Keys of Awakening
Sudra

RAHULD ( S U M M O N I N G )

The Twelfth Power of the Arcanum

Rahuld is an Active power.

Along the Inner Journey, allies are often needed and called upon. So too in the Journey of Life! The power of Summoning is not to be used lightly, and should only be practiced by those who have achieved some mastery of the preceding abilities, for much preparation is needed.

Application: Rahuld is the ability to call a higher order of being into presence. In order for this power to be used, one must ‘know’ or have had prior experience of the being they are summoning.

A practitioner of Rahuld is known as a Summoner.

From The Arcanum of Wisdom – Introduction for the Initiate

Illiom lay motionless, her eyes closed.

It was not that she was unable to move, it was just that she had no desire nor will to do so.

Everything around her was in constant motion; the reach of her senses had expanded so far beyond the limits of her physical being that she could not help but interact with everything she came into contact with. No longer constrained by the reach of her arm or by the quality of her hearing, nor by the limitations of her eyesight, Illiom felt that her reach could now be measured, not in spans, but in leagues.

For a time her senses were so bombarded by the rush of incoming impressions that she could not discern inner from outer, or near from far. The world suddenly seemed to exist within her, a part of who she was. All she could manage was to surrender to the state she was in. To be still and allow the experience of the countless, simultaneous expressions of everything her awareness encountered.

A part of her remained conscious of the physical shell that was her body, that which lay immobile on the shore of the Underearth Lake like some unimportant discarded object. She was also aware of others lying around her – she even remembered their names – but it was a superficial knowing, surpassed by a new and deeper perception.

Through it, Illiom saw each of her companions as a luminous, swirling flow of energies that expanded far beyond their mortal casing; sending exploring tendrils into the surrounding environment and deep into each other, until she was hard put to say where one ended and another began.

It reminded her of the experience she had with the Virupa warrior – only this was expanded a hundred-fold.

It was too much to hold onto.

Unable to contain the experience, she surrendered to its power. It felt as though the waters of a mighty river were flowing right through her being, over and under, on and on, in an endless stream.

Sometime later she opened her eyes.

The others were also stirring, struggling to return to the limitedness of their bodies.

Abdora spoke to Illiom’s mind and it was the strangest thing, hearing the words flowering there.

The feelings that you are experiencing will not last.

Her words echoed and distorted within Illiom.

It will take a span of time for you to adjust to this new mode of perception. During this time your experience will wax and wane.

A long silence followed.

You must be strong.

The elation of expansion is always counterbalanced by the dismay of contraction, and yet contract you must.

For you must return to the world and to the task that still awaits you.

Whatever you feel right now, know that all of it is transitory and – I promise - you will eventually settle into a new state of being. In the meantime, be strong, be patient, and grant yourself the time to assimilate what you have been given.

Time had lost all meaning.

Illiom tried to implement the Draca’s instructions but found herself unable even to think. It was as if she had lost her mind. She was thought-less and yet still functioning normally. Her eyes saw, her feet and hands moved, but she could not focus on the simplest thought.

With the other Chosen, she followed Abdora out of the cavern. Her eyes were blinded by the brilliance of sky. She perceived Iod even behind the dense cover of cloud; he was an incandescent orb of power.

Illiom looked at the Altran mountainscape that had so touched her on the way up here, and now felt nothing. There was no room for anything but the vast void that had opened up in the wake of her heart’s expansion. No thought, no feeling, no emotion.

Just awareness.

She was present to the world in a way that she had not been before. She noted the ebb and flow of her connection to the land: now all-encompassing, now non-existent. Like a puppet swung this way and that, she was jostled between these two opposites, and saw her inner state as akin to the slow and rhythmic swing of a giant pendulum.

It took almost half a moon for the pendulum’s swing to slow to a stop, for Illiom to reach a state of equanimity. Her companions fared no better.

They spent those long Altran days in another network of earthen halls, similar to the one they had stayed in when they first reached Nostum.

During this time the Chosen did very little, almost nothing in fact. At some point, they were joined by their Riders and the Iolans - Kassargan, the conjurer Keilon Var, and the dwarf, Dreel.

Illiom was reunited with her Tarmel.

She was glad to see him, yet at the same time felt distanced from her own pleasure.

Tarmel was attentive and concerned, but asked no questions and demanded nothing from her. For this she was grateful, as she had little to say and even less to give.

When it was not raining, Illiom was content to spend long hours outside, peering into the cleft of the deep valley where the silver river snaked in its endless quest for the sea. The mountains crowded around, aloof and impervious giants. The sky covered the world like a protective shield of grey metal.

She spent much of her time flexing her senses. She contemplated the changes that the Underearth waters had bestowed upon her, and experimented with their reach, testing their limitations.

And so, little by little, she explored who she had become.

On some level, she knew that this change should have been disconcerting, but the truth was that it was not. She felt as though she had been given a new garment to wear and, upon donning it, had discovered that it had always been her own skin.

This gave her plenty of cause for contemplation.

On the very last night of the silence, Illiom had a dream.

In it, she stood holding her Key in the upturned palm of her left hand, its ruby stone blazing with incarnadine light. Azulya stood on her right, her left hand extended, her Key a violet glow upon her palm. As Illiom placed her palm upon Azulya’s Key, another beside her placed theirs upon hers. The dream was brief, lasting only for a flicker of time, and yet for that short span its intensity eclipsed all else and became etched upon the retina of her memory, thus becoming one of the few things that Illiom brought back with her from the void.

Azulya broke the silence that very same morning.

“There is something we must do,” she said.

This statement was met with such a prolonged silence that it confirmed what they all knew. No one needed to question that the same dream had visited them all. They knew what they must do.

“Then it is just a matter of when,” Sereth stated.

“While we are still here, in Altra,” Illiom found herself saying. These first words felt awkward and clumsy, as if she had forgotten the use of her tongue. “We may not replace a safer sanctuary than this.”

This comment was met with unanimous agreement.

“Are we ready to do it now?” Elan asked.

“Is there any reason why we should not?” Scald countered.

“None at all,” Sereth answered.

“Then we should inform Argolan,” Malco said.

Distantly, Illiom noted that each of them had spoken as if they were attempting to communicate in another language: weighing their words carefully, using them sparingly, and allowing long silences to linger between.

“Agree,” Undina confirmed, coming nimbly to her feet. “I go replace.”

She returned with Argolan and the rest of the Riders.

Undina rejoined them but the Shieldarm and the Riders paused uncertainly a short distance away.

Tarmel sought reassurance in Illiom’s eyes that all was well with her. She gazed back at him, distant, serene.

“There is something that we must do,” Azulya informed Argolan.

The Shieldarm stared at the Kroeni for a moment and then moistened her lips.

“Very well. What do you need from us?”

Sereth shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “We just want you here with us.”

Argolan nodded slowly.

Like the rest of the Riders beside her, the Shieldarm looked at the Chosen with uncharacteristic hesitation. It was as if there was a chasm, between the Chosen and their Riders, that they were unable to cross.

What have we become?

But the thought was just a transitory thing that faded as rapidly as it had arisen. Azulya was right and they all knew it: there was something they all needed to do and the time to do it must be now.

Illiom looked at Tarmel again and her heart melted at the look in his eyes.

She reached out towards him from inside the vast emptiness that seemed to have filled her being. She reached out with waves of presence and recognition and, though she could not be sure, she felt that he received them. His eyes lost some of their haunted intensity and the beginnings of a smile softened the corners of his mouth. Slowly, and with purpose, he nodded.

Go, his nod seemed to say, do what you must.

“I feel that we need to do this outside, under the open sky,” Azulya continued.

There was no disagreement. They stood and filed out into the open, making towards a stone platform that offered a magnificent view of the Altran Mountains.

As they gathered, Illiom tasted a tang of power in the air around them, as if a storm was brewing. But the clouds on this day were not thunderclouds; they were high streaks of steel that rent the sky, and were borne on winds that were far too high to be felt down here where the earth-dwellers lived.

The Chosen arranged themselves in a circle, like dancers taking their places in a well-choreographed performance. Illiom knew that Azulya would be on her right, but that was all; she had no idea who would turn up on her left.

It was Sereth. He smiled with the joy of a child as he came to stand beside her. Illiom looked at the circle that was forming. Next to Sereth came Elan, then Malco and next to him, Scald. Undina looked small and dainty next to the cowled Chosen and she looked up gratefully at Azulya, who completed the circle.

They began connecting hands haphazardly, without any method or order, and the link was almost complete, when Sereth pulled back.

“Wait,” he said.

He knelt and put his Key down upon the rock at his feet. He rubbed his face vigorously.

“Whenever you are ready, Sereth,” Scald said, but without any hint of annoyance.

Sereth beamed at him.

“We have no idea what we are doing, we only know that we must do this. We do not know what is going to happen. We have all shared the same dream and we are acting upon it because it the clearest sign of our cohesion, as Chosen, that we have so far received …”

He hesitated, looking deep into the eyes of each. He nodded, smiled to himself and rubbed his hands together. He picked up his Key and held his hand out to Elan.

As the priestess covered it with her hand, he lowered his own over Illiom’s.

And the world vanished ...

A rushing sensation.

A soaring up into sky and, disconcertingly, a simultaneous dropping, a falling down into earth.

Both sensations cohabiting the same paradoxical experience.

A silent wind howling, around and through Illiom.

Her hair stands on end as a tingling of power dances across her skin, caressing the length of her body: an almost unbearable pleasure.

When the Voice comes, everything changes again.

Illiom could listen to that voice for the rest of eternity.

Does the voice even say anything at first?

She is not sure.

Maybe all that she hears is simply the sound of breathing?

This sound, this voice, it is like the ocean of infinity washing on the shores of eternity. Everything is contained within this movement, everything that exists does so only between this ebb and this flow.

And the silence that is cradled between this ebb and flow? Oh, what depth! What balm … what peace …

How could one ask for more?

To relinquish the puny breath for this greater one that stretches and rises and expands … and then collapses onto itself in a tumultuous release of tension.

To flow … with the magnificent drawing in of all that is.

To ebb … in the exquisite infinite exhalation and release.

To let go … and to embrace …

To let go … and to embrace …

Illiom is lost in the measure of those breaths; she is lost in the waiting for … she knows not what, nor does she care to know.

A small and feeble part of her protests weakly, but it is like the clinging of a dying flame to the last stub of a wick about to drown in the inexorable expanse of wax beneath it: a blue, tremulous glow and then … nothing, just a thin thread of smoke to mark the place where it once was.

The passage of time is now merely a meaningless annoyance; she can wait until death comes for her and still not care. How can she, when the voice that now lulls her into this torpor speaks a wordless promise of truths that stretch so far beyond the realms of mind as to be beyond reach; utterly incomprehensible in their distance, in their weave, in their unfathomable essence, and yet as true as the fire blazing within her breast …

Illiom …

And all the worlds move to accommodate that one word, that one name ... her name.

The word is uttered just once and yet the waves that precede it, and those that ripple in its wake, wash through Illiom as though she is nothing more than a small rock-pool of seawater on the very cusp of the Endless Sea, and a great wave has just washed over her. The rock-pool remains, but can it be said to be the same, after all that it contains has been washed away and replaced?

All of her waters are now replaced, all swept away, all renewed and refilled. All gone.

Open thine eyes, Illiom …

Being gone, there is nothing left to offer any resistance.

And as her eyelids open, so do the skies also open.

A dark abyss of distance unfolds, like petals of a flower, to reveal a falling shower of stars. Stars that pulse from the farthest reaches of reality, filling the void with light, spilling a vat of more stars across the infinite shores of awareness …

Illiom can scarcely breathe.

Awe and joy, life and deathly fear, tear her open until she feels eviscerated, her core exposed, poised for the reaping that must surely come …

Open thine eyes …

The voice is soundless.

Like Who’s, or Abdora’s, but also nothing like either.

With supreme effort, Illiom complies, this time opening a different set of eyes, the inner eyes that look within, just as the bodily ones look outward …

Stars … more stars.

More stars than she has ever seen surround her. Above and below are lost concepts, as are ahead and behind. All around her, nothing but stars.

Who are you? She longs to ask. But is this not the same question that a fish might ask of the sea? It rings hollow and undeserving of reply, yet still a reply comes. Just not quite in the form that she anticipates.

Oh yes, there are words, but with them comes something greater, something larger than feeling or knowing, something so unlike anything she has ever experienced that Illiom has not the means to describe it.

She feels something brush against her forehead and the universe enters her. Illiom feels herself stretching and expanding outwards to let it all within. Somewhere far, far away, someone screams.

Is there any pain? Oh yes, she might describe it as pain: a pain so great that she might die from it if she were not also cradled and cushioned by indescribable sweetness.

Speaks the voice ...

I am the One who opens the eyes of babes, who breathes the first breath and the last

I am the Witness who watches the blade of time slice the thread of life from each and every soul

I am the One who weeps for all that has been lost and laughs for all that is gained and found

I am the One who sits at the Gates of No Return and the One who soothes the despairing heart in the darkest night

I am the Last and I am the First

I am the longing and the longed for

I am both the luminous pearl and the thread that joins her to her kin

I am more than thou can hope to bear

I am more than thou can bear to hope

As the Voice speaks these words, the distant stars dance and swirl and shine all the brighter. Illiom stares at a cluster that fills half the sky and, as she looks, a face emerges: a face made of stars.

The features of the Goddess are impossible to mistake for those of a mere mortal.

It is not just beauty, for beauty is an ephemeral thing; it is not just power or kindness or grace, for these are all qualities dependent upon perception.

The Goddess’ features exist outside of the temporal vault, and stretch even into those places where no life can ever hope to be sustained.

Sudra’s is the face of the innermost core of all being and Illiom is surprised to discover that She is intimately known to her.

Illiom recognises her features just as she would those of a beloved one.

Sudra!

Illiom’s mouth shapes the name, though not a single syllable of sound escapes her lips.

It warms my heart to hear thee utter my name so, my Beloved

The Goddess’ words seem inconceivable to Illiom. That the Goddess should speak with her is beyond her comprehension.

We have little time to spend together, my dear brave, luminous, and precious soul

Our truths turn in vastly different spheres, and while timelessness is the yard in mine, it is not the yard in thine

There is much that I would say to thee but, of all things, what follows is the most important

Therefore hearken now, and hearken well

Illiom looks into the depths of those divine eyes and longs to gaze into them for all eternity. But Sudra’s words are her command. Illiom picks up the tatters of her senses and turns them towards the Goddess’ words and the meaning that they bear.

Know this! Nought can ever be brought into being to impede or to slay thee, except a snare of your own devising

Only the blade that thou willingly forge within the fires of illusion can have the power to harm thee

Thou shalt not yield to the forging of such a weapon

When all else fails, remember this ...

Enveloped in the Goddess’ breath, Illiom experiences such a quickening in her heart, such a surge of connection, that she is completely aware that Sudra’s words are essential knowing.

The Goddess continues, but her voice holds a different cadence. Her words are fire, and carve their meaning upon Illiom’s very soul.

When the very seed that slumbers at thy core is threatened

And all hope is dashed upon the shores of Darkness

When every turn offers only ruin and despair

And the only escape lies in a dire fall towards death itself

Then, my sweetest Child, open thine arms

And fall

Fall, and know that I shall be there to catch thy fragile frame ’ere it shatters against the harsh illusions of embodiment

Thou hast heard the call that counts and it is the call of thine own Heart

Heed it always, and where it leads, follow

Though reason-less, its call speaks louder than the promises of a thousand well laid thoughts, for it speaks the highest of truths and its promises are not fancies of mortal flesh

Illiom watches in awe as her Goddess, the Goddess of the world, reaches towards her with an invisible hand and lays it for a moment against her cheek.

It is done, my sweet one

Time is at an end

Thou must return to thine own world now, and I to mine

Go, my Daughter

Bear the message we have shared within thee

See the truth only through the eye that does not blink

Drink always from the deepest of wells

Go now ... Illiom

To be told to go, even in such a gentle way, wrings Illiom’s heart dry of tears and blood.

She reaches towards the withdrawing presence with one useless hand, but already it is too late, already the time for any such gesture has passed.