The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure - By Storm Constantine Page 0,242

Years had passed, but in private moments, when she dared to dwell upon it, it felt to Mima as if Lileem and Terez had disappeared only last week. Never, in all her wild imaginings, had she ever considered she would be doing this; voluntarily travelling to the no-place where aruna, and its unpredictable dehar, had taken her lost friend and brother.

At the appointed spot, Pellaz asked his companions to sit in a circle and join hands. They sat beneath the rock on the sweet summer grass that was damp with evening dew. A great ghostly owl flew over their heads: surely an omen. Peridot and Astral stood motionless outside the circle, and for once their masks of being ordinary beasts of earth seemed to have slipped. They did not bow their heads to munch the grass, nor switch their tails or toss their manes. They watched, with full and focused intention.

Mima took her brother’s hand on the one side, and Ulaume’s on the other. The moment she did so, she closed her eyes and it was like sharing breath. She was back at the white house with Lileem: it was a flickering grainy image, like the old movies she had seen what seemed like centuries ago. Her entire time with her adopted family flashed past her perception in seconds, then she was going further back, into a sunset and the smell of ripe cable fruit. She was brushing Pell’s hair before a mirror by lamplight, and she was thinking: he is so lovely, he should have been born a girl. The moment Cal had set foot in their settlement, with all his languorous beauty, Mima had known that Pell would be lost. And that was before she even realised Cal was Wraeththu.

Pellaz squeezed her fingers and she sensed he must be picking up on her thoughts. His own were shrouded, but perhaps not. Perhaps the images in her mind came directly from him.

The Tigron drew in a slow deep breath through his nose. He called upon the power of the Aghama, the life force of creation. He called it down upon them. Mima could see it as a radiant beam that came from the centre of the universe and held them in its light. They would travel this beam to other realms, to unimagined landscapes. Where her hand joined with Pell’s, she felt as if the flesh was melting, as if she had begun to meld with him completely. Their bones would interlace like the twigs of trees growing close to one another in a deep dark forest.

‘Think of Lileem,’ Pellaz said to her by mind touch, ‘and do not let her go. Keep the image pure and strong and true. It is your lantern in the darkness.’

He leaned towards her and put his mouth near her own. They did not touch but the streams of their breath mingled, causing myriad microscopic explosions in the air between them. The reaction kindled a new form of energy and where it existed, so the boundaries between the worlds became thin and unstable.

‘Rise,’ Pellaz said aloud. ‘Mount Astral, Mima. Flick, Ulaume, stand back.’

In a daze, Mima jumped up onto the sedu. The landscape around her had changed. It was as if she could perceive the essence of everything. The animal beneath her was so strange, she had to concentrate on the image of horse to stop herself leaping from its back with a scream of dread. She could hear the air fracturing, reality shattering, like guns firing in the distance or glass breaking underfoot. Astral connected with her as if his mind was a snake. A whip of intention lashed out and hooked into her consciousness. She could hear him speak. We will open the way on the steam of your breath. Hold true, little one. Hold the lantern high.

With a final ear-splitting crash, reality broke apart, Astral lunged forward and Mima was hurled into the space between the worlds.

Rushing, vortex, waves of energy that she could smell and taste. A soaring ghost beside her that she could not see, but could only feel. The thing she rode: it had wings that were like oars that were like blades rotating. She wasn’t riding it. She was in it. And this time, her awareness was fully awake and alert. She would not forget this journey. She was not a passenger, but a pilot and her navigator was the otherworldly being that enfolded her essence.

Few experience this Astral told her. Hara ride their dreams of