I stood alone, with the wind swirling around me. No matter which way I turned rooftops ran away in rigid grids, a colourful quilt of brilliantly dyed clay tiles. A rainbow of emotions crept up slowly, only to accelerate and hammer me with vicious blows. Confusion… where were my markers, so painstakingly placed behind me as I had stalked the wounded perichyali on its way to its nest. Fury… the perichyali tracks had completely disappeared, rusty blood splotches and claw scritches swept away into nothingness in front of me. Terror… the only hope to find the anti-venom for my mother vanished along with the tracks. Despair… another day, and she would no longer be able to wall herself against the steady corrosive poison that glutted her veins. Weariness… now I had to waste precious time and energy doing a seeking for our current residence.
I sank to my haunches on the edges of a sigh and allowed the intense physicality of my external self to sink into my next inner layer. The fear enveloped me for a moment, as it did each time I attempted a sink. A flutter of the eye-lash, a twitch of the finger, a minute distraction due to sound, sight, smell or feel, and I would be lost. The first layer was the most dangerous, being as it was the closest to the exterior. I had just come into my drividian stages, and a seeking was the limit of my abilities and a difficult to achieve limit at that. With a few more years, and a singer to train my mind paths, I would be able to pinpoint heartbeats as needed with minuscule energy loss.
Every member of the Drivid race is born with the ability to merge and exist in the various dimensions that describe this universe. But the ability to do so grows over time. The stages are described as unfolding into each inner layer of the self. It is the consciousness that actually travels, leaving the physical mass behind. To learn to separate the sense of self from one’s physical body is the first and most difficult stage of the unfolding. It is usually undertaken under the empathic guidance of a trained singer and takes anywhere from a year to five before the student is deemed capable enough to perform the first sink on their own. Each individual’s path to the unfolding is different. The catalyst for each person is highly personalized and is obsessively protected from any except the guide.
I quietened my thoughts, and started a quiet inner chant, the lyrics of a favoured earth-nourishment song that was taught to every Drivid child when they can start to hold a tune.
Aram tavur satvir tuvah.
Intarh derim jaanas savah.
Etas kalim shaasray rasah.
Taroh mayih sambhaadh vateh.
Consolidating my mental feelers added a measure of confidence to my trance. I directed my physicality to draw measured breaths while keeping the smell sensors cut off from my receptor cells. Internally, I no longer knew if I was breathing in the rose scented air on the roof of the temple. The dusty clay tiles under my palms no longer abraded my sensitive skin. My thighs and knees might complain if I continued in my squat for an hour more, but the ledger of my brain had closed its doors to external sensation along with my sinking.
The tune was unnecessary now. The gentle cadence helped me set the various distractions free until I floated inside a tight mental cocoon with the last dregs of fear to keep me company. The words floated around me, losing their meaning, just the thought-sounds providing the foundations for beginning to define my mental boundaries. It was this stage that was the most dangerous for beginners. Any sharp jolt from the external self that was allowed inside the cocoon would cause such trauma on the individual consciousness that the separation of mind from body would become permanent. The body would stay comatose but alive without help for a short while, and then would start to decay. With help, the physical processes could be prolonged indefinitely, the body would remain in stasis until the external support was pulled off. The mind, on the other hand, would be free to traverse all the dimensions, without any anchor to hold it in one place. It would be so agitated due to the sudden loss, that the cohesiveness would start to fray until it lost all sense of self and became absorbed into the energy blanket that surrounds us. Very rarely has a bisected soul been brought together again, and only at the cost of the life energy of an eighth stage singer.
Annoyingly numerous repetitions of this information, especially the dangers, served to ensure perfect memory even though the duration of my education thus far had been quite short. My reluctant teacher, my dearest mother, made it a point to mention, only 5 to 6 times an hour how young I was to the unfolding and how much of a fledgling I was to the first stage. My unfolding had not been guided by any singer. The first activation had been accidental, something unheard of in our histories.
My mother was singing the earth-nourishment song at the top of her voice while following her obsessive routine of cleaning the kitchen, a sight (and sound) that I had never thought I’d miss. It was the beginning of spring and I was caught up in dreamy reflection of a gently waving leaf bud, delirious at being outdoors in the warmth. All of a sudden, the ticklish sensation of someone’s hair on my face threw me out of my contemplations. Imaginary hair up my nose drove me into sneezing fits, and when I finally wheezed a last gasping “achoo” and was wiping at the snot on my face… well I was in the same place – but not quite. There was the strange sensation of having air up my legs even though I was decently attired in a pair of tights. I turned back to look at our old home, and I think that was when I developed my squeak. I definitely squeaked. And it must have been a loud squeak – a squeal, much to my embarrassment.
A person who is going through the unfolding has a very striking look. The eyes look liquid – like they are about to melt and run off the face of the owner. And their shadow – it has very sharp edges, almost like it has been cut with a knife. My mother, unlike me, knew exactly what was happening. I can still picture the terror that replaced the smile on her face – like she had suddenly been possessed by a very frightened spirit in a split-second, or that she had developed a sudden new and terrorized personality that overcame her more sane self. Terror like that, it drives sharp knuckles into you. I felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on me. And the strangest thing was, besides that expression, her terror expressed itself in vivid three dimensional colour around her. I had never before seen anything like it. She tip-toed to me, like I was a skittish wild-cat at the edge of her personal territory that she wanted to feed, but knew she shouldn’t. I snorted out a laugh, and if anything, that added to her fear. The red around her started doing a crazy, pulsing dance. I was getting nauseous looking at it. By the time I transferred my squint from her red blanket to her eyes, I realized that she was nose-to-nose with me.
Cold hands stroked my cheeks, while pale ice-blue drops slid down hers. I was fascinated by the colours. I had no idea what was happening but was completely overwhelmed by the new sensations I was experiencing. I suddenly realized – my mother, my unflappable, eternally and sometimes annoyingly chirpy mother – she was crying! This unprecedented development must have brought about my rising with such swiftness that I was left dizzy but not seeing the colours any more. And that was when disaster collided with us. My mothers hands suddenly clamped onto my shoulders and a howl shook my already unstable senses. I gazed blankly at her feet which were doing a strange dance, scuffing the ground behind her scattering a rain of scarlet drops. It looked as though a line of earth had risen up and was undulating madly, dancing with the grass around it till the they stroked it in parallel stripes. It was a kuvarna, in death throes. Kuvarnas are a breed of extremely poisonous, rapidly multiplying snakes that attack very rarely. When they do bite something, or someone, the venom ejection from their glands occurs at such a high rate of acceleration, that it causes them to suffocate to death. If one was dying, and there was a welt on my mother’s calf, then she had been bitten. If she had been bitten…
That was when I found out about being a member of the Drivid clans. That was when I learnt rudimentary healing skills. That was the first time I heard my mother’s shaking, expedited tutorial about the dangers of unfolding. That was the last time I saw my mother smile and heard her sing. She had been a singer. She refused to explain why she had left the Drivid fold, why she lived with me on the outskirts of a small village who knew her as a herb healer. She directed me to place a tourniquet around her thigh, and then I turned around on her and point-blank refused to chop off her leg. Fancy that, my sweet obedient self morphing into a rebellious teen at the perfect moment. The poison spread through her until the argument was moot. She used her skills to direct the poison along certain external dimensions of her body, but grew weak in the process. My energy was flagging after my unguided first sink and rising, but I somehow managed to pack some basics along with our money, fashion a pair of crutches for her, and we left. I couldnt convince her that we needed to stay and get help. All she kept saying was, “I have to find him”. It was almost a chant. She hobbled off on her crutches and I had a hard time keeping up. We hitched multiple rides over the next few days. I lost count. All I knew was that I was so tired, I would fall comatose if I stood still for more than two seconds, and I was so hungry I would probably eat in my sleep if something edible was placed within reach. We landed up at our current residence, a musty brick house, with an air of disuse, sheets draped over massive pieces of furniture, a layer of dust so thick it looked like bedding, and a well with the sweetest of water in the back. She had the key – how, why, whose, I have no idea. I had a quick session on how to do the unfolding correctly. We ate some stale bread along with the ambrosia-like water. We must have slept through a whole day. I had another two practice sessions and she taught me how to do a seeking, all the while telling me I should keep my eyes open and not depend on the seeking to find my way. Fear was a stench that lay on us like slime coating a snali pest. I rested some more. Then, on the evening of the second day in the new place, she sent me off looking for the perichyali venom with strict instructions to come back at sunrise whether or not I had fulfilled my goal – and no unfolding, mind her! So, here I was running back to her without the venom, feeling ridiculously inadequate and shaky, doing a seeking against her express orders. I still had no idea what was happening and confusion had become so standard, that I no longer questioned how to tackle it any more. But apparently being meek was a thing of the past, as here I was, quietly rebelling against my mother’s fear, orders, and what I saw as her lies.
A slight twist of mental perception, and the fear trickled away. I had settled in to the first stage of the drividian unfolding and my confidence in my strength was growing. Gratingly slow, my feelers unfurled and hesitantly brushed feather-light streamers in the dimension newly opened up to me. Each sink can add or subtract dimensions from those already present. Confusing and strange as this may sound, it is nothing but pure logic and formulae and numbers, a field known as Diamens to Drivid scholars. The first sink adds a curved spatial dimension to the three spatial dimensions already open to us. The temporal dimension is not something any sane person plays with.
A slight jarring of the senses and I incorporated the fourth while settling back into my physicality. Opening my eyes and still sensing the world through the fourth was disorienting, but I got used to it faster each time. I really shouldn’t have attempted this on my own, but a slight smug pride in my abilities made me inclined to do it at every chance. With a slight smirk, a scrunched squint and a general clamping down of my irreverent pride, I focused on my mother’s aura. Thanks to the curvature of the fourth, distances were a different matter altogether. After noting the general direction to head towards, I tamped down my extra-dimensional sense slightly and started a measured jog across the empty roof-tiles.
Within a matter of minutes, I was back in a neighbourhood I recognized and could have disconnected from the fourth, but an intuitive suspicion stopped me. A reddish-grey aura appeared to be following in my footsteps. Now that I knew where I was, I refocussed my attention on the shadow and let out a sigh of relief when the aura dropped back. Naively happy, I felt free to let the fourth go. I reconnected fully into myself and stepped up my pace, easily bounding
over strips of empty air. Exhilaration and the cold, sharp wind bit into me as I raced over my very own kingdom to finally arrive at our rental rooftop. A quick shimmy down the water pipe, a push at the rusty window lock, and I was inside with the warm, heavenly smell of baking bread, and the softly smothered sounds of crying.
(also on my blog: http://deemedliterary.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/chapter-1-seeking-a-path/ )
I sank to my haunches on the edges of a sigh and allowed the intense physicality of my external self to sink into my next inner layer. The fear enveloped me for a moment, as it did each time I attempted a sink. A flutter of the eye-lash, a twitch of the finger, a minute distraction due to sound, sight, smell or feel, and I would be lost. The first layer was the most dangerous, being as it was the closest to the exterior. I had just come into my drividian stages, and a seeking was the limit of my abilities and a difficult to achieve limit at that. With a few more years, and a singer to train my mind paths, I would be able to pinpoint heartbeats as needed with minuscule energy loss.
Every member of the Drivid race is born with the ability to merge and exist in the various dimensions that describe this universe. But the ability to do so grows over time. The stages are described as unfolding into each inner layer of the self. It is the consciousness that actually travels, leaving the physical mass behind. To learn to separate the sense of self from one’s physical body is the first and most difficult stage of the unfolding. It is usually undertaken under the empathic guidance of a trained singer and takes anywhere from a year to five before the student is deemed capable enough to perform the first sink on their own. Each individual’s path to the unfolding is different. The catalyst for each person is highly personalized and is obsessively protected from any except the guide.
I quietened my thoughts, and started a quiet inner chant, the lyrics of a favoured earth-nourishment song that was taught to every Drivid child when they can start to hold a tune.
Aram tavur satvir tuvah.
Intarh derim jaanas savah.
Etas kalim shaasray rasah.
Taroh mayih sambhaadh vateh.
Consolidating my mental feelers added a measure of confidence to my trance. I directed my physicality to draw measured breaths while keeping the smell sensors cut off from my receptor cells. Internally, I no longer knew if I was breathing in the rose scented air on the roof of the temple. The dusty clay tiles under my palms no longer abraded my sensitive skin. My thighs and knees might complain if I continued in my squat for an hour more, but the ledger of my brain had closed its doors to external sensation along with my sinking.
The tune was unnecessary now. The gentle cadence helped me set the various distractions free until I floated inside a tight mental cocoon with the last dregs of fear to keep me company. The words floated around me, losing their meaning, just the thought-sounds providing the foundations for beginning to define my mental boundaries. It was this stage that was the most dangerous for beginners. Any sharp jolt from the external self that was allowed inside the cocoon would cause such trauma on the individual consciousness that the separation of mind from body would become permanent. The body would stay comatose but alive without help for a short while, and then would start to decay. With help, the physical processes could be prolonged indefinitely, the body would remain in stasis until the external support was pulled off. The mind, on the other hand, would be free to traverse all the dimensions, without any anchor to hold it in one place. It would be so agitated due to the sudden loss, that the cohesiveness would start to fray until it lost all sense of self and became absorbed into the energy blanket that surrounds us. Very rarely has a bisected soul been brought together again, and only at the cost of the life energy of an eighth stage singer.
Annoyingly numerous repetitions of this information, especially the dangers, served to ensure perfect memory even though the duration of my education thus far had been quite short. My reluctant teacher, my dearest mother, made it a point to mention, only 5 to 6 times an hour how young I was to the unfolding and how much of a fledgling I was to the first stage. My unfolding had not been guided by any singer. The first activation had been accidental, something unheard of in our histories.
My mother was singing the earth-nourishment song at the top of her voice while following her obsessive routine of cleaning the kitchen, a sight (and sound) that I had never thought I’d miss. It was the beginning of spring and I was caught up in dreamy reflection of a gently waving leaf bud, delirious at being outdoors in the warmth. All of a sudden, the ticklish sensation of someone’s hair on my face threw me out of my contemplations. Imaginary hair up my nose drove me into sneezing fits, and when I finally wheezed a last gasping “achoo” and was wiping at the snot on my face… well I was in the same place – but not quite. There was the strange sensation of having air up my legs even though I was decently attired in a pair of tights. I turned back to look at our old home, and I think that was when I developed my squeak. I definitely squeaked. And it must have been a loud squeak – a squeal, much to my embarrassment.
A person who is going through the unfolding has a very striking look. The eyes look liquid – like they are about to melt and run off the face of the owner. And their shadow – it has very sharp edges, almost like it has been cut with a knife. My mother, unlike me, knew exactly what was happening. I can still picture the terror that replaced the smile on her face – like she had suddenly been possessed by a very frightened spirit in a split-second, or that she had developed a sudden new and terrorized personality that overcame her more sane self. Terror like that, it drives sharp knuckles into you. I felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on me. And the strangest thing was, besides that expression, her terror expressed itself in vivid three dimensional colour around her. I had never before seen anything like it. She tip-toed to me, like I was a skittish wild-cat at the edge of her personal territory that she wanted to feed, but knew she shouldn’t. I snorted out a laugh, and if anything, that added to her fear. The red around her started doing a crazy, pulsing dance. I was getting nauseous looking at it. By the time I transferred my squint from her red blanket to her eyes, I realized that she was nose-to-nose with me.
Cold hands stroked my cheeks, while pale ice-blue drops slid down hers. I was fascinated by the colours. I had no idea what was happening but was completely overwhelmed by the new sensations I was experiencing. I suddenly realized – my mother, my unflappable, eternally and sometimes annoyingly chirpy mother – she was crying! This unprecedented development must have brought about my rising with such swiftness that I was left dizzy but not seeing the colours any more. And that was when disaster collided with us. My mothers hands suddenly clamped onto my shoulders and a howl shook my already unstable senses. I gazed blankly at her feet which were doing a strange dance, scuffing the ground behind her scattering a rain of scarlet drops. It looked as though a line of earth had risen up and was undulating madly, dancing with the grass around it till the they stroked it in parallel stripes. It was a kuvarna, in death throes. Kuvarnas are a breed of extremely poisonous, rapidly multiplying snakes that attack very rarely. When they do bite something, or someone, the venom ejection from their glands occurs at such a high rate of acceleration, that it causes them to suffocate to death. If one was dying, and there was a welt on my mother’s calf, then she had been bitten. If she had been bitten…
That was when I found out about being a member of the Drivid clans. That was when I learnt rudimentary healing skills. That was the first time I heard my mother’s shaking, expedited tutorial about the dangers of unfolding. That was the last time I saw my mother smile and heard her sing. She had been a singer. She refused to explain why she had left the Drivid fold, why she lived with me on the outskirts of a small village who knew her as a herb healer. She directed me to place a tourniquet around her thigh, and then I turned around on her and point-blank refused to chop off her leg. Fancy that, my sweet obedient self morphing into a rebellious teen at the perfect moment. The poison spread through her until the argument was moot. She used her skills to direct the poison along certain external dimensions of her body, but grew weak in the process. My energy was flagging after my unguided first sink and rising, but I somehow managed to pack some basics along with our money, fashion a pair of crutches for her, and we left. I couldnt convince her that we needed to stay and get help. All she kept saying was, “I have to find him”. It was almost a chant. She hobbled off on her crutches and I had a hard time keeping up. We hitched multiple rides over the next few days. I lost count. All I knew was that I was so tired, I would fall comatose if I stood still for more than two seconds, and I was so hungry I would probably eat in my sleep if something edible was placed within reach. We landed up at our current residence, a musty brick house, with an air of disuse, sheets draped over massive pieces of furniture, a layer of dust so thick it looked like bedding, and a well with the sweetest of water in the back. She had the key – how, why, whose, I have no idea. I had a quick session on how to do the unfolding correctly. We ate some stale bread along with the ambrosia-like water. We must have slept through a whole day. I had another two practice sessions and she taught me how to do a seeking, all the while telling me I should keep my eyes open and not depend on the seeking to find my way. Fear was a stench that lay on us like slime coating a snali pest. I rested some more. Then, on the evening of the second day in the new place, she sent me off looking for the perichyali venom with strict instructions to come back at sunrise whether or not I had fulfilled my goal – and no unfolding, mind her! So, here I was running back to her without the venom, feeling ridiculously inadequate and shaky, doing a seeking against her express orders. I still had no idea what was happening and confusion had become so standard, that I no longer questioned how to tackle it any more. But apparently being meek was a thing of the past, as here I was, quietly rebelling against my mother’s fear, orders, and what I saw as her lies.
A slight twist of mental perception, and the fear trickled away. I had settled in to the first stage of the drividian unfolding and my confidence in my strength was growing. Gratingly slow, my feelers unfurled and hesitantly brushed feather-light streamers in the dimension newly opened up to me. Each sink can add or subtract dimensions from those already present. Confusing and strange as this may sound, it is nothing but pure logic and formulae and numbers, a field known as Diamens to Drivid scholars. The first sink adds a curved spatial dimension to the three spatial dimensions already open to us. The temporal dimension is not something any sane person plays with.
A slight jarring of the senses and I incorporated the fourth while settling back into my physicality. Opening my eyes and still sensing the world through the fourth was disorienting, but I got used to it faster each time. I really shouldn’t have attempted this on my own, but a slight smug pride in my abilities made me inclined to do it at every chance. With a slight smirk, a scrunched squint and a general clamping down of my irreverent pride, I focused on my mother’s aura. Thanks to the curvature of the fourth, distances were a different matter altogether. After noting the general direction to head towards, I tamped down my extra-dimensional sense slightly and started a measured jog across the empty roof-tiles.
Within a matter of minutes, I was back in a neighbourhood I recognized and could have disconnected from the fourth, but an intuitive suspicion stopped me. A reddish-grey aura appeared to be following in my footsteps. Now that I knew where I was, I refocussed my attention on the shadow and let out a sigh of relief when the aura dropped back. Naively happy, I felt free to let the fourth go. I reconnected fully into myself and stepped up my pace, easily bounding
over strips of empty air. Exhilaration and the cold, sharp wind bit into me as I raced over my very own kingdom to finally arrive at our rental rooftop. A quick shimmy down the water pipe, a push at the rusty window lock, and I was inside with the warm, heavenly smell of baking bread, and the softly smothered sounds of crying.
(also on my blog: http://deemedliterary.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/chapter-1-seeking-a-path/ )
