Althea spent the next two weeks engulfed, alongside Arsalan and Zella in reading and theorising about the board and the flame. Though she hadn't said anything of the riddle to Arsalan, she and Zella pondered it in their time away from him. Althea's outburst of feelings for Arsalan that she'd nearly acted on that night of the ball, slowly seemed to fade as nearly every other night for the last fortnight she'd taken Jasper to her bed. She couldn’t get enough of him. Each and every time they made love it got better and better... though at the conclusion of each night, she couldn't help the feeling that there was something left to be found there between them. It always seemed that their time spent in intimacy was too short lived.
It was near days away from All Hallows' Eve now, and the start of her last week training with the stones. Over the past weeks they had finished the communication training in which they meditated together and sang in a language so ancient, it vibrated through her body with all the weight of its age. The last week had pertained to her intuition, and testing how well she could sense danger. Arsalan had braced her, saying this upcoming week would be the hardest week yet, to overcome, but once she had, they would begin their next area of training, combat training, and integrating ability training into it. The thought both delighted and terrified Althea.
She was happy to finally overcome all of the hours spent meditating for some more active training, but the thought of further developing her ability was terrifying to her. After everything she'd read, all of the people who had gone mad… even though Arsalan had tried to reassure her, saying that she had overcome every obstacle he'd thrown her way, she still felt uneasy at the thought of practising what was essentially magic within her.
As she made her way to the large, partially baron tree, Arsalan smiled at her. He had been oddly nice to her over the last week, not that she was complaining, but the void of his usual brutish behaviour was slightly peculiar.
"Good morning!" he greeted her, and it was only then that she noticed a small hut just beyond the trunk of the oak tree.
She furrowed her eyebrows and glanced at him with a concerned expression passing over her features.
There was a light smoke puffing from the opening in the top of the small makeshift tent. Did he have a fire set in there? Althea had been wearing the heavier set of training garbs made for her by Layana over the last week, due to the bitter cold that had begun to take over now. Had he done this as an attempt to keep them out of the cold today? Why not just practise inside? The ballroom wasn't to be used for another few days, anyway.
"It's for your training," he said, walking over to the hut and opening the flap to the inside. Althea could feel the warmth radiating from the odd little space.
"Am I to go in... now?" she asked, still a bit confused as she clenched her bag of stones in a hand.
"Yes, go on, it's best we get started before these clouds start pouring down on us," Arsalan looked up to the sky which featured a haze of grey, speckled with dark patches of storm clouds.
With a sigh, she ducked and climbed into the small den. Inside were two cushioned seats, separated by a small coaxing fire with a brew of some sort hovering above it. The small space was thick with hot steam and the smell…
“Christ, are you boiling mud in here?” Althea asked. It smelled of earth and a deep, pungent mustiness. He chuckled and shook his head.
She took a seat atop the farther of the two cushions, and Arsalan followed her inside, taking his spot in front of her. He held two bowls in his hands that he’d brought in from outside the tent. She’d spied them as she’d come in.
“This,” the smile he gave her made a chill run over her skin despite the warmth of the hut, “is a traditional Amazonian brew.” Arsalan handed her what appeared to be a bowl of watered down mud. She looked down her nose at it, praying to whoever might be listening that he did not expect her to ingest whatever this was.
“I first tried it years ago, during my time deep within the Amazon Rainforest, just south of Manaus. Though I’m not a shaman… and this is no Maloca,” he chuckled, “I think we should still be able to reach our desired outcome.”
“Are we… to drink this?” Althea asked hesitantly… she had a strong feeling she wasn't going to like his answer. As if reading either her thoughts, or perhaps the slight grimace she was sure shown through on her face, Arsalan nodded.
“Yes, but don’t worry I've strained it well, and it has cooled so some of the, uh, flavours, are less potent. Though, be prepared, it is quite bitter.” Her grimace only grew at that.
“And why, exactly, are you making me drink this?” she asked, peering between him and the bowl resting in her lap.
“I will not make you do anything… ever… it is entirely your choice whether you wish to ingest this sacred brew Althea. However, I will enlighten you to some ways that it helped me overcome a plethora of mental obstacles I have faced. This brew is made from a concoction of various plants, straight from the depths of the Amazon, the ayahuasca vine, the leaves of the chacruna plant, chiric sanango, and bobinsana. The ayahuasca vine contains two inhibitors, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine that allow the psychoactive compound within the chacruna leaves to activate. The compound is actually one which already exists within our minds… but when an excess enters our bloodstream, it enables our minds to widen beyond the mere confines of this world.” Althea furrowed her eyebrows, lifting the bowl to study its contents.
“So I’m not drinking it for how it will taste… but what it will enact in my mind? What do you mean by the confines of this world?” she asked.
“It is hard to explain, if I’m being sincere… but I will warn you, the things you see and experience once you have ingested the brew are… vivid to say the least.” The way his angular jaw clenched and the flicker of nervousness in those silver eyes did nothing to reassure her.
“The first time I took it, it allowed me to see all that was, and all that is… it allowed me to understand that they are in fact one, everything that has yet to come has already been, and the present is all that there is. The brew allowed me to understand time, and this world in a way that I never could have imagined, and I believe that it is because of this enlightened understanding that my gifts have not affected me as they have others.”
“You think this brew has kept you from going mad?” she asked, mostly for confirmation.
Arsalan nodded. “Yes.”
It was all the confirmation she needed. If he believed it could keep her mind from being torn apart by its own delusions, she would ingest this odd smelling brew.
Althea nodded and slowly began lifting the bowl of strong smelling brown liquid. Arsalan raised his to hers in a sort of celebratory way.
“Congratulations Althea… you… you’ve come far.” Before she could let her mind wrap around those words… how much they meant coming from him, he had the wooden bowl pressed to his lips and was gulping down the contents. Althea followed suit, holding her breath as she brought the bowl to her mouth and drank deeply. The slightly warm liquid was bitter as it slid down her throat, nearly causing her to gag once, but she swallowed it down until the bowl was empty.
Then they waited. Arsalan doused the flame in water, not enough to fully put it out, but to create a thick cloud of steam between them. Beads of sweat formed above her brow, her neck, between her breasts. She took the wool lined tunic off, letting her body breathe in the thin undershirt.
Arsalan didn’t let his eyes fall upon her, for fear that he may not be able to look away so subtly… or worse, his body would react in that way it sometimes did when his eyes fell over Althea and he allowed his mind to drift to unholy territory. So he peered into the glistening embers, breathing in the heady steam that filled the makeshift hut.
He didn’t give Althea a warning as he began chanting the mantra he’d taught her a couple weeks ago. To his surprise, and delight, she joined in almost instantaneously. He let his eyes sweep up her slim abdomen and rounded chest, then to those bright beaming green eyes, before he let his own lids flutter closed. And though he attempted to clear the image of her, skin gleaming with sweat against the heat of the flame, like honey oozing from the comb… that face was evident in his mind with each inhale and exhale he took.
Althea wasn’t sure how much time had passed since she’d ingested the brew, but upon a so’ham blown exhale, her breath seemed to catch and suddenly it felt as though she’d been laid to soak in a pool of warm water. As she opened her eye’s, the room had dimmed to an almost completely darkened state. Arsalan still sat across from her now, but he appeared entirely different before her. His eyes were no longer their icy silver, or even that sated blue… they had turned a deep onyx, so dark and depthless that it gave her a slight fright as she peered at him.
“Allll-theeeea?” Her name on his lips was foreign to her. A long, drawn out word that seemed to curve on forever, as did his mouth, twisting in a way which was unnatural as he spoke. But she couldn’t look away, couldn't bring herself to close her eyes as she just stared at him. “Do you feel okay?” he asked.
Althea opened her mouth to reply but no words would grace her. Her gaze shifted from him, to the muffled embers before them. She let her attention fixate on the small glimmering flame peaking through charred wood.
Then it started.
Soft thrumming filled her ears, like the beat of an ancient war drum. She could feel her physical body shift, feel her head lift to the ceiling as her eyes rolled back. But she was not greeted by darkness as her eyes closed… quite the opposite.
“You, you, you, you.” The word echoed through her mind, rumbled through her bones, caressed her very soul with its warmth and familiarity. Was it her own voice, her own conscience? It breathed into her, filling her entirely with a foreign sense of both pleasure and wonder.
“Bearer of two identities, stitch between two worlds.” Another thrummed echo.
Light flashed before her and then she was floating, soaring through the darkness towards that radiating, all consuming light. As her mind flew, Althea’s head filled with overlapping whispers. None of the words were echoes of English, but of an ancient, long forgotten tongue.
“Grower of life, taker of darkness, assistant to death, eternal soul,” they spoke to her, their voices like spindly, morphing instruments.
Light flooded through her entire spirit as she made it beyond the tunnel of darkness. She swallowed down gulps of foreign emotion, igniting and being set ablaze by everything around her. So beautiful and wholly familiar to her. Not a place… but a state of existence.
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A new presence greeted her, seeming to say hello without speaking into her.
“Where am I?” she beckoned.
“You know,” was the entity’s only reply.
“My mind?” It felt true.
“The mind does not hold the memories of the immortal soul.” Around her, in the beaming warm light, emotions surrounded her, foreign and yet so familiar. The songs of animals not of the world she’d come to call her home.
“I know this place…” Althea said, or rather thought. A brush of energy swept past her, like the warm touch of a lover.
“This,” the word was long, drawn out as the entity seemed to breathe down her metaphorical neck, “is the sanctuary… where all eternal life both starts and ends. A resting place for spirits to be reborn.” In that moment, the feeling that surrounded her was infinite. A sort of joy and solas spreading in every direction with no limit, no restrictions.
“This is your home, little wind spirit… This is the home of all living beings. The skin you possess is a purpose.”
“What is my purpose?” she asked. A laugh ran through her, weaving through each vertebrae of her spine.
“I can not permit such information…” the entity crooned, “but… I’ll allow you to glimpse what awaits.” Her mind trembled, not with fear, but with anxious anticipation.
“Ready?” the presence beckoned.
“Yes.”
She was launched into herself, back into the darkness from which she’d come. But as she soared through the pit of onyx, a speck appeared far off in the distance. They grew closer and closer, that entity’s presence still with her, carrying her through this world of darkness.
The speck grew into a spiralling, morphing fractal, filling her entire existence with its tan and black patterns. It was like peering down a spiral staircase, each pattern repeating the first in different scales. But within the pattern, lay another and another, drawing her in farther and farther. The patterns were self-similar, folding in on themselves like ocean waves. She was entering into not just a shape, she realised, but a world… an entire infinite reality, full of endless complexity. The spiralling flow of shape and movement engulfed her, pulling her down, down, down, into it until she was one with this mesmerising world of intricacies.
“This world is my creation,” the entity whispered, “my punishment.”
As she studied the details closer, she noticed that there was no life within this world, no growth or warmth. It was cold, and vacant, and vast. But she could feel the presence of what once was… what had flourished here long ago.
“What happened to it?” she asked, still dwindling deeper into the world's infinite spiral.
“I was taken from my home, my world… and then something was taken from me. What was once a sanctuary is now unfortified, and therefore has been ravaged by the likes of monsters that only dwell in your darkest terrors.” Althea’s eyes scanned the terrain again, blank and empty. A feeling of such deep, all consuming melancholy, filled her entirely. And though she wasn’t sure why… guilt plagued her, as if she were to blame for this happening.
“Do not fret, little wind spirit, for I am eternal. I know all that is and all that will come. My world will be made anew… made to match the remnant of what it once was.” The intricacies of the spiralling pattern shifted as they at last neared its centre. Blazing warmth flitted into her, bringing with it that familiar sense of comfort and joy once more. They were back where they’d started, surrounded by what she could only assume to be paradise.
“The last haven,” the presence purred, “the centre of my world.”
“What can I do to help you?” Althea asked.
“Embrace, remember, and…” the entity paused, seeming to let warm, caressing fingers brush over her mind, “go back home.”
It wasn’t an answer, but a demand, she realised, as she was sent flying, soaring back through the darkness. The light of the fractals burned her eyes as they swept by in a daze, or rather as she swept past them. Darkness surrounded her and those voices from earlier began whispering again.
“When will you save us eternal soul?” their unified, withering voices begged.
“Why won’t you save us?” They were growing closer, circling her like predators stalking their prey. Fear began trickling into her, and that thrumming pounded again, filling her senses with its intense murmur.
“If you will not save us… then you shall join us.” The shimmering whisper was so close, Althea could feel it within her every fibre. And just as cold, spindly fingers clasped onto her shoulder, she jolted awake.
Darkness greeted her, but as her fingers clenched the soft, grey satin of her duvet, her heart slowed from its gallop in her chest.
“Althea,” a groggy male voice asked from across the room. She jumped, blinking in the darkness to see who was there.
Seeming to sense her unease, he said quickly, “it’s me, Arsalan.”
Her shoulders slumped and she relaxed once more, though she was unsure why he was in her room. She loosened her grip on the silk covers, noticing then that they were damp… she was damp, with sweat she realised a second later.
“How do you feel?” he asked, having walked from the wooden chair he’d been sitting in across the room, to stand before her now. The silver glow of moonlight shone in from the window, casted him in a cool shimmering light. He still wore his training garbs. Upon peering down, she realised she did too, though her boots had been removed. The last thing she remembered was sitting across from him in that odd little tent… how had she… had he brought her up here? To her room?
She opened her mouth to ask him just that, but when she tried to speak, she was instead greeted by a choking gag.
Arsalan moved quickly, helping her lean over the side of the bed as she relinquished the contents of her stomach. It was like vomiting up dirt. Dirt and bile. Arsalan’s hands were tangled in her hair, holding it back as she puked, and then puked again, until there was nothing left but air in her stomach.
“Fuck Althea, I am so sorry, this is all my fault,” Arsalan swore, his other hand rubbing circles on her back in an attempt to comfort her. “I shouldn’t have given you that brew.”
The brew… she remembered drinking it before the fire with him… had he experienced it too then? Whatever it had been…
“T–towel,” she managed to say. Her throat was raw and her voice was but a rasp.
She reached to take her hair from his large hand, and then he went quickly to the washroom to retrieve both a towel for the floor and a dampened washcloth for her mouth. He’d also grabbed her a glass of water to her utter gratitude. Then he knelt to the floor to begin cleaning her discarded stomach contents.
“Wait!” she rasped, attempting to stop him. Heat burned her face and embarrassment rose up in her. She didn’t want him cleaning up her vomit.
“Please Althea, I’m not afraid of a little puke,” he chuckled then got to work cleaning it up. Althea just gulped down the water in the glass, thankful for every drop of the cool liquid. She was parched.
“Did you… carry me to my bedchamber?” she asked as he finished cleaning up her mess. Arsalan only nodded, and because he was knelt below her bed, she couldn’t see what expression he bore.
“Thank you,” she said, peering down at the now empty glass in her fingers.
“Don’t thank me Althea… I am the cause of your distress… I should never have insinuated that you take the brew with me… I didn’t realise just how far it would carry you. You just…” he paused as if not wanting to relive whatever he’d witnessed. “I’m sorry.” She was still processing it all. When she’d initially awoken in her bed, she’d wondered if it had all been an intense dream… but she knew it hadn't been… she’d indeed gone somewhere, somewhere far, far from here. It was hard to remember everything that had happened, everything she had felt and witnessed.
“You needn’t apologize Arsalan… I am okay. And what I experienced…” she could hardly put it into words.
“I have never seen anyone tap so hard into the spiritual realm before… it was like one moment you were there and then… I felt it hit me too, but it didn’t impact me like it did you. One moment your eyes were fixated on me, on the embers before us, and the next,” he ran a hand through his unbound mop of dark hair, “your eyes rolled back and then you, your mind was just gone. What did you see?” he asked, looking back to her now, curiosity enchanting those dark features.
“I…” she shook her head unsure of where to begin, “I went to another world… maybe multiple other worlds… I don’t know, I probably sound as if I’ve gone mad…”
“No,” Arsalan spoke quickly, “you do not sound mad in the slightest Althea. The brew… it takes your mind places… helps you understand things that are usually clouded. The compounds from the plants open your third eye and allow you to see the world for what it truly is… and it is a very vast place.” She nodded slowly, understanding him entirely. After what she’d seen and felt, he was very right about that.
“It’s hard to recall all of the details now… but there was this place, a sort of paradise… Arsalan it was so, so divine, so utterly beautiful and not of our mundane beauty, but of true unfiltered beauty. And there was this… this presence there with me. Well there was more than one, the first I think was my conscience leading me to where I needed to be in order for the second to find me. When it did, it guided me through, speaking to me without words, but just feelings and thoughts, but I somehow understood.” She was rambling, she knew she was, but Arsalan's blue eyes were aglow with both curiosity and fondness as she spoke, which made her want to continue.
“It showed me a different world… a world that was dying, and yet this entity had kept a small part of this world safe, and that tiny sliver of existence, it was… that paradise, that was it. It had saved it, and it was… wondrous.” Tears stung her eyes as she tried and failed to feel the kind of emotions she had felt in that place. She wondered if she would ever feel that way again…
“Hey now,” Arsalan lifted himself from the floor and sat atop her bed, “you mustn't let yourself dwell too much on what you experienced… you were put here for a reason Althea, embrace that.” The warmth of his fingers brushed against her knee. She’d nearly forgotten the end… how those other beings had surrounded her, begged her to save them.
“You’re right… I was put here for a reason,” she declared, though she wasn’t sure exactly what it was yet. But it had been no mere coincidence that she’d been brought here, to this place, that she’d met Monique and Jasper and Meg and James when she had… mere days before her ability had slithered from its dormancy. Things were falling before her like pieces in a puzzle, and now it was her responsibility to put them into the right places and create the bigger picture.
Arsalan’s mouth tilted up into a smile as he said, “I am glad it has led you where you needed to be.” He picked the towel up from the ground, tossing it into the hamper. Althea peered to the window, moonlight trickling in. She wondered what time it was…
“How long ago did we… take that brew?” she asked, it had been daylight… likely only approaching midday when she’d been swept beneath the curtain of this reality.
“About twelve hours ago… It's nearing midnight.” She blinked. Holy mother… she had been unconscious for that long? Arsalan reappeared after washing his hands and opened her wardrobe to grab a set of cotton nightclothes.
“Change into something more comfortable, and get some rest, okay? Take the rest of the week to fuel your body with food and recover, we will begin our combat training next week.” She nodded and he laid the garments beside her on the bed before strolling to the wooden chair and grabbing his pack. Had he sat there the entire time? Waiting for her to awaken? She supposed he had.
“Rest well Althea, is there anything you need before I go?” he asked, turning to look at her. If she were being honest with both him and herself, she didn’t really want to be alone with her wandering mind and thoughts right now, but she didn’t dare say that. He’d already done more than enough for her. So Althea just shook her head.
“No… thank you for watching over me Arsalan, goodnight.” Something twinkled in those bright eyes of his, she could see it even through the darkness. Then he nodded and exited her bedchamber.
After changing into her nightclothes, Althea laid back down in her bed, Archibald coming to nestle in beside her. But sleep did not greet her quickly… nor did it claim her for passing hours as she sat, pondering all that she could remember of what she’d experienced. She was scared that if she closed her eyes and let her mind soar free, she would wake to forget the urgency behind what that entity had implied. Its world was dying… and she didn’t know why it mattered to her, or how she tied into helping it, but she would start by not letting herself forget that which had been whispered into her. Little wind spirit, it had called her. Just as the wind carries with it the tales of past lives as it sweeps over the earth, weaving them into the fabric of the land, she too would embed this experience into her memory.