Ritual Reality
23 Promethean, The Unbound
Saturday, 21 June 1969
As soon as Wayne dropped the pouch, his ghostly companion nearly dove off the cliff trying to catch it. She looked at him strangely, then back at Rebecca kneeling on the ground below. Wayne pushed himself out of his resting place and scrambled upward. He felt a nudge as if impatient hands were pushing him upward and then he rolled away from the cliff. The Lady rolled beside him and glancing back at him in disbelief, she turned and dove off the cliff.
“So that was it. You weren’t interested in me at all, were you? Just like everyone else. You just wanted your trinket,” Wayne muttered. He’d grown quite fond of the ghost.
The voice caught up with him as he stumbled away from the edge of the cliff. It was no more than a whisper in the back of his mind. He was on his feet and running before it finally sank in. He pulled himself to a stop about a hundred yards from the crag and stood there panting, trying to catch his breath and comprehend what his ears had heard. It echoed, coming back at him from every direction. Rebecca’s voice, echoed by the voice of the Lady. She loved him.
She loved him! He hugged his walking stick to him in her place—their place??—and spun round and round, dancing them along with him. She loved him.
“Waltzing Matilda; she loves me; she loves me,” he sang as he danced in circles getting dizzier and dizzier as he spun. A stone dislodged under his foot and he came down on his butt with a crack, narrowly missing knocking his teeth out with the staff. The moon above spun in a lazy arc around the sky overhead. He couldn’t stand that. Fighting motion sickness, he rolled over on his stomach and scrambled to his hands and knees when he realized he was looking over the edge of a sheer precipice at rocks several hundred feet below him.
He collapsed back away from the cliff. He couldn’t believe he’d climbed it. He had to be crazy. Mustering his courage and mastering the dizziness and vertigo, he crawled back toward the edge and looked down. He’d nearly taken a dive off that and it was a long way out to the water from here. There was that other voice in his head. Why did he expect someone to be looking up at him where there were only rocks staring back?
Gather your senses together! Mari. You left her someplace behind. Why did she turn suddenly so cold and strange and then yell as you broke from the circle that she loved you? What did you do? You broke the spell, that was it. She’d been spellbound by the black kettle. If only someone had taught you what to do. What horrendous sight had she seen in its black depths? You must find her. She can’t go on thinking that you deserted her. No. You just broke the spell. You must find her now. No hordes are chasing you. There is only the brisk chill of the evening.
Wayne shouldn’t have tried to find his way out here alone. Spooks cropped up at every turning and each tree came alive. Each great standing boulder became a Titan fleeing from Olympian gods into the western world. He should have waited for Glenn.
More spirits occupied these Isles than any other place in the world. You didn’t notice them so much in the South where civilization had forced them into the sea with the arrival of the Saxons. The pagans were driven into seclusion. With the pagans had gone the dryads, the nyads, the faerie folk, and gnomes. And the Titans. But the Northern Lakes were a Tolkienesque environment. Spirits were far more likely to be restless around their haunted sidhes.
Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways.
He stumbled again and spun around, striking out with his walking stick at imagined armies of faerie spirits rising to attack him. Nothing. Just loose gravel and a path. If he wasn’t careful he would imagine himself in a dragon’s lair or on a stairway to the stars or some such other superstitious nonsense.
I know better. Some voice in my head keeps telling me… showing me… glimpses of a future… or past… so far separate, yet not so distant, not so foreign. But the knowledge that is gained is of such great proportion. Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Pour me a golden goblet of it like some bright elixir that when I had drunk of it, I would become immortal.
The images that filled Wayne’s double mind were too much to be borne. Life becomes ever more beautiful. Later beauty overpowers the first. It was simply a cycle of life.
This must have been what the Titans felt when younger, more beautiful gods than they captured the savor of sacrifices sent heavenward. Such beautiful pain that he would, like Hyperion, fall to an Apollo who not only looked as bright as the sun, but sang as well.
And here, in his primitive body, he was trapped like Saturn without his scythe, with all the voices of his age, petrified.
Like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor.
Wayne was so lost, so completely caught up in the fantasy of another age playing behind his eyes that the sudden blast that rocked the earth like a giant treading on the ground beside him caught him unawares. He tripped and slid down a short embankment beside the path, then rolled with a splash into the river.
Damn! Must he always wake up with such an unexpected dousing? If he didn’t have pneumonia by the time he got back home it would be a miracle.
A laugh bubbled up from beside him as if it arose from the water itself. It was deep and rich and full and female. He struggled up onto the embankment and sat facing the river trying to see who had witnessed his ridiculous pratfall. There she was, out away from shore, her white shoulders glistening above the surface of the water in the pale moonlight.
“Rebecca?” he whispered, straining his eyes to see features in the wan half-light.
“Were you here to meet someone? Should I hide?” said the laughter filled voice. No. Not someone he knew. He had stumbled on a stranger out for a midnight swim in the middle of nowhere. How embarrassing. He’d pick up his gear and slip away.
“Come on in for a swim,” she said to him. “You’re all wet anyway.” That was true enough but he was also basically shy when it came to bathing with a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere. This was a discovery that he had just made. “Come on. Don’t be bashful,” she coaxed. “Lay your wet things on the rocks to dry and come enjoy the water like it was meant to be enjoyed.” The voice had taken on a different tone completely and he had his plaid cape and boots off before he had reminded himself that this was not Judith, either.
“Who are you? Do I know you?” He strained to see her face.
“Who would you like me to be?” she said with a certain provocative uplift to her voice and her body in the water. “I’m flexible.”
“You remind me so much of someone I should know.” Wayne was standing shirtless with his feet in the water. It felt like something else was motivating his body again and he stepped back deliberately away from the water.
“That’s it. You’ll want your pants to dry so you can wear them later. You know what they say. Swim naked, go home in your pants. Swim in your pants and you go home naked.” Suddenly there was another voice in his head and other eyes looking through his, just long enough to whisper a name. His pants were off and he was in the water before the word had passed his lips.
“Mari?” he whispered as he swam out to meet her. She laughed again and rolled to swim away under water. She came up again behind him. How could a ghost from two hundred years ago take this form? She seemed not to have stopped laughing the whole time. “It can’t be. Mari’s part of a dream I had about The Vagabond Poet.” He kept turning around in the chest-deep water trying to keep the woman in front of him as she swam circles.
“And if I were Mari, I’d be a hundred and eighty years old. Who would you like me to be? Judith? Rebecca? Or are you still thinking of Lissa?” He watched as each of the women she named seemed to come across her face. Then she was the young woman he had first seen in the water who looked so much like Mari of his dreams. “They are all illusions, you see? Like making an elephant disappear on stage. But this one’s the easiest and I can tell you like it.”
“Why is that one easiest?”
“Because it is me.”
“But you can’t be Mari. You said so yourself.”
“I could be a descendent of hers, though, couldn’t I?”
“Yes, but… You’re such a chameleon. I can’t believe I’m…” Wayne paused. He’d just said something that rang a bell. “Chameleon? I had a dream about Chameleon.”
“I’m the stuff dreams are made of. You’ve been dragging me through your dreams. Now let me take you through one of mine.”
“What?”
“Isn’t it easier to imagine that you are asleep in bed and I was just a dream playing in your head? That’s what you’ve been doing. Believing it’s all a dream and you are safe in bed—no witches, no ghosts, no dreams-come-true.”
“It could be that,” he sighed. She was close to him in the water now. Their bodies slid sleekly past each other, brushing in the slow current.
“I know what kind of dream you’re having,” she laughed.
“What kind of dream is that?”
“A wet dream, obviously!” She splashed water squarely in his face, laughed and disappeared under the current. Wayne laughed, too, as he searched for her in the water around him. When she surfaced, she was behind him, her hands clamping around his chest, her dripping body pressed against his back and her head leaning on his shoulder. “You’re such a nice dream,” she said. He reached behind him and stroked her hips with his hands, turning his head toward hers as she nuzzled deep into his neck.
“I almost wish it wasn’t a dream. Does it have a meaning?”
“How about a purpose? Will that work?” she asked.
“What’s the purpose?”
“You’ve lost something and it has left you confused. I want to fix that. I want you to believe in magic, my young vagabond.” Her voice was so serious—so mournful.
“That’s a little primitive, isn’t it? I can only believe in what is natural.”
“But magic is natural. In fact, all of nature is magic. Magic, like turning a plain piece of wood into a beautiful art object. You understand that kind of magic, don’t you?”
“That’s just a craft, or an art,” Wayne argued half-heartedly. He knew how he felt about making things. She was right. It was like magic.
“Magic, too, is just a craft or an art. Do you know what night tonight is?”
“It must still be Saturday. Or Sunday morning.”
“It’s Litha.”
“Beware Litha,” he whispered, remembering a warning that he had interpreted as a joke. “It’s midsummer, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The shortest night of the year. The night when the faeries come out to play and almost anything is likely to happen.”
“Like Shakespeare.”
“I am your Titania and you are my Bottom,” she said, pressing against him and stroking his buttocks under water.
“Am I such an ass as that?”
“You’ve tried pretty hard lately, but no. It’s not all your fault. We all tried to help and ended up confusing you. We need to remove the blinders from your eyes so you can see.”
“Can you do that? I’ve been so confused. Just when I think I have things figured out, my head gets muzzy and it’s like the curtain has fallen before the final line.”
“Look. Look into my eyes,” she said turning him toward her. He gazed into the depths of her eyes and was captured there. “Look into my eyes and become The Unbound.” He knew those eyes. A peaceful calm swept over him and he moved to kiss her.
“Lissa. Chameleon,” he whispered. She kissed him back and as they kissed, a flood of memories came back upon him. A tornado. A wall of light as they made love on the rooftop. The cup that he carried in his shoulder bag.
“Believe in magic,” she said softly.
“To what end?”
“The end, my faerie king, awaits you there, at the top of that hill.” He looked up and saw the glow of firelight at the top of the hill, a few hundred yards away. His calm changed to foreboding. No matter where or how he ran away, he would end up under the geas of the same fate. And at the same time, through other eyes that had played so casually with his mind, he knew what awaited him there.
“I’m sacrifice?”
“I think not. You’re Vagabond. In these hills, the vagabond is a priest and messenger of the gods. You need only take that message to the ones who need it. They need it, Unbound. They need you.”
“I always forget what you’ve told me and think it is just a dream afterward.”
“Tonight, I promise, you will remember. I will be your Mnemosyne.” She laid her lips softly but not insistently against his, waiting for his response. And if he did respond? What difference would it make to his fate? There was still so much that was locked up inside him. But in his dreams, she had been Mari and he had been The Vagabond Poet. They had raised powerful magic.
They rolled over again and again in the water, embraced together in their lovemaking, not two people, but four—the dream couple urging them on. Their lips and hands sought each other’s secret places as he carried her to the shore and they lay down on his plaid. She was faerie-like. He explored her back with his fingers, seeking a sign of wings. When her mouth enveloped his hard cock, the air around them began to glow. As he buried his face in her sex, seeking to bring her pleasure, he prayed to all the powers there were that they would enlighten him and protect him. Their mutual explosion solidified the walls of a dome of light around them.
He rolled Lissa, The Chameleon, over and she pulled his body up to guide his still-hard cock into her vagina. She placed her hands on either side of his face and he could hear her repeating the same prayers he had just invoked—praying to the powers of the East, South, West, and North, asking the goddess to help her purge his mind of the blocks that restrained him.
“Is it only about the power, Chameleon? Please tell me. I won’t hate you, but I need to know. Is it all only about the power? Do you love me?”
“Oh, Unbound. Please don’t think that of me. Or of any of us. We cannot enter into this covenant without perfect love and perfect trust. I have that for you. I am not your girlfriend, and so we make love in the circle and raise power around us. But I do love you. The Hart loves you. The Swordmaster loves you more than both of us combined.” At the mention of their names, a curtain parted in Wayne’s mind and he saw Judith’s instruction, their first time making love, her gift of the necklace that he had lost. He heard all Rebecca’s stories and legends, even some of them from the classes he had slept through.
He rose toward his climax as did Lissa. They locked eyes in the moonlight and Wayne whispered.
“I come with perfect love and perfect trust.” And they did.
When he awoke, his clothes were folded neatly next to him. He sat and looked up the hill at the glow. He must not have been out long, but where was Lissa? He started to pull on his pants when a voice spoke.
“Don’t bother. You’ll just have to take them off again.” Wayne spun to see a black-robed figure standing behind him.
“Uncle? Bound One? What are you doing here? How…?”
“It’s hard to sleep when you make a psychic racket like that,” his uncle laughed. “You still have a connection to the spirit plane and I am dreaming.”
“There’s so much going on and I’m overwhelmed with the memories. But there are still dark spots and…” He looked up the hill again. “Bound One, I’m afraid. I don’t want to go up there.”
“Think of your oath, Unbound.”
“What?”
“Ah. I lift the geas I placed upon you. Think and remember all.” His uncle made a gesture and Wayne felt another layer of gauze removed from his memories.
“It’s true. It’s all true,” he whispered.
“Now. Your oath, Promethean.”
“I, Promethean, do of my own free will most solemnly swear to protect, help, and defend my sisters and brothers of the Art.” Wayne repeated the words first spoken in the dark of his uncle’s sanctuary. “I will keep secret all that must not be revealed. This do I swear on my mother’s womb and my hopes of future lives, mindful that my measure has been taken in the presence of the Mighty Ones.”
“Good.”
“But what will I do?”
“Just what you’ve sworn. Up there.” His uncle pointed and when Wayne looked back, he was gone.
Wayne stuffed everything in the shoulder bag except his knife and his walking stick. Then he set his face to the hill and smiled. He could not help himself.
He believed in magic.
Wayne could see the silhouettes of the stone pillars against the firelight long before he could see the people who had been dancing, but as he crested the hill and looked in from the North, his heart stopped. A man held a knife at Rebecca’s throat. Not just a man. That evil doctor. Everything else went dark before him. Screaming like a madman, he charged toward the circle headlong between the giant stones that stood on the northern side. Enceladus and Asia. He could feel the heat of his own anger flaring in his temples.
When he shot between the two mammoth stones, the world suddenly slowed to a halt. He felt himself stopping, his momentum eaten at the gate. It was not like hitting a brick wall. More like diving into a bowl of gelatin. Even his scream died before it reached his ears.
No one had seen him or seemed to notice, they were so wrapped up in the battle that was taking place near the low stones on his left. He saw the two fall over the rock; saw the bounce on impact of Rebecca’s body landing on top of the man. How that must have hurt her already bruised back and shoulders. Then he saw the missile launched and sailing toward where he stood, trapped by the unseen force between the rocks. And he couldn’t move.
Rebecca had instructed him in self-defense and found him a slow learner. But her lessons were still there. Never duck and roll if just turning your head would save you. But in the mass, he couldn’t even turn his head. And there was no doubt the knife would hit him as squarely as if it had intentionally been thrown at him. His own knife, made with his own hands. His anger burned in him. With one supreme effort he twisted his hands to bat the object out of the air with his staff.
It struck. The stick was ahead of the knife and the knife struck it squarely and stuck in the wood with a jolt that seemed to loosen the fabric of the mass holding Wayne. He knew without seeing that it had struck squarely in the heart at the center of the circle. Without his conscious will, the flames carved above the heart blazed into the fire, fueled by his anger. Flame leapt from the staff to his knife and he ripped the blade upward, severing the blockage and releasing him to charge through like a flaming meteor into the circle.
The coveners followed the flight of the blade toward the northern gate of Carles with their eyes and only then did they see the naked man between the stones. When the knife struck, sparks burst from the impact and the intruder disappeared behind a sheet of flame. Two men had already jumped to pin The Barber’s arms as Rebecca crawled from his grasp, but only Judith moved to save Wayne. She grabbed the sword he had made for her and rushed toward the gate. She had no time to open a gate.
As if the door of a blast furnace had been opened, the flaming man burst into the interior of the circle and charged across it toward where Rebecca had fought her battle. Judith grabbed a ceremonial robe, intent on wrapping him to smother the flames, but there was no question what the goal of the flaming form was. He might as well have been Hyperion blazing through the sky in superhuman form as he covered the ground between the gate and the spot where The Barber stood pinned between two coven brothers. The flaming god descended and from The Barber a second figure emerged, bent on attacking the attacker.
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde,” Wayne called as the demon separated itself from The Barber. The words had come from his uncle’s book, all of which, Wayne found, was fresh in his memory. But getting the demon out of the man was only half the problem. Disposing of it before it found another victim was the other. This time, there were no words. Wayne raised the knife and a blade of wind extended from it, slicing through the form as it gained substance. The wailing shriek as the demon vaporized echoed in the sudden stillness of the moor.
Turning, Wayne leapt upon the altar stone with the knife still raised and his staff still flaming. He stood above the terrified doctor on the rock. The flame died on his staff leaving only the glowing blade of the stage prop hanging from it, but Wayne’s naked body glowed as if at any moment it might again burst into flames. As he began his striking descent from the height of the stone, the knife he bore connected with the solid reality of a knife raised to challenge it. In that instant he saw the winking diamond eye of Elhin, Rebecca’s Athamé. He followed the hand that held it to Rebecca’s eyes where he gazed with such pained intensity that both clouded with tears.
“That is not our way of punishment, my friend. Let the circle handle it.” He took in the totality of the situation for the first time. Rebecca stood naked in front of him and he realized with a heightened flush that he, too, was without a single stitch of clothing.
“Is it really you?” he whispered, his voice hoarse from the scream he had uttered.
“It is,” she answered simply. Then for the first time she let her own vision widen and follow her arm to the touching blades. “Creüs,” she whispered into the stillness of the circle.
Silence veiled the air as the gathering absorbed the meaning of the word that Rebecca had uttered. Even the High Priest sank to his knees as he realized he had nearly come under the sacrificial blade of the First Face of Carles. Rebecca knelt at the altar and kissed Wayne’s feet. The entire coven knelt at the cue. Then she rose and kissed his hands. Then she kissed… Oh my God! Wayne’s knees buckled as Rebecca’s lips touched the crown of his cock. Rebecca caught him on one side as Judith caught the other. Rebecca planted a fourth kiss in the middle of his chest and finally invited his lips into a deep union with her own.
Ecstatic cheers burst out all the way around the circle. Wayne was suddenly down from the stone and caught up in the double embrace of Rebecca and Judith with his head buried between theirs.
“Is it too late to be embarrassed?” he asked. The two women laughed out loud.
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, babycakes,” said Judith, kissing his ear and cuddling close to both him and Rebecca. “Believe me,” she finished.
“You are hot, though,” Rebecca exclaimed, pulling back a fraction. “You could light a match on your skin.”
“I’m glad I’m not wearing anything,” he said. “I don’t think I could stand it. What’s this all about?”
“You just happen to have made your spectacular entrance into our circle bearing one of the four sacred symbols of Carles, slew a demon, and defeated a dark magician. The knife you brought. It’s been missing for fifteen years,” said Judith.
“This?” Wayne asked, looking at the knife still in his hand.
“Yes,” answered Rebecca. “Remember I told you that the staff and cup were part of a set of artifacts that were used to focus psychic energy? The knife that you have is part of that set.”
“And the leather pouch the old woman gave me was the fourth part of the set, wasn’t it?” Wayne asked. Things were finally making sense. With his memories cleared, he could tell the difference between what he dreamed and what was real—most of the time.
“The old woman was my mother, the High Priestess of our coven,” Judith explained. “In the bag was the Fourth Face of Carles.” She reached up and kissed Wayne deeply. Not just a coven kiss, but the kiss of lovers. “My love, after everything you’ve been through, I hate to ask you this, but…”
“You want the knife,” he finished for her. “I guess it was never mine anyway. I was told that it chooses its own.” He held the handle of the blade out to her. She hesitated a moment then dropped her hand.
“Not me. Her.” Wayne turned toward Rebecca.
“You are the Hart within the circle,” Wayne said.
“Also, the Huntress of Carles,” Rebecca continued. “I was tasked a year ago with summoning the Four Faces of Carles together here tonight.”
“Then take this with my blessing,” Wayne said, extending Creüs toward her, flat across his palm.
“It seems that I have received three of the four tools from your hand,” Rebecca answered. “On behalf of Threlkeld into whose hands the First Face of Carles is ever entrusted, and for the cildru of the great circle Carles, I accept it from your hand.” She took the knife from him. A faint thrill emanated from the blade. Rebecca knew its origin. She had bonded herself to the bearer of this knife in a fire ritual years before. It was a sensual, sexual thrill. Rebecca could feel her body tightening in response to the sensuality of the blade as she pressed her thighs together.
With both their hands clasped over the handle of the knife, she slipped into his embrace and felt the heat of his body pressed hard against her own. When they parted from the intimate kiss, both were flushed and Rebecca tried to speak twice before she finally held the blade high in her hand to show the circle.
“Behold, Creüs, Windmaster, Ruler of the Eagle, First Face of Carles.”
The coven cheered.
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