Passage 2

Passage 2: The Space Between Worlds

Orion took me around campus to a part of the land that would have never caught my eye, but it has been there all along under my nose. It’s just behind a building which has no importance to me, except it is just a garden with a neglectful look about it; ivy growing on it, and a few ancient oak trees scattered here and there. This is a place where no one under the age of twenty would ever pay attention to.

Now that I’ve experienced it for myself through these new eyes, I can see why.

These were of an entirely different kind. Instead of stringing people together, they hung suspended in the air itself, taking shapes that looked somewhat like constellations. The silver and purple glow made an invisible pattern, forming an intricate web that looked alive.

"What is this place?" I asked as I halted myself at the entrance of the garden.

“It’s called a thin spot,” Orion continued. “An area where the borders of the planes naturally aren’t as strong. Your university just happened to be chock-full of one of the points with an exceptionally strong resonance of the astral plane, no doubt just coincidence that it happened to be where your school was.” Orion led them into the room, and it seemed as though the threads parted smoothly for him as though he were skipping a rock across a stream. “There are thin spots all over your world where the borders of the planes aren’t as strong,” Orion explained as he moved deeper into the threads.

I was following him much closer, conscious of the fibers touching my skin, like cobwebs. There wasn’t much that was painful about it, but it was something that registered my attention. There was a prickling sensation, as if the hairs on my own arm were standing on end.

"So, I am learning magic, right? Magic here, in broad daylight, mind you. What if a person were to bear witness?"

Orion plopped down on the rock bench that had been there since the building of the university. “They won’t. One of the first things you have to remember is that people will see what they expect to see. Even if someone happened by right now, they’d only see two students talking about something. Their minds would supply a perfectly normal reason.” He patted the bench beside him. “Come on. Lesson number one.”

I sat down, keeping what I thought was an acceptable distance between us. The cord from our chests tightened but did not break, still radiating these impossible colors.

Orion caught me staring at it and smiled. “Not distracting, is it? The connection. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it, eventually.”

"What if I don’t want to get used to it?"

“Then you’ll be very distracted.” He turned fully towards me. “But that’s not what we are focusing on. What I would like is for you to describe what it is that you see. Not the threads, but all of it. What is the difference in what it is you perceive?”

I slowed to a stop to take a closer look, to notice what had changed. The patterns of magic were plain to see, but it wasn't the only thing that had shifted. The colors were alive and vibrant. The darkness beneath the oak trees had a depth to it that had never been visible before. There was a signal off to one side of my vision, a radio channel broadcasting a signal just out of range.

“Everything feels more," I said finally. “More real, more immediate. Like I’d been living my life in a screen and now it’s been removed from me.”

“Good," Orion approved warmly. “That’s exactly right. What you're feeling is astral awareness. You're tapping into the magical energies that are at work in everything. Most humans never feel those energies in their whole lives, and you're feeling them now. You're feeling them.”

He held out his hand, palm up, and I watched a light build in his palm. A web of silver and blue energy twisted together to form a ball that pulsed like a star. It was beautiful and mesmerizing, but it broke so many laws of physics that I knew.

“How?” I whispered.

"Magic is the expression of will through the power of the astral dimensions. I create in my imagination what I want and then use the power surrounding me to implement it," he said as he deliberately turned his globe with his fingers and it slowly revolved as it cast shadows on his face. "You too can do it now," he said as he fixed his gaze on me. "The awakening was more than just restoring your eyes to you," he said as his gaze dived into my brain. "It gave you the power to tap the astral currents," he said as he waved his hand on his head as if gesturing.

“I don’t know how.”

"Not yet," he said. "But you will." He clenched his fist, and the ball vanished. "Let's start with something simple," he said. "Notice this flower." He nodded at a faded daisy somehow alive in the shade. "Can you feel the connection of life between the flower and the earth?" he asked. "There is a connection of life between every plant, every animal, every human, and the earth," he said. "If you can see it, you can weave it."

I gazed at the flower in puzzlement. “I don’t even know what I'm looking for,” I replied.

“Yes, you do. You’ve been noticing threads all morning. This one’s no different. Don’t analyze it so much. Trust your gut.”

Easy for him to say. “Inuition” had probably been refined since childhood. “Inuition” was presently yelling at me that all of this was nonsense.

I knew this. But I decided to give it a try. I concentrated on the daisy and tried to see beyond it. At first, it was just an ordinary droopy flower, which had to be watered and set in the sun. Then, slowly, I began to notice something else. A small green cord, which existed only barely, linking the roots of flowers to the earth. The cord was flickering, like a beating heart.

"I see it," I whispered. "It's green. But it's so faint,"

“Reach out for it now. With your intention, not your hand. Imagine the cord growing stronger, the flower taking more and more sustenance from the earth.”

I was not aware of what I was doing, but I did the best I could. I was focused on the thread, on the thought of illumination and strengthening. Then there was a pause, long enough to be a pause, before there was a reaction. Then there was a shift occurring within me, as if a door was opening. Energy was in movement, as if it was passing through me towards the thread.

The daisy unstraitened. The colors returned to the petals. The leaves unfurled, reaching for the sun.

I gasped in shock. “Did I just do that?”

Orion’s smile was bright. “You absolutely did. And on your very first try, no less. That’s amazing, starlight. Some people take months to master influencing living beings.”

I was warmed with pride in my chest. Which was silly of me because I wasn’t even sure if I wanted all of these things that were happening to me. But it’s hard to deny the rush of doing the impossible. Casting magic.

"What else can I do?" The question spilled out of me before I could control myself.

"Look at that! You're excited now, aren’t you?” Orion teased him, but he clearly liked his eyes a lot. “No need to get ahead of oneself, please. Just completed your first working, after all. That's enough to tire a man pretty considerably, if my experience means anything."

It was as if on cue that a wave of tiredness swept through me. Not oppressive, but it was definitely present. As if I just did a sprint without warming up.

“Feel that?” Orion asked.

“Astral fatigue,” Orion continued. “You're not accustomed to using your energy yet. But your body will develop a tolerance for that with practice. Until then, we have to pace ourselves,” Orion explained.

The trouble was, I wanted to try and build an argument for why I might want more, but it was true that I was genuinely tired and it was escalating rapidly. I sat back on the bench. “This is going to be an adjustment.”

"Most worthwhile things do." He stood, stretching his powerful legs. "Come on. I’ll walk you back to your apartment. You can rest and let your system recover. We can resume the lessons tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" I looked up at him. "You're just assuming I want to do this again?"

“Don’t you

The response to that question is yes. Despite all of the weirdness, all of the exhaustion, all of the other things, I wanted to know more. I wanted to comprehend a new world which I had apparently stumbled into. But to do so meant to lose all control. My world had turned upside down.

Orion appeared to sense my conflict. He eased his facial expression. “Listen, I know that’s a lot to take in. And yes, I did push you pretty hard today. The thing is, though: you don’t have to make any decisions today. Just think about it, okay? If you want to come back for another lesson tomorrow, that’s it. Otherwise, no worries.”

He turned to walk away but turned back again. “However, if it’s any consolation, I do think that you have some talent in that area. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.”

“I saw him fade away, disappear between the buildings with a ease that made it seem as though the impossibilities were more familiar to him than to me. The string between us strained but did not snap, a reminder of the bond that I had neither called nor sought but which I could not ignore.”

The return walk to my apartment was strange. I was feeling the fibers and tuning into the sense of awareness that comes with projection. There were other college students walking around me on the way, unaware of the energies at work, the links between each of them, and this whole other reality where their reality was incorporated.

Was it always like this? Was the magic all along in the background while I have been fascinated with the world of telescopes and equations?

My phone was buzzing. Text msg from my roommate, Maya, asking if I was coming home for dinner. Business as usual, acting like everything is normal when in fact everything is far from it. I have merely completed a series of magic spells in a secret garden with a man who says he comes from another dimension.

I sent her a confirmation text, then headed upstairs to our apartment on the third floor. I saw that Maya was in the kitchen, trying to cook stir-fry but with a lot of smoke blowing out of her very hot pan.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said, waving the spatula in my direction. “Can you open some windows? I’m making a disaster.”

I laughed and went to help her. I slipped right back into our friendship groove. Maya had been my college roommate from my freshman year, and this dynamic was a result of our college studying patterns as well as our shared aggravation with our college administration. Maya was an art major, a sculpture aficionado, blissfully unaware of anything related to such things as astronomy and physics.

I mean, I’d been watching her struggle with getting down the veggies she’d sautered up with some kind of sauce from the grocery store when I pondered what she might do if I’d told her what happened this morning.

What I wanted to know is whether I could see her thread.

This helped to bring my awareness into sharper focus, and then I could see it. “The silver thread, glinting and living, which connected Maya to an individual that I could not see from my position, likely friends and family, to individuals connected to other threads that were revealed to me.”

"Are you okay?" asked Maya, noticing that I was staring. "You have a weird look on your face," she said with a chuckle.

"just tired," I answered quickly. "Stayed up late to watch the meteor shower,"

“See anything good?”

“Yeah. It was pretty incredible,” I said aloud. You have no idea, I thought.

We had dinner, and Maya was telling me about her sculpting class and the arrogant artist who came and critiqued them all. Just normal conversations about regular stuff. That’s what it should have felt like. A return to a sense of normalcy.

Rather, it’s as if I was watching everything from behind glass. There, but not there. Different, in a way I could not quite put into words.

Once Maya was in bed, I sat by my own window to look out at the stars above me. The stars looked the same as they always had. Far off, beautiful and bound by the laws of physics that I had studied for years and years. Now I knew there was something more out there.

But the cord that bound me to Orion was humming quietly. I was conscious of his presence out in the city. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was elsewhere. Perhaps he was off in his astral plane of existence living who-knows-what kind of life.

Fated mates. The universe had ordained that we were to be together. Ridiculous. Impossible. Scary in a way that had nothing to do with fated mates and everything to do with the fact that it was only this morning, and I’d met him, and already I’d felt the draw to him, the_compulsion to be near him again, to be sitting at his feet, to be listening to him, to be understanding him.

What was it about the bond itself? Or was it I, as ever fascinated by the secrets of the planet, again drawn by the impossible?

I didn't know. And it's because I didn't know what was going to happen that I went to bed and laid there all night, looking up at the sky and wondering what in the world I was supposed to do.

When the morning arrived, I had reached a decision.

I was in the garden exactly at nine and was wearing clothing sufficient for yard work and brought a thermos of coffee, which was greatly needed because of a poor night’s sleep.

But Orion was already there, sitting on the same stone bench as before. He had been there the whole time. He smiled brightly as he saw me approach, and his ease was so beautiful it left me breathless.

“you came,” he said.

“Don’t let it go to your head. I’m only here because I have questions.”

“Of course you are,” But his voice was kindly and happy. “Ask me anything, starlight. I am an open book.”

I shifted to sit beside him, closer than yesterday, and took a sip of my coffee before going on. “Tell me about the astral plane," I asked. “Tell me about where you come from. Because if we’re going to do this," and by this, I meant learning magic, "then I need to know the whole picture."

Orion leaned back in his chair, and a thoughtful expression crossed his face.

“The astral plane is very difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced it,” he explained. “It is much like your world in many respects, yet it is also very different in other respects.” There would be changes in geography dependent upon the will of the people and the flux of magic on that particular plane, he stated. A city would stay in one place for many years and then move overnight if the flux of magic beneath the city changed, he explained. Time did not progress linearly on the astral plane,” he stated.

“It makes no sense.”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “That’s why I said it's hard to describe. Perhaps the best way for you to understand it is to witness it yourself. But that’s for more advanced students. For now, you need to learn how to handle your skills. And realm-crossing should not be taken on impulse,” he said.

“How often do you cross over? Come here, I mean,” Jane asked.

“Oh, even more so now that I’ve found you. I’d come here from time to time looking for my true mate, and then I’d leave without sticking around for too long. The weight of your world is simply too great for me. The way all your systems, all your rules, are defined and governed in accordance with the way your world works. The way all these scientific laws are strict upon one who is accustomed to the rules of magic.”

There was a sense of vulnerability about it, a hint of a light glowing through the veil of optimism. I remembered the strangeness of this encounter for him. He had been searching for a very long time, without any means of getting in touch with a person who could not sense the mere presence of him.

“What’s your family like?” I asked, to my own surprise at myself for asking such a personal question. “In the astral realm.”

"Complicated," Orion's smile turned ironic. “My mother is head of the Seventh House, a powerful family of magicians. There are certain. expectations. Certain tasks my mother wants me to perform. And finding my fated mate in a different dimension, from a non-approved astral bloodline, is going to cause me a certain amount of problems.”

"Oh great. Not only am I cosmically bound to him, now I get to work on a dimension-driven political soap opera. Peachy."

He laughed. It was a warm and catching sound. “Don’t worry about that now. My mother is a force to be reckoned with, but ultimately, she wants me to be happy too. The tie that binds is a sacred trust. She wouldn’t mess with fate.”

"You sound sure about that."

“Trust me. I've known her all my life.”

We easily began a discussion, and Orion began teaching me more about astral projection seeing. Techniques for filtering the fibers so that I was not inundated with information in any way. Techniques for sorting through the different kinds of magics passing by.

One of the qualities of the man that I experienced as a teacher is that of a good communicator. He was very patient with me. He encouraged me without being condescending. He gave me things at a pace that was comfortable with me. He repeated things in different ways if I didn’t pick up the first time. He encouraged me with genuine sincerity when I succeeded. But in the midst of all this, I was more and more aware of him. Not the bond. Not necessarily. Although that was always there, in the back of my mind. But him. Just as a person. The way he spoke of magic as if it were a source of joy. The way his hands had been gentle in demonstrating procedure. The way the lines around his eyes spoke of a man who laughed often. But sometimes he was just insufferable. Too cocky by half. But he was also nice, nice and thoughtful, nice because he wanted to share his world with me. Just as the sun was reaching the height of setting, casting a pink glow across the sky, I came to the realization that I had spent the entirety of the day with this man. The time had flown by like minutes, with nary a thought of anything such as classes or homework, things I would have had on my mind. "I should be getting along. Maya will be looking for me." "Same time tomorrow?" Orion asked, with the hopes clear in his voice. I nodded. “Yeah. Same time.” However, as I turned to walk away, I sensed our connection being stretched to the breaking point, yet holding. I caught myself looking forward to the next day, to learning more, to this impossible world. To seeing him.