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libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Act 1 (from Acts of Desolation) #fiction #scifi #serial #somethingsacred

“Share your body with me. Let me in.” She was hovering all around me. Not as sexy as it sounds. She wants to take over my will and use my body for her own purposes. Well, maybe that is sex for some, but not me.

“You know I can help you.” So enticing. I can almost be persuaded, flooded by feeling of her concern, that she is so kindly offering me her soul. I know the rules. They can’t get in without an invitation. Here, in the cacophony of noise, light, movement, I have the distraction to avoid falling into her psychic trap. Concentrate on someone else, someone I can in some sense relate to. There. That girl in the background, her costume just enough different from the rest. She is palpably alone, and enthused with a fear and excitement at being part of the scene.

The ghost can see her, too. All that charming vulnerability, just waiting. This girl didn’t have the experience I did. The ghost desperately needed a body. She had corporeal errands. I, so far her only psychic link, was not cooperating. If only she could manage an invitation from this lonely young woman who was looking for something new. I would be off the hook, out of this mess that was none of my business to begin with.

Red and green spotlights were flashing across the stage. The band was revving up into banshee shrieks over an accelerating, hard-driving beat. Everyone was screaming, the dark, perspiration-dripping room closing in way too fast. I wound my way out of there, back onto the minimally quieter, darker, emptier street.

It was raining, a cold January rain when it’s not interested in snowing because that would feel pleasanter. Had it been this wet all night? I didn’t remember.

She was there, the girl from the club. I don’t know if she was following me. Maybe the ghost had gotten to her. I looked her straight in the eyes, and I was lost. She was not the innocent I had expected. It seemed that potent forces were collecting here, and I seem to be vibrating in the center of an impending storm.

3

Before I can gather up the necessary will to run off, she walks to where I am standing and takes my hand.

“Take me with you,” she says simply, quietly. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

We make our way, through the rain and icy streets, to the hole. I light a fire to dry us. As it turns out, she has a flask of very fine brandy in her pocket, which makes the warming up process far easier. In no time it seems like we were old friends.

“That’s because we are,” she tells me, laughing gently as if remembering a private joke.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this. But, if someone had to, I’m glad it could be me.” This does not sound encouraging.

“I know you’re retired. I now you’ve been taking memory suppressants to help you stay truly undercover. I know why.” This is more encouraging, since so unlikely. This must be another one of those dreams. Soon the sirens and jumbled images will take over until I find myself suddenly awake, terrified, covered in sweat, with no idea why.

“I am sorry. We have ourselves a situation. We need you. You are going to have to come in from the cold.”

Suddenly I am very cold indeed. Shivering uncontrollably, as tears take over my face, I still don’t know why.

So, it turns out I am part of a highly trained secret corps of empaths, developed by the Genetic Weapons Initiative during Cold War III. When the new Administration and Congress were voted in after the Worldwide Peace Convention, they dismantled GWI as repugnant to the conscience. We were sold to a secret mercenary group for ad hoc assignments.

This is a lot to take in, and apparently the story gets weirder from there. Calinda, my new best friend, is also my old best friend and my biological twin, though several years younger than I. There was a mutiny against the mercenaries, a secret war between secret entities.

“Dorie, I know you wanted, needed so badly, to get away. I know you just wanted a peaceful retreat.” She hugs me as she speaks, holding off some of my terror as the visual memories run scatter-shot through my inner view. What could they possibly need from me? I am nothing but broken, hiding in self-imposed ignorance.

“You sleep,” she decides. “I’ll walk your dreams. It will all make sense when you awaken.”

I feel Calinda’s safe presence guiding me into the dream, the denied memory.

When you grow up in a vat, created as an advanced biology experiment, any semblance of family takes on great significance. Especially for empaths, who are forced into intimacy relentlessly, having the security of well-known, bonded, intimates can be crucial.

It was a small, efficient team: Reag, our revolutionary leader, his wife, Romy, Arden, his bio-twin, and me, his oldest friend. We had learned that the GWI labs were still in secret operation, churning out human weapons for the mercenary organization with which we were now at war. We were all linked in, both for strategy and emotional support.

Arden and Romy were in the main lab building, setting the explosive charges in the embryo and accelerated growth vat rooms. The kids in the vats, undergoing treatments to bring them to physical maturity in months rather than years, could feel our presence. They were helpless. There was no way we could save them and destroy GWI. That would take resources far beyond anything in our power.

Reag and I were in the communications tower, standing look-out while scanning and overriding the data stream to keep our actions from being monitored. Most of the lab’s operation was automated, especially during the scientists’ and technicians’ downtime.

We weren’t prepared for the silent screaming. The vat kids knew why we were there. Their energy, a massive panic surging outward, set off the explosives before Arden and Romy could escape. Noise, light, pain, hundreds of young bodies ripped apart, still silently screaming. Arden’s and Romy’s screams coming through even stronger, with poignant, tragic intimacy.

http://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/03/acts-of-desolation-when-battlefield.html

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 8 #fiction #somethingsacred #serial

Back at the beginning of her people’s history, Caela’s ancestors were bred according to parameters not interested in reproduction. This genetic weapons project had to be closely controlled. There was no room for rogue breeding. These human weapons were not produced sexually, but technologically. To make sure they were fed chemicals that prevented sexual viability.

Once they became free to live as human beings, they discovered issues with natural methods of achieving parenthood. For many it was difficult or even impossible to conceive. In their captivity both women and men were used to lives of hard work, service, not subject to childcare responsibilities; in freedom they tended toward producing as a community small numbers of children who were cherished by all. Over time these people assimilated with the greater population and took on the more normalized nuclear family patterns. Still a large percentage of these families were career couples without children. Even if a couple were fertile, women who decided they were not ready to take on a pregnancy had the ability to convince the newly forming life to dislodge before any sentience became a possibility. When that embryonic sentience did emerge, the gestating mother found herself suddenly a pair-bond, in total empathy with her developing child.

Caela had assisted with difficult births, calming mother and child as she helped them to separate. It wasn’t until she experienced pregnancy with Felicity that she was able to understand, finally and too late, the answer to her mother Letta’s undoing.

You are Letta. You have known all your life that you have an exceptionally strong sensitivity, even among people for whom hyper-sensitivity to others’ emotions is the norm. You have learned a kind of control, an ability to use reason and rules developed of experience to make of this what had sometimes seemed a curse a gift. You have made a good career for yourself as an admired and respected healer. You have made a good marriage with a man you love and respect who loves and respects you. You have a wonderful, adorable little child and another on the way.

You are forced from your happy secure home into total chaos. You are forced to endure months of hardship when physical hardship is something you had never known. You are afraid; the fetus is terrified. You try to find calm, but instead the terror keeps escalating in perpetual feedback. There is terror all around, within and without. This goes on and on as if it will never change. When it does change, it is a tragedy. The baby dies, despairingly panicked mom trying desperately to protect, give comfort, to that little dying life falls down, down, beyond recall. The march is over. She doesn’t notice. Life is over. There is nothing left of her to return. Some physical form that was once Letta goes through what to her have become arcane motions, when bidden. She swallows food, processes air and nutrients, doesn’t actually sleep because she is no longer actually awake. It’s not that she meant to desert her loving daughter, sever that bond. It’s just that there’s nothing left of her to bond with. There are wounds that never heal, never even have the consciousness to try.

By the time Caela has found this understanding, she is so joyfully in love with the child growing in her womb that the realization she had so long sought comes as mere information, not some holy treasure at the conclusion of a quest.

https://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/something-sacred-caelas-story.html

One person like that
libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 7 #fiction #serial #somethingsacred #scifi #fantasy

Caela also found herself spending much time with the historians. The ability to share their stories mind to mind was better than an oral tradition keeping their people’s history alive for those who found such information fascinating or useful. Those who collected and maintained these stories enjoyed nothing better than sharing them with the curious. They were happy to answer young girl Caela’s serious questions as she worked to figure out such issues as her place in the grand scheme, but more urgently how her people had dealt with illness and the mental instabilities of the kind that had taken her mother’s nurturance from her. She found she wanted to know about all manner of her ancestors’ dealings with adversity, the connections and decisions that led to her creation, that she might better understand her talents and developing goals. She didn’t know why it felt so important to her to gain these understandings, only that it was for her a hunger. Singer was not bothered by this particular hunger. He enjoyed the stories she shared with him, but as entertainment more than education.

As Caela’s growing talent for healing became recognized, by herself and others, she became more and more called upon to help out with medical emergencies. Working with those injured by accidents, overtaken by infections, childbirthing, she slowly became familiar with how to respond to panicked, hurting people desperate for reassurance as well as an easing of their pain. Singer she found to be bursting with pride for his Caela’s special abilities so gratefully treasured by their community. She found him always truly happy to be able to help her sort out and deal with her feelings, sympathetic suffering and exhausted sensibilities. He helped her to reach within her own neural system to renew energies outpoured for others. He seemed boundless in energy, love, enthusiasm to share. Thus, she needn’t fear depletion or falling into despair from surfeit of vicarious pain. She could concentrate on the healing, the powerful and precise energy she could freely give. As with any sincere practice, over time it became who she was, how she was perceived by herself and those she knew.

Letta’s physical death, her body finally letting go, while Caela’s body was in the throes of adolescence, was a sad reminder of what had long since been lost. It could not be more to those who had said their good-byes bit by bit over the years when all they could feel from her was emptiness. Caela had never quite given up on trying to reach her mother, who somehow zombie-like managed to go through the physical motions of life without engagement, thought or any but primitive private fear and sadness. Letta had apparently departed from any attempt at salvation, could not be reached, brought back into her life. Bit by bit, Caela became less convinced that she could help. She allowed herself to give over her time and thoughts and energies to more immediately real healing and relationships. Lev too had long since given over his hope to a self-sustaining realization that allowed him to live his life for present projects and future possibilities, not promises lost to the past. They cared for her shell lovingly, devotedly, without demanding what wasn’t left in her to give. When her body too left them, no longer taking breath or circulating blood with heartbeat, they said their final good-byes and gave her shell back to its natural part in the cycle of growth and decay.

https://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/something-sacred-caelas-story.html

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libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Far sought, darkest, deepest dreams so far, long departed before consciousness rewakes ghosts, impure images, whispered wraiths may haunt beyond sensory acceptance vague nauseas, involuntary shakes, subtle odors suggesting graveyards in rain and mist and pain yet never really say where forward leads

Rain, wind, I almost expect to see spectral faces briefly glaring against the windowpane. It is an intense season. More violins than percussion in the mix as I hear it tonight. The weeping oboe more than the screeching saxophone, strains of late night heavy blues on keyboard, and of course that bass fiddle, that deeply booming bass. Scorpio is a season I can feel gripping tingling through my guts. I think Nietzsche was a Scorpio -- all about that inheld power so intense that only the starkest expression will do.

Scorpios look realer than real to me. It's as if they are fully three dimensional in a two dimensional world. Tom is so completely Scorpio. He thrills me with mere memory, the thought of his name. He is so very there, so intensely present. While I fly hither and yon, he is my staunch fixed point. He is the exhilaration of the wild storm and my secure harbor. Beauty and Beast, the fulfilled fairytale reveals me to be the enrapt child laughing and clapping in awe and enthrallment. Yet I have exiled myself from my soul's safe home. I am walking in the rain buffeted by angry winds and icy pellets, opening myself to helpless pain, even horror. How appropriate for the season of transformation through mortal trial. The snake of power coiled in my spine is not fooled by my blushing protestations. I have allowed myself to become an emotion junkie, leaping into the magnetic attraction of that which leaves me trembling but more alive. Thus am I Tom's equal and other self. We are a parrying of challenge and resolution, storm and harbor, at play. I am working on a birthday e-card poem to send him, looking through googled images, discovering a route to music through picture and words. It's all ultimately music. I feel it in my every movement, in all the ambient sounds and vibrations.

Moving to the groove of the eternally mutating symphony, we could, if we were closely enough connected, dance ecstatically through it all. There are times when I feel that is exactly what I do.

I have heard about people who believe sharing music can change and save the world. It does seem to be a basic value; but it can also divide us, like probably anything we can find to disagree on. How well will I get on with a friend who insists on a constant background of commercial country music or Italian opera, or any musical dialect I can't stand. Because I am so attuned to the vibrations, sound sequences I find unappetizing often give me actual symptoms of sickness, headaches at least. Yet there are plenty of otherwise seemingly fine people who actually prefer these to me horrid sequences of sound. I might reflect that I need to broaden my ear; but it's not just me. Music can be as divisive as any other means of expression. Souls are different. We are not all one. Or, if we are, it is a one of many disparate parts. Is there a music we can all agree on, all feel speaks within us, moves us to dance together, to join, joyfully, in song? Or are we divided by our separate drummers?

We pagans dance around a sacred fire to bring our visions to magical fruition. People dance. People sing. People throughout the world, from earliest history, find ways to express musically. We must eat and eliminate the unacceptable of what we've eaten. We must breathe, in and out, the right mixture of elements. We must take in fluids and let excess fluids flow. We must find shelter from storms and predators and heat and cold. There are necessary conditions for the continuation of life as we know it. We seem to need music, an ethereal and ephemeral formulation. What else do we need to be healthy and whole that scientists have not unraveled? If humans are some amalgamation of animal and angel, or Earth spawn and alien, are there neglected necessities that keep us from our potential abilities? Is that why so many of us suffer and die early from illnesses that make no sense if we were engineered for survival? Is that why depression is rampant and anti-depressants so often exacerbate suicides? Something seems to be missing from a great many lives. Do creatures have analogous problems in the wild? If enough wilderness still exists to make that relevant, because such illness in wild creatures might well be due to encroaching civilization. When all that is left of the wild is an open zoo paid for by tourist dollars, what will have become of us? Or is that what we already are? I stroke the soft fur of my small, to me, feline companion, knowing we are both far from wild, yet atavistic enough to feel alive.

#fiction #serial #scorpio #witch

excerpt from
Something Sacred gestation pages
Persephone in Fall
http://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/persephone-in-fall.html

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 6 #fiction #serial #somethingsacred #caela

https://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/something-sacred-caelas-story.html

Singer loved to explore, or rather wander into serendipity, in the vast woods surrounding the community. There had been a great enterprise of clearing space for shelters and farmland, as well as, as different projects were conceived, commons for whatever needed accommodation. Wood cleared for space was a major resource as well for buildings, furniture, fire fuel, whatever could be fashioned from it. Very little dent was made in the deep, deepening, deeper acres of forest which had long dominated that part of their world. The city from which they had come and its outlying farmlands and open fields had been cleared forest, developed over time and perceived need for open space in which to grow, build, civilize.

The exiled, at the beginnings still of their epic march, upon reaching the outlying farming area thought to exchange the money they carried, as they were leaving a social market system in which it could be of value, for tools, seed, livestock. They understood they would need to start a new farming community far within the forest still to come on their journey, once that land could be attained and cleared. Ready food and food preserved for future readiness on their way to their new home land was also purchased, as well as grazing pack animals, adapted to the local flora, appropriately accoutered to help in carrying the load.

This forest had never evidenced harboring creatures with any interest in preying on man. The local wildlife were mostly small and herbivorous. Those who were carnivores were content with the smaller forest creatures upon which they had always preyed. Even the large farm animals brought with man as frozen embryos to eventually be bred for foodstock (as who could know if indigent species would be nutritive to man) were not part of the dietary plan of indigent carnivores. For the most part, they preferred to lie low, maintain an invisible noninterference compact.

Singer felt in tune with the natural world, the living planet. It gave him a constant flow of music he could feel throughout his body, rhythm, melody, sweet sweeping choruses, in constant improvisation. He loved wandering in the woods, singing along. Caela knew to find him there when he hadn’t already dragged her along proclaiming on beauty and the sensual thrill of it all.

Making love on a bed of wet, slippery leaves, at one with the glistening beat of the rain, she could feel the smile inside her expanding into ecstasy. Singer’s smile, where she felt rooted.

Of course there were the never-ending flow of chores. Everyday was the cooking, cleaning, tending to livestock, cultivating crops, repairing clothing, furnishings, tools. Then there were always adjunct chores to bigger projects, buildings, planting and harvesting, manufacture of what useful items had been designed, even preparations for celebrations fell under the category of chores, work needing to be done.

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 5 #fiction #serial #somethingsacred
https://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/something-sacred-caelas-story.html

Lev was a good guy, generally acknowledged. He loved his little almost motherless daughter, Caela. He tragically loved Letta, his strength, his shining beautiful other half, his courage and moral compass. She was gone, worse than dead. Right there so he could touch her, but she wasn’t there, wasn’t her, to be touched.

Maris was. And sometimes others. He loved them, each for the special people they were, the feeling of sharing of intimacy they allowed for him. They weren’t Letta; nobody was, least of all Letta herself.

For young Caela it was all just part of the life around her. She felt loved and protected by Lev, and she felt his sorrow. She felt the uplift of his mood when he and Maris played in the easy jocular way they had come to together. She felt her mother’s terror, the inchoate creature she had become, unable to take part in the lives that continued around her.

So many tragedies, not little to those for whom they are daily deep suffering wounds holding down, holding back, severing hopes and possibilities.

Singer always made her feel lighter, so matter of fact and invested in having fun. Really, isn’t that the way, salving wounds with healthy living joyously engaging? Yet wounds, chunks taken out of all of us from time to time, need, deserve, tending. Learning who she was, what she valued, Caela grew to understand that loving the wounded meant for her an attunement to discovering ways to heal. It’s not about denying the wound, but helping the wounded to find a way back to wholeness. Who she was, influenced by her time, tribe, circumstances, DNA, not some preordained destiny, carried her moment through moment, creating the weave, the fabric she lived, as Maris created beautiful works of woven wearable art. Enjoying the feel, the weave, of such a perfectly fitting radiant garment, Caela’s consciousness dances. Like all art, this dance tells an enthralling story to those with the will to see, to feel resonance.

Let us go dancing into ceremony of joy and tribal cohesion. I see, smell, feel a firepit on a cool evening. Shared sacred time for histories secured to memories, mingling ideas, fears, fantasies, the reassurance of the constancy of love. Why do we think that we need more? Ah, yes, man is built to defy the capacity for satisfaction that we may ever be hurtling forward in our grand endeavors. Drama requires friction. But does not enlightenment require an eternal flame? These are not Caela’s thoughts. They are thoughts that surround her, always within her reach, perhaps awaiting her perusal. They are not conscious thoughts, but of the philosophies that shaped her. Self-evidently, what happened happened. This does not imply destiny. If the story had turned out otherwise, we would simply have told a different story. There was a time she had to traverse a forest. Thoughts from a close surface may manifest as traveling companions when regular companionship is scarce.

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 4 #fiction #serial #somethingsacred #caela
https://caelastory.blogspot.com/

There were other people back there/then, bound up in who she was, who she has become. Now she is happy to pick out their voices in this visit to her past, her child mind.

Her memories drifting, focus in on Maris, strong hands, open caring face. “Singer’s mother, but in so many ways a mother to me.” Maris had taught her to sew, a strangely relaxing use of her hands and so practical for keeping garments in repair. She did not have Maris’s talent, nor her daughters’, Singer’s sisters, for the magic of the cloth. She did not seem to have the necessary patience. She did enjoy those times of womanly intimacy among Maris and her girls, sharing reminiscences, studying together in their conversation worlds of ideas and discoveries. The instance that occurred to her now was from when she was of the age still a child but starting to become aware of the intricate charms of romance. Puzzled by what was not evident from Maris’s reminiscing, she had asked:

“Why aren’t you angry, bitterly angry, when you speak of Aron? He betrayed you, deserted you and your children to keep his happy easy life.”

Aron had been Maris’s husband, father of her girls (but not Singer), back in the city, before the troubled times that marked her community’s history. Aron had left Maris rather than be exiled with her. He was not of the marked group except by marriage. The marriage had to go, not him.

“There is no need to annoy myself with anger.” Maris had pointed out. “He is the one who has missed out on this life, caught in the intrigues and unfortunate values we left behind. He is quite angry, ashamed, disappointed with himself, and does not have me to help him sort out his frustrations and confusions. I must admit, looking back, that a good part of why I was attracted to him, why I married him, was that he felt so needy at a time when I was consumed by the need to be needed. Having kids makes that nonoptional, puts it into immediate focus. Aron’s needs were no longer so important to me. Now, I’m not sorry that I loved him. I am sorry for him for giving up on himself, what he could have been if he’d ever really believed he could. When we’re young we take so much on faith in the future to make up for our ignorance.”

That was the kind of thing Maris would say. It all made sense in her clear, deliberate imagery, punctuated by wisps of passionate emotion that Caela had not understood at the time.

What would Singer say? The very young Singer when they were children working out together what must be the meaning, the appropriate attitudes toward life; Singer through all the years until the years that no longer held him. He was always with her still, in a sense by her side. She could feel his strength, unwavering sincerity, light gentleness of being. She could hear him lapsing into song as an integral part of whatever task or frivolity engaged him. He had always been so present in her life, from very early years. They had grown together such that his physical presence though missed was never essential to their bond.

Children together, parents together. Felicity had something of her mother’s gift for healing, though not her intensity. She was more her father’s easy-going side-kick, bright, flirtatious, friendly in that way of caressing openness, that sunny temperament that everybody loves. See her loving her life in the chaotic home she creates and shares with so many busy friends, constant activities, every day a celebration. Singer and Felicity always bubbling over with fun, enticing Caela to let go and enjoy the merriment. Just thinking of them always lightened her heart, widened her smile, brought laughter to her eyes.

He would say: “There is so much beauty, in here, out there, everywhere. Come, enjoy it all with me. Open your senses, feel that everpresent amazement when you take it all in. Feel me experiencing with you, my most precious friend.” Yes, he would be dancing, hugging, exhorting with melody and rhythm, imaging a clownish comedy of musical movement, hyperbolized flowering woods filled with glorious natural delights. She could feel his dancing eyes, sunlight smile, adoration, fused into the Singer center of her mind. Always.

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com
libramoon

Caela’s Story 3 #fiction #serial #somethingsacred #caela

She could feel the presence of the small frightened creatures that hid from her in the woods. It was easy to find one simple mind and hypnotize it with projected imagery. The creatures would respond from a place of which they had no awareness, the way fish are unaware of water or humans are unaware of the chemical stew bubbling out commands through our bodies. Calming the creatures, she felt a sympathetic calm, helping her to learn correspondences between the feelings within her and others. People were more complex, but also more familiar. The problem was more in keeping the separation along with the intimate connection so she could find the way in to help, to heal, without being overwhelmed or trapped in the shared pain. That was part of her problem in trying to find her way into a healing position with Letta. Her mother was too much a part of her, too easy to get lost in the sharing and fall forever to no one’s benefit. So far, at least, the delicate balance escaped her abilities. Again and again she was made aware that she was still a young child with a great deal to learn about, well, everything. Children often feel an urgency to grow up, to become smart and important like the grown-ups who inform their world. She didn’t feel frustrated and impatient so much as willing, willing her self to absorb the knowledge and skill she needed.

But it was not all like that. There was so much more to being a child, including the everpresent possibility of pure wonder, pure joy, great exhausting laughter, strong arms to lean into and feel safe.

It’s not about where we are or what we have. Children don’t start out with expectations, but with simple basic needs and a readiness to make what sense they can of whatever presents itself as their life.

Old Caela watches young Caela at play, from a great distance of time and circumstance. Memories, experiences, that came between separate them. Old Caela recognizes the child and that they share secrets from which she can still learn, take a special kind of comfort, see a shining thread of something she wants to call truth.

https://caelastory.blogspot.com/2009/08/something-sacred-caelas-story.html

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