Chapter 32
Across the board, Celine scribbled reincarnation and spun around to face the room, her dusty-plum-colored dress skimming the floor. “Who here has ever had déjà vu? Show of hands.”
Every hand in the room lifted into the air, some more eager than others.
“Wonderful. How about a dream that felt so real you can still remember it?” This time, fewer hands were raised.
“While some of us believe it’s a coincidence—that familiar, visceral connection to memories—some belief systems hold the notion that these instances are insightful tools into lives once lived or reincarnation.
” She underlined the word three times. “The cycle of death and rebirth, also known as reincarnation, is believed to end when nirvana or enlightenment is achieved. Karmic balance is said to be the key to unlocking this milestone. Anybody know what karma is?”
A freckled girl whose name I didn’t know raised her hand. “Karma is the effects of a person’s actions; what they put into the world will be returned to them.”
“Perfect, Jenny,” Celine said with a smile.
“I couldn’t have said it better myself. Yes, what you give is what you get.
And those actions have a ripple effect stretching across lifetimes.
The idea is that one can learn from their past life’s mistakes in order to be better in the next, therefore bringing them one step closer to peace or nirvana.
This belief inspired many in the artistic world.
” She clicked the projector on and cycled through slides of gorgeous, ornate designs.
“Take the mandala for instance. In Tibet, the mandala is said to represent the structure and flow of the universe. A symmetrical, geometric symbol built from the inside out, some believe it’s meant to be a tangible depiction of the soul connecting to its next life. ”
She turned to me now, and I leaned forward on my hands to listen.
“But,” she continued, “how do we recall our own pasts? I mean, I can say without a question in my mind that I don’t remember how my past lives went. Let’s explore that, shall we? Please, if you’d all turn to page two-twenty-three in your textbooks, we’ll dive more in-depth into sacred symbols.”
I shuffled to the page and was instantly absorbed in the colorful images and patterns.
In the center of the page sat a sketch of a woman, legs crossed and hands folded in her lap.
From top to bottom, seven symbols. Purple: atop the head, marked the crown chakra.
Indigo: over the forehead, the third eye chakra.
Blue: below the chin, the throat chakra.
Green: center of the chest, the heart chakra.
Yellow: top of the stomach, the solar plexus chakra.
Orange: placed between the hips, the sacral chakra.
Red: at the base of the spine, the root chakra.
“The chakras are believed to be both physical and spiritual,” Celine said.
“And they can easily fall out of alignment. To find one’s true self, we have to look deep, to search within and realign those tracks.
That way our energy, what we put into the world, reflects a balanced soul.
We have to flow, if you will; the same way art itself cannot be forced and requests fluidity. ”
I raised my hand, to both mine and Celine’s surprise. She acknowledged me with a gentle nod.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“Great question.” Her smile was contagious, eyes kind.
“There are many ways. Tinctures, herbs, and crystal healing are said to connect oneself to the wealth of the universe. Each chakra has a stone which correlates with it. When one enters into meditation in search of cosmic answers, crystals can be the amplifier to the truths we seek. Help us bridge the gap from the physical to the spiritual.”
She scribbled seven words across the board. Clear quartz: for the crown. Amethyst: for the third eye. Sodalite: for the throat. Rose quartz: for the heart. Citrine: for the solar plexus. Carnelian: for the sacrum. And lastly, hematite: for the root chakra.
“Place each atop their correlating zones before meditation.” She continued. “And it’s said to help aid in past life recollection.”
It didn’t take a genius to realize the pattern here.
Crystals, talismans, the Lores and their essence stones: they were all connected somehow.
They had to be. Based on the look in Celine’s eyes, she saw my internal wheels turning and approved.
Explore this, her expression seemed to say.
And I made up my mind that I would. I owed it to myself.
To Aislyn, Margaret, Fiorenza, and all the other past-selves who’d hurt, because I hadn’t found a way to save my spirit in their lifetimes.
“In conclusion,” Celine said. “Your assignment is to study a piece of art in whatever medium calls to you, but it must embody flow and balance. Ask yourself: What does it mean to truly live? And how does the way you live impact the creative process? Be prepared to share your findings next Friday.”
When class let out, I stopped at Celine’s desk. “Very interesting class there. Almost like it was pointed or something,” I teased.
“You think so, do you?” She smirked. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But if someone were to say, dive into the assignment and meditate, I might encourage said person to look for signs their previous selves might be trying to convey.”
“Duly noted.” I sighed, my real reason for pausing to chat lingering on the top of my tongue. “Cillian … Where is he?”
She tapped a stack of loose papers into a clean stack. “Took a trip. He said he had something he needed to retrieve … for you.”
“For me? What is it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. He left this morning in a bit of a hurry, but said he’d be back soon. You never really know what soon means to that man, though.”
“Right, well, thanks.”
A parting nod, and I headed to my room.
I hopped on my bed, ready for some good, old-fashioned research when a putrid stench hit me like a sucker punch. “Oh, God.”
Waving my hand in front of my face, it took only a moment to figure out what it was.
The flower from Leeran—no, Deception had lost its glamour.
Once beautiful, a layer of thick black mold choked out the bloom, but worse still, vein-like roots jutted from the stem, pulsing and swaying with their own life.
They reached for something, anything, in the red-tinged water, an unsettling hunger about them.
I fought back a gag as I carried it out onto the balcony and chucked it—bottle and all—into the rose bushes below.
My chest tightened. Gone. Erased. Like I hoped his betrayal would be in time.
I snatched my phone off its nearly permanent home on the charger, opened the internet tab, and plopped stomach first onto my mattress.
Chakra balancing stones, I tapped into the search bar, and instant results popped up from countless websites, but the third down caught my attention: Food for the Spirit, chakra healing kit. One tap and I was in.
The introduction to the kit reaffirmed everything Celine had explained: each chakra, each correlating stone, and the placement of each confirmed in a series of pictures.
Lucky for me, I had each of the specified stones in my personal collection, which would have been comforting if it weren’t for my sudden realization.
My heart sank into my toes, and I thrashed the table drawer open to remove the bloodstone.
I rubbed a finger across Chaos and Famine’s essence stones, comparing their likeness to the images on the screen.
Chaos, a shimmery, translucent stone: clear quartz.
Famine, cobalt blue with white shattered veins throughout: sodalite.
Though each possessed otherworldly qualities, they were too similar to ignore.
It made sense Chaos would be associated with the crown chakra, with how a person thinks.
How I thought. And Famine would naturally be in reference to the throat.
I let my fingers slip through the divots yet to be filled, pondering what beasts may lay in wait to fill those gaping holes, and a shiver ran up my spine.
Whatever they were, I didn’t suppose they’d be any more welcoming than the Lores I’d already slayed.
And by luck alone, might I add. My finger sunk into the last empty pocket on the bloodstone. Wait …
An eighth divot.
Last I’d checked, it’d been seven altogether. I looked over the chakras, counted them again, then glanced back down at the stone. Seven chakras, seven Lores, but eight slots. That’s not ominous or anything.
I leaned over to snatch the tin of crystals from my windowsill, popped the lid, and picked out the seven I needed. Crossing my legs, I circled the chakra stones around me and lit the palo santo stick on my nightstand. What could an eighth divot stand for?
Only one way to find out.
My attempts at meditating and connecting to my previous selves for guidance lasted the better half of the evening. By the time night crept through the balcony doors, I had zero results. So much for that.
Celine’s recommendation from earlier flooded over me: I might encourage said person to look for signs their previous selves might be trying to convey.
Signs … what kind of signs? My eyes locked onto Aislyn’s grimoire.
The strange little triangular piece of paper from the beach …
I hadn’t read it yet. I wasted no time, pulling the page from its tucked spot in the cover and unfolding it on my bed.
I traced a finger along the torn edge, the passage ripped out of a book, and I squinted to make out the faded words:
At the beginning of time, the Old Gods of Fate and Death fell deeply in love, a consuming and powerful bond.
For centuries lost to time, they delighted in one another, captivated in contended bliss.
But Time changes all things, and soon they found themselves wanting.
Together, they sought to create as Gods often do and wove beings together with bits of their inherent power, thus breathing life into the Ancient Lores.
In their blind yearning and naivety, the Gods gave little consideration to what truly creates life, especially in regard to free will.
They granted the Lores consciousness without concern for their ability to empathize or show compassion.
Space and Time moved the wheel of universal consciousness ever forward—as is their nature—and soon, the Old Gods again found themselves wanting.
They grew curious of life outside the ethereal realms and cast their sights on the mortal plane. How were these feeble beings capable of such love and misery, despite their brief, fleeting lives?
The more Fate and Death’s interest in mankind grew, the more their amalgamated children fought for recognition—they slaughtered and pillaged for it.
Humanity soon hung on the brink, hunted to near extinction by the God and Goddess’s abominable creations.
Fearing the cosmic ramifications, Fate and Death wrapped their souls in mortal coils for one day and walked among the humans in search of a solution, but the damage proved too vast. Disgusted by her own children, Fate made a severe decision, invoking the wrath of Time himself: She turned back the eternal clock.
But such things do not come freely, and the veil between worlds was irrevocably thinned.
Humanity’s fears were doused in cosmic energy, thus manifesting the Ancient Lores on the mortal plane through nightmares, solidifying their existence as multiplane beings and weaving them into the universal fabric of all things.
Fate’s hands were tied.
While she could never undo the Lores’ existence, she could lock them away.
As an attempt to mend the bond between the Gods and humanity she had come to adore, she and her lover, Death, bestowed a fraction of their powers to the new leaders of the realms above and below: Anathema—the realm of eternal darkness—and Elysium—the realm of eternal light—to uphold balance and maintain the prison realm created between for the Ancient Lores: the Shroud.
Fate—distracted by her own wishes—grew blind to her lover’s ever-growing bitterness and his discontent for what he deemed a cruel and unjust punishment. When Fate refused to hear his reasoning, Death lashed out against his lover, overpowering her and weaponizing her own children against her.
But Time demanded balance.
And so, the first blood pact on any plane of existence was struck: Fate and Death could never again reside in the same realm to ensure history would never repeat itself.
Time saw Fate’s broken heart, stealing her away for his own, and they in time bore new children capable of protecting Time’s human creations from further destruction: the Ancient Fables.
And Death wept.
But hope, too, was born in the wake of their misery: a child of polarities wrapped in a mortal coil.
Conceived in the heat of passion while Fate and Death wandered the woken world, the sleeping key was forged: the Alchemist, able to turn darkness into light, breathing magic into humanity to protect themselves against the beasts of the mind.
But Fate feared the child and what powers it may possess, her shame too heavy to bear.
She placed a crown atop the Alchemist’s head, granting the key dominion over the Shroud, and turned her back.
The Alchemist has lain dormant ever since.
But some say the key walks within the Shroud to this day, at war with its own nature, both nightmare and dream.
By the story’s end, I was entirely sure of one thing: The vision I’d seen of the beings fighting over the rift in the sky was—beyond a shadow of a doubt—Fate and Death.
But the Alchemist, the mysterious being stuck in the Shroud, who could that—a knot caught in my throat.
A crown upon its head … at war with its own nature …
Bethesda.
I read and reread and reread again, searching for any hidden clues or insight into how to stop her or what her desire might be, but found nothing. Irritated, I tucked the page back in my grimoire, kicked my eyes up to the ceiling, and stared into the void.
Little did I know, it aimed to stare back.