flyss

Photos are easier than words. I’ll start with them.

We’d walked under this bridge,

and then came up on top to cross it here.

That’s where it happened. (The photo’s from afterwards, once they’d all left.) Like I said, I’m working on how to describe what happened. And Strattera wants me to go first.

(Continued in the next post) — Flyss

What happened last night was … so much. So unlike anything else.

I’m not forming words very well. I need to tell this story, but I need to recover. And I need to work on how to talk about it, to do it justice.

To do her justice. — Flyss

(Continued in this post)