A Vision of Fire

Caitlin was startled to feel the effects of that realization in her body. It was as though she were energized from her feet all the way up. Her torso felt bright, almost radiant; her mind was clear as the tone of a tuning fork; and she was ravenous. She rang for the hostess and asked for the menu.

Something had clicked into place, though Caitlin didn’t know what.

Over dinner, she devoured the materials Vahin had given her. She read about the combined power of souls, of prayer. Connected in the transpersonal plane, souls could form a powerful group spirit capable of ascending even higher, outside the reach of time, space… and death.

A cataclysm, she thought. Fire, ice, floods. A city or civilization beset by a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami, encroaching ice. Caitlin remembered Maanik crying in their first session over an arm that had been ripped off and her dead pet that was not Jack London. Maybe that had happened to Maanik’s counterpart in some ancient place—before that counterpart had died, burned to pieces by volcanic fire or an inferno caused by tremors.

But Maanik had said that she also became pieces first and then burned. What pieces? And how?

Okay, we’ll come back to that, Caitlin thought, forcing herself to stay focused despite the mental lull caused by her full stomach.

She thought about Atash’s vision. Other residents of the city seemed not only prepared for the cataclysm but eager for it. Instead of running away from an erupting volcano, these people in robes gathered in a courtyard of columns, apparently waiting to die. Eager to die? Robes that were soaked in oil; a reference to cazh; a word and gesture meaning what? Some kind of transformation.

Those residents—Caitlin had seen them. They had a ritual they were determined to complete. Whether that rite was done to thwart the volcano or honor it in the hope of pacifying it, she wasn’t sure. But if Vahin was correct, perhaps the ritual had transported their souls to the transpersonal plane, whatever it was. Their souls left as their physical bodies burned to fine ash. Maanik’s consciousness split into fragments and lifted up as her physical body burned.

Presumably then, the souls that reached the transpersonal plane were ensured not a life after death, but life beyond the reach of death.

But why have Maanik and Gaelle and Atash connected with that? Shared trauma here and now cannot be the only reason.

Those prayerful residents in robes had denied help to Atash’s counterpart. Why had they excluded him? They had accused him of placing faith in “things without true power” and said that he had crafted his own fate. She thought of people she had seen in war zones, those who had tried to leave and those who had gathered in a place of worship and perished—difficult choices made under duress, but with the same goal.

Escape.

Then there was her father and the Norse-style longboat. Caitlin remembered Maanik talking about a dragon, perhaps a carved dragon head on a ship? Some residents may have taken to the sea, trying desperately to sail away as fire fell on an ocean already lashing them with steep waves. Atash’s counterpart may have quailed at that choice. So he had begged the robed man to save his brother through cazh instead, turning to religion as a last resort. Rebuffed by the priest, Atash’s counterpart had done the ritual without the help or sanction of the priests—and it seemed to have worked. Thousands of years later, with Antarctica long buried under ice, he had found Atash’s soul, exposed by the trauma of his brother’s execution, and somehow made his way in.

But why would that cause Atash to set himself alight? Had the soul given him the wrong message? Or—and the thought made Caitlin choke up—had that soul been trapped in that traumatic moment like some prehistoric insect preserved in amber, all this time.

Too many broad strokes, she thought, but a start. A place to go with Maanik.

Caitlin leaned back, shut her exhausted eyes, and tried not to think of Atash locked in a burning body for millennia. She thought of the animals instead. What was their role in this? Jack London had to be aware of the presence of something unseen. What about his avoiding his mistress’s right hand? One of Vahin’s booklets said that energy from the world around us entered through the left hand, the heart hand. Then, filtered by the body and soul, negative, unwanted energy exited through the right hand. Maanik’s left hand on Jack London would have safely received his loving energy. But her right hand would have been emitting all the suffering her counterpart felt in the transpersonal plane. No wonder the dog had avoided it.