Stars Dancing [Dreams-To-Lovers Romance]

He was just a stupid boy. Let him run to the off sphere by himself. I had to find Paulo. Stupid boys. Stupid off sphere. With her long twisty hair and everybody talking about her. Even Paulo went to see her. He slept on her hair! Gross! Where is he today? He's my mirka. Not some stupid off sphere's. He's not at Bennen's eating peppers. He's not at the sauna. Oh! There he is coming down monastery lane! I can feel him. He's so happy to see me! I'm happy too, Paulo! I found you! He says he wasn't lost and jumps into my arms. I'm not grumpy anymore.

- Sibsil Creed, Stories of Shurwinn, (2856)

I ran the photos I'd taken in the Preservation Library from the art book about the Sistine Chapel through a translation program. Okay, let's see... The Delphic Sybil. Sybil? The book described a painting called the Delphic Sibyl, extolling the craftsmanship of the artist of the Sistine Chapel. It didn't really explain to me what the Delphic Sybil was.

I had several other pages to look at. Hmmm… More Sybils. And more detailed paintings of other people. A lot of naked pale people and pale people in robes. I needed more information on the Sistine Chapel. Sorchen had been right, I needed to spend a lot of time researching because I had no reference to understand the paintings. I decided to search for background info on the Sistine Chapel.

Search: "Ancient Earth Sistine Chapel"

Woah, lots of information. I could've spent the rest of my life studying it! I searched for a summary. Hunh. If I understood it correctly, the Sistine Chapel was an Ancient Earth Temple to their gods; it was a thousand years old! It had paintings of all different kinds of gods on the ceiling. It had been old when the Earthens joined the Known Cosmos a few centuries ago. So, that was long, long before they had star travel or advanced technology. They may not have had even basic technology. And yet, an artist had painted a glorious temple standing on scaffolding.

There was a close up that caught my eye labeled "Creation." A naked pale man was lying on the ground looking dazed, and a grandfatherly figure reached out to him from a uterus, surrounded by children and women. I wasn't sure how a man reaching to an elderly man and them touching fingers was "Creation," but something in it tugged at me. Like the grandfatherly man was in a womb, not on the ground, and he was reaching down to someone who was listless, trying to give him a spark of life. It was beautiful.

But I couldn't study all of the artwork and learn Ancient Earth traditions. I needed to focus on the Siblin connection. I felt myself getting close to something. I focused on the Delphic Sybil, since that was what Sorchen had wanted me to see.

Search: "Ancient Earth Delphic Sybil"

I went cold. Numb. All emotion left me. I just stared at the image on my pad. How could it be? How was it real? Was it really happening? There were stone pillars, round, and etched with lines from top to bottom. I had seen the scene before. IN MY DREAM. When I was in the coma, I saw those columns, and then I saw— wait. . . the symbol. The T with an O on the top of it. Was it there? It wasn't in the picture.

Search: "Ancient Earth Symbol T with an O on top"

It was real. It was an Ancient Earth symbol called ankh, from temples over 5,000 years old! Egyptian symbol of life. Used in death rituals to symbolize eternal life. Death was not the end. The O on the top represented the female womb, and the T represented the male phallus— symbolizing creation.

It couldn't be happening. It couldn't be real. How could I have seen ancient temples, thousands and thousands of years old, and an ancient symbol of life beyond death? I didn't know anything about Ancient Earth. My subconscious mind couldn't have given me those images. But I had written the dream in my journal weeks ago. It was recorded right there in my handwriting. I really saw that scene in a coma. And I had no prior knowledge of it. How? What had happened to me?

Something had happened to me, something real. It wasn't me just having a traumatized reaction to nearly being murdered. It was something very real. Calm down, calm down, and breathe. I could figure it out; think it through.

Things had been really weird for several months. It wasn't just trauma; it was something else. Something very big had happened to me. I did go through a trauma, a massive trauma; no one should ever have that experience, but something else had happened too.

I was nearly dead. I was probably dying. Maybe I had- had I? Had I? Did I? I couldn't think it. Could I think that? My whole body clenched.

Did I die or almost die, and then — didn't?

And what if I I did? I saw something, something happened to me that had no explanation in the world I knew. I saw symbols of life and death and life after death. And creation—the womb and the phallus of the ankh. And I wasn't the same when I'd woken up in Jensen University Medical.

My mind woke up to trauma, and pain, and people who didn't know what had happened to me when I was dying. They didn't know what I had seen, and that new part of me retreated because it had to figure out what was going on.

But I'd been getting clues all along that I wasn't the same Ryst. That something fundamental had changed with how my brain interacted with the world. And I hadn't understood it. Because I'd had no frame of reference to be able to understand it. Just as I didn't understand the Sistine Chapel because I knew nothing of that world or their gods.

And that new part of me was with me when I woke up from the coma. I knew nothing about what it was, so I didn't understand it. It didn't really exist in my world.

So, what was it? What did I see? It couldn't have been a dream. My brain didn't have those images of the Temple and the ankh. My subconscious couldn't have generated that content because it didn't know about Ancient Earth! So, what was I seeing? The past? Was I seeing something beyond Andromeda Galaxy? Did I see— another world?

It was a lot to take in, but it made an odd kind of sense, and that calmed me. I wasn't crazy. I just didn't know how to interpret the strange things that had been happening to me since the coma: all the dreams, the sensing other people's anxiety, knowing their intentions, and hearing their thoughts.

All the overwhelming sensations—even the orgasms. I'd developed senses that weren't touch, taste, sight, smell, or sound. It was beyond what biological definitions, but it was just as real. So my senses were something more.

I was something more. I was new. I was different. And I couldn't expect anyone else to explain it to me. I couldn't expect brain scans to give me answers because it was something beyond technology, or at least, beyond the known technology.

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And I'd slowly figured out that something had happened to me when I was on the threshold between life and death. I had seen two pillars— pillars of a Temple, and a symbol of eternal life, and a voice had said, "No!"

Was it telling me not to die?

Was it telling me not to live?

I needed to know more about the Ancient Earth Temples. I'd seen those columns, so what were those Temples, and what was a Sybil?

Search: "Ancient Earth Delphic Sybil"

The Sybils were women, over 3,000 years ago. This information was all so old, the building were ruins millennia before the Earthens left Earth! They were women who— woah.

They were priestesses. They were prophetesses. THEY SAW THE FUTURE. They predicted the future and wrote it down. Their books had been lost in fires, but historians had confirmed that their predictions had come to pass. They even saw events that happened centuries in the future. They had been well-respected and kings used them. To plan wars. Of course, they had miraculous women, and they used them to organize wars.

Everything I read seemed to discuss those events as historical fact. No one called it "Legend of the Sybils," or "Myths from ancient cultures." I kept reading and discovered that the Temple of Apollo was the seat of the Delphic Sybil, a prophetess known as Pythia. Apollo was the god of prophecy, healing, music, and light. On the threshold of his temple was carved, "Know Thyself" into the floor. That knowledge gave me pause. The "Know Thyself" was a warning to people about to walk into the Temple:

"I warn you, whoever you are. Oh! You who want to probe the arcana of nature,

that if you do not find within yourself that which you are looking for,

you shall not find it outside either!

Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures.

Know thy self, and you shall know the universe and the gods."

Search: "Arcana definition"

A deep secret, a mystery.

Search: "Know Thyself Ankh"

A picture of an Ankh and a proverb inscribed in the walls of Ancient Temples of Egypt.

"Know Thyself.

The kingdom of heaven is within you;

and whosoever shall know himself, shall find it."

"Know thyself." Words inscribed in the floor of the Temple of Apollo. Whose columns I had seen in the coma. And the symbol of the ankh. When I had fallen onto the ankh, at the threshold of death, a voice had said, "No!"

Or had it said, "Know? "

Did I hear, "Know Thy Self" when I was in a coma?

I fell quiet. Quiet and awed. I felt reverential. I looked around me. At the stone floor, at the shiki I was sitting on. I realized I was holding up my hand, marveling at it, reaching out.

It reminded me of the first moments I'd arrived in Shurwinn, sitting in the porter, looking through the glass at the village. My fingertips touching the glass. Like I was looking at the village as though it was a painting, marveling at it. Like the nude pale man painted on the Sistine Chapel, reaching out to something beyond. Like him, I was reaching. Always reaching.

In my dreams, I reached out, searching. I was trying to find something. I had been between life and death, and something had reached out to me from the womb of creation. It may not have been a grandpa in the sky, but I was changed.

I'd been trying to understand it. Trying to understand it from the point of view of someone who had no frame of reference to understand it. Like a foreigner in a new sphere, not knowing the language, not knowing the customs. Wandering around and trying to learn the new shape of my life. I had been searching and searching for something, and what I had found was my self.

A self who didn't like my old life. A self who was lonely and dreamed of a lover beyond imagining. A self who kept going despite finding everything around me confounding.

And the whole time, everything I had been doing for months had been a journey of Know Thy Self. I'd been figuring out who I was. Making choices every step of the way about who I wanted to be. I just hadn't known that I was on the Know Thy Self journey. I didn't remember that I had crossed the threshold of the Temple that had lead me to a new life.

I had been trying to make sense of my old life. Because I couldn't understand myself without first knowing myself. Even all the sexual experiences, the self pleasure, the crying in loneliness— I hadn't want to feel any of that loneliness my whole life.

I'd been getting to know myself, and my true feelings about my life. And when I did, I started to see and experience the JOY of who I was, and the beauty of who I was as a woman. I wasn't crazy, I was healing something essential in my self. I was in the Temple of Apollo, the god of healing, and my life was a treasure beyond treasures.

Words

I hate words

Words

I love words

Words

Insufficient

Words

I'll hum instead

Collected Unpublished Lyrics

- Sibsil Creed, Stories of Shurwinn (2783)

Salt scrubs, unlabeled, of course. Oh, just grab one and get to it! I scrubbed myself vigorously. I felt edgy after being in my small room all day researching the Sybils. So, I'd gone to the spa where there were no signs, but familiar comforts like salt scrubs, showers, shampoo bars. Once I rinsed off the scrub, I slid into the large rectangular indoor pool, and swam to the far edge, all the way to the exterior wall, where a passageway led to the outdoor pool.

Outside was a huge, round hot tub—big enough for 30 people. There was no one there, so I had it all to myself. When I surfaced outside, the night air was cool. Really, too cool to be naked and soaking wet, but it was warm under the water of the hot tub.

The sky above was an ocean of stars. Ocean after ocean of stars— exactly what I needed. I needed to stretch out to the vast sky above. I leaned back and floated on the surface of the water. The cold air was a bit much for my bare breasts, but I wanted to see the stars. It was so easy to relax in the hot water under the clear, dark sky.

The day had been so unreal. All of it. Was it really just a few hours ago that I had read about the Durstahngnat— the upside down male erotica position? It felt like a lifetime ago. And then meeting Sorchen. And she had known exactly what I was looking for in the library. How did she come to be there, at that time, in the Fertility section, right when I needed her?

Sorchen and I had eaten lunch together in the dining hall. My first shared meal at the monastery. No, my first shared meal on Shurwinn! And I had told her the whole story about Tonino, the little boy who wanted a date and the mirka Paulo walking me down to Nona's house. The berries, the "Siblin Lone Warrior Nun."

And how trying to figure out what those words meant had led me to the monastery. Then I had found the Durstahngnat, and eventually found Sorchen sitting at the library table. It was a very long journey to get to the answer to what Siblin Lone Warrior Nun meant.

And I still hadn't deciphered all of it. I couldn't even try to look at the Chaludra graphics. I was still digesting the Delphic Sybil, the Temple of Apollo, the ankh, and "Know Thy Self."

So, I just let myself float, and let all of the new knowledge percolate, like tea in a pot. Stewing in the hot tub. What was the end result of all of it going to be? I exhaled a slow sigh of relief and focused on the stars.

Did the ancient Sybils look at the stars? All those stars, a galaxy away in the Milky Way? What did they think of when they watched the stars? Did they know that there were millions of people on those stars? That people like me would read about them, and wonder about them?

"Dear Sybil, did you know that I would ask about you and what you saw? If I could've talked to you, would you have thought that I was like you? Are we sisters in this strange new world of visions, and mysteries, and arcana, and things that no one else can sense?" I whispered.

I closed my eyes and smiled. It felt so nice to relax and just let myself go. I could feel out beyond the oasis, beyond the desert, beyond the sphere, beyond, beyond. And I was naked, and my breasts were in the cold night air. And I was happy. AND I WAS NOT AROUSED. I was in public; I would NOT be doing anything erotic.

I shut out all memories of The Art and Practice of Tindin Erotica. No, that book did not exist right now. There were no nude men in backbends about.

I laughed to myself, and I felt something. Something happy and warm, and there was an arm around my waist. He was around me, and he was laughing too. I could feel him! He was with me! He could feel me! And he knew! He knew I wanted him, and he knew I was in public, and he laughed at me! He was behind me, nipping at the side of my neck, teasing me and playing with me. We laughed together, and he faded.

I stood up, lowered my body into the hot water, and my eyes opened.

I smiled. I was awake, and I had not been alone.