Ed waited patiently for a the proper time to awaken Cynthia. He stared at her body as it slept, peacefully next to John her boyfriend. The sound of groggy breathing came through to the astral plane Ed was standing on. Everything about her room reminded Ed of Cynthia. Her vermilion checkered business suit for the next day had been laid out as if she would be going to work, a ruse no doubt to keep John from questioning her on her daily whereabouts as she took an unscheduled vacation.On her cherry nightstand he saw some work papers, a pen, and a notebook along with a brand new gleaming copy of Stephen LaBerge’s "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming." Picking up the book he brought it closer into view so that Ed’s own auric light would shine on it. As his personal glow flooded the cover, Ed laughed softly at the thought of himself as a childhood camper reading a comic book in a tent by flashlight at Camp "In The Word" . The secrecy with which he now stole a peek at the dog-eared page Cynthia had left off on, reminded him of that camp a long time ago. But the thought was quickly cut-off lest he loose himself in the daydream. Ed had to admit, the girl did her homework when properly motivated. She obviously now realized her dreams were far from the ordinary kind. The book was proof of that. Her guides must have clued her in with those synchronous hunches they sometimes managed to pass through the ether that "lucid dreams" was the correct word in modern day language. Here it was only five days since he had appeared to her as the Teacher and she was fast on track to exploring her inner world. He felt a sense of pride at her accomplishment. He looked at the marked page, 238, and read the list of question to consider asking a dream character to maintain a dream dialogue. Very apt, he decided, as he noticed past the page Cynthia’s astral body slipping out of the physical, like a luminous worm pushing the earth aside as it came out to the surface. Time to see how much she had really learned, he decided as he put the book back and reached over tugging at her glow worm arms to help her slip off the body completely.

She wandered with him unaware that she was with him as Ed led her through the vortex of the Colis shell and into their past lives. Together they would uncover the life they had both forgotten.

"The Verve is like the Wind," the sage of Sheba said to Ed Bishop as he pulled the shawl about his shoulders tighter against the night wind. "It has no substance and yet it lives. It is not an animal, thing or place and yet it is all. It is The Verve."

"Is it a god?" Ed heard himself ask the tattooed, half naked man in front of him.

"A god?" The sage laughed at the thought. "It is all things and it is none. Why do you ask Scintilla?"

"I know as a woman, I should not care for the things of science," Scintilla answered as Ed watched himself in this woman’s body, her knuckles throttling the shawl as she spoke in hatred. "But, I am curious. If it is not blasphemy why should I be barren and another woman fruitful? Why does the Verve pick some to scorn and others to uplift? If it is a god, then it is a cruel and unjust god!"

"Is that why you come to me now whilst everyone sleeps? What can you offer me in exchange for a life?"
Scintilla paled at the old man’s suggestion. She had been warned the man was evil beyond death. His science was the mourner’s dirge. His knowledge the knowledge of a dark, haunted world. Her teeth began to chatter at the cold blasting into the old man’s tent. The sage remained unperturbed basking in the night air like it was a warm summer’s breeze.

"Who are you, really?" Scintilla asked wanting to know with who or what she was now bargaining.

"I am a king and a pauper." The sage smiled brightly his rotting teeth breaking through the grim clasp of his lips. "I am the Giver and the Receiver. Who are you?"

Having her own question thrown back at her, Scintilla thought. "I am the barren dessert."

The sages eyes lighted humorously at her response. "How true, the stale wind," he nodded in consent. "How do you feel about that?"

"I want a child."

"What can you offer me in exchange?" Again the damning question.

Scintilla lowered her eyes in desperation. "What do you want from me?"

The sage finally moved to compassion leaned over and gently cupped Scintilla’s chin as he lifted her head to meet his eyes. "The child I can give you will be part of the Verve. Send him back when he is of age to continue my work when I am gone. For his sake, and for yours."

That would be years away, Scintilla realized. She would finally leave behind the curse of a barren woman. The gossiping tongues, and pointed jokes would end. She would be an outcast no more. By the time the boy would be man enough to go to the sage, she figured he would make up his own mind. He no doubt would have no part in the black magic.

"Do it." She agreed.

"Just remember the wizened man warned her as he gave her a drink of the sleeping juice. An old man is easily taken by the beauty of a younger woman," he winked cronishly. "But the Verve can not be deceived. It has no substance and yet it is. There are only four actions a man can take with the Verve: to hold, to receive, to give, and to take. The Verve are the four winds: the stale wind, the wind that breathes, the wafting breeze and the swift tornado. You will no longer be the stale wind, but the wind that breathes. Taste the wind in your dreams. Know it. Make love to it. Do not be mistaken. To break this promise will be to bind me to you until you’ve given me my payment."

Scintilla took her leave of the old man’s tent and walked over the hill to her own community. Slipping into her own tent she went to sleep dreaming of the promise of a child. The old man came in her sleep dropping the seeds of the Verve within her, giving as he said was his function. The seed grew within her and blossomed into a youth of exceptional manliness and charm. He could hunt better than the rest of his tribe. He was a quick learner and had mastered the art of wood sculpting as well. He was far from the studious child Scintilla had expected coming from the old sage’s Verve. Maybe it was this clash that made her forget her promise. Then her husband died one winter in sickness. She justified her denial to herself as she lay awake husbandless pondering the shame of a widow without a son to take care of her. It seemed she had only avoided her fate for a while not escaped it. Ostracism was her lot if she complied with the sage’s request. For that reason she delayed, waiting for the day the old man would make an appearance at her door and claim her son as his. But he never arrived. Realizing how weak the sage was in actuality and maybe dead at this point, she dropped the promise all together from her mind. She had promised to take him there, but if he wanted her son, he would have to come and get him himself, she decided.

The images faded at Scintilla’s death as Cynthia’s ghost floated away from the sage’s image and stood next to Ed again on the astral plane, the Colis shell still in Ed’s hand.

"I was the sage!" Cynthia marveled at her profundity in some earlier time.

"I was Scintilla," Ed admitted chagrined. "Too much pride, it looks like."

"The Verve? Does it exist?" Cynthia wondered about the magic in her dreams. She had gone to sleep and discovered the magic within herself! What did she need Ed to explain things for? She had been the teacher at one time. She just had to remember. The thought excited her as she started to become lucid within the dream.

"You owe me!" Cynthia echoed the gist of the dream.

"Exactly what?"

"Why, you promised to give me your son and you didn’t!" Cynthia couldn’t help but feel delighted that Ed was now in her debt.

"So that’s what you want? You want me to impregnate you in return?"

"Oh God! No!".

"What can you offer me in exchange for a life?" Ed echoed the sage’s question.

"Why did I loose my magic?" Cynthia wondered wishing she could bring it back now.

"Only you can answer that. I don’t know." Ed said.

"The actions of the Verve: to receive, to hold, to give and to take. The answer must be there." Cynthia muttered as her data analyst mind started to tear apart the dream puzzle."The four winds. I wish I knew."

"Now that you’ve name it, you’ll own it." Ed revealed to her. "The magic is only yours once you’ve named it."

"That’s absurd!" Cynthia began to argue. "Wait! You know of the Verve?"

"Verve? No." Ed replied. "My magic has its own names. It’s my world and my reality and my names."

"So you really can’t teach me anything?"

"I can teach you only a feeling. There are no thoughts to explain what you experience as your reality. If it were so then we’d share it. By sharing it, we trap ourselves in the dream. I know only a feeling. That I share freely."

"Mysticism! This isn’t some kind of unexplainable phenomena." Cynthia railed at Ed for his secrets. "There are rules. There is action. There is us."

"What action will you do to me?"

"I gave. You did not give back. Thus I can not receive. I can not hold that which isn’t my own. Thus I am stuck with taking." Cynthia reasoned it out. "But what am I supposed to take so that we can get on with this?"

"My dignity." Ed said simply aware the lesson he had delayed was now upon him.

Cynthia awoke to buzzing head ache and only snatches of dream. It had been a dream about wind, four different types she thought: a stale wind, the wind that breathes, the wafting breeze and the swift tornado. It sounded like poetry. Magic poetry. Incantations maybe. There had been a magic word there. A whirl she thought, a verb maybe. No - a ‘Verve’, that’s what the word had been. And naming it, she claimed it as her own.

Ed got up, his physical body drained from the night of traveling. His life now of service was beginning to come into focus. Ara and Mishra sat with him as he meditated upon the lessons he was trying to learn. His childhood had been blighted with enthusiastic Protestantism. He had been bred a true Baptist and even now continued to abstain from dancing and drinking even though he knew them not to be evils. Back then he took his intoxication from the Bible as he prepared to become a minister like his mother always hoped. During the early years of training within the Bible camps he had learned to love the scriptures, upholding the high ideal of love before him as the Mecca to his soul. Until that one fateful and prearranged (Ara and Mishra reminded him of his karma) event at "In The Word" Camp. As a young boy, shielded from the fornication in magazines and TVs he hadn’t been prepared for the advances that had come from his camp counselor. When the counselor had invited him to his lodge to sew some new badges on his uniform, he had agreed readily. When he had gotten there, the wise twenty-three year old held Ed’s 10 year old mind in full attention and admiration. Ed didn’t understand exactly what he had done with Jeff, his counselor, only that it had made him feel sinful and dirty at the end. The word "molestation" was too far from his vocabulary to understand that he had been betrayed. He continued to go to church but everywhere he turned he sensed hypocrisy as the crime began to take shape as he got older. He lost his earlier enthusiasm for the church and then his mother had died. It was the crowning blow his religion suffered as he began a period of searching trying to understand why evil should come to a child or death to a mother. It was during his 13th year that the dreams overtook him.

They spoke to him of having lived before. Of betraying a child’s trust, of seemingly orphaning a child through the lust of an illicit relationship. He had paid back his debt in this life through personal pain. It also spoke of magic. To him it wasn’t the Verve: that was true. It was the Source. But it described the same energy. It was the power of love. The power that helped him forgive his molester, his fate, and carry on with the final pilgrimage to the altar of love. And then he met the two friends who would never betray him: Ara and Mishra. It was to them he had turned, and they had welcomed him and nurtured his spirituality, leading him to the teachers he needed to hear, the books he needed to read, the lives he needed to understand. He had supported himself in his endeavor like any missionary would: through handouts and a personal trust fund. He became the healer he now was: a man of service and responsibility. A man who understood his karma. A man who could hear the wind blow and understand its language.

CHAPTER 13