The Gathandrian Trilogy 03 - The Executioners Cane

everything turns dark.

    Simon

    The world exploded into his mind and body once more and death slipped away. He knew how strong it had been, and how much he’d given in to it. But now he was no longer hanging from the tree. He could not feel the agonising stretch in his arms, the splinter of pain at his right shoulder. Even so, every bone, every part of his skin cried out for relief. He opened his mouth, panted, but no sound came out. He had not expected it. He had been … somewhere. He understood that, but the sense of the place he had been in was rapidly vanishing out of his mind-grasp.
    There had been people, Lammassers, Gathandrians and a hundred other races and beings, but their shapes, and whether he might have known any of them, were also fast disappearing, and the more his thoughts grasped after them, the faster they fled. It had been a place of darkness and light, of night and day, simultaneously. It had been full of singing but also utterly silent, a silence which flowed through his blood and into the very centre of his being. The silence had overpowered his senses so his only response had been to weep, at the same time as he had been filled with such joy as he had never known. He had stood, his feet on the expansive earth, and had seen the horizon stretch out so far he could not see where the ground ended and the sky began, or indeed if those measures meant anything in this strange and glorious setting.
    He sensed a presence in the centre of the scene, straight ahead, and was drawn towards it. He had encountered this before, after the battle when Annyeke had killed Gelahn, and Simon himself had entered the realms of the dead to try to rescue her young charge. However he had not expected to meet the Spirit of Gathandria again quite so soon, although “meeting” didn’t accurately describe the experience in any way. Because he had walked only a few steps when the Great Spirit of the lands slipped through his skin and bone and poured its strange energy through his blood, which was the only way to speak of the sheer devastation and ecstasy of it. He fell to his knees, scrabbled like a child on the ground, fingers digging deep into grass and soil, and panting hard. His thoughts and memories, all the loves and pains of his life exploded out of flesh and time-cycle and into bright air. It turned him inside out, it made him know what death was like and it also gave him strength.
    The words that launched themselves from his heart to the heart of the being ravishing him were these: Show me then, show me what is my life, and then I can live it.
    A long silence in which everything happened and also nothing. Simon became aware the light around him was fading, but the light inside was growing stronger. He rose to his feet, staggering under the strain. Across his vision streams of people and vast lands flowed past, and he felt as if he were seeing all the worlds and races that had ever been up until now. He feared them and he longed for them too.
    Is this what you see when you watch us, Spirit of Gathandria? So many people needing you and with none to help them?
    The Lost One did not wait for any response; he understood the answer lay within the depths of the question, and what he had asked was what the Spirit saw. He was aware of the wide beginnings of calm, perhaps even acceptance.
    I am closer to you than I think. How then can I help them?
    Simon closed his eyes, shutting off the scenes in front of him from his sight but not his mind. It was strange how much he felt at one with the air and the earth and the sky above, how his body was no longer a barrier but a channel. Was this what death meant? He laughed, but quietly, because this was indeed what it meant. Death was all around him and within him, and over and beneath him too. It was impossible to ignore or deny, stronger even than life in its intensity. He stretched his arms out as far as he could and flung his thoughts into the darkness within and without.
    So this is true. I am dead and this is the end of my journey . As that is what you wish, Great Spirit, then it is also what I long for, with even more passionate acceptance than you could ever plan for. Because of you I have sought my death at the hands of Lammas and it has been done. Your desire and mine are here fulfilled and you have all of me, body, mind and heart. Do with me here what you wish to do. Everything or nothing, it does not matter, as I am yours, in life and in death. Let all of it be as you