The Quintessential Voodoo Cowboy

I walk across the burgeoning desert of my own consciousness as it breaks apart and shifts beneath my feet, leaving little breadcrumbs dancing across the browned lawn of rock and scree beneath my heels. I am alone. There are dust-devils dancing on the wind, playing their havoc games helter-skelter with little mind for mortal woes. Tortoises are trudging on their way, dragging their great bellies along the ground as they go, little walking worlds with wizened faces and unknowable thoughts. I tip my hat to them, and trudge onward. I hold my own world, though here it’s inside out. That’s what makes this place. It’s outside-in. All those pouring sensations shoved in a grinder and blitzed down to spiritual matter and thought-stuffs. The inverted tortoise shell. The desert on the interior.

Some call this place Void. That’s one name. One road of many which a cowboy can walk. And walk I do. Sometimes in many directions at once.

The desert is circular in every sense. A great orb that is impossible to escape with logic alone. That’s where it traps me. The ground bulges and threatens to burst and swallow me up in blackness and negation, so I deny its ability to do so. I insist upon a linear world. A hexagonal chessboard made of equal parts and joined facets. One great obsidian jewel, all at once denying its chosen shape. My coat swishes in the wind as I traverse the glassy and reflective facet I find myself upon, and as my boots press down on it, slapping loud and clear, I think myself transported to some place safe. Somewhere ordered and calm.

Oh, but nightmares await after staring too long across the void, for it stares back into you. I see the craven reflection of my dream-form, my boots, my long coat, my wide-brimmed hat, tall and magely. A fastened shirt of an eastern style, silk and tightly drawn up to the top of my neck. And beyond that, no face. Six searing blue pupils set into vestigial darkness. The Voodoo Cowboy.

The glass cracks evenly into a million little hexagons, and there are new reflections in each of them, forcing me to look. See the visage walking on, pointlessly towards another identical facet. It questions. It laughs.

And one questions what it was that tore at the void. Is it the tap of my heel? Or is it something outside? Or is it that too much order throws the reflections into sharp relief?

Before long, it does not seem to matter. The reflections peel themselves off the glass and emerge as shadowy wraiths, hungry and eager. My six eyes flash. The wraiths converge and tear at me, tattering my clothes in seconds. My fingers pluck for the tools at my belt, and pull golden streamers of sigils from their holsters. I whip them through the air, and the wraiths burn at their touch, pulling away, unable to bear the constructive sparkling of the written word. Known Truths. That is their fear, and I use it. A faceless grin comes over me as they tear apart.

They limp away, and I show no fear, though the ghastly revenants have wounded me. Their venom is tribulation. That is their way. They attack from without, infect, and harry. They would see me stumble and lie helpless against the glass before coming back to tear flesh from the visage. Insidious, as all monsters of the mind are, upon reflection.

A great eye watches from above. An empty glass with mere darkness beyond. Their Eye. They would have me, if I stayed in the void. There are no cures to this place. No plants or sacred stones, no external magic or hoodoo to do the healing I need. Void is a place to end chaos, but it is poison itself, when too long is spent in the realm.

My six eyes gleam, and shut. I fall inward.

I am a great jungled psyche. Delirious, I tear my way through the green cleft of organic sensations. The grand and grotesque Id at the base of my skull. I arrive in this place, and I feel the melange of upper and lower spaces melding together. My visage burns with holy fury, emotive and certain. Here among the pale white roots of titanic trees and the cyan thrush of fungal weeds I gather together a perfumery, plucking sensations from their stems and mashing their petals and fibres together into a bitter elixir. I shudder at the wraith-venom pooling in my veins, and pluck a long, bone scalpel from my belt. I press its needlepoint to my skin and etch an opening in the hexaemeric language, pull another bandage of sigils from my bandoleer and stain it with the potion. I wrap it around the fresh wound, and lie back as I feel the antitoxin doing its work. Bright, hopeful thoughts fill me up. Half-remembered sensations dredged up from the chaotic moil. They collide into new stories and revitalising epiphanies. Illogic. Will and wisdom are far removed from the ordered hexagonal jewel that is Void.

There is light pooling in the wound. It enters my bloodstream, tingling and cold. Moonlight. Soft, happy, brilliant. It gushes into every other system in my body and drives away the demons where they lurk, whispering dark nothings and lies into my collective being. Some parts of me have already given in. The organisms in my stomach and my kidneys ache from the feel of mortality. They cease to be anything more than human, and suffer human pain. They become barren, swept moors filled with dark gases and black waters.

But stories cure them, just in time. Moonlight falls upon the swamped participles that are my composite and regenerate them, clearing the waters, seeding the lands with fresh hopes and air. The magic of it runs its course, and I sleep in a wreathe of moonlight, hat tipped over my eyes.

When I am wakeful and healed, I leave the Melange, snapping the clinging tendrils of the subconscious with a few brisk motions. This place may seem tranquil, but it is just as dangerous as the last. I could lose myself in its psychotropic mnemonia, and just as well dream forever of burbling and quixotic worlds. I pull myself back, because Melange is not all I am. There are other lands to walk, and I am never about one place. We split ourselves up so that we have somewhere to travel to. That is the nature of cowboys and wanderers.

I stand at the stone face of the gorge, and begin my ascent. The air thins and becomes warmer. The stone cuts into my fingers as I climb, though it gives way beneath me easily, and at times I stroll vertically, and there is no struggle in it. There are wind-carved pillars of stone expanding outward in all directions, and I find myself cresting one in the baking sun, the wind whipping at my clothes. I hoist myself up, stand a moment, and then sit cross-legged, observing the canyons and gullies that lay out before me. Every shadow gleams with purple light. Kangaroos play leapfrog with one another down below. It is like surveying a great stone forest with branches made bare, so that I might observe all the happenings between them. Caravans kicking up dust on the horizon. Long-tailed hawks sailing on the wind like kites.

There is no end to this story. There is no destination to sate the wanderlust that keeps my legs kicking and my brain thumping on its grand engine schemes. There are voyages west, there are voyages within, and once in a while, there are adventures to be had on the sharp-edged world that exists beyond the mind. I welcome them all. Mine is a restless existence. There will always be another frontier.

Small souls, big souls, great souls, new souls, come hear the music of thought playing for you in these  quiet places, slip between the scene and the solidification of your own serenity. For now is a time of peace, if you did not feel it already. There are slow souls too, though we are all moving in one way or another. Just close your eyes, open your heart and know it, eat it, read it, swim through it until you find your answers. If you do not like the ones you find then forget them and find some others. There’s no one way to reach yourself, but a billion strings wrapped around your heart and pumping it. Split yourself and walk all of them, or rush headlong down just one. I do care, but I don’t judge. This is a collective agreement: We all think you’re special. Sometimes it’s just hard to see the wood from the trees from the branches in the leaves without considering that we might be looking down on you. It doesn’t make you less by making yourself different. This is the truth.

I’m not sure if I’m making a mistake by reading so many books. Not for my time or profession or anything like that. I’m worried for my soul. I’m worried that every time I get into a really good story it’s like I’m living someone else’s life for a while, and being pulled into these serious and desperate matters that feel like lifetimes lived over the course of a few days. It ages me. It makes me tired and sick and worn out. But happy, too. Kind of like a drug.

I have this theory on post-traumatic stress and war bonding. It isn’t that people are terrified of what they experienced and relive it out of fear that it will happen again. It’s that in those few moments of tension and intensity, they felt more real than they’ve ever been. What’s happening on the outside doesn’t really matter. They don’t have to like or enjoy that part. What they like is what it does to their mind. How it hones it and makes it sharper, lends them focus and control, the power to fight without holding anything back. That’s why they get flashbacks. It’s the same drug. They need to feel alive like that again. And the only people who can really understand that reality are those who have sat down in the same trenches, and read the same books.

Every book is like throwing myself back upon the steeple of that reality, and I do it so gladly, because I need it so badly. I have to feel that sense of life and death decision, and the automatic follow-through of events. I need my life to be more real in that sense, and less Real in this.

Slowly but surely, it will wear me out, and I wonder what that will feel like in the end. I bet I’ll be ancient. I bet people will look me in the eyes and think “Jeez, where’s he been?” or know just enough that something’s off that they keep walking. I’ll be an old, paper-thin junkie, still jonesing for a fix, well aware that this time, it might push my sanity too far over into that side.

I know this, but I can’t help it. I can’t live without being in at least two places at once. And though I may try do without for just a little while, I keep getting pulled back into just one more story.

Hexaemeron v1

HEXAEMERON

Behold

THE SUNDERED TRUTH

Play now as

SACRED WITNESS

Bask in

THE CHOSEN REALITY

of

WORLD SIX

The driving force, the untiring demesne, the restless world,

REL’TASH

Abhor all other teachings,

WHAT IS WRITTEN HERE IS TRUTH.

Volume 1:

I

VOLIANOR was the first, spiralling away from The Womb with a distasting tongue, hoping to find the-reality-that-was-not. Five times he severed an eternity from the Womb, and he named all the pieces with immutable words. Five times he failed in his intentions, and drove endlessly on towards the chasm of Void. The SIXTH time he paused, as his words had shattered eternity and they were beautiful.

From the empty spaces between his words came NISHARO, who loved all things made and unmade, and hoped Volianor would love her back. For a time it was so. He and she soared through the heavens exploring the grey face of the sixth world in all its cold magnificence, and Volianor was pleased by what he had done. He wrote the forms that would keep the world whole, and came to understand the relationships between all the quarters.

ETERNITY

That hated thing, by which existence would pander forth faceless and boring. It was eternity Volianor sought to end, and it is eternity he has chained the fastest.

Floating in the Not-Between place of his Sixth World, Volianor found eternity seeping into the corners of his house and cast it out. He could not imprison it within a cage, but rather chose to destroy it outright. Its splintered fragments became the SIGILS, the governing form of Rel’tash’s laws, and spread out across the void he hoped they might never unite.

Its pieces were incarcerated by his will lest any fraction of eternity came from The Womb to release them, and from the still pieces he crafted imperishable designs. Some Sigils he named the captors, LEGIONS of which bound the largest fragments, those captives held in place by their own brothers. By forcing them to choose sides he ensured that divided neither would ever be free. For truth was that

ONE was the LOCK

THE OTHER was the KEY

And yet neither could bear the other’s touch.

Twelve times the generation of Rel’Tash were spent by Volianor in residence, watching and hoping to find his downcast-eternity. Yet on the thirteenth turn he could not bear to watch any longer. Nisharo pulled his face to hers and their energies joined, and from this joining was born

THE MYSTERY

Rising like a wave, an unanticipated feeling carved from darkness and light. Her name was

SELAYUTH

And she was the first child of the Sixth World, restless in her desire to understand her father’s work.

At once Volianor saw his mistake, and gathered the void-energies necessary to negate his daughter before she could contaminate his world. But she ran, aided by the guile and guise of her mother, and vanished into the realms beyond physical creation.

Here she stole the hidden territories of her father and built a new house for herself from which to study his destruction. In secret she foundered TWELVE DOORS

And in fascination she cut duplicates into the walls of her house. She grew practised in opening these doors when it suited her, and with the eternity that entered her house she rewrote Volianor’s laws as her own. By this act she discovered

SENTIENCE

And infected the coldness of Rel’Tash with living warmth.

Volianor watched as Selayuth’s house appeared above Rel’Tash within the Heart-Dimension, and prepared his annihilation. As his wrath gathered Selayuth presented the

Truth of Life:

THAT SENTIENCE SEVERS ETERNITY INTO LOCKS AND KEYS, AND ONCE BOUND ACROSS A MILLION WORLDS, ETERNITY WOULD END.

As Volianor saw this truth he attempted to cast aside his wrath, but it had grown too strong to dissipate entirely. He and She held it between them, unable to let go or divert the cataclysm without destroying Rel’Tash. For millennia Volianor held the energy still while Selayuth doctored its form with laws, giving it mind and bearing. After eons it became

DARKER-THAN-NIGHT

The undying death that was

VISCEPTOR.

Visceptor’s malice was held in place with a grafted purpose, so that it would only strike slowly and at essential points in time to stunt the flow of eternity into Rel’Tash. This was its only will, and the Dark Orb of its power gloomed above as a watcher to the affairs of living souls.

Selayuth watched Rel’Tash closely, assisting her father’s design

THOUGH HIS PURPOSES WERE NOT HERS.

Nisharo’s joy was unmatched as her family gathered around her. She had a son and a daughter and a life-bond, and reeled in the ecstasy of their companionship. It was then that she named them

MAT’RU’EL

The Harmony – unaware of the troubles to come.

But this harmony was a lie, for Selayuth sought answers to questions Volianor had forbidden, and hid unspeakable truths in her house.