Gate: The Night Sky Above the Indus Valley
I stepped through the vision gate and stood upon a barren plain beneath which leviathans tunneled, pushing the dirt up as they swam underneath the ground. A great mound of dirt came towards me and it exploded beneath my feet, creating a tunnel down which I fell into darkness.
When I could perceive my surroundings again, I stood upon the nose of an enormous tiger. I was no bigger than a flea and his cat eyes crossed as he gazed at me upon his nose.
“Who calls the great Khan?” the god asked, his voice thundering and assaulting my ears with his power.
“You are too big,” I squeaked. “For polite conversation.”
“And you are much too small,” he replied. The tiger began to shrink and I to grow, so that in moments we were of a size. “Better,” said Khan, politely licking his paws and grooming his beautifully striped ears. “Who are you?”
“I am Heidi,” I said. The world around us began to take shape and we suddenly stood in a high mountain valley covered in dry, human bones. Something large moved beneath the bones, pushing them up and down in its passage, like the creature who had brought me to this place. As the bones were disturbed, shadowy human figures rose from them and resumed the battles that had ended their mortal lives.
Khan gazed calmly at the haunted valley with no movement other than an occasional grooming lick of his paws. “This place feels cursed to me as the fallen have no peace in their after lives,” I said after some time had passed. “Are we here for a reason, Great One?”
“You tell me,” he said. “For you called me here and it is you who woke the Indus Valley.”
“I do not choose my destination in the Inner Worlds, only what I do within them. A greater power brought me to this place and time,” I said. “Usually I am shown a lesson or balance an injustice of some kind in my journeys. Are we to confront the creature beneath the bones?”
“If you speak true, then I would advise patience,” Khan said. “Let the valley completely awaken.” So, we continued to watch the spirits of warriors rise, fight, and fade. The bones began to slowly disappear as their energy was spent and they returned to their graves within the earth.
“Once upon a time,” I said as the tiger god and I watched the endless struggle of the ghost soldiers. “I met a Warrior King who sat upon a throne of enchanted bones, very much like this valley. He was paired with a spirit dressed in red and they possessed a black cauldron. When they placed the bones of the Warrior King’s throne within their cauldron, the spirits who had been imprisoned in his throne by their violent ends were released and changed into flowers.” I watched the spirits of the valley repeat their life patterns again and again. “I wish I had that cauldron with me now,” I said finally. “Perhaps we could do the same service for these lost ones.”
Khan’s golden eyes gazed serenely at the warriors as the haunted bones continued to dissipate. The valley continued backwards in time. I saw the natural forces of wind, water, and time shape the space from primordial earth. Further back in time we traveled until Khan and I stood on a flat plain which was empty of fighting warriors. In place of the valley, a young Indian boy in a turban with a beautiful red jewel on his forehead appeared. He laid on the ground at our feet and wept ruby red tears.
“Don’t cry,” I said, falling to my knees beside the boy. “Please don’t cry. What is wrong?”
“Did you see?” he said. “What they have done to me. Did you see it?”
“I see what they have done to each other,” I said. “In your space but not to you.”
“I am my space,” replied the boy. “For I am Indus.” With the declaration of his true name, Khan, Indus and I were suddenly standing in the valley of bones once more. “I cannot forget what happened here; the spirits won’t let me.” The creature began moving beneath the bones again and the weeping boy was carried from my arms here and there over the valley by the thing beneath the ground.
As I contemplated how best to assist the suffering being, something heavy coalesced in my clenched fist. “Gaia sends her greetings,” I said, opening my hand to reveal a gleaming diamond teardrop from an earlier encounter I had with the earth goddess.
“The Earth sleeps and there are none who can wake her,” cried the boy as he was thrown to and fro by the power beneath the valley. Indus’ turban unwound from his head and his long, black hair fell in waves to his feet. From its strands, more rubies fell like his tears and scattered amongst the haunted bones.
“You are mistaken,” I said. “Here is the proof of my words.” I ran after the haunted spirit until I came close enough that he could put his hand upon Gaia’s tear. The diamond released a sigh and dissipated into dust which spread throughout the valley. There was a rumble and the hidden thing that had been tormenting Indus burst from beneath the boy’s feet, revealing itself to be a hideous copy of my friend the centipede, Time.
But unlike the being I knew, this version of Time was blind with razors for teeth and swords for his many arms. He took advantage of the brief stillness caused by Gaia’s tear to try and swallow Indus, but a light burst from the scattered dust of the tear and consumed the creature in its brilliance, sending mutated Time back into the void he emerged from. The light continued to increase and where it touched the skeletons they vanished and fields of flowers took their place.
The boy looked at me in stunned silence. “Mother?” he asked at last and as I shook my head in negation a spirit in a burka stepped out of the tear dust. She carried a wrapped baby and she placed the infant among the flowers, embracing the weeping Indus with his falling rubies. “You came back for me,” he said, burying his face in her robes. “You came back for me.”
“My dear boy,” she said. “My favored son. I never forget my children, never. Not in this existence or any other. Come and take your rest.” There was another flash of shining light and they were gone from my reality. The new baby began to wail and flail his arms about. I went to pick him up to calm him but Khan placed a restraining paw on my shoulder.
“That earth spirit is ancient though his form is new,” the god said. “The valley itself will embrace him. Watch.” Even as the tiger spoke, the earth of the valley broke apart and the child sank into the soil. Then all was quiet and beautiful flowers nodded beneath the sun in the Indus valley.
“Khan, what just happened here?” I asked. “I do not understand what we saw.”
“The spirits of the places age and after millennia require rest within the bosom of Gaia,” the god said. “I suppose you were called here to bring peace and balance to Indus, who as you and I witnessed suffered for ages under the weight of his own time and past traumas.”
“Why didn’t Gaia come sooner?” I asked. “This spirit was suffering so badly he was weeping ruby tears. I think no one, spirit or embodied, should have to bear a pain like that.”
“There was no one to bear witness,” Khan said simply, flicking his tail and walking away from me in the stately way of cats the world over. “Come.” Ahead of the tiger god, a fantastical palace in the manner of a sultan of India appeared.
Khan led me to a dome within its spreading walls and I heard as a whisper on the wind: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…” I marveled at the beauty of the place as well as the appropriateness of the words used to describe it.
We passed through a long room with many pillows upon which veiled women slept, leaning against each other in familiar comfort and ease. Khan slowly led me to the end of the room where a huge bejeweled throne sat upon a dais. He climbed the steps and as he did so his shape changed and he took the form of a man with striped skin like a tiger and brilliant golden eyes.
“This is my home, wanderer,” the god said. He clapped his hands together and a gorgeous woman slunk from the shadows about his throne and danced before him. “It is a place of beauty and learning, a palace outside of time, its pressures and its outrages. I give this gift to you now. My favorite dancer, Mouse, gives this gift to you too.”
The dancer removed the veil around her head revealing skin covered in the light gray fur of a mouse. She shimmied and shook, making impossible figures with her body for a time, then she gracefully bowed to Khan and retired back into the shadows.
“Do you know who paints the fur of the tiger and chooses its pattern?” he asked. I shook my head negatively. “It is I, the great Khan, the god of tigers who does so.” He reached his hand towards me and, where a mortal man would have fingernails, he bore the pointed claws of a tiger. I found myself transported to the foot of the god’s throne as he gestured in my direction.
Khan gently traced a pattern of stripes over my hands and arms and I began to resemble a tiger myself. “I think,” he said, as he continued to move his claws over my skin. “You come to these worlds not to learn about those who dwell in other realms but to learn about yourself.” Khan brought his face very close to mine and I found myself hypnotized by his great, golden eyes.
“Tell me, wanderer called Heidi, what can you teach me?” he said. “I am a god and may not be summoned like a lackey but you have done so today and I will know the secret to your power so that I may do the same. You will tell me now.”
My skin was the fur of a tiger and I felt my form begin to change into that of a giant cat. My tongue changed in my mouth and for a moment I couldn’t remember how to form words as I was becoming a speechless animal spirit. I reached inside myself for peace as well as power and I placed my furred hand on the center of Khan’s chest and felt his heart beating beneath my palm.
“Great One,” I said. “Mighty Khan, today you have shown me the beauty of letting events unfold in their own time and as they are meant to. You have demonstrated simply that being fully present in the moment is enough to change the world.”
“You are immensely powerful and you are wise and beautiful,” I continued. “But I can call you forth because you are not separate from myself. We are one. All in creation are one. For we are the thoughts of the Creator dancing the steps of the Now as we were destined to do.”
The fur with its pattern disappeared from my skin and so did Khan’s. He stood for a time as an unearthly handsome man with golden eyes, gazing at me in mild surprise but quiet acceptance. Then he continued to change and I found myself standing with my hand pressed to a mirror within which I was reflected back at myself.
I removed my hand and gazed into the mirror which surrounded me on all four sides. The veiled women and sumptuous palace were gone but above me the universe shined down as it always had. The stars in the firmament spun and twinkled but then smeared in their patterns like the stripes of an enormous tiger.
The sky continued to change until it was no longer the cold and uncaring vastness of space but Khan himself gazing down upon me and reflecting himself in the mirrors around me. I laid on the glass floor and raised my eyes to behold the tiger god in the sky and found myself sinking into the mirrors of reality, becoming one with the universe and the tiger god’s reflection.
Then I fell out of the gate and my vision ended.
The Light Congress 