“Let your mind go, like relenting to the pull of fatigue and drifting from conscious awareness to the awareness of your dreams, the awareness of your subconscious thoughts. But don’t be drawn into the subconscious, hang there in between the point of giving into fatigue and being taken by it. Drift there. Be that feeling, not awake and not asleep. Remember your time in the Ife-Osu, how easily it was to be and not be, you are there now, in a seemingly infinite black space. Are you aware there? Look around at the emptiness. Now, you must bring your spirit along with you. Feel yourself, your body in that place. Look at your legs and hands. Have you done it? Are you there in the black? Do you see anything? You’ve done it. Turn around.”
Darker is not in the Kazi Dōjō anymore, even though his body is still sitting cross-legged in a meditation room. He has managed to achieve the mental realm, and Kazi Fandral has eased the release of his soul from his body to rejoin his consciousness.
When he turns, he sees a form of Fandral that is familiar to the man he knows in the physical world.
“You should construct a landing place for yourself. Usually, the consciousness constructs an environment automatically, but you were distracted with your soul at arrival. Make your environment so that we are not floating in the black.”
Darker thinks about the block where he was raised, the three and four story residential buildings along the two-way side street off the main avenue that was always alive with people and activity regardless of the time of day. And then he and Kazi Fandral are standing on a typical street in the Bronx, New York.
“Very good,” Fandral says. “Your experience is clear, this is very detailed.”
“This is unbelievable,” Darker says. “It’s almost like I’m in that place, but this isn’t as complete. This body gives me bounds.”
Fandral nods. “You want the dissolution. Complete relinquish of your energies to the Ife-Osu. When your soul expires you can achieve that again.”
“How long does that take?” Darker asks.
“That is impossible to say. Your soul went directly there after your first death, and some spirits exist for millennia after their physical death before they achieve it. The ways of the Ife-Osu are mysterious.”
Darker rolls his eyes.
“Ok Fandral,” he says.
“The other way to achieve the permanent dissolution, is to run the Rainbow Road through heaven and hell that leads to the Ife-Osu.”
“The Rainbow Road? Is that here?”
Fandral nods and then levitates above the street.
“Follow me,” Fandral says and Darker understands the mechanics of this realm well enough to catch up to him as he speeds to the bounds of Darker’s mental construct. When they make it to the edge, they hover just below the shiny barrier where the blue sky of Darker’s construct ends and the unformed darkness of the realm just beyond it begins.
“Alia is out there now looking for it,” Fandral says. “It is not easy to find the Road in the vastness of the Dreamscape. There is no map to it. Alia is learning that in order to navigate this realm, one must master their own consciousness that works in tandem with this place in ways that are not always easy to understand. The way to Ife-Osu is inside all of us because we are part of it. In order to find the way to it, we need only look deep within ourselves for the location.”
“Can I help Alia find it?” Darker asks. “Then we can go there together.”
“You will have to find her somewhere out there,” Fandral says.
“To master the everything and the nothing,” Darker says grinning, happy that he can give Fandral a taste of his own riddle-speak, “one need only give into the sensation. Let go of your notions of reality, accept that everything is possible, everything is happening and there is no need for imagination, only realization of any notion one may have. I understand that, therefore, a simple snap of my finger will bring me to the Alia I seek.”
Fandral smiles. Darker is wise, a true Kazi, maybe even Makazi.
“Go safely. The Alia is steady on her mission. If you are not useful to her, she will not even acknowledge you. And running the Road as anyone other than the Alia is practically impossible.”
Darker smiles at Fandral and thanks him sincerely. “I would not be here without you.” Then he snaps his fingers and disappears from his own mental construct.
Darker will return in The Hyperion Issue 30!
PRL Serials 