The Stone by the Stream (Part 25)

“Come back, Cynthia!” came the voice, barking in the human girl’s ears like the call of an anxious hound. “It’s not too late, you can still come back. Don’t give in! Can’t you see this is why the Temple has been calling you all this time?”

The words flowed meaningless as all things flow toward their end, pouring out to die and be reborn in the vastness of the ocean. The girl who had once been called Cynthia realized she had never been a thing separate, never a thing apart from the trees, the grass, the sky, and the Naiad standing before her. All things (though what human arrogance even to speak of things!) were connected in the divine web of nature, each little thing touching the rest and defining it.

But what were definitions? What was thought? What was life?

There was only the oozing tendency of matter, heaviness, the fluid of existence flowing inevitably to its lowest point of equilibrium. The creature conventionally named Cynthia experienced Being as a pure play of lights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells — all undifferentiated and unmediated by the crude rockiness of human language. There was no difference between her, the Naiad, the Priestess, the dirt, the sun, and all else that was. But even more than that… there was no difference between there being a difference between those things and there being no difference!

“Cynthia! Remember who you are!”

And the musical voice of the part of being that could be provisionally called the Priestess played like the fingers of the harpist across the tuned instrument of her consciousness. Unconnected with anything so crass or human as meaning.

What was meaning, anyway? An arrogant human construction that had nothing to do with reality. Nothing to do with what the world really was. A thin blanket covering over the realization of this passing world as it truly was, truly is, and truly shall be for ever and evermore: the fullness of the body of the Goddess, here ripening and here rotting, here passing away and here being born to new life once again. Pervading all things and tending toward their destruction and dissolution…

“Cynthia! Come back. You are a woman, you are a human being, you are kneeling in the grass beyond the stones. It’s raining. It’s thundering. You are right here now.”

Cynthia blinked. What was this? Some fragment of identity quickened within the morass of her consciousness. Who was Cynthia? Or what was a Cynthia? The sequence of sounds stirred something in her, something like the memory of a dream nearly forgotten but then recalled after waking.

“Your parents are Ariston and Lydia. You are twelve years old. You took part in the prayers to the Mistress of the Moon this morning. You’re considering becoming an Initiate of the Temple of the Huntress.”

Yes… yes, Cynthia was what they called her. But what was the point of being Cynthia anymore? All things tended toward their end, so what was the point of resisting the eternal flow of time? Better far to give herself over to it and let the sinking inertia of all things drive it inevitably toward its dissolving, wasn’t it?

“You are a woman. You are alive. You inhale your breath and you exhale it. Blood flows in your veins. You have a beating heart, Cynthia. Don’t you feel it beating in your chest? This is your life, your own life. Your own separate, individual life. Come back, Cynthia. Come back to yourself.”

She blinked again. Still all things flowed around her, but there were objects for her vision. Individual raindrops shining as they fell to their rest among the individual blades of grass. The fingers of her hands clasping at the ground before her. The Naiad, the Priestess, the stone bench arranged in its half-circle. The shining identity that glowed unique and pure from the core of every thing.

Yes!

“I hear you, Priestess!” Cynthia (yes, Cynthia!) shouted, the tears flowing down her face and mixing with the rain as they fell.

Trembling, she lifted herself onto her own feet. Eyeing the Naiad, she took cautious steps in the Priestess’s direction, suspecting it might lunge out with a fluid thrust. Yet it did not move, its void eyes expressionless as ever, the creature’s form still as ever in its fluid mobility.

Cynthia reached the Priestess and clasped her hand — yes! It was still possible, can you believe it, it was still possible for two distinct hands from two distinct people to come together feelingly in a unified grasp while all around them the rain plummeted along the paths of gravity.

“Let’s go back to the Temple,” the Priestess said.

Cynthia nodded, gazing softly upward into the wet face of the blue-eyed woman. “Yes. Yes, let’s go back to the Temple. Yes, I want to become an Initiate now.”

And when they took their first steps of return to the path that led to the Temple, the Naiad struck.