The Golden City

Through the watery blur of her frost-numbed eyes, Njoro could see lights.
A golden glow shone through the blue monotony, and she didn’t know if this was a clear sign of her passing between the worlds for a final time as the woman Njoro from Lhasa - or if it was an actual light source back here in the material world.
Every cell in her body was cold as the grave, and she could barely move anymore, yet the view of the light gave her a final energy boost to crawl across the dry snow in its direction.
As she got closer, she could see that the light came from behind a tall gate set in an entrance to a tunnel leading underground, beneath the surface of the ice.
With the last of her strength, she got up on her feet and stumbled towards the gate – into her death, her rescue – or both.
The enormous metal doors of the gate were wide open, and just as she saw that the light was coming from further down the tunnel beyond, she fell.
She felt so endlessly tired, and just as she drifted off, lying in the cold snow, she thought she could hear voices.
And then there was nothing.

Expelled

An intense energy rush hit Mac, making his body shiver all over as he stepped firmly onto the staircase leading up to the main platform of the gallows.
As he stared coldly into the short future ahead of him, he could feel a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
He was completely fearless.
”Why are you smiling?” The Officer standing at the top of the stairs asked, in a nervous, cracking voice, desperately trying to demonstrate as much authority as he could possibly muster with such a weak and revealing voice. ”Don’t you know that you will die soon?”
”Well,” Mac said, ice cool and unfazed, ”I’ve never been hanged before, at least not as far as I can recollect. It might be a new experience.”
The remark left The Officer looking even more bewildered, trying desperately to avoid looking Mac straight back in the eye.
Two guards grabbed him by his arms and led him to the middle of the execution-device. As one of the guards secured the rope around Mac’s neck, he casually continued: ”And every new experience should be welcomed in this dire dance of mortality, don’t you agree?”
The two guards glanced swiftly at each other, then turned towards The Officer with puzzled, worried looks.
Then no one said anything for a while.
”But, you know …” Mac paused, and jacked his head slowly from side to side as to give his neck a good stretch to fit the rope. ”You are most welcome to join me on the ride, if you’d like.”
The Officer looked him in the eye with a mixture of deep hate and uncontrollable fear.
Mac totally ignored this, and continued:
”With MY looks and YOUR apparent MENTAL capacities, I’m sure we can even make HIStory together.”
The Officer was trembling with anger as he shouted his order.
The trapdoor below Mac’s feet opened.
The rope tightened, and reality shifted.
Everything was trembling and pulsating.
A reddish, flickering light was glowing from within the whole space around him. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
He could barely catch a glimpse of his surroundings in the turmoil, but found himself being hurled through a narrow passage of some sort. An illuminated tunnel that seemed to be composed of living flesh and blood.
And then, as suddenly as it had started and without any warning, it was all over.
He got up from the ground he was sitting on. The rope was gone.
He looked around, and found himself standing in the middle of a road he’d never seen before, in a strange little town with even stranger buildings.
Everything else was apparently normal. The sky, the trees, the crisp air. But all objects apart from those directly of Nature all had something unusual about them.
Surely this was also part of the magic of the House Witch!
He decided to ignore the strangeness of the place. He wouldn’t let her cheap tricks get to him and blur his judgment.
After all, he was a man on a mission. He had a simple job to do. It was to keep his focus on the task.
He collected himself, and took a deep breath.
Good.
Then he started walking down the small road.
He passed dusty little buildings with transparent front ends.
There was electricity, and electrically operated devices were all around, so this would be somewhere close to home, and not somewhere shitty down south or eastbound.
He’d actually never seen anywhere that had this much electricity before, come to think of it.
Maybe this was one of the more restricted areas in the Middle-North that he’d not been granted access to before? Shit! If this was the case it would be fantastic! Then they’d really progressed much further than what was being made publically available in the Middle-Northern cities.
But surely, if this was the case, someone from R.O.S.E. would be here to greet him soon?
If not…
Could it be that this was House of Lhasa’s secret polar location that he’d actually set out to find on this mission?
Bloody hell! How about that?
Those fuckers! This base looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. So much for the oh-we’re-so-scared-of-technology that the Traditionalists kept on blabbering about. The cheeky bastards had already built a whole city full of the stuff themselves!
Would you believe it?
Still, it looked quite shit. They had no style, even when they actually approached the future, they still got it all wrong, he concluded.

But what a scam!
It could have been that the Witch had poisoned him and first made him hallucinate and lose his senses temporarily, but that he’d then managed to overcome her, get out of the confusion, and finally made it to target.
He was a survivor, after all.
Mac decided to waste no more time, and get down to business.
He made a mental map of the surroundings within a perimeter of a couple of hundred meters. Not much to register, but just a few buildings down from where he now stood there was a place that seemed full of activity.
He ran towards the place, quickly pulled himself back up against the wall to the building next to the entrance, and waited in silence for a couple of minutes.
But no-one came out or entered, and he could see no guards or armed security.
He decided to play it head-first.
Without making any attempt at camouflaging himself he walked straight towards the building and in through the front door. Cheeky, he thought, but still a successful strategy.
The room was filled with low tables surrounded by chairs, and the walls were covered with meaningless, ugly paintings. To the left of the entrance was a long, tall counter. A few heads turned lazily as he entered, but nobody seemed to react to him being a stranger here at the base. He obviously was playing it right, maybe there were too many faces here to keep track.
After all he hadn’t been able to see any traces of the ice in any direction when he was outside, so the whole place must have been enormous.
He walked over to the counter, and stood himself in front of it as casually as he could, as if to ready himself for something.
He opened his bag and pulled out the memo-box, carefully hiding it in his palm.
He flicked through the pictures on the device, and opened the info-sheet on the target object drawing.
“I’ll be damned!” he whispered to himself below hearing level.
At least half the tables had people leaning over and operating devices exactly like the one that R.O.S.E. had set him out on his mission to secure.
Major problem.
How the hell would he play this now?
From the mission briefing he knew that what they were looking for was of very high priority, and crucial for gathering exclusive knowledge of the past, pre-catastrophic era. Mr. Sykes at R.O.S.E. even used the words “A possible key to unlock the future”.
So what did this information actually tell him?
Probably that something very, very special was contained within the target device.
And what happened to people when they owned something of high value and importance?
They started acting weird. And probably a little paranoid, too.
He’d have to just rush in on this one.
Behind the counter a man was busy preparing the strange black brew they seemed to drink in this place. Mac pretended to be studying the board on the wall.
Why the hell couldn’t they write in Global, and not some fucked up language? He couldn’t read a word.
The man approached him. It was now or never.
“So…” Mac said. “All is good?”
The man stared blankly at him.
Shit! These people were trained. Was his cover about to blow? Mac could feel his pulse accelerate.
“I mean, nothing unusual taking place? No problems?”
“Sorry mate, I really can’t follow you. You gotta speak more slowly. What are you saying? Did you say problem? You have a problem? You Russian, mate? You sound a bit Russian to me.”
Mac considered to rush for the door. This could blow any minute.
The man then gestured to someone sitting by one of the tables.
“Hey Boris! Come over here. This bloke don’t speak any language I know, but he sounds a bit Russian. Can you try to translate?”
A thin bearded man got up and approached them. Probably a guard. Mac thought through his possible moves to disarm him, five he could think of, but just as he was about to place a blow at the side of his neck and run for it the man said, in some strange old tongue: “Help you why come here?”
Mac decided to see if he could talk through this and slowly opened his tightened fist.
“I just wanted to ask whether everything was OK, you know. How things were going with our friend here and his business in general.”
The thin bearded man turned to the man behind the counter.
“He’s definitely not from any part of Russia that was known when I left back in ‘73, but from what I can make out he’s wondering if everything is OK with you and the coffee-shop.”
“If everything’s OK?” the man behind the counter answered. “As if it ever was. Why’s he asking?”
The beard turned to Mac, and in his ancient version of Middle-Northern asked: “He wonder why ask.”
Mac felt that he was gaining back some control over the situation, and decided to continue his pursuit: “Well you know. These days you get a lot of strange people just hanging around all over the place. Suspicious individuals. Up to all sorts of mischief. Anyone like that trespassing these premises?”
The man, whose name he now understood was Boris, spoke back to the counter-man, who answered him:
"Haha! That’s a good one. This guy a stray survivor from the Cold War or something? Suspicious people, eh? I wish something as exciting would happen in this sleepy old town. The only weird attractions we’ve got is Old Miss George and that crazy old raver boy that comes down here every Sunday, and they’re not much of a catch neither of them. One is a toothless and harmless old queen virgin, and the other one’s more of an acid casualty than anything the KGB would have sent to peep behind the Iron Curtain. All he ever does is sit alone at the usual window table drinking coffee, talking to himself for hours before walking around the park talking to the trees and then leaving town again. Not much more to him, really. Come to think of it I haven't seen him for a while, though."
The bearded man named Boris laughed out loud for a while and exchanged some more words with the counter-man, and finally said: “No. Not suspicions here.”
Mac felt defeated and clueless. Then he smiled goofily to the two men, and hastily left the place.
“What now?” Mac thought. “A Mission failed report?”.
It wasn’t like him. Not like him at all.
As he walked around the little town, carefully considering alternative approaches, he gradually started to notice the details of the place. Whatever his next move would be, maybe he should take some time to breathe. This place didn’t seem too bad, and after such a long time in the ice and then all the struggles with the Voodoo of the House Witch in the cave, maybe he needed a little rest and restoration before moving further?
It wasn’t as if anyone here had any suspicions towards him anyway, in fact, he suddenly felt very much at ease here in the little strange village.
Mac walked around the town for a while, and after a stroll by the bank of a nice little stream, he turned around and went back to the place with all the people inside.
After entering the door, he walked straight over to the counter, and without thinking he said to the man behind the counter: "Could I have something to drink, please?"
For some strange reason this time the man seemed to understand perfectly what he was saying.
"The usual?" the man behind the counter answered.
"Please." Mac answered, curious about what the usual was.
The man gave him a cup with a steaming hot, dark liquid. It looked nothing he was used to, but as this was his usual he decided to give it a try.
He walked across the room and sat down by a window table.
Leaning back in the chair, he tasted the hot black substance, being careful not to burn his lips. It tasted completely new, but had the same vague familiar feeling about it that the whole town now seemed to have. He quite liked it.
"This was the strangest of days", Mac thought.
Then he looked out into the fresh autumn air.
He felt calm. Far removed from all the usual alertness and mission-related frustrations.
This was a good place to be, he thought.
Maybe he would just stay here for a while?
At least until he’d figured out his next move.

Returning to the source

On the way to the airport Vix felt extremely excited and light at heart.
His luggage was been packed meticulously, almost Zen-like, with the optimum items needed for the trip something he found extremely satisfying.
In his backpack - to be kept as cabin luggage - he had a newly acquired book. It was about the Mayan Calendar and seemed well-cosmic.
He had his mp3 player with his top-notch headphones connected. The headphones were so big that they made him look like some kind of oval Mickey Mouse, but the sound quality was crystal clear and loud enough to shut everything else out, so he didn’t care that some people stared at him when he wore them.
His laptop was fully charged, and although he wouldn’t be connected to the web in flight, he could always play a round of “Pong” or go through his notes as planned.
When he arrived at the airport he went straight to the check-in. He had come very early, so he had plenty of time.
Well through the humiliating, and in his opinion, totally unnecessary security-check, he’d picked up an overpriced sandwich and a bottle of water.
He sat down at the gate, even though his flight hadn’t even come up on the board yet. There were actually one or two flights to depart from this gate prior to his.
“No problem”, he thought.
He was on top of time, and was thoroughly enjoying it.
After setting himself up properly, he put on his oversized headphones, pressed play on track one in the optimized music library. It was in shuffle-mode, and after his clean-up he couldn’t go wrong from here.
Then he opened his laptop and accessed the free airport web courtesy of his flight number.
He checked the news and some music sites.
At one of the disco forums, where he’d just been checking out what parts of his record collection were worth before taking them to the second hand store, there was a strange thread that caught his attention.
A sequence of posts, each containing just a couple of lines of text - all contained rather cryptic messages.
The thread was called:

"Earthbound – Surfing the Apocalypse"

Which he found to be quite a funky title, although he found this to be a strange entry into a forum focussed upon disco.
As far as he was concerned, most people into that kind of music rather preferred the bright soundtrack of a carefree lifestyle rather than cryptic, sometimes dark communications from shady sources.
The absurd thing was that the string of near nonsense had a strange familiarity to it that he found inexplicable.
He didn’t bother reading it all to see what the fuss was all about, but decided to have his say anyway.
He had created a user account for the forum when he went through his records. He logged in and wrote the following reply to the thread:

“Everything is connected.”

Then he thought no more of it, and continued to circle around in the usual manner, clicking randomly, checking the same bookmarks three times, but finding nothing of interest.
Somehow, this just made him restless again.
Vix put down the laptop, drank some water, and picked up the book about the Mayans.
He’d already been through a few chapters during tea-breaks, in-between cleaning out his flat, and it was certainly fascinating and out-there reading.
After reading for a little while, he put the book down again.
He would have to change his strategy.
This didn’t work.
He picked up his laptop again, and logged into his blog.
Then he uploaded the track currently playing in his headphones.
It was "Kool Karma" by Illumination. It sounded optimistic in a subtle way, and it suited his expectations of his destination well.
Then he posted a picture of a scenic beach again – this time without any nuclear explosions in it.
It wouldn’t be appropriate at this point.
But he felt as if this post wasn’t enough.
He thought he could do better.
Now that everything had changed inside him he felt a new kind of responsibility, something he’d never felt before.
Earlier he had checked in on the site peacerael.org, as it happened to be one of his most recently added bookmarks. Not much happening there.
He opened his mail program, hit the "new message"-button, and filled in the mail-address to peacerael.org.
Then he scratched his chin for a bit, and then wrote his first ever poem:

PARADISE BOUND

We're heading down

The Cosmic drain

But that's all good

It's all ok

Cos there is no pain

On the Cosmic plane

So have no fear

We’ll soon break through

Both time and space

And in their place

We’ll all create

A secret garden

Where we’ll walk around

With a mental hard-on

For all to see

A peaceful, magic

Shit-cool

Perfect

Playing-ground

For you and me

(Vix, age unknown, and irrelevant)

He studied the result, felt very pleased with himself, and hit "send".
Would you know it?
Vix.
Poet.

He boarded the plane.
First, he entered the wrong corridor, and got some bad looks from the business class people up front.
It didn’t bother him at all. He just worked his way through the aisle back to his own compartment. The compartment where the real people travelled.
Tourist class people.
He sat down in his seat and buckled his seatbelt.
The woman next to him smiled at him.
It made him feel comfortable.
Soon they were accelerating across the runway, and before Vix knew it, he was on his way to Okinawa.
After he had had his little meal with some half-decent tea, he pulled up his laptop and flicked through some notes in the soon-to-be-perfectly-ordered ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ folder.
He then sat back and listened to some tracks from his mp3 player.
The woman next to him stared at the huge headphones, showing no signs of remorse over her obvious rudeness. They were that big.
As he flipped the seat to the resting position, he let out a small sigh of relief.
Moments later, he fell asleep.

Vix was standing in a very strange room.
It was some kind of workshop, with large metal objects and rolls of copper wire stacked against one wall, and a messy desk full of big papers with strange scribblings on them.
The whole place smelled of dust and burned rubber, and the more he looked around, the more he got the feeling that he was inside a very old building. In fact, everything in here looked very old.
He sensed something was not quite right.
He felt perfectly fine, only different somehow.
There was a door to his right. He decided to go through it.
On the other side, he entered into an old-fashioned library.
There were books everywhere. All the walls had tall dark wooden shelves filled to the rim with books and stacks of documents.
Vix sat down in a large leather chair. Next to the chair was a small round table, and on top of the table was a black notebook.
He picked it up and looked inside.
There wasn’t much written in it. A couple of charcoal sketches of something he couldn’t interpret with certainty, with some ancient handwriting below.
He put it back on the table.
Then he noticed his hands.
They were not really his hands.
He looked down on his lower body, and discovered that it wasn’t his body either.
He jolted upright and started walking around the room.
This was not good, he thought. Not good at all. But what to do?
There was another door on the far wall. He decided to open it.
Behind the door was a darkened room, and in the shadows he could see a large bed, a chair, and a small table with an old Victorian washing-basin, a mug and a mirror on top.
He walked over to the table, swiftly grabbed the mirror, and returned to the door where the light shone in from inside the library.
As he lifted the mirror to his face he kept his eyes half-closed in case something had gone more wrong than he could handle at this point. After all, his life had started to un-warp these last few weeks, and the less of this otherworldly kind of shit he got himself into, the better.
As he peeped through his squinting eyelids, he could make out a man’s face. He opened them a little bit more.
Vix was sporting a dark brown moustache and dark brown hair. The surprised look of two brown eyes met his own as he opened them up wide.
Shit!
He knew this face.
It belonged to Nikola Tesla.
He slammed down the mirror, almost breaking it in the process.
“Shit!”
The last thing he needed was some kind of morphing shit going down.
What to do?
He couldn’t really afford things going all pear-shaped at this point. He decided to try and sort this out in a civilized way.
He gently lifted the mirror, and said:
“Thanks for the Pong machine.”
“You’re most welcome”, the man in the mirror answered back.
“It’s a little puzzling - meeting like this, I mean… I’ve always admired your work, but…”
Vix couldn’t find the right words.
“Not at all!” Tesla replied. “I have something to show you, something of great importance.”
“Oh…” Vix said.
Then Tesla started walking, with Vix inside.
He didn’t stop until they were standing in front of the messy desk.
“Here!” the great inventor said, and pointed at one of the drawings. “I never really put my ideas down on paper, but due to the fact that I will have to show it to you, I’ve slightly changed my routines this time.”
“Well, thanks”, Vix said.
Tesla/Vix then picked up a big rolled-up paper, and spread it out on the desktop.
“This”, the inventor said “is the key to free energy."
“Free energy?” the same mouth replied, this time at Vix’ will.
“Yes. It’s my Over Unity Machine. It transforms energy from the Earth’s magnetic field and turns it into electricity.”
“But how?” Vix could feel a major overload about to take place.
“It’s simple. Like all my inventions, like all good inventions. It simply turns one form of energy into another. Nothing of great genius, really. It just exploits a natural resource that’s already there - in abundance, and, based on the principle of a simple mobius coil, translates that resource into something that this planet never can seem to get enough of.”
“Wow!” Vix said. “Mobius what?”
“Ahh!” Tesla said, smiling, then continued: “Dear Victor, of course I don’t expect you to understand the underlying workings of my invention. I just need you to carry it with you into the future. There will be a time when the battle over energy will darken this Earth as it has never been darkened before. Man will kill and slaughter to no end to obtain access to more and more energy, and the generation of this energy will all be based on bad technologies with little efficient exploitation of the fuel it’s utilizing. Still, because there will only be a few greedy hands controlling this industry, the system will be kept afloat at all costs, and any attempts at creating alternatives will be played down, and even be directly opposed. Eventually this will lead to a great crisis with a very, very costly outcome for humanity. So, you understand that I am giving you a great task in choosing you as the courier of my blueprints for a different solution.”
Vix could feel a new panic wave building up inside, and all he wanted to do was scream “Okinawa!”
Instead, he said:
“But how on Earth am I gonna do this?” He lifted the mirror up to his face again, staring desperately into the stranger’s face.
“Easy. I’ve printed it all out on this walnut”, Tesla said in the mirror.
“Walnut?” Vix replied.
He looked down, and saw that he was now holding a walnut in his hand. At first it looked like any other walnut, but when he lifted it up to take a closer look, he could see that there were tiny words and formulas carved out all over the walnut, like one of those Guinness world record miniature bibles that had been printed on a nail’s head.
Then he looked in the mirror again, but this time Nikola Tesla had gone, and in his place a red demon with a wide grin stared back at Vix.
He screamed, the demon screamed, and the Demon/Vix almost lost the walnut with the plans for Tesla’s Over Unity Machine.
“Go away!” Vix shouted. “I am your Master.”
The red demon-face gradually morphed back into his own face, but just as he was about to feel that he got the situation back under some kind of control, he almost jumped with fear again, as his face morphed once more – this time into some sort of alien. Or more half an alien.
It had greenish skin, and one big black alien eye, but the other one was much tinier and resembled a human eye.
“I am your Master, too. Fuck off!” Vix shouted to the half man/half alien.
The face morphed back into his own.
“Good, good, good”, he nervously said to his own familiarly anemic and unhealthy reflection. “Now, let’s find a way out of here.”
He turned around, and headed for the door at the far end of the room.
Just as he reached it, he heard a terrible sound coming from behind him. A deep animal growl. A raging, deadly, savage warning of an imminent attack rang in his ears.
He turned his head in the fraction of a second, and then saw it.
A large, black gorilla came running through the corridor at the other end of the room.
He threw the door open and rushed out, then he slammed it closed and turned the key that was sitting in the lock on the other side.
He desperately looked around for something to help him solve the situation.
Then he discovered an old dusty Xerox-machine standing by the wall.
It was just what he needed.
He frantically placed the walnut on the glass surface of the copying machine and hit the ‘copy’-button.
The machine lit up and made a whirring noise as it started copying the walnut’s outer shell covered with Tesla’s construction drawings.
The banging on the door got wilder and wilder and the growls from the gorilla now hit an all time high.
He was about to accept the fact that in the next moment the giant ape would succeed in tearing the door down and go for the kill.
His kill.
Then it struck him.
This wasn’t happening!
It wasn’t happening at all!
This had already happened.

Vix woke.
Weightless.
Falling.
Then he remembered the plane he was in.
Around him there was total panic, with people of every breed and shape crying, shouting and waving their hands in the air.
Some were also praying - especially the ones that didn’t look particularly religious to start with.
This was bad.
In front of him, the open laptop still stood at the small seatback table, unmoved, as if by magic.
Vix was still buckled up in his seat.
He felt incredibly calm, and had no intention of panicking or losing his focus.
He simply pressed the button to put his seat back to the upright position, hit one key to wake the computer from hibernating, and then started typing into his still open ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ document.
The words and figures from his still very fresh dream had somehow fastened on his inner retinas, and he had no problem re-constructing Nikola Teslas construction drafts from the walnut/Xerox copies down to the most intimate detail.
His mind was super-clear, and he knew he was meant to do this, so it had to be done.
When he’d finished, he closed the laptop, put the table back up, and – locking his body firmly between his and the seat in front of him – lifted the seat bottom and took out the life-vest undereath.
Then he put the laptop into the empty compartment where the life-vest had been, replaced the seat bottom, and put the life-vest on.
It was a very difficult maneuver, but he still managed, cramped in the tiny space between the seats in a descending plane.
Then Vix sat down in his seat again and thoroughly buckled his seatbelt, sporting a bright yellow life-vest with a red plastic whistle attached.
And waited.
Gradually the floor in the corridor started slowly throbbing, and soon the whole metal tube of the plane cabin seemed like gently breathing.
This warbling effect stayed, very slow and comfortable, and Vix had no fear of the sensation.
A figure came walking casually along the isle towards him.
He knew this figure.
It was the Black&White man.
“So, we meet again”, The Black&White man said.
“I guess so.” Vix replied.
“How have you been?”
“I’ve been good, I guess. Just fine.”
“Splendid”, The Black&White man said and clapped his gloved hands together once.
“Say, would you care to join me for a nice little walk. I guess we could need some fresh air both of us. I don’t care much for sticking in here.”
Vix looked around him.
The cabin was now filled with smoke and screaming people. Sparks were coming out of the walls, and everything was falling apart all around them.
“Great idea!” Vix said.
There was nothing he wanted in the world other than go for a walk with the Black&White man.
“Where to?” the Black&White man asked.
“Okinawa.” Vix replied.

Defeated by the whiteness

Njoro fought her way through the howling wind.
The skis felt like enormous lead chains tied to her feet.
She wondered if she would be able to withstand this for much longer.
She’d been walking for days. Ever since the passing of the Savage.
He had eventually given in one morning. Not that he hadn’t put up a fight. So much power in him. Such a pity about the misuse of it, and the consequences he suffered.
Anyway, it’s probably turned out a great lesson for his soul.
It’s all about learning.
Now she was learning her own lesson.
She had been forced to move purely by intuition, and never expect to see further into her own future than as far as her eyesight carried.
At the moment it was as far as the tips of her skis.
She would have to dig a cave.
She loosened the sleigh she was pulling, picked out the wooden shovel and started digging.
Things had acquired a certain routine now that she’d been on the move for so long in this place. It wasn’t long before she could slide herself through the narrow entrance and start rigging her temporary nest.
Soon the fire was made, and she no longer smelled the strong smell of the burning fat, but only looked forward to the rich portion of bear she would soon be digging into.
Under the circumstances, she did well. Alone.
A satisfying feeling.
After eating, she crept into the fur sack, and soon as she lay down with a steaming cup of peppermint, she couldn’t think of a better place on Earth to have occupied at this point.
She let her thoughts float. She thought of Lhasa. Of Pi. Of the frozen expression in the Savage’s face as she left him back there in his icy grave.
No ceremony, just a brief blessing, and then she had set off.
How many days, she didn’t know. There was no point in counting – it wasn’t about such things as days and nights. The light was absent anyway, and the only thing that mattered was being on top of the moment.
If she survived the moment, her reward would be another moment, and so on.
A simple arrangement, and not such a bad deal after all.
There was magic also, even if she didn’t dare to make any journey into the Otherworld, as there might not be anything to return to in the physical world if she left it for the merest fraction of time.
She was fragile.
And that made her strong.
At one point she had been working her way across a part of the ice that was surprisingly flat and agreeable to cross.
Above her the stars shone clearly, and there wasn’t so much as a gust of wind, but it was bitterly cold.
At first she just kept staring at the tips of her skis as always. It was a question of hard and determined work to walk while pulling the weight of the sleigh. Then, as she paused to breathe and have some water from her pouch, she glanced at the sky.
A fantastic display of the Aurora Borealis spread out across the sky above her. Flickering waves of green, blue and violet were flashing above her like nothing she’d ever seen. It was as if the sky had exploded, stretching thousands of kilometers into the heavens.
She found herself speechless, gazing into the colourplay as though spellbound.
They’d had occurrences of the Northern Lights before on this trip, but nothing like this. This time it was as if Heaven itself had come alive and opened its gates to her.
Then she remembered something Mungpuk had said during her first encounter with the phenomenon further south. He mentioned that one of their old tales told that if you were to find yourself alone with the Lights, and waved something white at it, you would disturb it and could risk it stretching down from the sky and get you.
Njoro thought for a while.
It was just her, the ice, the Earth and the Lights.
She felt brave.
She unfastened the small leather backpack, and fumbled around inside. Then she pulled out a small piece of white silk that she had used to wrap her sacred stones in before leaving them all behind in one of the first camps.
She hesitated for a moment, then lifted her arm and waved the white silk at the sky.
It was quiet.
Very quiet.
“Well”, she thought, “It’s a nice story.”
Then she re-packed her sack, put it on, and started fastening the sleigh to her harness.
Just as she was fiddling with fastening the leather strips, she heard the sound.
A low, humming sound coming from deep below the Earth.
It grew in intensity, and above the humming she heard icy cold sparkles of something that sounded like tiny crystalline explosions.
Then there was light.
White, ruthless light, shining from all around her. From within the arctic night itself.
She instantly ducked and hid her face in her hands, trying to cover her ears with her elbows in the process.
A difficult maneuver, especially when you’re panic-stricken.
She lay there for what felt too long, and didn’t dare glance upwards to the sky. Her heart was pounding manically, and a terrible wave of regret washed through her mind.
She was sure this was the end of her journey.
But eventually it seemed like the deep sound faded, she could feel the vibrations leaving her body.
She tried to lie as still as she could for as long as she could, but had to peek out after she’d started shaking with cold from not moving.
It was gone.
Only the stars were shining.
She dried the sweat from her forehead as she rose to her feet.
Then she slowly started moving, in a quite unstable and not very elegant way.
“Point taken”, she thought.
Then the girl Njoro from Lhasa kept moving into the dark landscape, with her eyes firmly fixed on the tips of her skis.