[Content Warning] The Tara Dale Chronicles: the Woman in a Coma

Blast it! She could see the defences were fraying - again. Whoever was attacking was being very determined, she thought, as she calmed herself and visualised the light of a sun within her pouring blue and gold energy into the shields and sigils she had set about herself.

Of course, as far as she was aware, no-one else at work saw any of this: all they saw was a young woman having one of her periodic migraines, and waiting, reclining in the best chair they could find, with a cool damp cloth over her face, until a friend came to fetch her. And speaking of Greg, where was he? He was the closest of their little group that could get to her – oh why had she agreed to help here? – but he had said he would be fifteen minutes nearly an hour ago.

As she grumbled in her mind, her ears sensed a disturbance in the library (oh no – Greg’s love of Star Wars had preceded him!), and, a couple of minutes later, he was there, acting the role of solicitous friend until her colleagues left to allow her to “get her stuff together”.

Immediately, Greg’s eyes unfocused, and he whistled softly. “I don’t think I want to touch that aura myself, it’s got so many Algiz and Berkana runes on it.” He paused, scanning her further, and grunted “Ah – there it is: you’ve got a link going into the back of your third eye chakra.”

Tara groaned “Unh. No wonder I couldn’t pick it up. Can you get it?”

“Sure, I’ll just do some Band-Aid stuff for now …”, his hands busy at the back of her head, her colleagues probably jealous at the massage from her cute friend, a friend who, with his mixture of indigenous, Afghan, Scottish and German ancestry, had been described as a blue eyed homage to Omar Sharif, “and get the rest when we get you out of here.”

The pain and distraction was easing now, and she could feel her breathing deepen and slow, and her shoulders relax, as her mind came back into focus.

“OK, Greg, I’m good enough to travel now – many thanks. Shall we go, then?”

“Why, yes, Miss Monobrow, we shall.”

Tara’s European heritage had given her a dark set of eyebrows that were all but one (well, that was what her mother had said, although not too many of her family had shared the problem), and she and her friends had made quite an in-joke of it. She stood slowly, and stretched as Greg looked round the dark timbered antechamber and back into the library, with its dome and multitude of long, desk lamp studded tables.

“Where to?” he asked.

Noticing a colleague hovering into proximity, she replied “Home will be fine, thanks. I’ve got my med’s there”, and she smiled at the colleague.

Once in Greg’s car, however, she growled “What’s Ky up to?”

“Entertaining his parents.”

“Oh – yeah, I’d forgotten about that. OK, it’s a reasonable day for autumn, so let’s go to the Gardens then.”

Melbourne had an impressive Botanical Garden, used for research by those who were serious about plants, relaxation by those who weren’t, and poncing by the Preening Set running ‘the Tan’ track around it. For Tara, the massive trees and surfeit of Nature Spirits and, if they were lucky enough to avoid any school tours, one of the duck-laden ponds would be a perfect place to work.

Twenty minutes later, she could see that they were in luck, and they found an ideal space where the energies of shade-giving trees and reed-lined and duck-dotted water blended in a comfortable balance, and the grass was not too damp (they had no picnic blanket to sit on, for this unplanned trip). Tara could see one of the caretaker spirits, an indigenous woman in this case, although they could take other forms as well. She mentally greeted her, explained what they wished to do, and asked for permission to proceed. The spirit smiled, and gracefully acceded access with a sweep of an arm.

“Nicely done”, commented Greg.

“Hah! Since you taught me to do that, who exactly are you praising? Me, or your teaching?”

The corners of Greg’s mouth quirked upwards, but he said nothing.

“OK, let’s get going.”

Without moving or saying anything physically, they quickly set up their wards – psychic defences – to the four corners of the compass, and above and below, and began rhythmically flushing the space, and their auras, with pulses of various colours. Greg was partial to the Hermetic tradition, so he performed – again, mentally, with no discernable physical movements - a traditional ritual known as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Tara had eventually wholeheartedly embraced her mother’s witchcraft, and added her mental casting of a circle after Greg had finished.

“Feel safe, Greg?”

“Hah! Always. … Well, almost always, and certainly now, dear lady.”

“Lady! Who you talkin’ to?”

Greg’s mouth did the quirking thing again, and he shrugged expansively.

Then they began working.

Methodically, using Greg as a monitor to make sure she neither missed anything, nor stopped short of finishing each step, she found all the negative psychic links – they looked like murky, turgid cords of yuck, Tara had once said – attached to her that she could, tracked each one to the other end, and used her inner Sun visualisation to dissolve every inch, every astral ‘molecule’ of each cord, and cleansed and healed whoever, wherever or whatever was on the other end. After all, these links were the result of her shortcomings and flaws and wrongdoing or inadequate doings.

And none of them was related to the attack she had suffered.

She groaned with exhaustion, and flopped back onto the grass. The Sun – the one in the sky, that is – hadn’t moved much, and she guessed no more than an hour had passed, although the air was noticeably cooler and damper, and some clouds were building in the sou’west.

“So, what next?” asked Greg.

She thought for a few moments. “Ky’s busy, Harry’s travelling, you’ve got a meditation group tonight, so … “

“ ‘le Oncle’ Bob?”

Tara smiled. Her mother’s friend, universally referred to as everyone’s “Uncle” Bob was well known to be a Francophile (and hence the reference to ‘le Oncle’), but not so well known for the well-disguised psychic master he was, and had the habit of turning up at odd moments when  he was needed.

“No, I think I’ll do some work in the astral tonight. I suspect that, if he’s needed, ‘le Oncle’ Bob’ll turn up when he’s supposed to, and not a moment before.”

“OK, no probs then.”

Greg turned to watch the cars passing by outside the Gardens, and then added: “Well, we’re somewhere between the end of school traffic and the start of peak, shall we head off?”

Tara, distracted by her dilemma, grunted her assent, Greg smiled in reply, and they were off, vainly trying to brush the damp out of the seats of their pants.

A few hours later, showered, changed and a good time after having been fed, Tara sat on the lounge in the living room in northern Melbournian suburbia shared by her and Ky – who was working his trumpet magic at a gig tonight, and began to work.

She set up her protection, this time standing and facing each quarter and doing the gestures and postures she had only visualised earlier that day, and finished with an invocation to Tyr, the God who was her main Patron Deity. She’d never seen or sensed Tyr directly, but He’d made His presence known clearly enough, somewhat to the chagrin of Tara’s mother, who had hoped Tara would have a ‘nice’ female Deity like Lilith as her patron deity: Lilith, who had given her mother so much desperately needed fire and passion and independence when Tara’s mother had, in her twenties, been selecting which cultural influences to embrace, and which to reject.

In her circle, Tara sat comfortably, and began shifting her consciousness to a more psychically aware state, and ‘looked’ with her opened third-eye chakra, to see who was present.

“Hi there. Nice to see you here.”

“Hi Toby” replied Tara – also ‘speaking’ telepathically, which didn’t always use words as such, but the words are convenient for telling the story.

Toby, who appeared as a young, good looking - very good looking - male in his twenties, was a guide, an entity who currently had no physical body, and thus was what is termed ‘discarnate’ or, to be blunter, dead. He and Tara were completely unfazed by this, and had worked together often – generally, though, when Tara was sleeping naturally, so she asked “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with your company, of course,” she added.

Toby smiled, and replied “I’m here for the headache – or, rather, the fixing thereof.”

“Ah, OK, then.”

“Shall we begin?”

She nodded – well, her astral conveyed the impression of a nod, and they began.

Tara found herself lifted, until she could see both her neighbourhood, and the adjoining suburbs. They were all covered with what seemed to be a cyclone – a raving, turbulent, circulating mass of pain, and anger and fear and hate … and she’d been on the outskirts of this all day, nowhere near the worst of it.

She looked at Toby, shocked, and asked “Where is all this coming from?”

He gazed back at her.

Tara thought, and then asked “It’s not me, is it?”

“No, but there is a significance to asking the question.”

“Ah”, she replied. “Am I prepared to take on doing something about all this?”

Toby nodded.

“Can I do something about this?” As Toby opened his mouth she continued "Of significance, I mean – can I do something significant about this?”

“What do you think? No,” he amended ,“what have you been taught?”

Tara sighed, and grumbled that the situation was one she had become aware of for a reason so she was probably – definitely - meant to at least try.

Toby smiled encouragingly at her.

“Stop distracting me.”

He smiled wickedly at her, and she grumbled some more about misplaced use of cuteness. At that, Toby laughed.

“OK, so, fun over” – she glared at him – “for now, next question?”

Tara thought carefully for a few minutes – or what seemed, in the astral, to be what she would have called ‘a few minutes’.

“O-kay … this is bigger than anything I’ve ever dealt with before, and I don’t have my usual team – apart from yourself, so … is this something where there is a key point or place or time or thing or PERSON, that I can do something to – something within my abilities, something that will change this situation?”

Toby smiled – this time, one of his genuine smiles, the sort that lit whatever part of reality he was in up.

“Very good, grasshopper.”

Tara rolled her eyes, and replied, seriously: “Is this something I am allowed and able to know, and are you able to guide me there and through what needs to be done?”

Toby’s smile broadened, and he replied softly “Yes, Tara, there are no karmic or other limits upon this situation; it needs input from your side” – meaning someone with a physical body, someone who was therefore incarnate – “and this could be both an opportunity for you to be of service, and an opportunity to learn.”

She nodded tightly back at him, feeling the pre-psychic combat tenseness building.

“OK” said Toby, binding them together with a cord of gold and blue energy, “Let’s go, and I’ll help you keep your shields up.”

As he said that, he moved his hand to the middle of Tara’s back, and she felt an oddly gentle flood of warmth and confidence suffuse throughout her. With that, her shields psychologically stood up straighter, and they started off through the storm. She felt as if she was being tossed and pummelled, but the blows were softened by her shields and her stomach felt strong enough to be settled through all the turmoil.

After a subjective eternity, she saw the classic ‘eye of the cyclone’ ahead, and, standing arms upraised in it, was a woman, screaming dementedly.

She thought to Toby Is she trapped there? Is that why the storm is here?

No, he thought back to her. Come down to the physical and the etheric.

With that, she had the sensation of sinking, knowing that the sensation was just her mind interpreting the change of frequency as they moved from the lower astral to a frequency where they could observe both of the frequencies labelled as etheric and physical.

The woman was there too, sitting beside a bed occupied by a younger woman. The despair made it clear that the young woman was special to the other woman – perhaps an adult daughter? The ages were about right for that, and there was no sense of the intimacy of lovers – and the young woman had clearly suffered some calamity to be a hospital bed hooked up to so many machines.

Protected from the astral storm by being in the eye, they could use the sense of speaking, and Toby complimented Tara.

“Yes, well done. The woman is indeed the mother of the other, who had recently got her life together after some major problems, when she was the victim of an accident: a gust of wind tore a branch off a tree, and the young woman was struck, and is now in a coma.”

Tara nodded, and Toby prompted “Do you see how the energy is arranged?”

Tara looked: she could see psychic links coming out of the mother, extending upwards and twisting together into a rope. A she moved her perception further up, she could see the rope was moving – almost like a tornado, which was creating the larger cyclone (or typhoon, or hurricane, if one was in other parts of the planet).

She brought her perception back and looked at Toby, and saw the astral of the young woman standing beside him.

“Oh! You’re – you’re … I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Catherine”, she replied. She looked at Toby and asked “Is this the woman you said could help?”

He nodded, eyes still on Tara.

“Catherine, I’m sorry for what has happened to you and your mother. At the risk of asking you to state the obvious, would you tell me as exactly as you can, what it is you would like me to help you with?”

The young woman shrugged helplessly, and said “Well, all of this!”

“Do you want me to help you pass over, or to see if I can help heal the injury?”

“No, that’s not it. Toby has explained to me that I will eventually die, but not until my children are themselves adult, so I’ll be able to see them and be some part of their lives as they grow, and I don’t want to lose that.”

Tara opened her mouth, then paused. Catherine hurriedly added “I know they’re grieving, and upset, but I can meet them in their dreams – and I have, a few times, but I can’t get near my mother, and she’s … she’s… hurting so many people.” Tears were rolling down her face as she added “Can you … can you save her from herself? Please?”

Tara’s compassion for the younger woman’s suffering overwhelmed her, and she hugged Catherine, feeling her energy flood into the other woman, and gladly drawing some of Catherine’s pain and suffering into herself.

When the moment felt right, she held Catherine at arm’s length, and said “I will do whatever I can, I promise you.”

She turned from the weeping woman to Toby.

“So, boss, how should I best go about this? Any suggestions or bright ideas?”

He nodded, and replied “We’ll both handle this one. Catherine, I need you to be with your mother as much as is possible through this. We’re going to be taking away energy that, harmful though it be, is something she is doing because she wants to protect you, and it is the sensing of your nearness that will help her soul to guide the incarnate mind through this process.”

Catherine nodded, turned towards her mother, and drifted off.

Toby held his hand up when Tara began to speak, until the daughter was firmly into her mother’s aura.

“OK, I’ll give you a run down on what’s happening here. The mother – her name is Yvonne, by the way – has had a few recent incarnations as an ultra-aggressive male, and took this life on to balance those out a little. One of those former lives was as someone with incredible magickal power. In this life, she’s been ultra-sceptical, partly in a misguided attempt to balance her own personal indulgence, and partly in reaction to the absolute horror of what she had done.”

Toby paused, and looked sadly at the woman before continuing.

“Unfortunately, she’s just bottled everything up, and, being so sensitive to the possibility that she’s done something wrong, she can’t be worked with in terms of getting her latencies under some sort of control – let alone properly resolved, and she’s doing nothing to properly address the wrongs she has created.”

“So … what do we do?”

“Sadly, she’s out of control, and without any conscious will, she is actively harming many people – and places, and other entities.”

“So we stop her.”

“Yes. But as gently as possible. What she is trying to do is to shut down anything which could further harm her daughter, and since she subconsciously recalls the damage she did by psychic means, she is blindly shutting down ANYTHING that has anything to do with psychism.”

“The ex-smoker effect, ” commented Tara. At Toby’s silent query she explained “Someone who gives up smoking is stereotypically supposed to be an absolute terror on all other smokers.” She shrugged her astral shoulders and finished “It’s like all such generalisms – generally groundless.”

Toby’s image projected the image of a smile.

“Yeah, I know. I’m nervous, OK? So … I’ve been noticing that big link coming out of her heart …”

Toby nodded, and added “There’ll be others helping us, and Adam and I are going to try to stop you getting too hammered.” Adam was another guide Tara worked with from time to time.

She nodded, drew in a breath – which flooded her aura with energy, and dove onto the link at a point half a dozen metres away from Yvonne’s heart.

It was like coming into a bull-riding competition where the bulls were on some violent street drug. To say the link tossed and twisted was like saying a major earthquake vibrates the earth somewhat. The struggle started to push her consciousness into a void, and then back to her body, then switched between the two so quickly she thought she would either throw up or worse. Then the energy in the link started to try to dredge up every moment of doubt, fear or weakness – at that Tara almost laughed in relief.

Her ‘le Oncle’ Bob had drilled her in the importance of being comfortable with one’s personal flaws, imperfections and past mistakes, as negative entities would try to throw them against her as a means of weakening of distracting her, or getting her so caught up in despair that she either gave up trying, or stopped too early.

Strengthened by the link’s diversion of energy into a pointless attack, she let the flaws and energies fly through and about her as they were dug up, as if she were transparent to such matters, and clawed relentlessly closer to Yvonne’s heart chakra.

This was what she had been born for, and she felt exultant as she reached close enough to plunge her astral hand into the heart chakra pulsing turgidly before her – and stopped, recognising that surge of exultation as a danger. She forced herself to focus on the pain that Yvonne was going through, feeling the link thresh more desperately than ever under her, and gently reached in to the energy fields, taking care to synchronise her energy as much as possible, and then she allowed her compassion to pour through her outstretched arm. After a few minutes, Tara started thinking of the lives where she had made mistakes, and how she had recovered from them. She could feel the tornado being cleared away, and a sensation of sunlight dissolving clouds after a storm, dissolving and dispersing the cyclone that had ravaged Melbourne’s north and east. She drew that sense of sunlight to her, and focused it through Yvonne’s heart to build up a sphere of golden light around Catherine, gradually extending it out until all the key parts of Catherine’s life were also protected.

She felt Yvonne sigh, and felt a hand lightly grasp her shoulder – Toby, drawing her back.

As she did so, she saw a crowd of other people around Catherine, and Toby explained “They can reach her now; she will be looked after.”

He looked at Tara. “And you need healing – more than I can give you, so let us return to your body.”

How was that going to help? she wondered, too exhausted to put any fire into or even behind the thought. But as she let herself sink back into her body, she saw a glow of blue and green light nearby, and recognised Ky’s energy. Oh! He’s back. Of course.

It was an effort to open her eyes, but she did so when Ky grabbed her hand.

“Well, I’m glad to see you back here and not twitching and thumping all over the place.”

“Yeah – unh.”

“No – don’t sit up yet. Give yourself a minute or two.”

“Uh, OK. Um, was I-”

“Yeah, you really were.”

“Oh. Big clearing job.”

“No kidding, Sherlock!”

Sarcasm was so not Ky’s scene, she thought.

“Sorry – I’ve been dealing with this all day. Greg had to bring me home.”

“And you didn’t think to ask him to stay to help?”

Tara woke fully at that, and sat up carefully and slowly.

“I. Did. Not. Know. How. Big. It. Was. Going. To. Be.”

As she spat the words out, she realised the concern in Ky’s eyes was real.

“I’m sorry, Ky. I’m still a little strung out by all that, and it was big – all the way out to Eltham was being affected by this … poor woman, who was just trying to protect her daughter – her daughter in a coma. And you know how the guides can be – by the time I’d got going, it was too late to stop and ask for help anyway.”

“Yeah, well, someone actually did ask – in a way”, replied the slightly mollified Ky.

Tara raised her monobrow at him.

“We did enough of the gig to get paid, but a few patrons wound up ill, so the venue decided to close down early, and when it did I had the feeling I should just come straight back here.” He narrowed his eyes, and continued “I kept hearing this very bad, truly appalling faux Français accent mumbling something about “Eet ees herrrr beeg test”.

She smiled. “So I should thank the mysterious 'le Oncle' Bob, eh?”

“Yeah”, replied a serious Ky. “That, and the nastiness of whatever you cleared.”

He held up a hand to forestall her protests.

“Yes, I know it was some poor woman trying to protect her ill - no, comatose daughter, but … I think the energy is what made people feel ill at the gig, and I felt it all go just before you came back.”

Tara settled back onto her elbows.

“So. I did … some good?”

“No, you did a lot of good. But you were thrashing around, and you have got bruises that I can see, and I let myself in through your circle because otherwise you would have broken it.”

Tara felt a chill around her heart. If the link had caused her to break her circle, she would have become vulnerable – either directly, or through something getting into her physical environs while she was in trance, and maybe causing a fire.

Ky could see the impact that had had, and added softly “We’ve talked about this before. No big work on your own, OK?”

Mutely, Tara nodded, and then settled down to taking a census on her aches and pains and bruises. None of which were in her head now, so she supposed that was a plus.

 * * *

She was awake. Blast - there was something she had missed! The clearing had gone too easily: she’d missed something - someONE else. She sat up in her bed, and swore – and again when Ky, obviously outside her bedroom, stage whispered “Tara? Are you awake?”

She was too disturbed to even grump out a no, or some other smart remark: she opened the door, and said “I missed someone –someone big.”

“Yeah, I got woken with the same message.”

“Hm. That probably means-”

“Yeah, I heard a car a minute or two ago.” replied Ky, still stage whispering. He coughed, and spoke normally: “I’ll turn on our lights and open the door.”

Two minutes later Tara and Ky had been joined by Greg and Harry, their little band’s scarily powerful shaman, who also played trumpet in Ky’s brass section – Tara being the saxophonist (when not being a librarian) and Greg the one with a trombone. They’d been working together musically for a few years now, and psychically for almost as long.

“So … just passing by, or need a cup of sugar?” asked Tara.

Greg blew a raspberry back at her, as they settled in to their favoured positions - Harry on the floor, leaning against the wall near the gas heater, Ky and Tara sharing a lounge opposite the heater, and Greg perched with crossed legs on a kitchen chair.

Ky began.

“Harry, how much do you know?”

“Greg filled me in on today’s work in the Gardens.”

Ky nodded, and added “OK, I got home and found Tara doing some powerful work.”

He growled “Solo!”, and then asked Tara to explain what had been going on.

She did so, succinctly, and finished with waking up to a psychic alarm call, the feeling that there was more work to do.

“And that brings us to here.”

Harry responded first.

“Yeah, that storm’s been building up for a while, but there’s no way that woman could have created that on her own: she lacks the strength now – I checked – even if she had been powerful in a past life.”

Tara opened her mouth to speak, but Harry got in first.

“I know you did powerful work - I felt the storm lift, and I’m not surprised it was as rough as the two of you have described, but … I think there was a major uncooperative involved as well.”

The little group had found a major split in the earthbound spirits they worked with. The majority were either lost, or caught up in some emotion, be it anger or grief or resentment or remembrance of physical or other pain, and basically their focus could be shifted from the frequency of this world to that of the astral (where they should have gone after death of the physical) relatively easily - by healing, clearing negative energy (pain, confusion, the aforementioned anger/grief/resentment, and the like), talking, and changing the immediate environs of the entities to prove that they were no longer in the physical world.

Uncooperatives, on the other hand, knew where they were, and what was going on, and deliberately, maliciously used that to influence others, harm people they didn’t like, and build networks of influence – control, as the four termed it.

Uncooperatives fought back, much as the link into Yvonne’s heart chakra had …

Uncooperatives were a much, much, much smaller group than cooperatives.

(Even smaller, and proportionally scarier, were the uncooperatives who were still incarnate … )

Before they even thought of checking for that possibility, Harry stated the obvious – “We need to get our protection going and our game faces on, people” – and they started: Greg with his Hermetic work, Tara her magickal circle, Harry a circle of shamanic stones, and Ky a ritual that drew on his Chinese heritage – and, as a side benefit, left the room with the crisp smell of an incense that Tara adored.

Ten minutes later, they were sitting on the floor inside the circles of power that they had created, circles they had practised doing together until, after countless failures, they had a combination that harmonised.

They discussed their options, and decided a spirit canoe, using Harry’s shaman skills, was likely to be the safest and most effective way to work. And at least a group of four musicians would have no problems with a suitable drumming rhythm to guide their journey …

Harry led them into the Underworld. It had been difficult, at first, for them to be able to split their awareness so part could stay drumming, and part could journey - in fact, it had taken several years of hard work and frequent practice, but they had eventually mastered the knack. Once there, they all had made enough journeys to have allies – power animals, most called them – to call on. Tara’s was an Owl, and she sensed Toby there as well: she turned to look at him, and was startled to see he had shifted into the image of a dragon. Harry called to her to keep up, and she did so, starting to feel the exultation of a hunt from her Owl.

Their communication could be described as telepathy, but in truth they had worked together so rigorously, and for so long, that it was in truth more akin to a group mind: one had a thought, and it came into existence in the others at the same time the first thought of it.

They were following the scent of negative energy, a powerful hatred, from the Underworld location that corresponded to that part of the astral where Tara had worked earlier. As they travelled, they became aware of a red glow ahead – Harry thought it was like a volcano, viewed from just over the horizon, and they all agreed. As they closed on it, they could feel pulses of discordance, and smell gusts of acrid smoke, and then they were close enough to see the raging figure at the heart of this eruption of hate.

The entity had adopted the image of a dinosaur – a T Rex, and Greg, who had had nightmares about these as a child, gulped. Harry turned, and threw a handful of powder at Greg’s eyes which solidified into a set of goggles.

“Ah – thank you bro!”

Tara and Ky looked at each, and then at Harry. “Filters to take away the image and leave the truth of the energy behind” he explained.

“Got some for us? asked Ky.

“No, it takes too much effort to make” he grinned back. “And besides, there’s a tactical advantage in dealing with what he sees himself as.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“It’ll make it easier for the three of you to keep him – and that’s a pronoun of convenience only at this stage – busy.”

“Yeah?” replied Tara. “And what will you be doing? Selling tickets from the sidelines?”

Harry smiled, looked at the Toby-dragon, and replied, in his usual enigmatic fashion, “You’ll see …”

And with that remark, the two of them disappeared, and the three were left to fight the angry monster.

Tara merged into her Owl, and swept behind the creature, sending balls of her favourite golden light at points that felt key in the creature and the red glow around it. Greg was dancing – literally a shuffling, folksy sort of solo dance - in front of the creature, and in doing so creating streamers of his favourite green energy that tangled the creature: each streamer would be let go of the moment the creature, dwarfing the tiny human in front, grabbed it to try and pull Greg close enough to harm. Meanwhile Ky had sunk into the image of earth beneath the creature’s feet, and was pushing a massive tidal wave of earth at the creature’s feet.

Slightly – only slightly – put off balance by the three, the creature tensed to leap – and arched back in pain, almost as if it had been electrocuted. Sensing something spectacular, and probably hazardous, about to happen – no doubt at the hands of Scary Harry – the three friends zipped together, and formed a cocoon of light so brilliant that it had no colour. At the last moment, Greg formed an image of an anchor, and Ky complied, holding them to the image of earth in that location.

When she was thinking later about what happened next, Tara felt it was like being in an exploding Sun, but a Sun made of hate and pain and despair. As the buffeting eased, they turned their awareness to where the creature had been, and saw what looked like a Roman soldier – a Centurion from two millennia ago, held fast in ropes of purple by Harry and Toby. Within moments, other figures appeared and joined in, and the Centurion was submerged in figures of Light, the combination encompassing the full spectrum of colours. Exhausted, Harry and Toby eased their grip on the ropes, others taking their place, and shambled over to the three.

“Wow” commented Tara.

“What she said” added Greg.

“What did you do?” asked Ky.

“Beat the bad guy” quipped Toby.

Harry tried to laugh but, too exhausted, flopped to sit on the earth.

Greg looked at Ky and Tara, and the three directed healing energy to Harry. He looked quizzically at Toby, who shook his head and, after a pause, joined in the healing. As he did so, he explained what had happened.

“Shamanism doesn’t only work the Underworld, and what our young friend here did was to jump the two of us from Underworld to Overworld, to a place where we could come back inside the Centurion’s defences in the Underworld.”

This was a technique that all four had used, taught by ‘le Oncle’ Bob to Tara, and passed on by her to the others, although they had used the shifting around the various etheric, astral and other nonphysical worlds, not the Shamanic view of Reality.

“When we came through” continued Toby, “which we could only do because you had his attention so fully engaged, we were able to shatter the structures he had built up from within, and the rest you saw.”

Ky asked “Who was he? How did … all this come about?”

“He had been a Roman Centurion who died in the battle of Cannae. Humiliated by the scale of the disaster, he refused to accept the defeat - let alone his death, and started working for what he saw as the ‘greater Roman glory’. Of course, the Ancient Roman Empire - well, it was a Republic back then, actually – was a pretty nasty, aggressive, expansionist place in many ways, and that’s what he kept doing: building an empire purely for the sake of building an empire.”

Harry asked “So we were up against someone who had two thousand years of experience?!”

“Slightly more, actually.”

The intrepid four looked at each other sombrely.

Toby laughed.

“Come on, cheer up you lot. Didn’t you have fun? Wasn’t that a pleasant way to pass the night?”

Ky groaned “The entire night? Oh no, I’ve got so much to do!”

Toby smiled, and replied “Come on, let’s return. You all stopped drumming some time ago, so we can just travel back. No need for any canoe.”

They assumed it was done with Toby’s help, but they found themselves back in their bodies, transitioned back to the physical incredibly smoothly, and only ten minutes had passed.

“Okay people” announced Ky, “Just pass out here. Just get comfortable first, alright?”

With the ease of long practice, they did so, and spent the rest of the night in deep, peaceful sleep.

 


Copyright © Kayleen White, 2014 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit, of course :)