Part 57 – Lethe

A report from Councilor Thursday on recent events – part one of three.

Dear Lord Phaon,
I am sure my conduct over recent days has raised some questions, and while I suspect you and the others have guessed most of it, it is probably appropriate- for the record if nothing else, that I try to set down my own account.

========================================

PART ONE

I will make clear to you that I myself had little understanding of what was happening, before I entered Nereid's control room, on the night of the 27th [relative time]. The visions and prophecy relating to the Six-Fold Star had, of course, been with me for some time, since the founding of the New Eye of Harmony, in fact, and these had led me to take a special interest in the creatures detected in the vortex, creatures which certain prior reports have clearly identified to be [REDACTED], aspects of the [REDACTED], which prophecy rightly indicated would lead us to the Six-Fold Star, at a time when most dismissed these as being in some way connected with the recent terrorist atrocities against our nation. Our recent trip to the Star there confirmed its existence, and location, but while our forces were preoccupied with Tethseram there was little opportunity for a scientific investigation , and the visions did not subside, in fact, they seemed only to grow more in intensity.

The night your last incarnation died, and SEN brought to us the gift of two Titan young- two Hearts as you call them, SEN spoke to me, in the language of Time- micro adjustments of the causal flow, dancing threads upon the tapestry of vision. At the time, I was not to remember it, but, as is the way with the Titans and we, their Seers, we gaze upon the Sea of Time and they reach out from the Deeps, guiding our eyes.

As prophecy comes to those with the Sight, Sen and his companion had held up the Vision Entire to my eyes back across my timeline, from the new dawn of Lethe where first I beheld it, to that night where the full pattern stood finally before my eyes. I was to await the moment- a time when the clearest waters under the winds of time would stretch between New Gallifrey and our destination, and then to remember.

A few nights ago, as I write this, and as you write this, that vision came to me.

I'm afraid I have little memory of where I was, or what I was about, at the time. Secular and worldly concerns were driven from my thoughts- which is, of course, a fancier way of saying that the brain of a Seer is designed - and I use the word advisedly- to perceive space-time on a transdimensional level, and such perceptive faculties, when in use, rather disrupt the normal observational and memory processes.

I believe that I was in the wilderness, south of the forest, talking with one of the Outsiders who SEN or the Abbot had seen fit to bring through from the last days of the old planet, to this world in SL-Space, but the remainder is more or less a blank. I have no idea how I got back to the Citadel, or of little else in the interim, until I found myself seated in a chair, in the Castellan's front office, surrounded by a buzzing of voices, and underlying it all, the murmuring minds of the Titans in the landing bay across the hall.

It was SEN's presence, and empathic conversation with his symbiote; yourself, Phaon, which roused me. The sense of that mind, in the immediate present, and above all the pervading aura of smugness seemingly common to any proud parent- or foster parent- of any species, recalled to me my mission in both the general and the very specific sense, and- with some difficulty; the presence of the vision is quite profound and this body deceptively frail, pursued yourself and Kylie into the landing bay- myself pursued by Lords Tempest and Carter, and some medical personage appertaining unto the City.

The meaning of the Vision which had blossomed in my mind since the restoration was now clear to me, and urgent. Though we profess ourselves masters of the fourth and fifth dimension, still, like the early space travellers, for some journeys we must even now abide by certain laws of conjunction, and thus, I knew from the Sight, to reach the place and time ordained, we - you, Kylie, myself, needed to depart almost immediately.

The SASTAP could not convey us this time; SEN had another part to play in the events that were to unfold, I perceived that readily,and my instincts railed against calling on the Abbot. Guardian he may be, and worshipful, but I fear that in the duality of our theology he is very much the cold fire of the long, dispassionate view; and such things burn, by way of nurture. Then, too,of the times in which he has taken a hand, once, he amused himself by biting and burning off assorted pieces of one of my friends, and latterly of devastating an entire planet. The Abbot has my respect and loyal obedience, but I will not call his hand to the cradle.

This left a third, desperate option, the one which I now saw it had always been my destiny to come to, but, even as I moved toward my own Capsule, the Nereid, the medical man injected me with a sedative, setting the short term needs of the health of one Seeress above the long-term path of necessity. Perhaps some subtle chiding, at Destiny's hand, toward my own earlier rejection of the Abbot's embodiment of the cold continuum, against the emotional immediacy of the moment? Perhaps not, no matter.

In any event I was scarcely in a position to consider the moral lessons at the time, barely having the presence of mind to step forward and throw myself against Nereid's doors - fortunately she was alert, and willing to forgo the usual megum pod and yorrow seed routine with keys, and simply open, letting me fall inside as the classified of the drug overwhelmed me, washing away all Vision and thought.

To Be Continued...