Heartland

Trying to take a part of me.

Marielle.

She knew. She knew they were in my head. She knew what they offered, what secrets they held. She had tried to draw them off while we had been at Batofar. In the hallway. That was what she had been trying to unlock.

She had tried, and failed.

After that, things had gotten out of our control, and there hadn't been another chance.

I leaned out of the shaft and looked up. What time is it? I asked the Chorus.

They touched the ley, synced to the geomagnetic pulse of the planet, and told me.

After nightfall. Not yet midnight.

Unprompted, they also reminded me of the date.

'Second day of spring,' I murmured. The seeds, planted in winter, were starting to break ground today. The dead kings, buried in the cold ground, rising again. The world, broken and bleeding, made anew.

I laughed, and something broke free in my chest. I coughed, spat, and laughed again, my lungs clearer now. You are a sentimental bastard, Old Man, I thought.

He had waited until the last minute to come find me. So that everyone would be scrambling to find their new place in the organization. Within all that chaos, I would be able to move more readily, to be more able to accomplish the tasks laid out for me. But he could have initiated this plan weeks ago, in the cold death of winter, when everyone was hunkered down and waiting for spring to come. He could have surprised them all by starting early, but he hadn't. He had waited until the end of winter, until spring was imminent. For all of his education and enlightened thinking, he was still a vegetable god at heart. He was beholden to the cycle of the Land, and he wanted to be properly received into the bosom of that which waited for him.

In the old stories, the young lovers don't flinch when their goddesses tell them the price of being loved. They don't turn away when the ground opens up for them. They know, even before it is spelled out for them; they know what happens after that first kiss, and it never diminishes their love.

Leaning back into the shaft, I sent my tiny spirit light into the tunnel to see if there was any clue where it led. It went around a corner and bounced light back at me for a while. A route to follow at any rate; Lafoutain may have known where it went, but that knowledge was not forthcoming from the fog of the Chorus.

'What am I going to do with you three?' I wondered aloud. They were sulking, Lafoutain's suggestions about the way out notwithstanding, and the uneasy way the Chorus was boiling in my head said there was unrest in the rank. They were captive in my head, and it looked like I was going to miss the Coronation event; my presence wasn't required for it to proceed anyway. If I was supposed to give this knowledge over to the winner, then all I had to do was wait for someone to come looking for me. Antoine would probably smack his forehead tomorrow and suddenly remember where he left me. Then it would just be a matter of cracking my head open and letting the spirits out.

Was this what Husserl meant when he said they would leave me?

I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to die in this hole. That would ruin everyone's plan. As much as I wanted to curl up and die, if I tried-if I leaned forward a little too far and slipped off this shelf-the Chorus would just save me again. I wasn't done carrying them yet, and until I delivered them, they'd keep me alive.

So much for Free Will, I thought, slumping against the wall of the access shaft. I could be pithed like a frog for all that my ego was needed. Just as long as basic motor functions stayed on. Just as long as the pilot light in my soul stayed lit.

Is that it? the spirit of Detective John Nicols asked.

'Pretty much,' I whispered, fending off his insistent question. 'I'm pretty sure I can see bottom from here. What else is there?'

What about the child in the woods? The one who was frightened of the dark and the unknown? How did he survive?

'Was that survival?' I asked. 'Look where it has led me. All that darkness, and for what? To be a pawn in someone else's game.'

We're all pawns, Michael. Another spirit intruded, another echo welling up.

'Fuck you, Old Man. You used all of us. Even your daughter. What kind of father does that?'

He didn't answer-probably thinking my question was rhetorical-and the Chorus stormed into a wall of white noise in my head. Nothing but noise.

What else was there?

There's a psychological oversimplification about men: they don't ask for directions. If you swallow that line, then there's a thousand more that follow, justifications and rationales for nearly every injustice or moment of human stupidity that can be read in our history. Men are too proud to ask for directions; their testosterone causes this hubris, this blindness to the world around them, and everyone else suffers for it. But if you look at our stories, the myths that have formed the basis of our society for generations, you find that part of the complex cycle of comprehending the Divine is getting lost.

If we knew where to go, then there would be no story, no crisis, no opportunity to transform our lives into something extraordinary. We would know all the secret portals to faerie, all the hidden paths through the black woods, all the secret signs that unlocked the sealed doors. Not knowing the path is an integral aspect of not knowing who we are, and being lost upon that path is critical to finding it, to finding ourselves.

It's not that men don't ask for directions; it's that most confuse the mundane journeys they take as being something extraordinary and special. Not every adventure from your front door to the supermarket or the deli or the shopping mall is symbolic of the great journey of self-discovery and initiation; some of these are errands. Some of them don't matter one fucking bit, and the sooner you get from point A to point B and back again, the sooner you can go about doing something that isn't a matter of fulfilling a baseline Maslowian need.

Neither is being lost an excuse for an existential meltdown. Sometimes being lost isn't anything more than not having the proper perspective on your situation, or not asking the right question about your current course and your heretofore destination. Being lost is a binary state, really, a frame of reference not much different from being on track. It's a matter of perspective. Flipping from being lost to being on track changes nothing about your physical state or your metaphysical location. You either know your orientation in space and time, or you don't. Light is either a wave or a particle. It all depends on the observer.

And his state of mind.

What else?

I still had the deck of tarot cards. The pocket they were in was somewhat inaccessible from my left hand (being on the same side), but eventually I managed to tug out the velvet bag. Everything else Philippe had given me was gone, but I still had the cards. I still had a way to find myself.

I tugged the bag open and spilled the cards into my lap. I didn't even bother trying to shuffle them; I moved them around for a moment, losing a couple to the long drop, and then picked five. I considered trying to get the rest back in the bag, and started shaping the pile into some semblance of the rectangular deck, but then a thought struck me.

Why?

Why was I bothering? They were Philippe's cards. What was the point of keeping them? John had called my attention to what I was doing in the beginning, but from his perspective, it hadn't made much sense. Keeping trophies. I was hanging on to the Architects. I was hanging on to the symbols of an office which was never going to be mine.

Why?

No more, I thought, and I pushed the cards off my lap and let them twist away in the darkness of the shaft.

I was going to do a five-card spread. Keeping it simple. One for me; two for influences, above and below; one for the past, and one more for the future. I arranged them on my lap, face-down, and then leaned my head back against the wall of the access tunnel for a minute. Reflecting on what I was about to do. It all depends on the observer and his state of mind.

Card reading wasn't the same as scrying, but it was close enough that I wanted to think twice before I committed to this course of action. Piotr would be the first one to point out that, invariably, the question asked