Fire in the Belly - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 19

Fire in the Belly

Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 19

*

Before the rite commenced, Ratty had assured the group of advanced neophytes they would be experiencing an unusual form of ritual. The artistic initiate announced his evocation of Pan would be very different to the bog-standard version – nothing like the pomp and theatre of the prescribed ritual they’d already taken part in, derived from the works of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

“When the ritual is complete,” he tells the group with a stern glare, “I want you all to do absolutely nothing. I want you to internalise the energy and concentrate it into the core of your navel chakra.”

A circle of intently focused eyeballs glances toward the man askance. The aspiring magi had all been informed that chakra work was best suited to initiates and adepts – and was definitely not the province of uninitiated neophytes, who were still growing the living crystal spheres of the Tree of Life within their auras. Until all the sephirothic spheres of the Tree were fully formed and could rechannel any misdirected energies from the far more potent inward power centres, unguided chakra work could easily be a dangerous folly.

Rain sheets down from the wide gable of the manse as the neophytes stand barefoot beneath the shadowy eave. They wait before the pillars of the temple, sheltered within their cloaks from the gusty winds that accompany the summer downpour. Ratty’s lips part into a cunning grin. “Be not afraid,” he announces in the confected accent of Vincent Price while he rubs his palms together. “The core of your being is the place where Pan truly dwells – not in the base chakra, or in your genitalia,” he announces through a narrowing smirk. “Pan puts a fire in your belly.”

“I thought Pan was earthier than that – like the base chakra, or the sphere of Malkuth,” the Wood man inquires as his fingers stroke his long blonde beard. Jomana’s head nods effusively within the purple cowl of her hooded robe. “More like the sex centre,” she disagrees. “Like Yesod, between the base and the navel …”

“Ahem,” the initiate harrumphs. “This is an illustration of what I don’t want you to do at the end of the ritual. You have to empty your minds of all contention and contagion and simply feel the impulse of the life force within you – internalising it into your hara – nowhere else!” He snares them within the net of his awareness with a fierce glare; “And this time we’ll commence with an anticlockwise flow.”

Ratty watches their objections and questions die aborning before his withering glare, swallowed back down before they can emerge from the neophyte’s throats. He sweeps his multicoloured robe up into the crook of an arm and nods toward the temple’s entrance, then stands aside to allow them to enter. “Remember,” he says. “Not a word, not a sound… not a single expository gesture!”

The neophytes enter the temple through the north-eastern gate and quietly greet the quarters – whose elemental energies are maintained by the corporeal batteries of four initiates, seated behind each of the carefully constructed and consecrated macrocosmic weapons – and form an interlinked inner circle. As they link hands in fellowship the flow begins to circulate more slowly than usual, eddying backward and forward in sluggish currents of mismatching intent. Then the wave of rotating energy pours through their auras, pushing against a subtle tide of resistance for a few uncertain moments before the wheel of their combining will begins to turn of its own accord. They begin to stand in an unuttering silence which they maintain through the entire ritual.

Rratz Bander eschews his usual idiom of artistically styled ritual performance, standing completely still and silent in the centre of the cyclone. He charges the egg-shaped mass of concentrating ether with the ringing group’s circulating energies, intensifying and compressing the magical field from the moderator’s centralised locus.

Unanswered questions accompany a series of images, phantasms of Ram’s ladylove that parade through the Centraxian mage’s mind. He struggles to focus beyond the surface ripples of egocentric concerns; his eyes slit open and he attempts to quiet his thoughts, concentrating on a point below and behind his navel.

Ratty’s eyeballs roll back inside their sockets and his mouth begins to emit a hum so low it’s virtually inaudible; the cloaked figure of Arne Stook faces the young Centraxian shaman from the other side of the circle, a purple pillar standing between the identically coloured robes of Jomana and Gladryn.

Ram’yana closes his eyes and Rratz Bander’s intonation slowly fills his awareness, thrumming though his spine with a surprisingly resonant note that thrills through his plasm. The initiate begins chanting in barely discernible ancient Hebrew, a scarcely audible evocation rising and falling through the hubbub of his continual drone; a secondary voice issuing from the selfsame voice box as his usual vocalisations.

The shaman prince refocuses his awareness on his navel chakra, and is somewhat surprised to find himself viewing the world from the level of his belly. His perspective hovers just above the surface of a stilled liquid space, suspended at the centre of a slightly bulging fluid meniscus. He floats upon a pool, hovering in a broad round bowl which can only be the material vessel of his bony hips.

Ram’s mind stops spinning and plops to a sudden halt.

Everything is different. The cosmos is transparent, yet simultaneously solid and eternal. The circle expands to the limits of the horizon, and Ram’yana floats above a vast pool of liquid dreams. He basks in the light of an amber sun that hovers directly over his crown, luxuriating in an expansive spaciousness of blissful peace.

After a timeless time he becomes aware of Ratty’s deep chanting voice, now joined in rhythmic counterpoint by the other four initiates who hold fast the four quarters of the universe. At some point his chant has morphed into ancient Greek, and the shaman feels the intensity of the magical field throb with each syllable as a glowing light begins to form beneath the pure transparent depths of his internal sea.

A fire throbs in his belly and rears up his spine like a cobra; his vertebrae straighten and his body lengthens as a scintillating presentiment of kundalini’s rise fills him with flaming energy – and then the real thing sears upward and expands through his being, flaring through him like an etheric orgasm. In another instant he’s blinded by a blast of white-hot brilliance and the combining voices of the initiates disappear in a sea of white noise; “Io Pan!”

The Centraxian High Priestess lies on her belly amidst a cloudy sea of puffy cushions while five pairs of hands massage cluttered memories and knotted tensions from her sleek young muscles. “Are you sure you don’t want us to use the needles?” The Lady Ringell asks. Racheal grunts a negative for the third time as she turns her head to face the initiate, and the slim packet of acupuncture needles disappears into a drawer of the apothecary’s pine cabinet.

The massage has worked its magic on the Lady Racheal, who can hardly move as the practiced fingers of various neophytes and initiates stroke and caress each of her naked limbs. A pair of confident hands presses down along either side of her spine and compresses the tightly clenched globes of her snow-white bottom before gliding up along her back and returning to knead her shoulders and neck.

Racheal had earlier availed herself of the manse’s copious hot water supply, allowing the near-boiling steam that jetted from silver fittings in the large bathroom to salve her tension and wash away all surface discomforts. She’d stood under the blasting flow for apparent ages while her beau was otherwise occupied in the temple, and when she’d emerged from the shower two of the newer neophytes had been awaiting with a huge fluffy towel. “Fifi says you need a massage,” one of the slightly older young women informed the teenage priestess while they wrapped the towelling around her dripping body. “After a healing flow,” the other longhaired brunette added. “I’m Lucy.”

“A loose woman,” her companion declared with a lopsided smile. “I’m Jane.” Her symmetrical features were slightly marred by a fine cratering of old acne scars that followed the curve of a strong jawline. “Weren’t you in the pre-initiate group?” Racheal nodded as she retrieved her clothing. “Then we’ll do a flow first, if you like. We can use the room across the hall.”

When they’d finally convinced her to lie down in a vacant attic bedroom of the sandstone manse, the priestess had been uncertain about removing her clothing and had kept the towel draped around her body as she relaxed on the unyielding futon mattress. She was unsure whether the various members of the Dawn of Ra – some of whom she’d never met before - held salacious designs on her lithe young body, and lay back on the white silk sheet with eyes wide open. The neophytes left her to relax alone while they explored the manse for massage oil.

As Racheal stared at an ornately beaded lampshade and appreciated the artisanship of its geometric design, she slowly came to recognise the familiar style that had gone into the work. One of her fellow Centraxians, the Lady Alion – who was also an initiate of the Dawn of Ra - had created the construction. She sat up on the bed to readjust the towel as a handful of the latest intake of barefoot neophytes entered the room.

Rachel lay down on her back while they assembled around her. Despite her trepidation, the hot shower had left the priestess in a pleasantly enervated daze and the moment her head hit the thin pillow she relaxed into a supine posture with a satisfied sigh. Rain thrummed against the slate roof above their heads. The white noise penetrated stone, timber and plaster with a ubiquitous hum that further calmed her fractious nerves.

After her recent challenging experiences Racheal had remained perpetually on guard, unwilling and unable to drop her defences for so much as a moment - except when lying in the arms of her beloved prince. After an ongoing series of unfortunate encounters with less trustworthy individuals and malevolent magical circles and covens, the Centraxian High Priestess had developed an ingrained distrust of the works and motives of magicians and witches who worked together en masse – often conducting rites for purposes of which they were completely unaware.

Half a dozen magi circled her recumbent body and Lucy lifted Racheal’s head in her hands to place her damp mop of blonde hair in her lap; a tingle of adrenaline rushed through Racheal’s bloodstream while she tried to determine the neophytes’ motives. Yet when they began to chant the syllable ‘Om’ together and commenced a familiar healing flow, she felt an inexorable tide of utter relaxation carry her troubled thoughts away while her body sank into a warm golden glow.

Now Racheal’s consciousness returns to her body as the neophytes’ hands slip from the ring which they form about her and begin gently caressing her limbs on the bed. An amber glow suffuses her being and she feels cozened and coddled as a baby swaddled up in a warm cosy bassinet. She bristles for a moment and her mind comes fully awake to the bodies around her as she divines the intent of the strangers who caress her semi-naked form.

A dozen palms and a squadron of soft fingers begin stroking the ley lines of her body’s meridians as she sinks into a golden torpor, blissfully enjoying their careful ministrations. The Lady Racheal decides to give herself up to the utter abandonment of tactile pleasure, surrendering to the cosmos as she sinks into a state of helplessly hopeful relaxation. She places her self in the strangers’ hands as they drag clots of tension from her unwinding muscles.

She finally comes to accept that all of her masseurs are trustworthy and dedicated students. Despite the brief period of training they’d so far undertaken as new members of the Magic Group, they’re obviously all well along the road to becoming sensitive and talented healers. They all scrupulously avoid taking liberties with the teenage witch, skirting her most sensitive and private parts while they anoint her flesh with appropriate scented oils and the healing balm of gentle strokes and touches.

After a while Racheal happily allows them to slowly peel the towel from her body and strip her bare. She lies on her belly while they commence coating her skin with fragrant rose oil admixed with tincture of myrrh. After an indeterminable time of surpassing bliss, six pairs of hands slip beneath her sides and ease the supine girl over onto her back. Racheal is entirely comfortable in their collectively sensitive grasp, unconcerned by her exposure to the innocent healing touches of the unknown neophytes as they begin to massage the front of her pale limbs and white belly, her bruise-mottled throat, symmetrical feline face and fulsome white breasts.

When her beloved returns from the temple - silently contemplating the extraordinarily compressed charge of energy that’s been implanted in their auras during the ritual - he searches the ground floor for his unpredictable paramour. He encounters the Lady Ringell in the hall, and Fifi L’Amoure directs him upstairs. When he mounts the treads to the top floor he stands in the doorway to watch the remaining five neophytes massage essential oils into the nude body of his beautiful young bride.

The egg-shaped ring of neophytes forms the points of a pentagonal star around the Lady Racheal. Racheal reclines with her head in Lucy’s lap while the slim brunette’s fingers follow the ridges of bone that surround her sealed eyes. The healers glance toward her young hippy lover, who returns their cherubically innocent smiles with a happy grin. The healers continue to immerse their combining awareness and energies into a rapturous channelling of healing chi, a living force that directs their hands to knead the neediest parts of the priestess’s body.

Racheal moans with utterly satiated pleasure while practiced palms and fingers stroke and tease knotted tensions outward to her extremities. They draw cloying strands of ectoplasmic adhesions from her aura and flick them away to subside into the slumbering soil of the Emerald City. Ram’s gaze tilts up along Racheal’s slender frame to linger upon the bruises on her neck; over the past day the purple blotches have paled surprisingly quickly, fading to yellowing fingermarks on her fine white throat. He stands naked beneath his cloak in the doorway while Jomana squeezes by in the hall, intent on being the first into the shower after the ritual.

After the ritual’s formal closure, Ratty had become annoyed at the members of the pre-initiate circle. As they’d thrice farewelled the elemental quarters prior to leaving the temple through the south-westerly exit, Dai’s hips had begun to swivel and his long white hair shook free of his hood as he began a martial dance before the scarlet triangle which marked the fire quarter.

He’d caught Ram’s eye with a wink and the Centraxian shaman felt a quivering shiver pass through the bodies of all the neophytes assembled in the circle. Dai’s spine began to swirl and his hands rose from his sides as his body formed a series of magical stances. The frenetic lust for movement and expression burst from the vessels of almost all the advanced neophyte group and began spilling back into the energic battery of the temple. “Keep it inside!” Ratty had boomed, and they’d all concentrated on refocusing the unfinished Work of the Pan ritual into the cores of their navels with renewed concentration, their wilful silence reinstated amidst guilt-riddled glances.

The Lady Racheal bears the appearance of utter relaxation. Her eyes remain closed while multiple hands rove the living leys of her perfectly feminine form and the quiet low moans that issue from her slightly parted lips evince the placid depth of her enjoyment. Ram’yana spies T’Ruth approaching up the stair and at her silent signal he follows the initiated poet into the wood-lined upstairs hall. “Has she told ye anything?” the diminutive woman asks in something akin to a command. “Nay,” the prince replies. “I’ve had no time alone with her.”

“After all, she certainly is attractive,” T’Ruth declares in her wild Scots brogue. “I mean to say, the neophytes are drawn to her like iron to a magnet.” All through her small speech, the poetess examines the shaman prince’s reactions to her challenging observations. “But ’tis still very curious - the way she doesn’t seem to realise how beautiful she is, even after all this time...” Ram’yana is still thoroughly affected by the ritual and stares down at T’Ruth for a few recondite moments before his lips can form a reply, glaring through the aftermath of the rite’s potency. “Aye,” he finally agrees with monosyllabic ineloquence.

“Let’s have some hash down in the alchemy lab,” T’Ruth suggests. “Stardew managed to get some treated Temple Balls.” Ram’yana glances toward the bathroom door. “Love to,” he says, “After my shower.”

“Suit yourself.” T’Ruth shrugs and nods toward the bedroom where Racheal endures her glorious massage. “It’s A-grade hash. And bring the High Priestess along; she hasn’t seen the lab yet.”

“Hash?” Jomana’s voice knifes through the hall. “Count me in!” She follows the initiate downstairs toward the cellar as Ram’yana dashes to the bathroom. He catches a glimpse of the healthy pink glow suffusing Racheal’s skin, glancing past the bodies that surround her as he beats Arne to the shower, and the door seals the prince into his personal cleansing rite.

Removing his cloak and twisting the taps in the steamy room, he belatedly recalls his clothing is still on the downstairs veranda. As hot water streams into his tightly sealed eyes, psychedelic rainbows and colourful rectangular Toltec reliefs parade across his inner eyelids and he surrenders to the pounding needles of the miniature waterfall. At least Rache seems to be recovering from whatever that bastard did to her, the shaman surmises. She’ll tell me when she’s ready…

When he emerges from the bathroom - fully refreshed by jets of hot and cold water and invigorated in the afterglow of the Pan ritual - the lights in hallway, stairs and chambers have all been switched off. The carved woodwork and sandstone features of the stolid manse glow with the amber flickering warmth of beeswax candles, as thick as Ram’s wrist and as tall as his thigh, standing on the polished floorboards and varnished parquetry in handmade clay fixtures and glazed ceramic bowls.

He steps through the cool draught of the hallway with purple cloak slung over one arm and a rainbow towel wrapped round his hips, blinking away droplets of water that continue to drip onto his lashes and cascade down his long dark hair. Sounds of merriment and live music resound around the expansive house, emanating from the ground floor. Across the hall, the door to the chamber where Racheal is being massaged hangs three-quarters closed. The entryway stands between a large pair of framed oil paintings, unsigned portraits of members of the Group created by its founder and leading light.

The famous local magician has illustrated images of goddesses in milieus appropriate to their pantheons and attributes, using various female initiates of the magic group as models for the nude divinities – models proud to be renowned as intimates, muses and bedmates of the tantrically adept founder of the Dawn of Ra.

To the left of the door the goddess Aphrodite stands amidst foaming waves on a rock-lined strand of sand, carrying a huge scalloped conch in an open palm. Blue-skinned and composed with a bearing graceful as a blithe Hindu deity, the goddess laughs beneath a glowing starfield as she beckons to the full silvery moon in a bright purple sky, the lunar ball floating just above her other hand.

To the right of the doorway another of the absent magus’ lovers smiles in effigy; a green eyed and green skinned nude Venus erupting into glee, framed by curving masculine boughs, huge glossy leaves shaped like viridian hearts and lotus-like flowers which blossom all round and within the nubile goddess’s erotically charged form.

Ram’yana settles within the luxuriant glow of his refreshed awareness. He hadn’t truly looked at the paintings earlier in the evening, and was certain they hadn’t flanked the door to the spare bedroom during previous weeks. As he pushes the door all the way open he’s surrounded by scents of rose and myrrh, mingling with a cloud of amber incense that issues from a stacked clutch of smouldering joss sticks. When his eyes manage to focus through the candlelit mist the towel slithers from his waist and falls to the floor.

He hovers between the twinned goddesses, pausing within the ornately carved doorframe like a third life-sized painting in a triptych of nudes while his eyes focus on his equally unclothed lover; a blonde white goddess reclining on titian silk in the dim upstairs chamber. All but one of the newer neophyte masseurs has departed, leaving Racheal alone with an aspiring magician that Ram’yana vaguely recognises from combined Group rituals.

The bearded hippy lies on the bed, snuggling against the Lady Racheal’s left side, entwined around the naked pinkish form of Ram’s supine lover. Her face nuzzles into the dark frizz of the near-stranger’s afro haircut and her arm drapes across the older man’s chest and shoulder while his mouth suckles at her throat; his hand slowly palpates her right breast. Daniel’s eyelids roll open and he smiles through his woolly black beard in Ram’s general direction while his fingers twirl around Racheal’s rigid nipple. Attractive… the Lady T’Ruth’s summation echoes in Ram’s mind.

The man is clothed in a translucent cotton shirt and wraparound pants that betray his arousal, a flagrantly hard mound pressed against Racheal’s naked flank. Daniel’s lips glide along her shoulder as Ram’yana bends to retrieve the rainbow towel and covers his own water-warmed and anticipatory teenaged tumescence. Racheal hardly responds to kiss or caress, pressing her face more deeply into the older man’s hair, turning her hips toward him as the cool draught from the door reaches her naked legs.

Daniel’s eyes are a crinkling study in appealing appeasement as he stares at the young prince and gently manhandles and kisses his bride’s nude body. He continues his determined succour, barely restraining the heated rush of his obvious lust while her boyfriend looks on.

Ram’yana finds viewing the tableau surprisingly easy; the merest pang of jealousy is easily squelched. He kneels at the foot of the low bed, keeping his eyes fixed on Daniel’s while Racheal sighs into his scraggly beard. The young mage neither consents nor demurs to the older man’s fondling and furry mouthings; She’s pretty well awake and doesn’t seem to mind, he tells himself while he observes his lover’s barely discernible reactions to the other man’s cuddles and canoodling.

The fragrant odours are almost overpowering as wafting spirals of smoke and invisibly coiling aromas of scented oils writhe around the chamber. Ram’yana observes the jagged claw of incipient jealousy that tears at his innards while Daniel stares into his soul and awaits a gesture of assent or disapproval from the younger pre-initiate. It’s up to her, the prince decides. When she crooks her right leg over the other man’s thigh, Ram leans forward and ensures his naked kneecap makes contact with the rough sole of Racheal’s bare foot.

Racheal’s eyes flash open and twin candlelit reflections shine through the hairy thatch of Daniel’s head. Her nose emerges from his afro like a slim periscope, preceding the rest of her face as she slowly surfaces through his fuzzy underbrush and through the funk of her own lazy languor. “Ramses…” the witch-girl breathes as she hovers in Daniel’s grasp and assays her lover’s reaction. Ram’yana witnesses the scene with a total lack of expression, betraying no obvious sign or signal. Nonetheless, as Racheal’s foot rubs up along his thigh the Centraxian shaman wills his inconstant bride to reject his latest rival.

“Ram’yana…” Her hand rises from Daniel’s chest and she reaches for her lover with a languid arm, twisting away from the older man as her palm meets Ram’s chest. Her young man’s arms reach out to her and she pulls herself upward into his embrace. He watches Daniel shake himself awake through golden strands, and calms his ruffled would-be rival or lovemaking partner with soothing smile and an understanding tone.

“She feels much better now,” he says as his hands caress Racheal’s shoulder blades and spine. “Thanks,” Ram replies. The priestess silences any further condescending comments with a mouthful of slippery wet tongue. He sinks onto the bed and Racheal draws him into the succour of her hips as she wraps her legs around him.

The prince is only dimly aware when the other man takes his leave; the lovers are busily twining amidst the wreathing clouds of smoke. A gust of wind almost extinguishes the sole candle when the door swings widely open in the wake of Daniel’s departure. Racheal subsides against Ram’s chest and he asks her; “How was the flow?”

“Really fucking fantastic… truly surprising from mere untrained magi.” She smiles into his eyes. “But the massage was even better…”

“So eye saw.”

“And Daniel’s nice…”

“So ’t’would seem.”

“Don’t be like that. They all warmed me up for thee, after all…” She nips his nipple between shiny white teeth while soft fingers tickle his ribcage and flank. “You can finish me off. Come ’ere,” she orders, slowly falling back onto the bed without releasing his nipple and pulling him down atop her. Four hands simultaneously reach for flanks and buttocks, pulling their loins closer together as utterly attuned and familiar young bodies automatically strive for the renewed ecstasy of sexual union.

Ram’yana winds up halfway beneath Racheal while they kiss on the silken sheet, his right leg squeezing up between the soft surfaces and firm sluices of her scissoring thighs. Chest and breasts roll together as tongues plunge and thrust in time with the press of their undulating bodies. Another gust of wind pours in through the door and out through the window and the candle struggles to survive for a few glowing moments before it gives up the ghost to the wet wind’s inconstant billowing.

As hips rock and roll and Racheal’s right leg rises to provide better access for her man, the towel bunches up to become an insuperable chastity belt between the slowly thrusting loins of the inseparable lovers. Ram rips the towel from his waist and draws it from their declivities while Racheal smothers his throat and chest with kisses. When he registers the obvious fact that his gasping lover requires no further foreplay, the rugged force of his manly lust thrusts aside his decorous sensibilities and he pins her leg right up between his chest and her shoulder, fondling her tightly swollen globes and rigid nipples as he moves into position for a rapid entry.

Despite his intermittent success with meditation, the young shaman’s thoughts are never still for long. Rapid, he muses, as in rapine or rape… He slows his advance and Racheal moans as he pauses with the first few inches of his ramrod already squeezed up between her hairless trimmed outer lips. The girl squirms around the locus of her sudden impalement and moans from the depths of her core, vibrating Ram’s cock inside her tight belly. He begins to pull all the way out of her tightly sucking vulva and stops, pushing halfway back inside over and again, while tickling the witch-girl’s fancy with experienced fingertips.

Racheal groans into the windswept night while rain beats at the roof of the old sandstone mansion. She hooks her elbow beneath one knee to open herself wider for Ram’s advance, raising her foot up through her wavy mane while twisting toward her lover. She squeezes his right thigh betwixt hers, jamming his stout smooth length almost completely up inside her needily grasping belly. “Pan,” she breathes. “Io Pan…” A grand force begins to swell in the pit of Ram’s loins, firing his blood with a pulsating strength as the priestess’s sibilant whisper drains into the night.

Racheal’s fingers slide down her belly and she falls halfway onto her back while she cocks her left leg outward and up. She squeezes her cleft around her man’s lengthy thickness, rocking her hips to press her clitoris toward his pubic bone, responding to his slick reaming thrusts with reciprocal lust and moaning with uninhibited cries of intensifying pleasure. She kisses her right ankle, nipping her white skin and bringing herself toward an amazingly swift climax while Ram’yana fondles his beloved’s breasts, reaming his wonderfully responsive bride with an accelerating flurry of ever deepening plunges.

“My Pan…” He kisses the girl’s raggedly gasping mouth and sucks her sweet tongue between his lips while the pounding beat of jamming drums thrums through the bed from the lower floor, vibrating Ram’s flesh inside the vesicle of Racheal’s tautly stretching vulva.

He pins her down and stretches her out, fucking his uncommonly submissive witch-wife ’til she screams and screams again, strident cries ripping from her wide opened throat to tear through the rainy night of the slumberous Emerald City. The young shaman barely restrains his own mind-blowing explosion as Racheal grips him with all the unfathomable strength of her wise womanly musculature, ringing and wringing him inside her tight grasping tunnel of love.

Some little time later, they lie on the sweat-slaked silk sheet gasping for breath in the velvet darkness. The candles in bedchamber and hall have all been extinguished, blown out by the wandering winds while the lovers were lost in the throes of passion. They grapple in a sweaty, juicy tangle in near-total darkness while the sounds of partying filter up from the main hall of the house. Racheal’s right leg is still pinned beneath Ram’s chest while the smooth moonlet of her cheek presses against his furry groin. His shaft throbs inside her belly, jammed all the way up inside her.

When the fingers of Racheal’s left hand cup Ram’s fuzzy sack and she pulls him right up against her inner labia he raises one leg, sliding his thigh up against hers with delicious delicacy. He spreads his leg wider, opening her up and simultaneously providing her with better access as she absently fondles the unique smaller testicle that nestles between the outer eggs of her man’s scrotum; to her knowledge, the experienced teen has never yet met another man with three testicles. She oft finds herself surprised that the fact of Ram’s mutant sexuality and his extra testicle aren’t more widely known, given his endless proclivity for making love with a plethora of different lovers.

Racheal jumps with a start, squirming beneath him when a pair of soft lips begins to glide up her left ankle. Her own lips suck at Ram’s when the soft alien mouth slides along her shin and pauses for a moment while a soft tongue laps at her kneecap. The recumbent witch says nary a word, nor does she pull away when the tongue glides upward along her inner thigh and a soft cool breast dangles down and mashes along her leg, sliding upward along the sodden warm trail of saliva.

Yet Racheal cannot stifle a sigh when the tongue skirts around her lover’s scrotum and dives into the juncture of their interlocked loins. Her man’s cock jams even more deeply inside her when a pair of soft feminine lips slip around his right testicle and a talented tongue begins to twiddle against Racheal’s swollen clitoris. They groan into each other’s mouths when a strange woman’s soft little hands begin caressing their naked bodies.

She opens her eyes, trying to focus through mingling long hair and smoky darkness to see who it is; “Oh,” she gasps. “You!”

A true story

Continues…

- R.A.

Images – author’s

See

Further True Tales from the Prince of Centraxis -

Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents

Nesting Urge – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 2

See White Bird Must Fly – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 3

Which Craft – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 4

Black Dog – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 5

Mandrake & the Magician – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 6 Watching the Watcher – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 7 Promises & Compromises - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 8 The Invisible Great Divide - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 9 Circles Within Circles - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 10 Three Flaming Arrows - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 11 Round Peg, Square Hole - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 12 Monkey Business - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 13

The Blue Pill - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 14 Crossed Swords - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 15

Power Corrupts - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 16

Rogue Phantoms - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 17

Dreaming Entities - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 18

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1 Psychedelic Water Part 1 - Fractal Rainbow The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater

And see -

http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

http://hermetic.blog.com

More Images - http://imagine.today.com

http://enlightenment.today.com

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The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com

Second Arcanum, Ram'yana, Making Peace, Puppet of the Gods

Second Arcanum

Ram’yana

Peacemaker

Puppet of the Gods

Juggling Boulders - Wild Life 4

Juggling Boulders

*

Wild Life 4

*

“You pierce the egg of my soul with thy stare.” Seheal’s mellifluous tones penetrated the haze of roiling light that surrounded her slight spritely form, enfolded in the carven arms of a claw-foot wooden throne. Ever since her housemate Penny had departed for the kitchen the red haired grrl and the older hippy had been staring into each other’s gazes across the raggedy xpanse of a Persian rug in the shared house’s subterranean lounge room.

Seheal’s eyes were twin emerald fixities in a swirling mist of colour; her aura pulsed in time with Ram’s, wavering waves spreading toward him across the paces that separated her throne from his deeply upholstered chair. He could feel her heart beating through the protoplasmic viscosity of the breathing world. Their mutual yearning was a palpable pulsation of twinned heartbeats and intimately interlocking desires.

The underground space of the Gothic-inspired and rudely appointed living room was a plexus amid nexuses, an oasis of leyline-crossed energies; the walls had buckled inward in several places and a small underground stream trickled down a crumbling brick cornice near the open fireplace. Orange flickers licked at the girl’s bare toes as she extended her legs before a fire of smashed fence palings; the diminutive young Aphrodite had removed her stilettos and fishnets when she’d briefly left her guest with Penny and disappeared upstairs to ‘powder her nose’.

Seheal never took her eyes from his, matching the shaman’s stare with an intensity that challenged the intentness of his will – and which matched his heartfelt desire, beat by pulsing beat. Matched… Ram’yana pondered the matching blazes of their harmonically symmetrical wills, immersing himself in Seheal’s spirit and soul as her aura xpanded and contracted in time with their synchronised breaths. She’s a natural… How could a girl so gorgeous and bright be alone and available? His heart pounded alongside Seheal’s across the chasm of the communal lounge room, a pressing intensity mounting on a swelling tide of hopeful intimations, rising toward a crescendo of…

“Do you prefer sugar or honey?” Seheal’s housemate clattered down the wooden staircase carrying a tray overflowing with a floral tea set, and incautiously teetered on a loose broken tread. A silver teapot replete with handmade woollen cosy jostled against three dainty enamelled porcelain cups and a small plate of honey-dripping baklava. Penny frowned apologetically. “That’s me,” the young woman announced when she noticed the soundless shattering of their wordless mutual engagement. “A bad penny’s always turning up…”

“Honey, thanks,” the shaman answered before the moment waxed even clumsier.

“Ram’s giving me a lift up north tomorrow,” Seheal told the slightly older young woman. She stretched on the throne with catlike grace and her inflating bosom threatened to burst from her lacy bodice; her lithe limbs rapidly retracted when her gaze met the other girl’s. She reacts as if subjected to subtle censure, Ram’yana noted. Are they closer than housemates?

Penny placed the tray in the centre of the rug. “It’s a silken quim,” she announced, and her palm caressed the damaged silk carpet while her Irish eyes bestowed a knowing look upon the shaman through the satin sheets of her long black hair. “I’m sure you know what it was made for.” Ram’s expression betrayed nothing while his mind whirled around the vibrating string of Penny’s entendres.

The marginally plump and cherubic brunette openly displayed many of the accoutrements of a post-modern inner-city witch; pentacle pendant, fingers overflowing with silver-bound gemstone rings, and an open-weave shawl the shade of dried blood over a long black dress that came down to her bare black-nailed feet. She gave Seheal a wink that Ram espied in a corner mirror. “Giving you a ride?” she asked as she poured the steaming peppermint tea. “To your parents’ place?” she appended.

“Halfway there,” Seheal said. “I can get a train the rest of the way, or catch a bus – or hitch.”

“Promise me you won’t let her hitchhike on her own!” Penny spun toward Ram’yana and pleaded with an obviously genuine concern. She turned a relentless stare on Seheal. “You promised me you wouldn’t do that again, after…”

“Don’t be a bad Penny.” Seheal’s brow creased in mock admonition and her lips puckered into a pout. Her frown was more beautiful than a goddess’s smile and her radiance ate a pathway into Ram’s blossoming heart as Penny stared the redhead down. “All right,” the wilful pixie relented, “I won’t hitch any more. Not alone, anyway…”

“I suppose we’ll start packing your things up tomorrow,” Penny said through the pillar of fragrant steam rising from her chrysanthemum-covered teacup. Seheal climbed onto her knees before the fire and retrieved her cup and saucer. “I’m going to start tonight,” she demurred, flinging roseate coils from her glittering eyes. “I’ll be staying up anyway, until dawn, at least.” The women exchanged a meaningful glance.

Penny’s reply was slow in emerging. Her eyes closed in thoughtful contemplation as she spoke. “I see… then I’d best stay up and help you; you have such a godawful pile of stuff for someone who’s only been here a few months! How are you going to move it all? You should see how much she has…” Ram watched his hopes of bedding Seheal as the night unfolded flutter into the hearth and fly all the way up the convoluted brick chimney. “It’s all right,” he said. “I have a van.” Penny’s words echoed in the cavern of his braincase and their import dawned like sunrise streaming through an open cell door; Move it all?

“I don’t need to take all of it now,” said Seheal. “I’m not even sure I’ll be moving in with mum; we don’t really get along that well.” She turned her beaming eyelights on the bemused shaman. “But if you have any spare room we could take a couple of bits of furniture and a few other things with us, and leave them at your place until I pick them up later.” She leaned toward him and touched his knee with her index finger. “Sunset would be perfect,” she announced as tea sloshed into her tilting saucer. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Ram’yana recognised the moment of his dismissal and concealed his disappointment even as a pall of lonely longing descended on his shoulders in a heavy cloaking shroud. He made small talk and plans with Seheal for a few more minutes, unwilling to leave her mesmerising side even as the tide of his expectancy rolled away into the distance. Yet he recognised the unspoken invitation within the alluring looks the brazen grrl gave him, easily evident in her entrancing smile, her fleet arousing touches and unmistakeable body language – and in the way their hearts beat as one when their gazes locked amidst pounding waves of mutual and mutually unabashed horniness.

When Penny assembled the tea set and ascended toward the heights of the terrace house Seheal grasped Ram’s hand and led him toward the bare-bricked ground floor. He watched her womanly hips and girlish cheeks rock and swell, contract and relax through her tight cotton miniskirt with each barefoot step, entranced by the fluid flexure of her slender musculature as she preceded him upstairs to the front of the house. When they reached the exit she turned and wrapped her extraordinary body around the astounded hippy while their lips and tongues met in an impassioned epiphany.

She tasted of strawberries and cream, honey and cinnamon beneath a blandishment of peppermint. Her breath was a fragrant scintillating caress that filled the hollow shell of his body and remade him whole and entire. Her presence was inescapably attractive; their bodies were a perfectly interlocking jigsaw which, when joined, revealed expanding vistas of unexpected splendour. He was a moth drawn to a mesmerising flame that flared through his soul while fleet images and memories vied for attention with the vivid reality of Seheal’s embrace; visions of ancient encounters with the same fey red-haired pixie in bygone days and nights, strewn throughout the volatile flickering pages of fickle eternity.

Seheal pressed her entire body full-length against him and, as a single breath coruscated back and forth between them, Ram began to comprehend the magnitude of her love for him. The erudite perfection of her petite suppleness fit his frame in a formfitting clasp as she pressed her heated pudenda against his smouldering tumescence – and she whispered two words into his mouth; “Tomorrow night.” When she subsided in his embrace her eyes held a promise that required no further articulation, and she pushed him away and turned him about in the entry hall with a quick slap that tightened his buttocks.

He bid her farewell on the stoop and left the girls to pack Seheal’s possessions into a clutch of plastic bags and cardboard boxes in her as-yet unseen boudoir. As fleur-des-lys spear points wobbled loosely when the wrought iron gate clanged shut behind him, Ram began to wonder how he was going to break the unexpected news of his immanent departure to Andrea. She wanted to come away to the rainforest, too, he suddenly recalled.

“The moment of wonder is never far away.” His words seemed hollow, echoing around inside the sporty red car while predawn mist obscured the forest. One corner of Georgia’s lips curled into a smile as her hand reached for the door handle. “Is that another pearl of wisdom that I’m supposed to swallow with a pinch of salt?”

“Careful,” he said. “Mixing your metaphors can give you a bad trip. No – it’s just a simple inscrutable observation. You can take it however you like.” He cocked his head to one side and wound the window all the way down, admitting the ubiquitous mist into the sedan’s interior as he strained his hearing to listen beyond the cries of a solitary mopoke. “Hear that?” Georgia’s head tilted in the opposite direction as she hearkened to the barely perceivable thrum of a distant mechanical rumbling noise. The bright young feral was adept at identifying the sounds of approaching juggernauts and paused for a moment before nodding as she opened the door. “Sounds like they’re on the way – I’d better get back to the dozer.”

His eyes automatically followed the young woman’s long lean limbs as she slid from the bucket seat. A pair of semi-camouflaging tights clung to her skinny legs and buttocks like a second skin as Georgia pulled her sheepskin coat closed across her loose woolly jumper and climbed from the low-slung vehicle; far more appropriate to paved highways and suburbs than the rough muddy road on which it was parked askew, effectively blocking the forest track. She turned and bent down into the open door. “Looks like B.J.’s on his way back. Good luck!”

“Break a leg,” he replied as he twisted around to glimpse his friend jogging back down the dirt road toward the Fnord Concertina. Georgia spun to face the agile stalwart, thoughtfully aiming a torch beam at B.J.’s bare feet instead of his face as he slid to a halt and leaned against the car. “The cops have already set up the mobile charge room,” the intrepid scout managed to pant out while his breath slowly returned to a normal pattern. Georgia nodded. “Where?”

“At the turnoff,” he gasped. “There must be forty of fifty of them. And I think that’s the sound of the cherry picker coming up the road…” The more experienced representative of the North East Forest Alliance nodded as B.J. paused for breath. “Looks like they’re serious,” she said. “I’d better tell the others; you guys should get some rest while you can. You’ve both been up for days.”

“No rest for the Wiccan,” the driver announced as he reached into the back seat for a hardened steel pinch bar. “I think we could use a small landslide about now.”

“Or even a big one,” B.J. agreed with a grin. “You’d better tell Jarrah to get on the blower and call for reinforcements; I think we’re about to be seriously outnumbered.” Georgia gave a brisk nod and turned on her heel. “And we need to know whether they’ve set up the tripods and the other roadblock yet,” she called over her shoulder as she began jogging away down the narrow road. “Don’t get too carried away with the landslide…”

“Make sure he uses code,” B.J. yelled after her. He dropped into the passenger seat beside the older shaman. “I guess it’s unlikely they’ll be listening in on the seaphones, but you never know,” he murmured. “Got a joint for an old digger?” The shaman flipped a long spliff into his lap and opened the driver’s door. “Let’s light it up on the way.” He carefully removed the long steel bar to avoid scratching the duco as he climbed from the car.

There was no moon at this hour and a gentle breeze was rapidly freshening into a cool winter wind that sloughed through the tall subtropical treetops. After a few moments their eyes picked out a scattering of stars shining down through the thick clouds and interlacing canopies that covered their mountaintop vantage. The gravel road was a pale band of luminescence amidst an unseen landscape of shadowy hummocks and barely discernible tall pillars, rearing upward into masses of leafy darkness that swayed in the night, way above their long haired heads.

“I didn’t think they’d bring in the damn cherry picker so soon,” Ram’s friend declared as the distant rumbling slowly grew inexorably louder. B.J.’s footsteps approached around the dark glittery bulk of the car and their night vision was temporarily ruined when a cigarette lighter flamed between his cupped hands. Puffs of fragrant smoke were carried off on the westerly wind as his worried features shone with a ruddy gleam. His whisper was blown away with the smoke; “I’ll cover the road with an obstacle course while you loosen the boulders.” He took another quick puff and handed the joint to the shaman. “Do you want to stash the car?”

“It’ll make a good last-ditch roadblock if it stays where it is.” He consecrated the fuming number before taking a deep drag.

“Better lock it, then.”

“The steering lock is on and it’ll only jam up against the rock face if anyone tries to move it. I’ll try to get the landslide going a little further up the road. If we’re lucky we’ve already trapped all their heavy equipment in the log dump, and we might actually be able to slow them up for a while; until they unchain the girls.” He hefted the bar and began striding uphill, passing the joint to his friend. “You’d better have the rest; we may not have time for another one…”

“Well,” B.J. announced, “looks like it’s finally happening. Do you really think it’ll work?” Ram’yana stopped and turned to face a glowing red point in the darkness. “Of course,” he laughed as he butted the bar’s point into the gravel. “We’re totally outnumbered and they’ll get past whatever we throw in their way, but something will work; we just have to hold them up long enough, however we can.” He heard his friend’s voice snicker as he watched the burning tip of the joint nod up and down. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were delusional,” the younger hippy announced.

“I am delusional,” the shaman replied. “It’s just that my delusions have a habit of manifesting.”

“That’s why I’m here,” B.J. said softly, “instead of down at the tripods with the others.” He followed the shaman uphill as their returning night vision confirmed the configuration of the rugged landscape - whose delineaments they knew intimately, after years invested in exploring the remote threatened forests that surrounded their home. An unearthly chattering sound soared over their heads, spanning a gap in the canopy over the road as they froze on the spot. “There’s one now,” B.J. hissed. “Why don’t they believe us?”

“Yellow bellies,” Ram confirmed. He watched the distant shadowy silhouettes of a family of extraordinary gliding marsupials as they flittered across the brightening sky from one massive Tallowwood tree to an even more humungous assemblage of mighty boughs, chittering and chattering as they traversed ancestral sky-paths known only to their highly rarefied and endangered kind. “There are none so blind…”

“As those who choose not to see…”

“…as those who choose to only conduct surveys for endangered nocturnal animals in the daytime.”

The younger man stepped off the crunching gravel and disappeared behind a roadside clump of lantana. “And they clock off to leave the forest well before sunset.”

“I’ll meet you back here,” Ram said as he continued up the road. “If they start coming this way you’ll hear the usual signal.” The conservationists had developed a code of bird and animal cries; calls of native creatures that didn’t exist in this particular region – a fact which the police and even most forest-savvy loggers would almost certainly have no way of knowing. As Ram’yana hefted the heavy bar up the road the sounds of crunching timber announced the start of B.J.’s solo blockading effort.

The shaman had previously scouted a rocky slope where basalt and schist boulders balanced precariously, perched directly above a particularly narrow and precipitous stretch of roadway. As he approached the steep hillside the sounds of machinery labouring uphill and the crunch of hastily shifted gears drifted across from the next ridge. Almost here…

Climbing the hill with the heavy bar was far more difficult in the dark of night than during his unencumbered daylight scrambles. The extremely valuable and xpensive TV-quality 3CCD video camera was an intractable burden, its unforgivingly hard case slung across his back like a grossly impeding carapace; he hadn’t cared to leave the case in the Fnord, which was worth a fraction of the camera and was far more easily replaced. He bore his boxy cross with the stoicism of a dedicated war correspondent, ready to document the impending Battle for Little Wonder with a mixture of resignation, trepidation, giddy euphoria and surprising relief.

If he hadn’t already traversed the slope a couple of times, clambering across the loose cliff face in his semi-exhausted state would have been an even more foolhardy act than it was proving to be. He knew tiger and brown snakes inhabited the rocky defile, but trusted that the poisonous reptilian guardians were snug in their crevices at this time of night. Stones clattered to the road below as he crawled toward the exposed fangs of elongated boulders, sharp black shadowy sentinels surveying their horizon-spanning rainforest domain.

As he approached a patch of steep rocks that created a small clearing on a sparsely forested section of the landslide-prone slope, the cloud cover frayed into tatters in the freshening wind and the steep path became more clearly illumined by glimmering starlight. He dragged the bar up the last of the defile to the place where the guardian rocks had jutted across the star field for thousands or millions of years and hunkered behind a ragged dolmen, closing his eyes to concentrate on the sounds of forest, foresters and forest defenders.

Soft thuds and crashes came to him on the rising wind from the area where B.J. was dragging logs, rocks, branches and anything else large enough to impede lighter traffic out of the forest and across the muddy road. ’T’would be easier with more of us, the shaman mused. Another portion of his awareness countered his internalised suggestion; No matter how many more, you’d still be up here doing this alone… The squealing brakes of a prime mover ripped through his dichotomous reverie. The cherry picker’s here…

He climbed to his feet on the steep angle of the slope, leaning against the pointiest boulder – and the massive rock shifted slightly beneath his relatively inconsequential weight. This one really wants to go, he decided as he pressed his shoulder against the mass and heaved. It only moved another few inches before lodging firmly in place and he inserted the pinch bar into the narrow gap that had opened beneath it. He leaned around the lichen-clad stone, inhaling its dry flinty scent as he tried to see where the boulder would most likely fall.

A small, many-legged something ran across one of his hands – a reminder that he was about to destroy the entire world of a multitude of tiny life forms – and he consoled himself in the knowledge that in this case, the ends might just justify the means. It was an old point of contention amongst various bands of forest protectors, who were riven with factions like any other group; building tripods, tree sits, traps, roadblocks, forest camps and other defences often entailed damaging small sections of the forests they were saving.

The saplings and vines that went into their constructions were sometimes sourced from less sensitive woodlands, laboriously carted up mountains by the staunchest ferals and greenies; large sections of bamboo formed many of the structures in this particular mountaintop redoubt, painstakingly sourced from Ram’s home in the valley thousands of feet below. Yet there was always a last-minute need for local materials, and the shaman assured himself he was working for he greater good as he lifted the bar with all his strength.

The dolmen began to move as he added his weight to its bulk. It hung shivering on the brink, sacrificing a cascade of tiny stones before slowly beginning to topple. Ram threw his body backward onto the high slope as the ponderous rock teetered for a doubtful moment before hurling itself toward the roadway amidst a clattering of ancillary stones. A roll of terrestrial thunder marked its rapid passage and a great thumping crash presaged a series of lesser concussions as the boulder bounded down the road.

The soaring flight of Ram’s sudden optimism sank like a lead zeppelin when he heard the dolmen crash off the far side of the track; it continued bouncing and smashing through the forest for an alarmingly long time, crashing hundreds of metres toward the valley floor while he gritted his teeth at the stars. Gusts of wind tore at his long green velvet cloak and blew swathes of long hair into eyes and mouth.

The next boulder landed precisely where he’d hoped, and after an hour of blistering and dangerous vandalism the shaman was ready to climb down and crowbar the assembled materials into position. Even with the slightly better illumination provided by the Milky Way, climbing down was much harder than ascending. A bitter wind was rising to roar through the canopy and Ram’s eyes kept scanning toward the tree-hid eastern horizon for the first false dawn until he finally forgot his worries and dropped to the roadside in a cloud of dust.

After a short smoky breather he went back to work with a refortified and relentlessly plodding zeal. When he’d rolled rocks of all sizes into a road-spanning barrier around the locus of the collapsed section of hillside, he began to fill in the gaps in his improvised landslide with fallen sections of dead tree trunks and branches that the boulders had knocked onto the road. He worked in the dark, only turning the flashlight on for the briefest instants whenever he felt certain no one was approaching.

When he was finally done, the resultant rocky firewall was ready to douse with diesel or petrol and ignite into an impassable little conflagration. There was a large break in the canopy above the cliffside section of road, and recent rains had ensured there was little possibility of the fire spreading. Nonetheless, the rising wind presented him with a quandary; leaving the fire unlit would delay the loggers for a little while – considering that their heavy earthmoving equipment was currently on the wrong side of a varied series of blockading barriers – but setting the barrier alight would ensure no vehicles would be able to pass for many hours. It was too dangerous to bulldoze a burning firewall into flammable forest and this single obstacle could hold up the Earth rapists without the need for anyone to be arrested – unlike many of the forest defenders’ other tricks of the trade.

The loggers’ bulldozers and road making grader had been captured by a dedicated band of young dreadlocked ferals, who’d chained themselves to the machinery inside the logging coup despite the permanent presence of armed security guards and the murderous reputations of the equipment’s owners. Yet now that a busload of police had finally arrived, there was no telling how long their various impediments would hold up before they were all carted away and thrown behind bars.

But that can’t happen, the shaman decided with a firming resolve that was strangely incongruous under the circumstances. I promised everyone they wouldn’t be arrested…

He hoisted the heavy bar onto one shoulder and walked down the hill. There’s still time to light it, he told himself as he approached the first of the low but effective barriers that B.J. had assembled across the road. Every little bit counted – unless the loggers could reclaim their machinery, in which case all the hard-won evidence of their efforts would be gone in a few minutes. But the nearest replacement equipment was a couple of days away at the least, and the dozers in the compartments which were slated to be destroyed had young women chained and otherwise locked onto their blades and tracks, and were secured behind kilometres of tripods, landslides, tree-sits and more exotic blockading devices.

He looked at the mound of rocks and tree fragments. But if I set fire to it… A sudden gust arose out of nowhere, making up his mind with a display of undeniable synchrony. Maybe not… we can always light it up later…

In another few minutes he was back in the little red sports car, reclining against the headrest while B.J. passed him another well-earned smoke. “Why don’t you catch a few winks – I’ll let you know as soon as anything happens,” his dirt-encrusted friend suggested. Ram’s body felt like a stretched sack crammed full of splintering sticks and crumbling stones; “Aye; you’ve talked me into it. It’s been a long night.”

“It’s been a long year,” B.J. averred, “and this blockade’s been a longer time coming. Congratulations!” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “You did it!” Ram’s sardonic dash-lit glance dampened his friend’s enthusiasm. “Not yet,” the shaman replied. “And congratulations would be more fitting if we hadn’t come to this impasse… but thanks, anyway – and congrats to you, too!” They shook hands in the elaborate seven-stage Rainbow Grip while the car filled with smoke.

Ram didn’t believe he’d find sleep when the passenger door closed and B.J. returned uphill for a scout. There was no way of knowing how much time they had before the cops and loggers arrived, or what they’d do when they encountered the protesters. Yet the thoughts racing through his mind wove together in the merest of moments, forming a tapestry of memories centred on his vanished paramour’s glistening smile.

*

A true story

Continues…

- R.A.

Images – author’s

For Further Wild Life Tales See

Springs Eternal – Wild Life Part 1

Little Wonder – Wild Life 2

Matched – Wild Life 3

*

For Further True Tales of the Prince of Centraxis -

Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1

Psychedelic Water Part 1

Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra Part 1

Latest – http://centraxis.blogspot.com

And see

The New Illuminati

Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images

Save the World from RamPage

TimeSpace

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com

Wild Life, Eve Madonna, Down With All Fuehrers

Wild Life

Eve Madonna

Down With All Fuehrers

Stranger in a Strange Land - Shaman of Centraxis 18

Stranger in a Strange Land

Shaman of Centraxis 18

*

“One of the first things I saw on my first trip – it was an orange barrel, a small tab a little bigger than a microdot – was a completely detailed x-ray view of my body. I looked down at my leg and could see all the veins pumping away in shades of red and purple and blue, and all the nerves were yellow strings and masses distributed in a glowing network around my bones and muscles.

“I looked at my hand and arm, and they were the same; all my joints were clearly articulated; every separate part was visible, all interlocking in a seamless throbbing cooperative; when I focused on any detail, it magnified and became much clearer.” The teenage shaman licks rice paper with a darting tongue-tip and absently rolls the grass joint into a near-perfect tube.

“It’s true, what they say,” Leo observes. “You Northerners don’t use filters, do you?” Ram’yana smiles briefly and continues; “When I looked at everyone else in the room they were all perfectly normal – except that I could see their auras, and colours were swimming all over their skin; and all the other tripping people had the same light glowing in their eyes, unlike the rest of the party. But I couldn’t see right through them unless I really concentrated.” He rips a strip of card from the packet of papers and rolls it into a small cylindrical spiral. “When I looked down at this body it was automatic - all my organs were alive and individually conscious – all communicating with each other - and everything was surrounded by light.”

Leo crosses his legs and cups his chin in his hand. “So you believe people have auras?” Ram’yana fixes the other lad with an unblinking stare, unsure whether to openly declare his unusual beliefs to his naturally sceptical friend. He’s accustomed to Leo enacting the role of mentor in their conversations, and as he speaks with the slightly older teenager he feels a little uncomfortable with the shoe on the other foot. “I do,” he says. “And you do, too – it’s a green flame with an orange core, and blue flashes and blobs are circling your eyes. There’s a slowly swirling spiral of purple moving around your head like a smoky turban. If you relax your attention and look for a minute…” Leo returns his stare and they sit in silence for half a minute as they stare into each other’s eyes. “All right,” he says. “Go on.”

“Later that same night…” the shaman begins, but Leo interrupts; “I can sort of see a fringe around your head and shoulder, but it may be a trick of the light.” He glances at his feet and shakes his unkempt mop of hair. “How long did it last?” His dark eyes traverse the shaman’s body and fix upon his face.

“All night, really – but I was peaking out for two or three hours. The rest was a lot more contemplative and peaceful; less of an uncontrollable roller-coaster ride – except for the part where I lost my virginity.” He addresses his friend’s inquiry when he sees that Leo is preparing to interrupt; “It was my sixteenth birthday. Anyway, later on, when the party had wound down, I was waiting for a saucepan to boil - and you know what they say about watched pots…” He squeezes the small cardboard spiral into the end of the joint. “It seemed to take hours to boil, though it was probably only a few minutes. While I stared into the water I could see the flames of the gas jets outlined inside the liquid – their shapes went right through the metal pot and wavered like holograms inside the water; the liquid held the forms, perfectly visible as extended jets of fire. The tips of the flames were the places where the bubbles started to form on the surface. There were six of them, in a perfect hexagonal lotus, rising up inside the water like extensions of the flaming jets beneath the pot.”

He notices that Leo’s eyes are glazing over. “You see?” he says. “I told you it was hard to describe…”

“No, no,” Leo demurs as his eyes snap back into focus, “that’s really amazing. I was just trying to visualise it… It’s sort of like I thought it might be, after reading John Lilley.” He reaches toward the top of the piano and retrieves a paperback, balancing The Doors of Perception on one knee as he leans back on the stool. “And do you have… I don’t know, insights? Does acid enlighten you - and do you think it can be dangerous?” Ram’yana smiles as he takes a breath; the question is one he’s heard – and answered to his own satisfaction – remarkably often. “As Leary says, ‘it’s all a matter of set and setting’,” he quotes. “And purity, of course; you only score from a dealer who drops what they sell themselves.” His mind spins for a moment at the double entendre.

“Your mindset and the setting you’re tripping in have to be and feel just right – preferably in natural surrounds away from the city, in a place where you feel perfectly comfortable and can let it all hang out - otherwise you can get overpoweringly paranoid, or otherwise have a real bummer. It’s best if you’re tripping with good friends, somewhere exceptionally beautiful and comfortable – and the same is true for mushrooms, natch.”

“So I’ve heard. Have you had any bummers?” He stares at the shaman while Ram’yana pauses to phrase his response. “Quite a few,” he admits after a lengthening interval. “The trip magnifies whatever it is that you’re going through – or whatever you have to work out in yourself. But I’ll keep on taking it – though not too often. You need to leave at least a few weeks between trips, to recharge the batteries.”

“Or brain cells. Do you develop a tolerance?”

“That’s one reason,” Ram’yana agrees. “Though I wouldn’t worry about brain damage - not unless you think you’re a bird and jump off a cliff or out of a window; and those stories are really just urban myths, you know,” he hurriedly adds. “You can’t believe those bullshit stories; you’d have to already be seriously unhinged to do something that stupid, or at very least mixing your drugs – unless you were easily led, and allowed yourself to be hypnotised by someone like Charlie Manson, maybe.” He reaches for the box of Redheads. “But you need time to assimilate a trip – it’s a life-changing experience, and waiting for your tolerance to diminish is a safeguard. The visuals are amazing, but they’re just the icing on the cake.”

Leo riffles the pages of The Doors of Perception. “So what’s the cake itself taste like, then?”

“Oh, God…” Glimmerings of the continuing story that his higher faculties parade before Ram’s monkey mind return to him as Leo awaits further elucidation. “Uhh…” A magnificent tale of epic proportions unfolds through his inner landscape, a multivolume Book of Life interspersed with episodes of science fiction and adventure serials – some of a series of preliminary short flicks that have preceded each climactic peak of every feature-length trip during the young shaman’s year-long experiences with LSD.

He goggles as his mind reels, awed afresh at the import of living legendry, incorporating his resurrected being into an ancient and continuing nonlinear lineage - a tapestried narrative of interwoven ancestors and descendents that stretches between the poles of time in infinite curling helices. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, and I know it sounds stupid…” He struggles for words. “All I can say,” he finally declares, “is that evolution isn’t over; and that there was – and is - a war in heaven…”

At that moment a rapping sounds on Leo’s door. Ram’yana conceals the oversized joint in his hand when his friend’s grey-haired yet blossom-cheeked mother enters the room with a tray of gefiltefish canapés. “Don’t mind me,” she says in a well-concealed Polish accent, “but I was sure you’d be hungry. Your friend looks so skinny, Leo! Do I know your parents?” She sees the way her son’s guest eyes the comestibles. “You aren’t a vegetarian, are you?” The word is tinged with a blend of suspicion and sympathy. “Fish aren’t meat, you know.”

“Almost,” Ram’yana replies. “But I still eat fish. Thanks so much!” When his mother has finally left her son and his friend to enjoy the oily preserved fish, Leo wipes his hands on his trousers and spins the stool around to face the piano. “Do you mind I play something for you? I wrote it myself.” He locks his hands together and flexes his arms, cracking his fingers and swiftly opens the keyboard cover before his guest can respond. For the next forty-five minutes an extraordinary outpouring of melodic arpeggios and complex chords weave an intricate yet breathtakingly uplifting tapestry of sound; a symphonic creation which fills the boxy bedchamber with all the heart-felt passion of Leo’s unsullied delight.

Yet even as he sits enthralled by his talented friend’s amazing concerto, thoughts of Natasha fill an increasing proportion of Ram’s attention. Her alluring image is accompanied by a weird mix of inspiring lust, empathic concern, curious anticipation, compassionate regard - and the nascent glow of wonderfully blossoming and tenderly growing love.

He yearns to tell Leo about his accidental meeting with the girl they both knew so well when they were all younger teens – and to subtly grill him about anything he knows of Natasha or her family. Yet he can’t bring himself to betray the unspoken pact that lingers between them, imbuing him with a distinct redolence of her heartfelt trust in his discretion; he recalls the desperate hope that shone in Nasher’s tear-swollen eyes when he’d assured her he’d return on the morrow. How can I possibly ask Leo for information or advice without alerting him to my suspicions?

When the impromptu performance draws to a resonant conclusion Ram’yana draws his consciousness back to the room and greets the last reverberations of the final chord with effusive applause. “That was really something else!” he crows, leaning forward to read the handwritten sheet of musical notation sitting on the piano. “And you’ve written it all down note for note?”

“Yep,” Leo agrees, “Just like the real thing.”

“Wow, man – I never knew you were so good. That was fantastic!”

“I’ve written some songs, too, but… you really liked it?” Leo’s expression betrays an insecure suspicion that he’s merely being flattered by his old friend. “It was great!” Ram’yana assures him. “You need to record it!”

“It’s not quite finished…”

“Well record it anyway!” the shaman encourages him with an effusive thumbs up. Leo slumps on the piano stool and rotates from side to side on the circular seat that surmounts the thick wooden spiral. He flicks his long black fringe from his eyes and a forlorn look slowly dislodges the enraptured expression that lingered after the music’s reverberations had faded to inaudibility. “What’s the point?” he sighs. “I could never be a musician.”

“Why not? You are a musician, Leo – like it or not.”

“Oh I like it,” he agrees, reaching for a canapé. “Love it, in fact. But let’s face it, it’ll never pay the bills – and my parents would go nuts…” He crunches down on the slimy fish and the cracker crumbles onto his lap. “They expect me to go into law – they’ve given up on medicine.”

“But what do you want to do? You don’t really want to be a lawyer, do you?” The shaman almost spits the word out with a venomous disbelief. “Are you kidding?” Leo glares at him incredulously. “Who in their right mind would want to be a fucking lawyer?” He smoothes his hair and wipes crumbs from his chin before brushing the detritus from his lap. “If it was possible, I’d like to try a career as a musician… maybe get together with some guys and form a band… but it’s just not going to happen in real life.” His hand drops to the keyboard and a diminished minor seventh vibrates through the sudden stillness of the plastered chamber. “Except as a hobby…” Ram’yana tries to open a chink of hope in his friend’s hangdog demeanour. “Is there anything else you can see yourself doing – and enjoying?” he asks. What about writing? You were always a great storyteller…”

“Funny you should mention it.” Leo spins around on the stool to face his friend and his eyes begin to regain their glimmering lustre. “I’ve been toying with the idea of becoming a journalist – but my father says ‘Look what happened in Balibo.’ But then, he thinks walking through a foreign city is still as dangerous as it was in the war.

“But that’s something I might be able to do – if I can get a cadetship on some great metropolitan newspaper or other.” He closes the piano’s cover. “I could be Clark Kent, maybe; but music?” he sighs. “No way, I’m afraid. What about you?” he asks the Centraxian shaman with a brightening effusiveness. “What do you want to be - when you grow up?”

*

The Cold Wanderer glares through the narrow chain-fastened slit of the suburban front door. Dark frames around the screens of his eyeglasses appear beside a tattered bumper sticker that reads ‘Maintain the Rage!’ “Oh,” he says, “It’s you.” Ram’yana frowns through the slim gap while his friend undoes the chain. “Expecting someone else?”

“Not exactly; yer have a pretty thick hide comin’ back here so soon. Must be foolhardy bravery – or desperation.” Wanderer shakes his head as he closes the door in Ram’s face and the chain rattles out of its groove. “Y’always were a hardy fool.” The door swings wide to reveal the bearded Centraxian tactician’s frowning countenance. His skinny frame is clad in an incongruously neat black polo-neck jumper and his normally woolly beard has been trimmed to a shadow of its former wildness, reduced to a grizzly echo of his jawline. “So yer old friends weren’t so friendly after all?” His usual grin returns as he shakes his head. “Well, yer in luck; Penny and Dot’ve split fer a couple of days and Loren reckons it’s okay fer yer to crash while they’re gone.”

The teenage shaman shoulders his way past his blood brother and hesitates in the communal flat’s cluttered hallway. “How fortuitous,” he remarks, eyes scanning loosely stacked piles of Rimbaud, Plath, Kant, Marx, Engels, Neitche, Dostoyevsky, Krishnamurti, Jung and a leftie librarian’s hit parade of philosophers and professional thinkers. He heads for the lounge room while Wanderer closes the door and clips the privacy chain back onto its brass slide. “What happened to yer pack?” he asks the back of Ram’s head. “It’s in a safe place,” the shaman assures his travelling partner over his shoulder as he traverses the obstacle course of the communal flat.

He steps over a magazine rack and drops onto the couch, returning his friend’s quizzical grin with a matching smile. “You’re looking unusually neat and tidy.” The slightly older man grimaces and walks into the kitchen. “And you’re lookin’ unusually clean,” Wanderer parries. “Caffeine?” he inquires as he rummages through cabinets and drawers. As far as the Cold Wanderer is concerned it’s never too late or early for another cup of coffee.

“Sure. Loren isn’t here?” Ram’yana automatically glances at the huge silent black and white television which dominates the small lounge room. He toys with the notion of pressing the square ignition switch for a moment before realising that white noise will be the only show in town; all stations cease transmission after midnight in Bleak City, just as they do in the metropolis of his birth. The lowered tones of his comrade’s Canadian accent drift into the room. “She’s asleep – uni tomorrow.” Ram’yana automatically scans the piles of reading material which spill from the hallway to line the edges of the lounge room, searching for an edifying distraction from his romantic concerns.

“It’s cool with her if yer crash here,” Wanderer confirms while the sound of running water reminds his young friend that he needs to visit the loo, “but only ’til the other girls get back. Yer better be out of here before tomorrow night. If Penny sees yer she’ll be ropeable. Here,” he says as he leans into the room, throwing a thick paperback onto Ram’s lap. “Try this – it’s one yer might dig.”

Ram’yana stares at the author’s name on the thick book’s cover, printed in much larger lettering than the title. “Another Heinlein, eh?” Wanderer bestows his patented glare on the younger Centraxian. “The Heinlein,” he corrects the mage in a tone laden with graven certitude. “Never mind about Starship Troopers – this’s the only Heinlein yer really have to read. I’m surprised yer haven’t grokked it yet; I saw a copy back at J.J.’s place.”

“Our place, you mean?” the younger Centraxian inquires rhetorically. “I hadn’t noticed; it must be his. Appropriate title,” he observes, noting from the blurb on the front cover that the tome is a Hugo Award winner. “Stranger in a Strange Land. Never had a copy in my hands before…”

“That’s ’cause not many people want to part with it after they’ve read it – unless they know someone they want to turn on. And it’s more appropriate than yer may think,” Wanderer calls softly from the kitchen. “Y’can hang onto it for a few days; it’s Loren’s.” Clattering cutlery precedes his re-entry into the living room; he flings a packet of biscuits onto the low coffee table while his friend opens the book at a dog-eared page. “If yer hangin’ around, that is. Better start at the beginning with that one,” he advises as Ram’yana scans a random paragraph.

“Just testing,” says the shaman. Thoughts and visions of his rediscovered girlfriend keep obtruding across the wriggly field of printed characters. He finds it unusually difficult to concentrate on the sci-fi classic, and when a strong mug of instant coffee arrives a minute later the slight jolt of adrenaline barely makes a dint in Ram’s inebriated languor. He closes the book and watches Wanderer watching him over the rim of his mug.

He fairly bursts with the news of his extraordinarily coincidental meeting with Natasha, but fears that if he starts to mention their encounter the entire tale of their rudely interrupted union will fountain forth in an embarrassingly revelatory torrent. Although he’s overheard many frank and specific descriptions of various women’s sexual talents, proclivities and peccadilloes while working behind lighting desks in pubs and clubs, the idealistic young shaman’s carefully cultivated sense of discretion always ends any discussions of his own ‘conquests’ before they can commence. Unlike many or most unreconstructed pre-feminist males, he keeps intimacies private and doesn’t divulge pillow talk to his contemporaries – not even to his blood brothers.

Beer-swilling footballers and cricket players in the uptight straight world of violent drunks are invariable sexists and chauvinistic pigs, almost to a man. They bandy details of their dalliances – fanciful, factual or thoroughly embellished - to friends and strangers in a rank competitive pecking order pervading every aspect of their boring and boorish daily lives. Most sincere feminists avoid such fraudulent scenes of male piggery like the plague - although many otherwise intelligent women follow in their mothers’ footsteps, drawn to the very type of men they loathe and fear; just like their fathers.

Very few of Ram’s male associates in the alternative environment of the hippy counter culture reveal the precious details of their relationships with their lovers and spouses. Any conversation about their ladies’ lovemaking talents or sexual abilities and proclivities is regarded as a breach of honour and a distinct invasion of privacy among his peers in the Court of Centraxis – even though many share the love of the same girls and women, often at the selfsame time.

Their sense of discretion isn’t entirely due to an inherent sense of nobility; more intelligent males generally realise it’s oft unwise to provide potential rivals with any tips on seducing one’s spouse or girlfriend. They see little point in encouraging further competition or desire for their beloved mates in the males that always surround them. This isn’t the major motive for Ram’s current reticence; the passionate compassion that warms his breast and loins whenever he thinks of his lovely young girlfriend builds an unbroachable barrier around the details of their interaction. Besides; how could he possibly explain their relationship – or Natasha’s challenging behaviour - to his Canadian blood brother?

“Loren and I are goin’ to Mont Salvat tomorrow,” Wanderer announces. “D’yer want to come along?” The hippies have often discussed the famous artist’s commune in the most southerly mainland state’s distant foothills. They’d agreed to visit the inspiring location during a rural side-trip on their current sojourn in Bleak City. Yet Ram’s mind remains fixed on the girl of his dreams. “Uh,” he mutters, “Tomorrow? I’m not sure… I think I have a date.”

The Cold Wanderer grunts in reply; the science fiction aficionado turns his attention to a relatively new groundbreaking work by Samuel R. Delaney. “Found yerself a princess, hmm?” He doesn’t glance up when Ram’yana puts his mug down on the table and leans back into the recesses of the lounge. “Thought that was a love bite.” The silence xtends until he raises an entirely different subject; “Loren reckons we ought to ring the cops...” Ram’s eyes flash from the page to the face of his friend, who continues speaking into the open book. “…about those loggers.”

The young shaman is still so absorbed in the events of the evening that it takes him a moment to decipher his friend’s meaning. “And tell them what, exactly?” he asks. “That we jumped out of a car before anything happened? Or that they were drunk drivers carrying guns? The fuzz would be more likely to haul us in…”

“That’s what I said to Loren – but she reckons if we don’t tell the pigs – anonymously, at least – those arseholes will probably kill someone. And she’s probably right, y’know; we’re lucky to be alive.” His pale blue eyes flicker at the shaman through distorting lenses.

“Don’t let me stop ye,” Ram’yana replies as he glances at the vertical space-age curved telephone handset sitting upright on the table like a misshapen bong. “But make sure the call’s made from a public phone.” Wanderer grunts in reply. “Dost ye have any idea where they picked us up – or even the place where we escaped onto the highway?”

“Within a fifty mile stretch or so,” the Canadian says with a shrug. “I told Loren there wouldn’t be much point…” As Ram’yana recalls their potentially deadly encounter with the drunken redneck hillbillies a strange blend of anger, thrill and trepidation swells within him. “Didst get their number plate? Not I – certes not while we were hiding in the forest.”

“Nah,” Wanderer confirms. “No way. But we could give the pigs their description and tell them the make of the station wagon; I think it was an EJ Olden…” The notion of calling the police is so outlandish to the young hippies that Ram’yana has a hard time grappling with the concept. He closes the book with a sigh. “I suppose if those bastards picked up a couple of girls – or a single guy hitching – we’d be partly responsible for anything that happened,” he says after an extending pause. “It couldn’t hurt to tell the cops. Probably.”

“Maybe I’ll do it in the morning,” the Cold Wander mumbles as he gulps down the last of his coffee.

Later, as he reclines in a comfortable nook that Wanderer has arranged for him in the flat’s concrete-floored laundry, the teenage mage finds he’s been rereading the first page of the thick old Heinlein paperback, unable to concentrate on letters, syllables or words; a vision splendid soon fills his internal world, leaving no room for other concerns.

Her name resonates through his dreams, an evocative word that repeats silently and automatically, over and again as the Centraxian shaman drifts into a particularly appealing yet challenging vision quest; “Natasha…”

*

“Atoh, Malkuth, Ve Geburah, Ve Gedulah, Le Olahm, Amen!” The nubile dark-haired priestess of the Great Goddess completes her ancient Hebrew invocation of the primordial Cross. Palms thrust upward toward heaven, she resembles a feminine teenage Atlas supporting the lowering roof of a raw stone grotto. Slick rocky surfaces frame her compact form, barely perceivable in a swirling mantle of shadow. The recurving surfaces of her ripe conical breasts arch upward, glowing with sinuous ripples of lunar light reflected from the wavering pool at her unshod feet.

She leans back into silvering rays of a half-occluded moon, a stark revelation of snowily pallid beauty in the pervasive tenebrous gloom. The girl’s finely chiselled features flare in argent beams streaming through holes in the cavern roof. Her lustrous dark hair is wound up atop her head into twin conical spirals and her smile is warm and inviting to legions of flittering spirits that hover all around, flickering just at the brink of perception. A low murmur begins in the depths of her throat, only gradually becoming audible as a repetitive series of divine names; “Asherah, Aloah, Anat, Ba’al…”

The syllables resonate through the dripping grotto, the priestess’s musical contralto resounding from faceted walls and awakening forgotten memories that vibrate within Ram’s supine body as waves of indistinct sprites spread into toroids and helixes like a swarm of ectoplasmic insects. The shaman recognises ancient names of the Babylonian-Hebrew-Canaanite heavenly family, primordial archetypes from the earliest Talmud and even more original pre-Biblical texts and traditions.

The divine mother, father, daughter and son predate the predatory priests of Jehovah, who all but erased their names from human memory and replaced their balanced familial pantheon – along with those of myriad matriarchies and a plethora of various fair-minded, enlightened, ruthless or savage cultures – with the monomaniacal warlike rants of their uber-male newcomer, the one-eyed mad warrior sky god of the Tetragrammaton.

The shaman prince should know; he comes from the line of high priests who carried the Ark alongside the Redeemer, officiated in the rituals to and sacraments of the living deity who masqueraded as Jehovah, and bore the resultant stigmas (and concomitant elevating or fracturing psychic stigmata) for thousands of years thereafter.

He lays unmoving beneath the young priestess on a rude stone altar, peering into liquid moonbeams that limn her naked young body in a luminous wavering nimbus. Her chant twists and weaves through other shifting voices that echo inside his braincase, a phantasmagorical chorus of chaotically contradictory yet strangely dovetailing images and instructions which stream through the young man’s being;

Her ancestors are thine… Some spirits were closer to the Divine Breath when it blew across the waters of Creation… Open thine heart… Deep red blood fed bowl, shining with fullness… Giving font of needful creation… The moment of wonder is never far away… Truth and virtue are the bread of blessing… The Goddess is all… Only the empty open vessel is filled by the divine… Drift within the inner circle… The mind will come to understand… Cease striving to serve… Io Pan… All bounty flows from the womb of the Goddess… Taste the fruit of the vine… She is thy doorway back into the fold… The glorious pulse of silver seed, passing from plane to plane… Mind to mind, heart to heart… The inner sense of innocence will guide thy inward passage…

A cool feathery sensation flitters against the centre of Ram’s breastbone, recalling his attention to the glorious feral feminine vision that rears above him in the damp dark cave of uncarven stone. The priestess’s upper face is masked by shadows ’neath her thick coiled horns of spiralling hair; twin glittering points of light shine down at him from the pits of dark eye sockets while her tongue darts between delectable moonlit lips and flashing teeth, an awe-inspiring sibyl weaving multiplex sibilant spells over his semiconscious soul. Her fingertips flicker across his exposed surfaces like stones skipping across the swelling meniscus of a pond that awaits an approaching storm.

The young teen quivers at the thrill of feminine fingertips playing teasing notes across the monochrome ivory keyboard of his smooth nude body. Limber fingers dance and trip along his skin, all the way from Ram’s upturned toes to the top of his long-haired crown. Fingernails skim along goose pimpled skin and when a warm feminine hand incidentally brushes against his irrepressible tumescence the untameable drug of a wild rush of lust rips through his racing blood.

A shuddering shiver caroms through his spine. He yearns to move, to reach up and caress her body in return, but his limbs remain leaden and immobile on the granular stone as her staccato tickling touch raises his senses to a vibrant pitch of utterly receptive longing.

The supplicant on the altar decides he must be little more than a source of young yang energy and a ritual tool to the wise young priestess, yet not a mere plaything; he knows from long training that he’s the ongoing focus of her continuing invocation as she calls upon the ancient divine family of humanity’s archetypal dawn. Or is it an evocation? he wonders as spiralling spirits surround his recumbent form. Distant lights twinkle and glow beyond an all pervasive veiling aura, wilful phantasms of indefinite resolution sparkling and whispering within the cavernous space. Alluring vaporous scents fill his nostrils with intimations of a half remembered promise as her fingers glide upward across his parted lips and seal his blinking eyelids.

All that we can see or seem… Surrender all thought, all desire to control… The moment of wonder… Is but a dream… A shatan names thee… Sunder what’s mortal in the pyre of the soul… Within a dream… Thunder down under… Hers is the voice of a great shatan… Is never far away… She knows both ways…

The babble continues, leading the shaman onward to follow an underlying thread of meaning through an apparently random labyrinth of synchronous concepts and images. He feels the priestess lean down over his recumbent form and his eyelids slit open to the subterranean moonlit fantasia. She blesses him with drops of sacred oil that she flicks from her eyes as transforming forms circle her in a fey masque of shifting masks. Droplets spring from her fingertips and drizzle down onto his chest, sinking through his surface and spreading out beneath his skin with a vivid heated rush.

Then she speaks a new spell, a low chant that he barely comprehends beneath the circling sight of unseen whisperers; “Isis, Astarte, Hecate, Demeter, Diana, Kali, Inana…” Her voice is vaguely familiar and completely mesmerising as she repeats the spell with ever concentrating intensity. “Isis, Astarte, Hecate, Demeter, Diana, Kali, Inana…” Other voices join the breathy tones of the ethereally beautiful priestess as he’s lulled into the cyclic song of the seven Great Goddesses; Seven Mothers, Seven Daughters, Seven Sisters and their Seven Consorts. The feminine principles of all seven chakras light up into a dazzling rainbow spreading outward from his spine as the names of their respective goddesses are evoked into his subtle bodies. His eyes open onto a sightless horizon of sparkling infinitude while colours concentrate into glowing crystalline gemstones in the centreline of his scintillating being.

Fractal flowers of expanding geometries blossom and spin within his body, mind, soul and spirit as the Names flow though him, syllables blending into a continuous cant as twin serpents uncoil from his roots and weave up his spine, bowing outward and in, to cross and recross across and around the glowing rainbow vessels of his chakras – tiny crystals shining at magnetising nodes in the octaval chord of his being. He’s dimly aware of several unseen presences circling the altar and a series of seven divine male names reverberate in an ascending scale, in counterpoint harmony with the ongoing chant.

The cognomens of consorts combine with the names of their respective goddesses as the priestess steps back into shadow. “Isis/Osiris, Astarte/Mithra, Hecate/Adonis…” She joins a slow circumambulation around the supine aspirant’s pleasantly numbed and virtually paralysed form, becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the worshippers who consecrate his sleeping flesh and dreaming plasm to the divine Ladder of Lights; “…Demeter/Dionysus, Diana/Pan, Kali/Shiva, Inana/Dumuzzi…”

The circling chant rises in volume and the young shaman feels Her smooth hands paint the soles of his feet with the heat of Her palms. Lightly gripping fingers interlock with his toes and thumbs lock round his ankles before warm silken hands glide around his calves, slide up across his knees and stroke the fine down on his slender thighs. Her forearms brush by his rigid erection once again as She proceeds to caress his belly with circular serpentine motions. He feels soft warm thighs sliding up over his body as the chant swells through his being; babbling voices flood through his mind as the priestess kneels astride him.

Never far away… Like unto like… Birds of a feather… A bird in the hand… A sudden surge of energy rises from the base of his spine, surging all the way upward between the twinned serpents in a blinding blast of light and heat - and his eyes flicker open in the shadowy deeps of a suburban laundry, where his body has slipped from the bedroll onto a cracked slab of concrete - an inexpertly laid sepulchre encasing the old cold bones of Bleak City’s lost legions of secret spirits.

The shaman takes a deep breath before struggling back toward unfathomable unconsciousness, diving deeply into the moment of wonder to see all that he can seem…

A true story

Continues…

- R.A.

Images – author’s

Further true tales of The Prince of Centraxis -

Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater

Shaman of Centraxis Part 2 - Surfing the Cosm

Shaman of Centraxis ३ - Turning Tides, Breaking Waves

Shaman of Centraxis Part 4 - To Infinity and Beyond Shaman of Centraxis Part 5 - Land of the Living Shaman of Centraxis Part 6 - All the Way Shaman of Centraxis Part 7 - South of Eden Shaman of Centraxis Part 8 - The Whole is Greater Shaman of Centraxis Part 9 - Crossing Boarders Shaman of Centraxis Part 10 - Believer Shaman of Centraxis Part 11 - Behind the Veil Shaman of Centraxis Part 12 - Peace, Love & War Games Shaman of Centraxis Part 13 - Pole Dancer

Shaman of Centraxis Part 14 – Waking Wet Dream

Shaman of Centraxis Part 15 – Rending the Veil

Shaman of Centraxis Part 16 – Interrupted Dreams

Shaman of Centraxis Part 17 - Wherefore Art

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1

Psychedelic Water Part 1

Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra Part 1

Latest – http://centraxis.blogspot.com

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TimeSpace

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From The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com