In the Garden

I felt a slight tug and jerk as Lorne touched the side of my cheek, my eyes growing unfocused. As the Garden swam into view, I know what I expected to see: A fiery Creature, a whirl of beating wings and blinking eyes, a blazing sword in Its midst. What I saw, instead, was a copse and beyond its perimeter, a free flowing river, its banks covered with lush and dense greenery. A Voice whispered on the breeze, “On the day you were created, you were prepared....” I turned expecting Lorne or Sariel, but I was alone in the stillness.

Taking one hesitant step forward, then another, I was inexorably drawn into the Garden before me. The abundance of trees was overwhelming and beautiful in its greatness. The branches of the largest seemed to lift ever upward to the sky, its roots going down to the waters of the river. I turned my head this way and that as I walked, the sound of birdsong catching my ear. Each call was piercingly beautiful and more real than I had ever heard before. The smell of the air was crisp and green.

I stopped beside the river and stood still as a needle, breathing deeply, and taking in the sweet smell of cedar mingled with the fragrance of the other trees. After a moment I knelt at the water’s edge and dipped in my fingers, finding surprising warmth where I had expected the icy coldness of a spring. I brought my fingertips to my mouth, tasting the water’s sweetness. As I did so, the Garden began to become ever more green, its smells more intense. I felt as though I had never tasted water before, never before seen a real tree.

There was sparkle of light, then three stones glimmering in a small patch of sand on the riverbank caught my eye, all smooth and polished by the water. I couldn’t tell you why, but at that moment I felt a strong impulse to choose one. It seemed important somehow, even necessary. I ran my finger over each stone, but the one in the middle seemed to tingle under my touch. After a moment, I chose it and dropped it into my pocket. I straightened and stood, noticing for the first time two trees at the very center of the Garden.

Each of the trees was laden with ripe fruit, but a fruit that I’d never seen before. At the base of one, there bloomed a rose bush; in the lowest branch of the other there nested a bird with brilliant red and gold feathers, a single plume of purple cascading from its back. I walked softly toward the tree not wanting to frighten the bird away, each boot making an impression in the tufted grass beneath my feet. I knew only that I longed to touch the bird’s silken feathers, I hungered to look into its dark and seemingly endless gaze. As I extended one hand toward it, the bird’s nesting branch seemed to bend toward my touch. I reached out to brush the soft red and gold plumage with my fingertips, but as I did so my fingers passed through unexpectedly, the creature’s feathers turning to flame and nearly consuming it with my touch. Its ashes drifted like dark snowflakes before me in a sudden stirring breeze, and I heard a lone cry as the single, remaining purple plume fell into my outstretched hand.

I stared at the purple blaze and then looked at the empty place where the creature had been. I should have felt fear or perhaps sadness for its loss, but instead I felt wonder. Whatever had happened to the creature had been so utterly right that I knew it with every fiber of my being. Unbuttoning the collar of my jacket dress, I slid the feather between my undergarments and my skin, placing it over my heart. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around the creature’s nesting tree, laying my head on its trunk and listening for something within.

Then I felt its pulse, images and sounds and scents rushing through me: The dance of fire at night, the scent of Grr’s fur, the cry of a newborn, Lorne’s touch on my cheek, the twinkling of the North Star, Brit’s shining eyes and the smell of the cookies she served in the Library. I closed my eyes and rested my cheek against the tree’s smooth bark, holding it and being held by the most living of living things. I’m not sure how long I stood there. I only know that I did not stir until, with the sound of rustling leaves and a glint of shimmering green, one leaf fluttered to rest at the toe of my boot.

I knelt at the foot of the tree, plucking the leaf from the grass and holding it between thumb and forefinger, studying each perfect vein from the base to the tip of the blade. I kissed it lightly and inhaled its scent, looking up to the tree with murmured thanks, before pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and wrapping the leaf neatly within. As I slid the small bundle into the folds of my skirt, I thought, “If only Grr could see this...it would make him whole....”

No sooner than the thought had formed, I found myself alone, standing in the wintry graveyard beside a cold slab nestled in the Toxian snow.

Lorne was nowhere to be seen.

What was Eden like... when You were there?

We were interrupted in our discussion of Eden by the arrival of a number of vampires led by the Overlord, JonnyGio Forcella. Among them were Nessa, her mother, Morticia, and Nessa’s daughter, Ashe. Nessa ran up to Lorne, grabbing him roughly and laughing wildly. “You like this or d’ya like it rougher?” She curled around Lorne, bringing her face within inches of His. Ashe choked back laughter. “What, honey?” Nessa replied to Ashe’s unspoken comment, “Ain’t you seen him topless? He’s hot, I tell ‘ya.”

Morticia licked her lips, her tongue gliding over extended fangs. “Nessa, darling, never heard of sharing?” she asked slyly. I looked at each of the vampire women, their hunger for Lorne apparent and I straightened up, wary once again.

Nessa thrust out her hip and pressed into Lorne. “I don’t like to share, Mother. I’m greedy ‘n selfish.”

I watched as Lorne placed His index finger on the center of Nessa’s sternum and slowly pushed her back. "Your pardon, good lady. I am back from a long journey, and wouldn't want to contaminate you with supernatural miasmas."

Nessa affected an insincere pout. “Okay, Lorney, babe… I get ‘ya, doll face… maybe we can meet up later when you have been cleansed...” she laughed.

“Err, mum…” Ashe poked Nessa behind the back, “being greedy and selfish is a sin, I think....” She darted her head around Nessa to lick her lips at Lorne.

“Shhh, Ashe,” Nessa replied, “I’m trying to master all seven….”

The Overlord cut the banter short, moving quickly beyond the ability to see, to stand just beside the stone slab on which I sat. Looking at both Lorne and me, he said in a voice dry with age, “I do believe you are paying visit to the dead... or is this a private meeting in such an uncommon place?”

Lorne shook His head, turning to speak over His shoulder to the Overlord. “It seems Joah was more contemplating the dead, I was simply using the unique spiritual qualities she has to guide my way back to the physical plane.”

I didn’t relax, but I did shift slightly on the slab, pointing to the headstone by my side. “Mary Olive Faith Dewitt,” I said in reply.

Ashe hopped up on a nearby headstone and looked around, amusement twinkling in her eyes.

“Is there a empty tomb around here?” Morticia yawned, “I’m sleepy.” The night sky was beginning to lighten, the sun not yet up, but the stars were fading and twinkling out.

“Tombs are so outdated, Grandmother… I prefer my big comfy bed with heavy curtains to draw around it, and shuttered windows….” Ashe wrapped her arms around herself with a dreamy expression on her face.

Lorne looked back to Morticia, nodding as He gazed around the graveyard. “There is more than one I believe. As I understand it, there were relatively large numbers of funerals performed here after no body was recovered for one reason or another.”

The Overlord nodded to Morticia, dismissing her to explore. She drifted off, walking around various tombs and inspecting each one. His gaze, however, never wandered from Lorne. “Then you don’t mind if we stay here a bit contemplating the dead too... we used too do so once a week and I wish this practice to be restored.”

“To see an Overlord of the Kindred Alliance in the graveyard would not be an unwelcome sight in My opinion,” Lorne said evenly. “Your predecessor spent many hours here, tending the graves, and showing them reverence.”

“That is correct, indeed,” the Overlord agreed. “But lately we have not been so welcome here….”

From a tomb to the right of me, Morticia muttered, “They need to clean in here.” I looked over to see her rubbing a finger along the stone tresses of a blank-eyed girl in a summer bonnet. The girl sat frozen in time, her hand resting on the carved stump of a tree before her. A few toys and trinkets had been laid around her and in front of the tomb’s opening.

I turned back to the headstone beside me, brushing a bit of snow from it’s top. Mary Olive’s engraving was worn. Weeds poked up through the cracked surface at its base. “There’s much that needs tending here,” I said. “Their memories are all but lost.”

Lorne looked down at me with a wry, if light smile. “Hopefully not all.” He turned back toward the Overlord. “Your predecessor also once confided in Me his intention to eat god.”

Ashe bent over a nearby stone and began cutting the frozen weeds with her claw and crushing them to powder with her hands, a sad and angry expression on her face. The Overlord shifted slightly giving Lorne a tight smile.

“Vladimir’s ambitions were high, but I suppose he was within his rights to try.” The Overlord spread his hands as if offering an apology. “I’d not dare to try in such a challenge… not yet, at least,” he grinned.

Morticia closed her eyes. With a murmur barely spoken, she rose in the air, floating and slipping into a trance.

“Difficult to say which ambitions were his and which were those of the dead, but it was always fascinating to witness,” Lorne observed mildly.

The Overlord shrugged. “I have more urgent business to take care of right now.” He met Lorne’s eyes with a cold gaze. “Maybe in due time I will try. Who knows...after all we have eternity….”

Lorne looked at the Overlord a long moment. “I can't imagine the taste will be palatable, but it is your eternity to have, of course,” He grinned slightly.

The Overlord stepped back, his eyes roving over his family. “I shall leave you all for now, but I want you to come here to remember your ancient blood.... I want this habit restored.” Without a word, he turned and departed, his movements so smooth and quick that he appeared to be walking through the headstones instead of around them.

Lorne watched the Overlord retreat then turned slowly away from him and back toward me, answering the question I had asked and almost forgotten during the descent of the vampires. “In Eden, Joah, it was perfect,” He said. “And that is why Eden did not work.”

“I hate perfection… it’s odd,” Nessa muttered, then startled as Morticia snapped out of her trance and landed with a curse on the frozen ground.

“Perfect beauty,” I mused, “Perfect love... perfect minds... why wouldn't that work, Lorne?” I was genuinely puzzled.

“Maybe too perfect?” Ashe muttered as she rubbed some dirt off a headstone.

“Because humankind are creatures of change,” Lorne began, “and perfection is a static thing. Idealized love leads to wondering why the object of your love is not what you thought they were.”

As Lorne spoke, one by one the vampires began to drift away from the graveyard. “Sun’s almost up,” Ashe murmured. I nodded goodbye as she and Nessa and Morticia slipped away. Lorne stood watching, his arms folded in front of Him. He lifted a hand in farewell as they departed.

I twisted around slightly to look up at Him. “It would seem to me... that in a place of complete wholeness, the possibility for infinite change would be possible… creativity would know no limits.” I looked down at my lap. “Look at the creation of the world,” I said a bit tentatively, knowing something of Lorne's role in that.

“Therein lies a problem as well, Joah, perhaps the problem to being with. If one does their best to do something, perhaps it will grow beyond them and take on a life of its own. Now imagine that on the scale of deities.”

I lay on hand on Mary Olive’s headstone, pulling myself up to stand, my boots still on the slab that was nestled in the snow. “You’re well acquainted with creation taking on a life of it's own, I suppose.” My memories were mixed, all Pestilence and Lilith and Eve and Sariel… creation and loss. “Still… it seems….” I broke off, staring down at my boots.

Lorne cocked His head, placing his His hands again behind His back. “Is there something on your mind, Joah?”

I raised my head to meet His eyevoids and spoke with great hesitance. “You say that no one can go there... not anymore. Yet, sometimes I feel I belong there.” I turned away with confusion, gazing out over the graveyard, then up at the lightening sky, pretending to look for the stars.

I could feel Lorne watching me for a while, and as He did so, my attention was drawn once more to Him. He wasn’t angry with me; instead, He was smiling sweetly. He raised a hand, finger curled to draw up my cheek softly.

I tilted my face slightly to His touch. “I'm being foolish, aren't I? Just dreams, I suppose... an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” I felt embarrassed and ill at ease.

Lorne smiled broadly at me, pushing His fingertips through the hair at the side of my face, and back behind my ear, cupping my cheek. “Not a silly dream, nor a quote from an instance where an actual dream was being discussed either, silly or otherwise.” He dropped his hand and brought it back behind Him.

“I suppose that's true,” I said softly. “But how does one know... if the dream is... real?”

Lorne shook His head. “There is only deduction, and even that is not unflawed at the introduction of the idea of Descartes’ perfect dream, Joah.”

“You mean the senses can trick us?” I asked. I brushed a bit of snow from my skirts, my small, gloved hand moving delicately over the fabric as I smoothed away bits of frozen debris it had picked up from the stone slab.

“I mean if your senses were all of them fed false information, all of them, how would you know?” Lorne’s eyevoids tracked the movements of my hand.

“There must be a way to test the senses, Lorne.” I trailed off thinking about the problem of dreams and reality. “How do You know?”

Lorne Harlequin shook His head, turning to look away. “Apart from logical inconsistencies, and only if there is a mistake in the dream? I don't see a way that any can.”

“I want to go there,” I said, turning my face away Him. I felt that I was making an impossible request, one I that had for so long been afraid to speak.

“Go...to Paradise? Go to Eden?” Lorne raised His eyebrows slightly, looking back to me.

I slowly met His gaze, nodding hesitantly, but saying yes. “I feel it calls to me Lorne.” I was at a loss as to how to explain. “After the Eden soil, Your seed...the death of my... fear... it grows stronger, more vivid... and insistent."

Lorne nodded slowly as I spoke. “I can take you there. To a part of it.”

“Please do,” I whispered. “Even if to a part of it... please....”

Silently, Lorne reached toward my cheek, as if in slow motion. As His fingers touched my skin, the world began to blur and brighten at the sound of rustling foliage and avian wings….

Mary Olive Faith Dewitt

I felt restless. The snow continued to fall, covering the City in a blanket of white despite the toxic properties of the air through which it drifted. Grrbrool had called my true name – three times he had called me – and yet the confused and fearful look remained in his eyes. My stomach twisted with guilt and responsibility and the complete inability to completely rectify the wrongs I had done. It was in this frame of mind, that I walked to the graveyard, wondering about other lives that had gone amiss, seeking the company of spirits as restless as me.

I opened the Iron Gate, stepping beyond it into the cemetery proper. Many headstones listed to one side or the other, or had crumbled and fallen to the ground entirely, given up to the purchase of weeds. I was drawn to one headstone in particular. Before it lay what appeared to be a footstone, though it was really a large, solid slab. I was uncertain of its purpose, but I sat down on it anyway, facing the engraving before me, and touching my fingertips to the lettering in the stone.

The air hissed beside me and after a moment I heard it crackle. A line rose up from the air tracing an area that soon tore open into a great blue void. I startled and pulled back, every sense alert as I watched. Out of the tear squeezed a globe of brilliant blue, trailing arcs of plasma that licked and hissed against the ground, an apparent cocoon forming over a skeletal humanoid torso.

I watched warily as the figure began to form, readying myself for any eventuality when all at once, the globe disappeared with a loud pop, leaving the bones to grow legs, a feeble layer of skin, and cloth. The death's head grin on the skull began to grow into inscrutable, expressionless lips as a face bubbled out of bone. I pulled my knees up to my chest, watching and waiting, still as a cat while the form inflated with grotesque and fluid sounds muffled by the skin.

As I began to recognize the form a silent “Oh!” of surprise escaped my lips. Before me stood Lorne, holding His arms out as the cloth continued to grow after the inflation has desisted, and then lowering His arms the process completed. “Thank you, Joah,” He said, stepping closer. “You make some journeys much less of a bother to return from.”

I smiled with relief, seeing Him fully formed before me. Relaxing, I unwrapped my legs and began to stretch out along the slab below once again. “You gave me quite a scare, Lorne,” I smiled. “Journey?”

Lorne Harlequin cocked his head, taking another two steps toward me. He lifted a hand and shook His head with a nonchalant, shrugging-off expression. “Simply a small visit to planes nonphysical, hence the dramatic entrance.” He stopped, leaning down to see what I was fingering on the headstone.

I turned slightly, looking into His black eyevoids. “Mary Olive Faith Dewitt, 1706-1768,” I murmured, pressing my fingertip into the worn engraving. “Eternal Rest Grant Unto Her, Oh Lord,” I said softly. “I wonder if Mary Olive found that.”

I could see Lorne following the text, His lips pursed. After a moment, he responded. “Well, she won't have been allowed into Paradise, I am sure of that.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked with a small frown. “Did you know her?” I gazed around at the other stones for a moment, wondering if any of those lying beneath the frozen ground had found paradise.

Lorne smiled vaguely as He turned to look round the graveyard, seemingly for His own reasons. "I did not know her, but because I know no one is permitted into Paradise I thought the assumption safe to make.”

“Eden, you mean...not...Heaven,” I nodded, finally understanding. A feeling of wistfulness and longing so sharp it hurt flooded me. “I dream of the Garden, Lorne. It started the night that Omega made Nareth her Chylde. Then… after You... ” I grew quiet thinking of all that Lorne and Legion had done. “It's vivid,” I finally said. “What was it like...when You were there?”