Keys of Awakening

TAMMAZ ( D Y I N G )

The Thirteenth Power of the Arcanum

Tammaz is both Passive and Active, as it encompasses both endings and beginnings, dying and being born.

This is the pivotal power found both at the beginning and end of the Seeker’s journey. This power allows the Seeker to move through the cycles of growth and to “learn while unlearning” until the goal is reached.

Application: Tammaz is the ability to transform into the next level of learning. It is a self-initiatory transformation that can only be informed from within. When it is achieved, all of the Seeker’s powers evolve.

A practitioner of Tammaz is known as a Daestoer.

From The Arcanum of Wisdom – Introduction for the Initiate

The journey back took a lifetime.

One filled with surreal and fragmented visions, with booming voices and fleeting insights.

At one point she was stumped as to how she would ever make the leap back down from the eternal vault of swirling stars, and yet in the next moment she was back in Altra, with no recollection of how she had made the transition.

Illiom opened her eyes then quickly closed them again as bright pain lanced her brain. She opened them again, more tentatively this time, and saw her hand.

It was resting, palm up, on a white sheet.

No, not a sheet.

Snow.

This is snow.

I am lying on a bed of snow.

She raised her hand slowly and brought it closer to her face. She studied her fingers as if they were something she could not remember seeing before.

She was alive and she was back.

This was her body.

But the experience of being back held an unsavoury aftertaste.

Her embodiment felt like an imprisonment: the pull of the senses, of weight and of gravity; the heaviness of her hand and the effort required to keep it up there, before her eyes, all became too much.

The hand fell back into the snow.

Her head soon did the same.

Later she tried again and fared a little better.

It still hurt to open her eyes, even though the quality of the light had changed, having become softer.

She closed them and lay still.

Something wet and rough brushed against the side of her face. She pulled away, but the rubbing against her cheek continued, repetitive and insistent.

She squinted into a pupil as large as the pit of a well. It was encased within a huge golden eye.

This was Irae, her snow-lion, and she was intent on licking Illiom’s cheek. She vaguely wondered how she had come to know the snow-lion’s name.

She moaned, stretched, and tried to rouse herself into a sitting position. She felt like an old woman, a weak and fragile crone.

A cursory glance around her told her where she was: on the platform overlooking the Altran mountains, the place where they had gathered before … before what?

Memory returned and the impact was like being crushed beneath a falling mountain.

Sudra!

Had she the ability to, Illiom would have leapt to her feet, but as it was she stumbled upright and teetered there on trembling legs, like a newborn lamb.

“Sudra …” she said aloud, her voice just a whimper.

Irae looked at her curiously.

The others were there with her, she now saw. All six of them, strewn on the platform of stone like broken puppets, as though the cords that imbued them with life had been cut.

There was no sign of the Draca or anyone else.

She raised her face to the heavens but instead of stars, she looked upon a brooding sky, heavy with cloud.

She noted again how the ground around them was cloaked in thick snow and the air felt cold ... so very cold. Each breath that escaped her lips formed a small cloud of vapour.

She saw someone else stir in the periphery of her vision, but could not summon the will to turn her head.

“Sudra?” she called out, a little louder.

Her vocabulary seemed to have been pared down to this one name.

Nearby, Azulya pulled herself into a sitting position, and a little further along, Elan was doing the same.

Sereth rose to his feet, his face lifted to the clouds. All around them the snow-lions sat or lay, waiting, watching.

Illiom took a few tentative steps.

Nearby, Scald stirred from his own supine position. He opened his eyes and looked directly at Illiom. The look of loss that haunted his gaze wrung her heart, for in it she saw her own loss and felt her own grief.

They had all witnessed something that - they well knew - was now entirely beyond their reach, never to be experienced in this world again.

There were no words to convey the emptiness that swallowed her soul.

An inchoate cry drew Illiom’s attention. It was quickly followed by others.

“Illiom …? Illiom!”

Someone had emerged from the opening in the stone and was coming towards her.

“Illiom!!!”

At breakneck speed, all composure gone, Tarmel flew towards her, stumbling in his mad rush, almost falling, until he reached her. His eyes were wild and rimmed with red.

His cheeks were wet.

“Illiom?” he repeated, and extended a hand towards her face, touching her cheek and lips.

His eyes searched hers as if to make sure he was not mistaken. Within them she saw a clash of emotions - relief, incredulity, joy, and even anger - all struggling for control. She was distantly aware of other voices.

She forced herself to speak past the knot in her throat.

“Tarmel …”

It was the second word in her new vocabulary.

Then she was in his arms. And he was stroking her face, kissing her hair, crushing her to him, repeating her name over and over.

She responded tentatively, but something was clearly eluding her.

Something is not right.

Tarmel sensed her confusion. He calmed himself.

“Illiom,” he said, quietly concerned.

“Are you all right? Is everything well with you?”

He looked around to see how the other Riders were faring with their Chosen.

Something is not right, she knew, but knew not what it might be.

“What happened?” she managed to say.

He looked at her, dumbfounded.

“What happened?!” he repeated, blinking.

He gave a short laugh.

“What happened?”

Seeing her expression he stilled, as understanding began to dawn.

“You do not know … do you?”

“Illiom, it is the eighth day of Meltfrost. Four moons have passed since you disappeared …” Tarmel waved a hand to include the other Chosen, “... you all disappeared, right here, on this very ledge! One hundred and eight days ago!

Four moons?

Tarmel saw her struggle to comprehend his words.

“We … I thought I had lost you. I feared for you, Illiom. Kassargan kept reassuring us that you were not dead, but neither could she reach you, nor could she say what had happened to you. All we knew was that at the very moment you joined hands, you vanished.”

But Illiom did not hear him.

Four moons?

“I … feared the worst. I prayed, oh, how I prayed! And now you are here, you have come back!”

Illiom looked at her Rider as though he was a complete stranger, her inner eye re-visiting the Goddess and the span of their meeting with her.

They could not have communed with Sudra for more than a few minutes, maybe one quart of an hour, at the very most …

Tarmel was still speaking; she could see his lips moving. She looked into his eyes and her heart warmed at the precious sight of him, at the sound of his voice. She loved him with all her heart but still could not hear a single word he was saying.

For Sudra’s voice spoke to her soul once more, and she heard again what the Compassionate One had said at the height of their meeting.

“Our truths turn in vastly different spheres, and while timelessness is the yard in mine, it is not the yard in thine.”

She understood now what the Goddess had been telling her: their encounter with Sudra had cost them almost one third of a year.

Little by little, Illiom returned to herself. The transition from Sudra’s world to her own was a gradual process and each new day reconnected her to some aspect of her former self.

At first there had been nothing other than the simple experience of existing – of breathing, of seeing, of eating or sleeping. Illiom looked around her with complete dispassion, conscious only of her heartbeat and the rushing of blood in her veins, or whatever else her senses focused upon. Disconnected from everything that was not present, past and future were meaningless to her.

Her mind felt clumsy and cumbersome, and thinking was a futile indulgence, one that dulled and dampened the actuality of her living experience. She could not be drawn into talking about anything at all unless it had some immediate relevance. What was happening in Kuon, the quest for Sudra’s Orb, even the Prophecy or the fate of Âtras held no interest for her.

She heard Kassargan speaking to the two Iolans, Dreel and Keilon, and the Riders, about the continuing struggle upon Varadon’s Keep and the dire situation that the last bastion of Albradan faced; but she could not hold its meaning clearly in her mind. It seemed like something distant, and somehow … irrelevant.

Simultaneously, however, whatever she did do, she did consummately. Each action, each gesture, became for the moment of its duration the entire focus and centre of her existence. The morsel of food in her mouth, the vast frozen vista of the Altran mountains, the glint of recognition in Tarmel’s eye – each of these experiences was all-consuming while it lasted but, when it passed, it simply ceased to matter.

As the days passed, however, the intensity of these experiences grew less, and with this fading, Illiom began to experience a growing sense of loss.

Seventeen days had passed since the Chosen’s return. It was evening and Tarmel, seeking Illiom, found her alone at the viewing platform, weeping, lost in a deep sorrow.

“What is wrong?” he questioned anxiously, gently placing his hands upon her shoulders.

She grew silent after a time, then shook her head fractionally.

“I do not know,” she whispered.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her to him and held her, saying nothing.

She closed her eyes and leaned back to rest her head against his shoulder, deeply accepting of the support he was offering her.

“You are still coming back.”

He was not asking, but she turned her face towards him and nodded.

She felt the bristle of his cheek rub against her brow. She fell into that sensation so completely that suddenly a vast and hungry chasm opened up inside her.

She turned around in his embrace and, lifting her mouth, she pressed it against his, while her hands twined around his head and neck, drawing him to her with a yearning that would not be denied.

She felt his hesitation in the way he held his breath and the sudden tension in his body, but a moment later she felt his own need rise to meet hers, their surrender into each other immediate and urgent.

They found their way back to their bedrolls where, covered by the lush pelts the Iolans had provided for them, Illiom and Tarmel joined in nourishing each other in all the ways that, until that moment, they had denied themselves.

By the time dawn lit the cave, Illiom knew that she was totally and completely back in her own world.

She was ready to face whatever the day would bring.

To be continued in

“Into Forbidden Lands”

Book Three of “Destiny of Fire”