But it is my truth, none other.
I walk; where others no longer walk.
I see; what others have become blind too.
I hear; where others have deafened their ears.
I feel; what others have forgotten to feel.
There is a reason they forgot,
Became deaf, blind and unfeeling.
They no longer wanted to know the pain.
There is a reason my path is all alone.
My path is blood and darkness,
Glistening starlight and pain.
The darkness and the pain are often
One in the same and you can't really see
The color of blood in the starlight.
And when the pain overwhelms all else
All that's left that you can really do... is dance.
This is my darkness dance.
Tobbie WhiteBird Crowe
But what must be remembered is that even in the midst of the deepest winter, the sun will someday come out again. That spring will some day return and all the ice that surrounds you will one day finally, finally melt away.
Just hang in there.
When sleep eludes one,
and the bed is cold
so empty and so alone.
They use to say
there were dreams you dreamed at night.
And then the waking dreams
were called daydreams.
But when waking dreams
come in the dead of the night,
One cannot really call them daydreams.
And they can't be called nightmares,
for you have never slept before having them...
So what can one call
the illusive wanderings
of one's mind in the depth of night
when all around you sleep.
Dreams of beauty and twisted reality.
What do these dreams really try to tell us?
There are just too many words...
And not enough ways to say them.
I’m off to Loscon this weekend with new Masks and Dragons for the Art Show. Despite pluming problems and a host of weird a** things going wrong, I am in pretty good shape and actually calm and not frazzled for a change.
Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving weekend.
The Beast may have mellowed with age and his spots now hidden by grey,
but his wild nature doesn’t change and spots though hidden remain.
The Prince of Toads is a true Prince indeed,
but the reality is, still a toad he remains.
The Prince still has his castle tis true.
But the would be Queen doesn’t seem to see,
That the shining castle by the side of the sea
Has always and only been made of sand.
This realm is full of red rock, lots and lots and lots of red rock. Big red rock, little red rock, red rock in every size and shape you could ever begin to image. Even the ground is made up finely ground up red rock. And what isn't red rock are vast fields of black lava lightly dusted in red rock dust. Rolling hills of red rock and lava, gently rolling hills, no real mountains and no real valleys... just endless rolling spans of red rock and dark gray lava spreads.
The okra sky above this red rock is always cloud covered, clouds that range in color from lightest pinks, oranges and peaches, dull yellow and brownish gold. The light is always subdued, never bright and yet detail is easy to make out and one can see with ease far away as well as near.
Small jeweled lizards dart amongst the red rocks and lava; it’s always warm there so the lizards are always active. They are range in color from black, charcoal and lightest gray with jeweled colors along their backs that gleam and sparkle in the low light as if real gems were in bedded in their skin.
Small pools of water gather here and there amongst the rocks brought by the daily gentle rains, it is safe to drink but always has a sweetish tang to it which leaves a copper taste in your mouth afterwards. The lizards not only drink of this but bath in it as well.
The breeze always blows softly there, warm during the daylight, cooler when the darkness comes. It spins and caresses the rocks and makes the sound that almost sounds like soft sighing song. Small tiny creatures float on these breezes, pretty little gold, red, purple and silver creatures that aren't quite a bird, nor an insect, yet somehow combines the two. The lizards sometimes try and catch these and eat them. I am told they taste rather sweet.
There is nothing in the land of value to offer a human. It is a stark yet mostly quiet place. It remains mostly isolated of human kind as it has nothing to offer in resources. There is however someone who lives there. ‘She’ lives alone most of the year, save for a short time each year when her special someone comes to visit. ‘She’ however likes the aloneness and quiet as she has never been fond of human kind. ‘She’ has built in this land with her own two hands and little house, a home of sorts that’s half house and half cave. It is comfortable enough and meets her needs, for ‘She’ is vicious towards any who enter this land and patrols it with a vengeance.
I know of her and this place because she is by blood my sister. ‘She’ was a child no one wanted and she was suppose to have died, instead she found the Red Rock Realm and she and it seem to feed each other’s needs. ‘She’ is loyal to me and pretty much despises all other save her one special friend. Though I found out as of late, our cousins both bring her small gifts from time to time to make her life more pleasant and I am told ‘She” even allows Night the Ranger to patrol on her realm. But only these are allowed.
My brother and I were visiting our good friends, my soul brother and his wife. As we were about to leave and they all were talking and kidding around like we always do before we leave each other, suddenly I was no longer in the living room but someplace else all together...
Suddenly I am traveling through a series of interlocking caverns, one that leads to another and then on to another and so on. They seem to go deeper and deeper in. I can feel myself moving through these caves. I can feel the air against my face, my skin, not at all chill though it feels like it ought to be. Nor does it feel damp though I can see the damp in places on the rocks and walls as I pass. I can smell which in its self is odd, as unless something downright reeks to high heaven I can no longer smell things. The smell is strangely clean and oddly refreshing. I remember that I should be sitting in my friend’s living room, and there is a part of me far back in my mind that can almost feel and see that I still do. But the strangest of all is I know that I am traveling without my feet touching the ground. And this should freak me as I hate flying dreams, they frankly creep me out. But this doesn’t feel like my uncontrolled flying dreams, this feels as if some other force is carrying me along which should bother me but there is no fear or the lack of my own control.
I hear the larger cavern before I see it. I hear the low rhythmic beating sound. I see the light, soft pale but somehow compelling. I am pulled towards it not just by the force that carries me, but also by something with in that seems to call to me. I enter into the cavern; it seems to be one of the largest, in it lays a body of water that could easily be called a small sea, the waves softly cashing back and forth making the booming noise that echoes through all the caves.
Above the water, is a very high ceiling that seems to act as a sky. It is a pale, light yellow and seems to glow softly. On the far side of the cavern above the water; hung in that pale, pale yellow, is a large round copper dick that shines and gleams like the sun on a new penny. From it and the sky come warmth and the source of the light.
Below this is the small sea, the waves in constant movement. The washing of this water against the dark gray lava stones and rocks that line the cavern and stink out here and there on the shore, make a low hollow sound. It is a rhythmic sound very much like that of the beating of a very large slow beating heart. The water is warm to the touch.
The beach that makes up the shore on this side of the water and lies between the lava rocks is made up of rounded almost smooth pieces of pure crystal. The seawater washes back and forth over this making the strangest sound, a cross between soft tinkling and a something heavy being dragged along. The strange and unsettling thing about these waves is the color. The waves are blood red, and there is no real water in this sea, just this clear blood red fluid.
This place calls to me; it pulls me. It seems to speak to me to come, to bathe, to enter in, to drink of its life, to become one with it. The pull is very, very strong and I do not trust it. I want to go, to leave, but I do not want to go to leave. The pull is so strong and it calls, it sings to me, beckons me, but while the feel of that call is welcoming and warm, I deep, deep inside of me sense that there might be more than one danger. And I can’t help wondering what else is there. I have just never ever been all that trusting.
The stale mate might have gone on but my soul brother sensed I was not really in the living room and had stated calling out to me. It was his voice I felt, and his voice I followed out. I saw him first and heard him say come back. I am not sure that his wife or my brother fully understood what had happened, and though I never said, I firmly believed my soul brother called me back from something that lives only in Shadows. But why that should have bothered me so, I don’t really understand as yet. The thing is that cavern is still there; I can sometime almost feel and smell it. Sometimes I can still see it and sometimes almost faintly hear it; it is like it is just waiting; waiting and wanting for me to return.
A place of strange and alien beauty, where everything including the inhabitants seem to be in shades of gray, white and silver.
The sky always looks over cast because the clouds and the sky are the same shades of murky white, lighter and brighter near the roof of the sky and more silver near the horizon.
Like this mundane earth plain, the silver cloud realm is mostly seas. Seas of gray silver white water, full of strange and wondrous fish of such delicate beauty that it would not seem that they could with stand the weight of the water, yet this delicate beauty hides a furious harshness of teeth and fang. The silver slate gray white-caps fall upon sand of the shore, sand so fine its texture is like soft silk as it runs through your fingers. This sand differs in color from the purest white, delicate beige to the lightest pinks and blues.
Strange grayish white creatures walk and hop along these beaches, creatures under a foot tall that look like small malformed three sided pyramids slightly rounded, and they walk hop on two to three pointy little legs that have no feet. They have no eyes, hands or mouths, that one can see, and they travel in groups of three or five up and down the coast, living in burrows in the sand dunes by the shore.
When I first started to remember, the really bad stuff from the past that I had forgotten; I woke up one morning with a vision of Mouse. Mouse is one of my alters, she looks a bit like me at sixteen with short mousy blond brown hair and big brown eyes that sparkle with humor.
In the vision I seen a shallow valley surrounded by low green hills all around. The sky is bright blue, the sun warm and golden and there is a smell of spring on the air. It is warm with a slight friendly breeze. I see tiptoeing through the middle of this valley, Mouse. She is wearing a grayish blue t-shirt and jean shorts, and she is barefoot. She is tip toeing barefoot through the middle of this shallow valley with very exaggerated steps. She sees me watching and with a gleam of humor and amusement on her face she holds one finger to her lips that tell me we must be very, very quiet. I look down at her feet to see that what she is tip toeing through is a valley full of old broken bones, skulls and dried blood. I am kind of puzzled.
It took me several months to search out what she was trying to tell me, but then I puzzled it out. I realize what she was trying to say was…
"Walk softly among the old dead bones of the past, least they rise up behind you and bite you in the ass!"
There are just no words...
The sky over these vast plains is also always gray. Sometimes filled with great billowing clouds of silver gray shot through here in there with the deepest shades of blue and slate gray. Even the cloudless sky is gray with swilling lines of whitest white and pale blue and yellow green in it. Once in a while in the distance you can see large dark gray jittery birds that fly clumsily through the skies as if there were not enough air to hold them up.
Dank canine like creatures shuffle through the gray dust, looking something like a starved coyote with scales. Dark charcoal with lighter gray on their scales. Their eyes shining like broken jewels in their gaunt features. What they eat I have never been able to assure as they always look like they haven't eaten for years and about to drop dead any second. They are shy and jumpy and scamper away on a dead run if they see you.
The gray man walks here, the man who was born old and dusty and gray for all the years any one has ever known him. He never changes, even though the years pass by him and others are born, live and die, he alone never seems to change. He has taken over this realm and most would just as soon let him have it as they see nothing welcoming about its empty plains and chilling wind. He works his dark magic here, plots and plans and evil doings. But he made the mistake of taking Little One there one too many time. She now knows the ways in and out better than even he will ever know.
She lets him be for now, but not before she locked the doors, sealing him in and all others out. He finds this amusing and it suits him for now, as he plots and plans and screams his wormy scrams. Little One knows what the gray man refuses to believe. There is a time in which the gray man will vanish away and will be gone; and the gray realm will once again be free, and the true inhabitants will once again come out to claim what once was theirs alone...
And Little One knows that time will come sooner than the gray man knows...
There has been an argument going on, quiet fighting and disagreement of some sort. The ship is filled with tension. I am being held by the strange creatures, my arms behind my back as they force me to look through a rather large longish window by two of the alien’s creatures. There are tall large square blocks of instruments framing both sides of this window, with the ceiling forming the top. The row of instruments on the right seems to go on further than the ones on the left, and than tapers off further on. The light also seems to be brighter on the right, and the left side is dimmer to almost dark…
The window in front of me that I am being forced to look out, and it does seem to be a window and not a viewing screen, the window is rather large I could step inside it, but it sits low to the floor and seems to slant outward and down from the walls. It is not on the same angle as the instruments on either side of it. I don’t seem to be looking out of it so much as looking down through it, and the creatures force my head downwards as to be on the same angle with it. It seems to be on an almost 45% angle.
The window looks down into space. In the window out in space is a planet, it takes up most of the viewing space of the window. Its ether very large or we are really close to it. I think there are other space ships around the planet as I catch glimmers of light off metal in the starlight. I feel completely confused and bewildered.
Suddenly the planet seems to explode from within without warning. It explodes in a fiery ball of yellow, white and red flame, and is gone. The tall, silent alien creatures have done it though I do not know why or how I know this. I feel great horror, disbelieve and confusion as the planet is destroyed. And the fact that it is all so silently, no noise, no nothing, makes it somehow seem even more horrifying.
The creatures release me; I turn stunned and terrified to my right to see my brother standing there. He is tall, blond and young and also being held by two other of the large (they must easily be between seven and eight feet tall). He is straining against their hold, struggling, screaming and crying, trying to pull loose from their hold… He is calling me a traitor, screaming it’s all my fault the planet is gone and our people are dead. I am confused, disbelieving. He has gone quite mad with grief. Did I do it, am I the cause??? If I did, than why am I so confused?? I don’t think I am guilty of this crime, it doesn’t feel so. But I am numb and in shock from the double loss of my people and my world, and my brothers madness added to that.
Was there a plan that I was somehow a part of that backfired miserable????
The scene replays over and over throughout Jr. High and most of High School. All the time I was living in Washington. Certain people seem to bring it on, they were the ones who also seem to see this scene too, however from a different perspective. They also seem to know much more about what was happening in what I saw than I had actually told them.
I think part of my confusion during the vision is the knowledge somewhere deep inside me that the planet destroyed was NOT earth, and the only brother I had was only two at the time this started, and was neither tall nor blond. I never really got any answers and wonder still what it all meant and why it kept repeating its self.
The ground, yellow brown and always warm under your feet. What sparse grass that grows varies in color from the softest browns to the deepest gold’s. The trees are low growing with spreading branches that sweep along the ground as if they were crawling across the land. The bark on the trucks is a golden brown that fades to a sandy white at the tips of the branches. The leaves are smooth, oval and slightly pointed at the tip and range in color from dark grayish blue to a soft greenish brown. At odd times they flower with large drooping sky blue flowers that produce golden nuts that look like smooth walnuts but are the size of small avocados.
There are small round furry creatures that look like fat ground squirrels with long straight tails that live in shallow hollows amongst the trees. Their fir is soft black topped in golden brown. When running around in the open they never open their eyes, and softly chitter nonstop as they go. It is assumes the chittering is like a sonar so they don't run into anything as they keep their eyes shut tight to guard against the brightness.
There are large skinny bird like creatures that only come out to fly when the sun is almost down. They live in deep burrows in the ground and have to run to take off. They range in size from a half a foot to three feet in wing span and have delicate feather the color of peach and burnt orange. They sour at twilight and all through the dark period on thermals and the warm breezes that come up once the large glowing orb has set. They make no sound as they sour and drift through the air.
It’s a quiet place even the clittering of the furry creatures is a soft sound. There is not much here to invite the traveler and the glowing orb that passes for light is much too bright for normal life to spend much time in this place.
There is no path; I just wander aimlessly between the trees, meandering back and forth with no real purpose. I know I have been here before, although I never know how I get here. It’s peaceful, calm; the only sound is the sighing of the gentle breeze though the trees and the leaves on the ground. As always I walk until I see a kind of building in front of me. It's made of weathered wood and stone, with great double doors always wide open to the woods although there is no path in front of those doors. I walk inside through these doors noticing as usual the leaves from outside have drifted though the door as well and no one ever seems clean them out.
I find myself walking down aisle with wooden and stone benches, or sometimes they are rough wooden pews on either side. The walls of this building sour up above my head with no windows anywhere. The only other opening in the walls, is a small side door across from the alter up front, which is also always open and leads back to the woods. There is no roof. There has never been a roof. It’s not missing, the building was never meant to have a roof. The trees and the leaves are its roof.
I wander down the aisle to the alter looking up and around. The temple is empty, always empty, always full of leaves; but it’s not dusty as you would expect a place with no roof to be. It’s very peaceful, quiet and tranquil. I have no clue as to where this place is. I never know how I get there and back again. The only sound I have ever heard in this place is the wind in the leaves, no birds, no insects, no people.
I like it there. It’s one of the few places in my life I feel totally safe and alone.
There is no natural light in this realm. Just a quiet soft darkness, that seems to drift on unseen breezes. If you bring a light into this place, no matter how bright, it light will seem dim and only cover a short distance and batteries run out swiftly on this plain. Its unnaturally quiet on this realm, sound doesn’t seem to travel very far, and if you try to talk you find yourself whispering, as if to not offend the silence of the place. If you stand and listen long enough, you can hear the ever so quiet sigh of the invisible wind shifting and spinning through the gentle darkness.
There are no markers or land marks in this realm, just featureless endless ceiling and floors fading off to endless soft darkness. Here and there, placed by the unseen ones who live on this realm are statures, some small, some larger than men. They are made of a strange, white stone that softly glow with its own quiet light. Some of these statures are things you would recognize on other realms, others just abstract. Offerings are left at the foot of these statures, strange foods, odd, dully glowing flowers. These do not last long, and are replaced by unseen hands.
People and other creatures have tried to bring things to this realm, but they don’t stay very long. Anything left on this realm slowly fades into mist no matter how solid it was to start with. Science works not at all on this realm, and food quickly turns bad and then drifts into mist. Fire burns in this realm, but it struggles to stay alive and its light doesn’t reach far. Other than the strange glowing stone the statues are made of, and the rocky floors and walls, nothing else lasts.
It is a quiet place, a dark place, but nothing of fear is in this place. Those who live there are made of the darkness and mist of the very air and cannot be seem by other eyes. They don’t bother the traveler who journeys there. And while there is nothing of harm in this realm, neither is it inviting to human kind. Things that keep drifting into mist tend to upset most people and there is nothing really of value on this realm to outsiders. Humans of evil intent have at one time or other sought to use this realm for their own, but it becomes too hard to maintain any kind of base there and doorways in to it, tend to move and disappear unexpectedly. Even the Realm Rangers visit less often than other realms, for its mere alien like aria is off setting to humans in general, and as such is its own defense. It is a place of peace that just wants little to do with human kind, and should be left to the softly signing wind and unseen people who live there.
Brief feelings,
Fragments of memories.
Things that must be caught and laid down some where least they excape never to be seen again.
And so we begain...