From the journal of Queen Gwendolyn Edgewood
Year 4188, Tel-Allal, Planet Bain
A Dream Blossoms
I recall how in those early years how one day I had ridden Trickhorn all day and was worn out from the hours of our playtime under the rich autumnal sun.
I could not escape the sense that there was something being communicated to me by my new friend, something deep and lovely, woven into her panting, and deep whinny, something whispered across bandwidths of our love. I fed her apples. She was gentle, so very aware of my small adolescent fingers as Trickhorn scooped the apples from out of my palm. While I fed her, I focused on the shine of her eyes, those deep dark orbs, and the rhythms of her breath. We were alone in the orchards, beneath my favorite tree, a prominent one seemingly in a perfect circle of other ones. Time stood relentlessly still that day. My troubles evaporated in Trickhorn’s presence.
In the east parlor of the great house, I recovered from my day, sunk deeply into one of the many black leather couches, and stared now into the rich orange and white glow of the fireplace. That something about Trickhorn stayed with me, until I fell into the oblivion of the sweetest early evening nap.
In dream, my favorite tree, Vo-Ma’s tree, our tree was before me, like a watermark shape, hollowed out at the center. The light speckled tree, a happy almost bouncing being, the edges around it swirling colorful energies of possibilities, our tree was a door, a dark one as if one were stepping into the starlit sky of another world. Our tree was our being.
I could hear nighttime creatures, the sound of locusts, crickets, their chimes, “Come child, come child, come child,” they beckoned, in their symphony which was joined by the deep sounds of wing flutter, the sparks of fireflies, a dense play of the deepest forest ever imagined as stars twinkled within the tree, our being.
Come child, come child, I heard, and could not resist such attractiveness, such innocence in these voices, like fairies and children, and with that, emerged a long-lost memory of the deepest sense of being home.
A foot, my foot, entered the tree shaped passageway, and placed itself in thick, dense grass, sacred grass — I somehow knew–hallowed ground, and now fully in, I was beneath a glittering dome of stars which shone over the thick purple and blue clusters of jungle land beneath the moonlight of two moons.
The cacophony of nature’s song enveloped me, and the song changed; ‘welcome child, welcome child, welcome child,’ and now I saw them, winged fairies, barely detectable to the eye, flying around me. Time shifted, and a story of days, weeks, and months played out as an adventure, beginning with Trickhorn, my trusty mehra appearing and joining me, and leading to fairies tending to me and preparing me for a long journey, an introduction, an initiation.
“Stick to the moss lanes, dear!” Red nosed Quinly warned, her hair curled, fuzzy, orange, her wings a wild tapestry of blues.
“Be safe, girl!” Sweet eyed Narndanay, gushed, her smile just like the day I saved her from the fairy eating Groutberger fox from the dark lands of the nothing.
“Come back to us soon, love!” Old Percy Moon cried, her eyes sad and telling the story of an old fairy lady who found me lost in the deep green Onelands, and new me “Since you were but a thimble’s size”
“She’s never been thimble sized!” Laughed Narndany.
All their names, their stories their qualities somehow were vivid strands of memory as I felt myself to have grown in their company.
As Quinly instructed, Trickhorn kept to the moss lanes and took us through deep rocky pathways, past curtains of vines, and into the deepest green of a land I doubted anyone had the talent to imagine, least of all myself. Trickhorn then brought me to a lake. The moons reflected off the silvery surface. Then we saw Her!
At first, I mistook the mountains as Her shoulders, the treeline and clouds for her hair, the stars for skin, but soon saw that she just stood right before my very eyes.
“Aja?” I asked impulsively, referencing another strange history I couldn’t possibly recall now, but knew to the marrow in the dream.
“Hmmm!” She seemed shocked, this perfectly natural form that was so beautiful, charming, inviting. She raised a single eyebrow over a deep green eye, and smiled.
“Well… somewhere else, some other time ago, I would have said yes, that’s me. Wow…Aja, of the Orija!? Such a good guess, my sweet one, but no, I am Ashuta. Still though, you are not wrong… but you are… but not really!” Ashuta laughed.
“Ha ha! How did you pick than name out of your hat?” She asked.
“Well… I don’t know. I… I really don’t know much about where I am, not even who I am really.” I began to sense I was dreaming. The memories all conflicted, creating a fog of story. What was real?
“Ahh… yes, that’s what walking my corridor is like. All the things you picked up lifetimes ago can get dropped off or picked back up in weird ways. It can be confusing. Ashuta, the lovely woman, walked over to the lake, her form a strong silhouette. Her hair and body had the strangest quality of taking on the shapes of the land. She bent over the water, nearly became it, and said;
“Having a drink of the Keminik should settle your nerves, and bring you in deeper.” She handed me a silver cup full of the water of the lake.
The moons caught the water and turned it into brilliant starlight.
Drink child, drink child, drink child
I took a deep long drag from the cup. The cup had a name – Nartuwande, it told me, and it was ever-yielding, more water that ever could be held by a cup, really. I heart felt ablaze! I then could see more clearly. Then I saw the lovely woman, as if my eyes were made of diamonds.
“You are Goddess Ashuta!”
Her smile was delightful. Her skin was brown, her eyes deep, dark, and full of the cosmos.
“Yes. What else can you remember?”
“This! This is the Great One Land!?” I squealed.
“Yup. Now you’re onto it. Anything else you can tell me?” She asked, almost testing.
With the question came a flood of lifetimes, some of which were being lived simultaneously. I was all of them, and in many of them I was frustrated by the limitation suffered by forgetting this land, our land. In this place, those other stories had no meaning, whatsoever. I laughed at who I thought I was, sleeping on the couch ‘back home,’ on the absurd planet Bain, while simultaneously I laughed at who I though I was sleeping under a giant mushroom in Oneland! So many simultaneous lives, lived, seen and known to be simple, tiny little dreams. I giggled.
“Ashuta, I’m… I’m actually from a world called Bain? How do I know, you, and the Great One Land so well?”
“You know me because you are one of mine, and I am yours. Only your deepest, truest self can hold us here. I just had to send my agent to you to help bring you here, where all of it is obvious to you.”
I sat in the grass and pondered as the water of the river Keminik coursed through me. Soon, my own hair seemed to become sky. An absurd notion arose that my shoulders were mountains, the nape of my neck a deep valley. Our tree, our land, our self.
I became drunk on it, and eternities shattered along the grey ranges that were my legs. I saw Ashuta. I was her, of sorts.
My sister, I thought.
whimsey
delight
Together we played hide and seek, condensed and evaporated in the high adventures of clouds. Then I caught her!
I was on the top bunk, she on the bottom, two young girls somewhere, trying not to be overheard by adults held the yellow light beams of a kitchen.
“Ahh!!!! Trickhorn? You sent a mehra to get me to remember?” I shouted down to her as I twisted a pig-tail and chewed gum before sticking it on the ceiling.
“Shh!!!! Duh!” She hissed and struck the bottom of my mattress.
“Well, I couldn’t send one of my sons! They would never get near you in that culture of yours! What a droll little planet, Bain. Besides, all you ever wanted from my land, was a mehra, and Trickhorn is the only kind of creature that can bring you as deeply in as you are with me now. Believe me, sister, Trickhorn covers incredible ground in dream. Ha. Yep, good ole Trickhorn.”
The light scape shifted again, and were no longer children, but in truer form, our form. Ashuta was again elemental.
“Whoa… I feel…” I couldn’t finish. I glanced around.
“Feel what?” Ashuta asked, her grin infectious. The Keminik again wove her silvery path through thick jungle lands. The trees swayed in the wind.
” Like ever being a child wasn’t ever… real.”
“Ha ha!! You are indeed an old… old soul my dear.”
“One of yours?”
“Yes, one of mine.”
“Well… what can I do for you m’lady?”
“M’lady?!” Ashuta’s laughter kicked up a soft summer evening breeze, and the trees swayed to its rhythms. “Ok… you’re already starting to forget.” She said.
“You’ve already done it. Just remember this depth, and be with me… my crumb,”
And in that moment, the way she spoke I heard the voice of my grandmother, Edowina. This place, or at least the gateway to it—the difference between either a hard argument to make– was the tree we planted! It was the depth of all that we are.
“Just stay with me for a while, child. I’ve missed you. Things have changed here, in the worlds that I’ve manifested.”
Things again shifted, and It occurred to me upon her stating that, that the planet Sten, our colony world that lay hidden beyond the cosmic rift was where She, the goddess Ashuta, was located… in a way. With that, my sense of time and space warped and bent around the gravity of Ashuta’s actual presence– timeless, space-less, just reality as it was already. All had been done already! It happened ages ago.
My Gwenness began to return.
“The Empire of Bain, is like… an ant colony who merely found the honey.”
I saw how insignificant my father’s problems were.
“As with them all my Gwendolyn. It’s time to move the honey.”
I sat with the Goddess in the field of swaying grasses. It seemed another lovely eternity. This was the language, Edowina spoke—pure, decoded. I was speaking it with a Goddess, by being with her. Then the sun began to rise in the skies of my dream.
“Halllooooo! My Goddess!” A voice called in the distance. Ashuta chuckled, but did not answer. She almost burst out laughing, holding a slender back of her hand to her mouth. There was a wry mischievous quality to her demeanor rising, as I saw her glancing for a hiding place. Dawn’s early light reflected from off of her green eyes.
I rose, feeling I might be discovered. The goddess glanced at me and nodded that it was time for me to go back. She winked at me.
“Ohhhh… tcha! He’s found me again. Always finding me at dawns early light, that one.”
“Goddess, who is it?”
“Oh… just my bright bean, … sigh… the sun to the moons, a sweet warm rascal… that’s all.” She seemed smitten in phrasing him thusly.
“I know you’re there, Goddess, for you cannot Not be there! Ha ha ha!!! Quanan and I are coming!” The voice called, nearly causing Ashuta to laugh more as her eyes darted about.
“Ohhh… well dang it. That was nice. Hem! Oh…Hey, one thing. I actually do need to send one of my sons to you. It will be hard for you to remember the specifics, but I need you to do your best for him. You will know what to do.”
I climbed on Trickhorn’s back.
“What is your son’s name?” I asked.
She looked at me disbelievingly, a frown that seem to say, Come on! You know, sis!
“Easy! He is the ray of light.”
“Well, m’lady. I will do my best for the ray of light,” I said.
The goddess Ashuta, grinned, giggled and pointed to the jungle behind me.
“Focus your attention on that tree, there.”
I did.
In a flash, there was again months of traveling on the back of Trickhorn, though deep green corridors of the heartland, all compressed into a moment.
I awoke
“The Ray of Light?” What kind of name is that?” Sleep released me upon saying it, and the groaning sound of my skin against the leather of the couch was deep and loud. The living room was dark except the dimming fireplace. In one of the other parlors I could see yellow light, and the sound of my mother and father’s voice.
“…been riding the mehra all day… exhausted.”
“I’ll go check on her, and have her go up…”
I had immediately forgotten the dream. It did not return to me until the moment I would meet Ashuta’s son. That was the day my nephew, Bren, in his adventures brought home Prince Joshua Korani to the palace some forty years later.
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