A Touch of Magic
7 Between the Worlds
13 September 2074, late night
WAYNE FOCUSED on the show. He’d talked to Paris about the lighting cues and how using the animals would work. It would be a little tricky to have a bird flying around the club, but Paris assured him the flight plan was set and his bird would perform.
What was really on Wayne’s mind as he watched the show, however, was the strange woman Judith had brought home with her. Wayne recognized the name—that is the real name, not the new identity. It had been two years before that Judith had burst into their hotel room in Bruges crying and wanting to go home. They’d all seen what happened. Her opponent in the World competition had scored an easy point on Judith in the rapier division.
And the match had gone out of control.
Both women had been disqualified from the competition, but Judith’s competitor had been taken to the hospital. Judith insisted that they leave at once and the five women and Wayne had caught a train to Ostend and then a ferry to England. They were all in Judith’s cottage near Keswick, England where they planned to stay through Lughnasad when Wayne discovered the puncture in Judith’s side. If it weren’t for Serepte, things might have gone much differently. The circle watched in wonder as Judith’s wound healed and Serepte had staggered to her flute to play the plaintive melody that let the wound escape.
None of them had been the same after that, realizing how powerful Serepte’s gift really was. It had redoubled all their efforts and commitment to educate her in the ways of the craft and protect her from discovery.
And Judith had brought the other woman home. Lil Szabo, the Iron Gate.
She wasn’t staying. Not with them. She had a room at the Hilton and was supposed to be deciding where she would settle down. She had a stipend the government was paying her in return for information on life behind the Iron Curtain. The Romanian was protected, but not tightly monitored like other foreign assets might have been. She had heard Judith was at the Ren Faire and decided to visit.
There was no animosity between the women. Judith was genuinely apologetic about the scar under Lil’s eye and Lil had been horrified to discover her thrust in that ill-fated match had actually pierced Judith’s side. Neither thing was supposed to happen, but both admitted to having been overcome by the haze. Lil now sat with Judith near the light booth as they watched the Great Paris in action on stage. Serepte had agreed to stay at home, but had called for the circle later tonight. When Lil left for her hotel, Wayne and Judith would complete the circle on their rooftop ritual space that would allow Serepte freedom to work.
Paris had been right on with the show, but felt tired and out of sorts by its end. He’d sped through his clean-up and before the bar closed, he’d hopped in his cab and taken off. But the show, everyone agreed, had been spectacular. There had been a fair amount of turnover during the evening with the early crowd leaving before the theater crowd arrived. Then the late-nighters pushed their way into the bar for the real start of the weekend. Paris had crowds of differing temperaments, but kept them all under his almost hypnotic control.
Wayne and Judith bid Lil goodnight and went home to join the family circle.
14 September 1974, The Metéora, Greece
Rebecca Allen, The Hart and The Huntress of Cobhan Carles, had left the great circle after the summer solstice ritual—Litha. Her daughter had declined the invitation to the festival and Rebecca couldn’t blame her. The circle put too much pressure on her—too much responsibility—too much hope. She had felt the same six years ago when she had been given the task of summoning the Four Faces of Carles, the sacred tools of the circle.
When she completed that task, much to the surprise of everyone, including herself, she thought the difficult part was over. She had been made high priestess of the coven and led them at least four times a year in rituals in the stone circle. Frequently over the past five years, she had been accompanied by Serepte and the five chosen guardians who surrounded her as the fifth circle. Five years, five circles, five guardians, and now Serepte was eighteen and the expectations were higher than ever. And she refused to come to the stone circle for Litha.
Instead, she moved her circle to Minneapolis and enrolled in the University.
As she had done each of the past five years, Rebecca left England before Lughnasad and spent the hot month of August in Greece, searching for a sign of her lost husband. She was on sabbatical this year. Serepte was away at college with the circle Rebecca had selected to protect her. There was no reason to hurry back to Indiana. She had taken a room in a pensione and spent her days walking the pathways of the Metéora, searching for clues to the location of the City of the Gods.
Doc had warned her that the gate was closed. Even though he had recovered from near death five years ago, he was still an old man and no longer traveled like he once did. He and Margaret had settled into a quiet life in his Greenwich home, reading and studying. Margaret was researching the despair of Norse mythology and Doc was still compiling notes from his many archeological expeditions. He talked about writing his autobiography, but never really set pen to paper.
Rebecca was thin—much thinner than she had been as the youthful bride aboard ship almost twenty years ago. Gray streaked her once auburn hair. She was forty-two years old but felt already that she had lived too long. She had part of one mystical summer with her husband and nineteen years alone, raising their daughter. Life was so unfair.
“It’s your fault!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. She stood at the top of the Tower of Agia, the highest peak in the Metéora waving her fists at the sky, blaming the gods for cutting her off from her husband. Then she sat, exhausted. There was only one thing left for her to do. It frightened her. Mrs. Weed had warned her of the dangers of a summoning. Was she prepared to take responsibility for whatever events proved necessary to bring him to her? Yes! Whatever it takes!
14 September 1974, very early morning, Minneapolis
Serepte awoke in the middle of the night to a soft hum that seemed to wrap her in a cocoon. It lulled her senses and let her drift in a euphoric state. She opened her eyes to see the bubble of sparkling lights protecting her. Supported by the four priestesses, Wayne’s ability to cast a protecting circle could include Serepte a floor below where they met on the roof.
She was amused by her circle, and confident that they withheld nothing from her. She knew what they expected, what the Great Circle her mother presided over expected, and where she fit in their little puzzle. She was to be a tool of the coven and Wayne was the toolmaker. But Cobhan Carles still didn’t understand what they were dealing with. They knew something important was afoot. Most knew that they were going to breach the fabric between the worlds, but they had no true knowledge of what would happen then. They had seen a vision and faithfully assigned four priestesses and the vagabond priest to become the cauldron. And in their view, Serepte rising from the cauldron was the focus.
She rose from bed and slipped on her heaviest robe in pale green. This had been one of her rebellions, to eschew the black and red of the circle and wear only pastel robes. Perhaps one day, it would be different. The weight of the robe settled on her shoulders and she thought that the time they would be gathering on the roof for rituals was growing short. It would soon be too cold. Already, there was a chill in the night air.
She collected her flute, looking at the other mystic tools she had arrayed on her dresser. Wayne had crafted each one lovingly, presenting them to her on her sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth birthdays. She knew that the final tool, her pentacles, would be given to her when she came fully into her power. That the collective assumed her power would have to do with a sexual act, didn’t bother her. She knew the others practiced raising power for rituals by having sex with each other. She knew that even her mother had engaged with both Wayne and Judith on different occasions. She wasn’t a prude about it.
But it would be on her terms, and her terms included love.
She felt a quick flush spread across her cheeks at the thought of that love.
She carried the protective circle with her as she ascended the stairs to the roof. When she approached her companions, their bubbles merged and Serepte passed inside Wayne’s protective canopy. On the rooftop, a large circle had been inscribed with powdered chalk. Meaghan had been the one to research and find a line chalker for use in marking out various playing fields like a baseball diamond. The local sporting goods store in Indianapolis had everything that was needed and they were able to meet over the past five years in almost any location, marking out their circle and pentagram in wooded areas, rooftops, parking lots, and even on the living room floor.
Inside the circle on the roof was a pentagram and her companions each sat at a point of the star. Again, Wayne’s precision as a toolmaker was important as the lines all crossed in perfect orientation. In the pentagonal center space, a small bowl contained lit candles protected from the wind and elements. Serepte entered the space on Wayne’s left and circled clockwise, stopping to softly kiss each of the priestesses and exchange a greeting. She felt love and joy from each of them. When she returned to Wayne, she snuggled into his lap and he held her as she kissed him on the cheek. It had been this way since they formed the circle when she was fourteen. He was her big brother and protector.
In front of each of the priestesses, a sigil had been drawn to represent the tools of the coven. Name signs. Creüs. Iäpetus. Cottus. Enceladus. And in front of Wayne, the symbol of the mystic cauldron, Ops. Of course, the sacred tools themselves, given into the keeping of the four priestesses, were locked in their rooms and only brought out on special occasions, usually at the stone circle of Carles Castlerigg. Still, their power could be felt emanating from the symbols.
There was no specific ritual for tonight. Serepte had felt a strong need to meditate within her circle. Earlier in the day, she had encountered a young man in the music building, struggling to bend the fingers of a damaged hand around the neck of his guitar. She had seen him before and knew he was a disabled vet, more damaged in his mind than his body after Viet Nam. She had touched him before, each time removing a little of his pain. Today, she had approached from behind him and laid her fingers gently on the back of his neck. He took a deep, shuddering breath, but kept his focus on the fingering of his guitar. Serepte focused on the damaged hand. The guitarist’s fingers unclenched and became more fluid as they moved across the strings.
Clenching her own eyes against the pain she accepted, she backed away into a practice room, hearing him quietly pray, “Thank you, Goddess,” as she left. He did not turn to look at her. Once in the room, she struggled to pick up her pan pipes. She’d known what she had to do and had prepared. The pan pipes did not require fingering to play the music she needed.
But now, in the candlelight on the rooftop, Serepte needed to fully purge herself and accept wholeness and health again.
She breathed deeply as she sat on Wayne’s lap, her flute held to her lips. The others returned to their meditative states and poured strength into her. She could see her breath, moving silently above her flute, dancing like the flames of the candles. They joined and separated and became three dancing red flames. She felt the pulse of their unified breathing. The breath filled her lungs with warmth and lifted her up inside. As she exhaled across the embouchure, the first tones filled the air inside their protective bubble. Her body lost the sensation of resting on Wayne just as the four women seemed to rise from their places and begin a dance around the flames in front of them. Every tension abandoned her body and she poured herself into the music. A soft green faded into her mind—stark contrast to the red robes of the priestesses. It took over from the red flames, purging them away in its coolness. She floated in her mind above a sea green swamp in a forest of cedar trees. Her flute carried her over bridges made of roots and a thousand layers of green pine needles. The bridges gently swayed and bounced as she stepped across them. The swamp was neither threatening nor treacherous, but a cool swamp of abandonment where she left her mind to rest between the massive trunks of two great cedars.
And further on she traveled, leaving body and mind behind. She walked into the night and glided as a soul, a spirit, a shadow of reality. Down out of the green she glided, down seven flights of steps through the deepening blue, down seven more into the violet, down further still to the ultra, invisible, and purely violet-black of night. Here she was accompanied only by the clear tones of her flute as she looked up into the night sky where pinprick holes in the fabric of the night became stars. Her spirit was free.
Here, she moved swiftly across the plains of darkness into which her shadow blended. Beyond the dark of the shadow world, she swept into a light deeper yet than the darkness. The sourceless light transformed everything around her to featureless gray. It was a shadowless light into which her shadow wandered without direction. A flat gray plain stretched in all directions and met a flat gray sky at its invisible horizon.
Ahead of her, she spied another shadow racing through the dissolution. She followed. It moved, as she did, but in the vacuous gray expanse, distance was meaningless. How far, how fast, she could not tell.
The change crept in upon her senses as subtle hues colored the earth and sky. The hard flat ground rolled gently into a small hill and a hint of green covered it in foreign softness. Directions took on meaning. A hint of pastel blue decorated the never present sky. Cresting the rise, the shadow ahead of her disappeared completely against an unmistakable blue horizon. She entered a valley and could sense a faint sound growing louder as she swept onward. Before her, a brook ran bubbling across broken rocks. On the opposite side of the brook grew a tree, hungrily sapping up the water. She crossed over into a lush vale where she drifted through a garden of flowers. She knew sounds, touches, smells, and sights were all there and longed for a body, so she could fully appreciate them with her senses.
At the crest of the next hill, she spied a house. Smoke rose in lofty wisps from the chimney. The brook wound its way around the hill to pass before the house. But deep inside her, something rang hollow. The smells she could not smell, the sights she could not see, were all still present. The sounds she could not hear still led her on. But something germane to the setting was missing.
She raised her hand to knock on the cottage door and simply dissolved through the doorway of the home. Inside she found an apartment appointed in simple but elegant tradition. It was, in many ways, reminiscent of Serepte’s own childhood home.
She found herself in a room of intricate detail. Entire scenes were carved in the walnut paneling that surrounded her, seeming to move and live with a life of their own. A grand piano stood near the windows. Shelves weighed down with books seemed to carry the weight of the words rather than the physical substance of the books. Next to a fireplace at the end of the room, tall windows looked out on the pastoral scene. And next to the windows, a man sat in a deep leather chair.
He shivered a bit and glanced up from his book. His eyes took in every detail of the room, searching each shelf as if from where he sat, he could see any book out of proper order. His eyes sought out every crevice, every pane of glass, every spark of the fire. At long last, his eyes came to rest on the space where Serepte stood.
She could see the depth of those eyes. She could see the meaning of that long and painstaking search around the room. His eyes could have seen any particle of dust that was out of place or disturbed by some unnatural force in the room, so familiar were they with their surroundings. Yet, for all their knowledge, they were exhausted eyes. They had read not only the words of the books that stood on the shelves, but the hearts of the authors. They were eyes that saw through the words to the shape of meaning penned by a hand, centuries past. They were awesome, deep, and tired eyes.
“Who is there?” he asked cautiously. “Are you a specter of my thoughts? Do you seek me from my longings? Show yourself or depart from me.”
She stood silently waiting.
“Why are you come in this form to this world?” he continued.
She stood and waited.
“Serepte?” breathed the man in a tone so low that it could hardly be felt in the room. “Serepte?” he asked again, louder. “Is it you at long last? Take shape. Be more than shadow.”
She found substance in her form. Her spirit was joined by mind and body so like her own that she was happy to be invited into it.
“Serepte,” spoke the man. “You are here of your own efforts. My beloved child Goddess.”
They embraced and her body took in the longed-for sounds of his voice, the smells of the leather-bound books and crackling fire, the vivid colors and sharp streaks of the grain of wood.
Her body felt the strong, solid embrace of the man and she whispered, “Father.”
She stood at arms’ length as she looked over her father and he looked at her. Only his eyes showed his age. In spite of nearly twenty years in isolation, the body of J. Wesley Allen did not look more than thirty. He was nearly that when he disappeared. His neatly trimmed mustache was dark brown. A few streaks of gray hair all but disappeared beneath the full growth of dark locks.
“Is it time at last?” he asked. “Have you found the key that will unlock the veil?”
“The simple way is sometimes more difficult than the hard way, Father.” It was difficult to tell him that they had not found the key. But perhaps her being here now meant she was closer. If she could hold him and take him with her, she could end his nightmare. But at the thought, her arms slipped through him as if she once again had no physical body.
“You cannot take me with this body of yours. You came here in spirit as I have often visited you. But here, I am hard reality and you are of my imagining.”
“Mother has told me that you were a man of great faith,” she began. “Otherwise you would no longer be waiting for us.”
“Do you see these shelves of books? They come from the great libraries of the world, ancient and modern. Some of them have come directly from the minds of authors who never put pen to paper. But great knowledge is hidden in these books and I have probed it all.” The passion rose in his voice, but suddenly his tone dropped and he was again her quiet father. “Knowledge, my loving daughter, ultimately supplants faith. If you know, you need not believe. The thing I don’t know, but that I believe, is whatever works.”
“You know what we are?”
“I stood in the flames with you at your initiation. I held your spirit in my arms and placed it in your mother’s womb. I know, perhaps better than you, what you are.”
He held her lightly once again.
“You and your circle must be careful. If there are forces that would prevent you, they will rise soon.”
“One already has,” said Serepte. “I did not see him, but I felt his presence and our Swordmaster was his match.”
“This time,” he responded. “If it is The Blade, as it must be, he is as competent in his craft as I am impotent in mine. He is everything that I am not. If only Apollo could be found. He would be able to show the way.”
“Apollo is dead.”
“He is dead in the same way that I am dead. Trapped in some world that he cannot escape. Perhaps in his own mind. He has not yet remembered. All that has being exists only because someone has remembered it. I remember Apollo. One day he will remember as well. And if The Blade has emerged from his prison, then the boy from Metéora may be near.”
“We will come for you soon. Just wait for us a little longer.”
“I have waited twenty years, my sweet. But what is that? You waited thousands.” She looked at him curiously, but he just shook his head. “Never mind. You will find me in the temple of light.”
“Where is the temple of light?”
“Within. Deeper within than I have ever dared to journey, even in this willing world of forgetfulness. I must empty all I have created around me to reach that temple. That is where I must go to empty myself and to be filled. I understand the purpose of the old man and his family. It was to remember so that you would live. That memory must be kept alive in you, or I will perish—forgotten. The distance must evaporate and all things return to one.” The tiredness in the voice and eyes moved Serepte. She could see his world shrinking rapidly. She could feel that even the substance of the body she had in his presence was less stable, was weaker with each passing moment.
“Serepte, rend the veil.”
“I do not know how. But I will never forget you.”
“Your memory is deeper than you suspect. Were you not surprised to find that you had powers that you had not imagined? Your memories will surprise you as well. Stay still and wait and remember. I will be deep in the temple of light.”
“Wait for me.”
They stood facing each other. His eyes tugged at Serepte as if he were having difficulty focusing his vision on her. They embraced. The clasp of her father’s arms filled her with warmth and security. Then she felt the arms slipping through her, her form dissolving in the thin air. For one moment, they were perfectly one, she seeing through his eyes the forgetting of his world. He, remembering through hers the world he longed for. He slid away from her into an abyss of solemn grayness, void equally of dark and light. Then she was once again only a shadow.
Serepte gazed at the afterimage of her father, gone with a blink of her eyes. Outside she found the brook running at her feet, the last border of her father’s consciousness. Beyond it, the horizon melted into gray void.
For a moment, she panicked. She wanted to return, but turning, she could no longer see the lush valley she had just left. She didn’t know which way to go, all directions were meaningless. Sky and earth were made of the same colorlessness, indistinct from each other. Flat. Gray. Lightless. Darkless. No source for her rememberings, but a vacuum that pulled at her being.
A memory of a time that surpassed measure flooded in upon her. Somewhere in this void she had been trapped, a captive for centuries. Now, it was a prison remembered, more frightening than one endured. It had been the memory preserved by the clan of believers that had kept her alive. A vague melody surrounded her. It wove in and about the place tightening a grip upon her that would hold tighter than before. She sped her flight across the plain, turning left and then right, always barricaded by the veil of music that intensified its presence. She could not rend the eternal constancy of this nothingness.
With the fog closing in upon her, she could not see beyond herself. No matter how she strained for a glimmer of hope, no memory but the horror of the emptiness came to her. She longed for the clear darkness of a star-flecked night—for any sense of direction. She felt herself turning in ever tighter circles, spinning, turning in upon herself.
Then across the eternities of infinite nothingness from the depths of memory that superseded her life, echoed a voice and a song. It had no source, but it conquered the dense melody that entrapped her. Her flute came to her hand with a thought and she joined the voice with her piping. Together, they cut through the fog. He reached for her and captured her and she surrendered to him and found the dancing stars above. The moon shone full and the stars circled it in a never changing, always new dance. A man danced among the stars above her head, spinning and singing, lifting the fog and neatly rolling it away. A promise was remembered, made across fathomless separations that guarded the boundaries of time and space.
And she remembered him.
She slept, exhausted, waiting for the dawn and the dawnmaker to come.
Serepte awoke in her own bed, sunlight streaming through her open window. Two of her housemates hovered near her.
“Welcome back,” Elizabeth said. Meghan lifted the red locks of hair from Serepte’s eyes. “How do you feel.”
“Fine. Yes, I’m fine. Like waking from a good night’s sleep.”
“We were worried. Even Wayne had never seen you so deeply entranced, yet never ceasing to play your flute. He held you until the playing stopped and you were simply asleep.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly noon.”
“Oh, no!” Serepte cried. “I have a date!”
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