Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Of Old Schools and Faerielands

I am walking down the road to my old school. The road is now a river; artificially constructed, it is raised above the level of the ground, and flanked on either side by a sunken river bank. I am walking along the river bank of the river to my old school. They are people, neighbours and school children, people I know, all along the river length.

When I get there the school has become an underwater facility, part swimming pool, part aquarium, all partially submerged. I enter the building and am given a small, brown, baby seal to care for. But soon I am chased by people from the facility, whose task is to take the seal from me. I run through the ice blue water facility with the seal in my hand, hiding in pool filled rooms and air conditioning vents until I manage to escape to the outside world by the river bank.

Now I am no longer on the river road to my old school. Now I am no longer standing before my old school, the underwater facility. Now the river bank is an enrailed moat. Now the underwater facility is an ancient castle, standing behind me. As I turn to face the school-turned-castle, surrounded by the enrailed moat that was once a river and its bank, I find myself in an old world, a new realm, a magickal sphere into which I am gazing.

In this Faerieland there are two species of being - the Wise Ones and the New People. The Wise Ones are of magickal blood. They are the faeries and the centaurs, the phoenixes and the beings that are both animals and human at the same time. The New People are descendants of the Wise Ones. The magick in their blood is thin and thinning, and they want to be exorcised of it completely. They are human, but not yet human.

The Wise Ones are holding a council meeting. They want to stop the efforts of the New People before all magick is gone from their descendants forever. They want to make life as it were before the blood began to grow thin. They want to keep their own wisdom and magick, which has been fading fast thanks to the efforts of the New People to exorcise all ancient power from that realm, and to rid the Faerielands of the olden ways.

A group of magicians, explorers and I are deployed by the council of the Wise Ones to find a way to stop the New People. My friend Georgi-Ann is with us. We sail to a parallel shore. The land is surrounded by a river or maybe a sea. There is a railing between the land and the water. Getting off the boat and onto the land, we walk into a garden.

It is evening in the garden. The plants here are pond plants. Tall, yellow grasses, rushes and reeds in violet, peach and rose and the pale green of the willow trees surround a water-lilied pond, over the surface of which is stretched a bamboo bridge. The bridge is on the same level of the water, and so it seems that we are walking on the water itself. Scattered across the land flanking either side of the pond are the stone statues of old gods. The light of the setting sun is softened by the low-lying and undulating mists of that place.

Beyond the bridge is a tunnel flanked on either side by the sheer drop of tall crags and cliff faces, leading to a deeper, darker, cooler place, the jungle interior of those lands. Here the colours are brighter and darker than the paler, lighter colours of the waterside garden. Deep, jade, jungly greens are complimented by the burgundy and purples of the plants which are in turn contrasted to the tawny golden yellow of the suspension bridge stretch across the space of that clearing. The plants here also seem moister and mossier than those of the garden. They grow upon the faces of the walls of rock that diverged from each other at the end of the tunnel, at the entrance to the clearing to encircle it.

Georgi says she prefers that jungle to the garden, but I like the garden best. We proceed past the clearing to the end of the bridge to a place I cannot see very clearly and do not know. I only see our return back through the jungle, back through the garden, back to the boat. It is also unclear whether or not we found the way, but I intuit and believe we do. I awake from the Dreaming.

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