That night as Cynthia prepared herself for bed she sensed Manu’s growing anticipation and was grateful John had gone away. Her boyfriend had left her on a business trip and despite the weather his plane had left that morning, tardy of course, but never-the-less the flight had not been canceled. Logan Airport rarely closed even when the snow threaten to pile up to record levels in a short span of time. They were prepared with plane de-icers, a fleet of snow plows and the patience of a citizenry quite used to the hostilities of winter. Thus, there had been no occasion to expect the cancellation of the flight. But, as ten o’clock rolled around, Cynthia watched the news and realized how lucky John had really been. The airport that never closed was shutting down due to the inclement weather.

Manu had remained hidden deep within the recesses of her body, his presence only detectable by a slight feeling of vertigo on Cynthia’s part. He had refused to speak after his gift and she half suspected that he was afraid Ed would hear him if he did break his silence. Being that, she began to doubt the episode had even happened. Maybe she had been dreaming? She wanted to reassure herself. Or hallucinating. After all, Sunshine was fine. But Sr. Mary had disappeared. She had called the hospital earlier and found out she had missed some of her rounds and the hospital had been trying to locate her. She might have had an errand outside the hospital that had delayed her from coming back what with all the snow, they had reassured her. But, Cynthia knew better. This really wasn’t a dream. And the fact that she now was struggling to stay awake as the waves of drowsiness hit her only made her more certain of that fact. Turning off the television and the lights, she realized how safe she felt with Manu’s presence within her. Normally, spending a night alone in her Boston apartment would have been enough to keep her awake the night expecting some random violence to befall her. She pitied the person who would try anything tonight.

Manu wound himself tightly along the core of Cynthia’s astral substance as it floated free of her body. It had to appear to Ed that there was only one person here, not two, and that would be a feat in itself.

"I’m sorry," Ed’s astral body floated next to Cynthia’s as he expected her to lash out at him for Sr. Mary’s predicament. "But, it’s not my fault."

"I know."

Minutes passed between them as their thoughts no longer held meaning.

"Hold me?" Cynthia pleaded.

Ed’s love gushed in a liquid flow of light, pouring down on Cynthia and enveloping her in a misty rain that served to raise her vibrations. As their joined lights vibrated together the sparks of life between them dispersed like droplets sizzling on a summer sidewalk, creating pockets where more light rushed into Cynthia’s threadlike caves carved from Ed’s ocean of feeling. Joy swept into Cynthia’s mind as they were propelled beyond the lower astral planes into the dimension of illusionless dreams. The pure white plain Cynthia found herself in was brilliant beyond compare providing a contrast of likes to Ed’s molten white flow in front of her. The Deja vu surroundings triggered instincts Cynthia had been unaware of up to that time. As a flow of Ed’s molten love dashed against her body, she felt her body pierced by multiple stabs of joy as she momentarily broke into a glitter of gold and orgasms and then coalesced again. Feeling a deep union with Ed she sent her own stream of self hurtling towards Ed who stood waiting to embrace his lover.

The spray from Cynthia’s fountain was tainted by Manu who hid himself, a speck of dust in a river of glowing lava. It hit Ed, a drink from a poison chalice, that he drank freely. The poison seeped through the crevices in Ed’s astral body disguising itself in the shower of glitter created by the blow which Cynthia had landed. The shock and recognition of an alien life form came late as Ed shuddered, realizing he had mated with death. Manu’s black dust seeped through his chest up his throat and into his mind while Ed was open and in that instance he grabbed the key.

Scrambling from the ecstasies expected Ed screamed as his body coalesced forcefully into a white hot ember, a poker of forged steel that plunged after the invading violator scarring a path of fire to route Manu out. Cynthia watched in horror as the top part of Ed’s form burst into flames searing an image of a solar flare that expelled Manu and came after its betrayer. Fire is an awful way to die, Cynthia thought in the instant she knew Ed was sending his purging flames towards her. They landed on her and she screamed expecting the Devil’s revenge on her. But instead the torch blew out upon contact and only the warmth of its blue intensity reached her, bathing her in a healing flow that started at her head and slowly melted through all of her finally oozing out of her feet. She knew she then that she was powerless before Ed. Manu had been exorcised.

They landed immediately in Cynthia’s bedroom as Ed’s astral body fell to the floor. He called on his guides for assistance and waited for their arrival.

"Why?" Ed asked the glow of his head scarred with veins of smoke.

"Your’re selfish and arrogant. You said you’d only help if it affected your own karma."

Ed refused to justify himself.

"Is he dead?" Cynthia asked regaining her confidence at Ed’s meekness.

"Manu? No. Spirits don’t die."

"Then what about Sr. Mary?"

"You made a pact with the Devil and you expect him to keep it?" At this Ed’s guides arrived and stood next to him on either side, their lack of reaction unnerving to Cynthia. Their countenances held not one drop of compassion from them even though their protege seemed badly injured. They touched his right and left shoulder motioning him it was time to go.

"I have to go. Manu will be on his way to the seventh level by now. I need time to heal though. If he finds the exit even this reality will be affected."

As Ed turned to walk out of her room and into the ethers, Cynthia realized he would no longer share himself with her. Even after betraying him, he had healed her refusing to condemn her for her actions even when she knew the wound she had helped inflict had hurt him emotionally. It was there between them, not in the words he had said, but in the words he hadn’t. There had been no accusations, no anger, no self righteousness. He had wanted a reason that was all and she suspected that he hadn’t had to ask her for it. He could probably have read it in her mind. He was her Teacher, still teaching her to understand herself. She looked down between them and realized the link between them was no more. The darkness in the chord had dissapated, Cynthia understood, as she had taken her revenge. She did not need the chord there to sense that. It was the light threads she now missed. Ed had opened her to the one experience of love that resounded as truth in her life. She shuffled uncomfortably, feeling a pang of regret.

"Ed?" She called after him as he left. "This wouldn’t have happened if you had at least tried to help me do what’s right."

Ed turned slowly, his chin dropping to his chest in fatigue. He said: "Love isn’t always about doing what’s right for us only, it’s about doing what’s best for all. It’s about doing your duty while pleasing god: dharma."

Her question forced its way through her gritted teeth: "Doesn’t being a healer imply that you will help people whenever you can -- regardless of the circumstances?"

"Are you looking for another promise from me? Just so you know, I have already promised to help people when it is in the highest spiritual good of everyone involved."

Cynthia’s fists dug themselves into her hips as she pointed out the obvious: "We all know how good you are at keeping promises."

Ed shook his head: "I’m hardly in any condition to help you now, aren’t I? If you want, you can still look for Sr. Mary within the dream. All you have to do is remember."

Cynthia stared at Ed before nodding her understanding. At this, Ed’s form, along with his guides, vanished, leaving Cynthia with the rest of the night to analyze the situation, devise a plan and get to Sr. Mary.

Manu’s essence spun into a bale of fire forced away from Ed’s presence by the scourge of just anger. As Manu’s essence rolled over onto itself, flames licked the outside of the bale trying to eat its way into its center. Fear and fire enfolded the sweaty core of green grass that was Manu within the bale. He could not move past the fire, he could only hope to roll it away as he continued to smother the stinging, crispness of raw, unadulterated energy. Each roll was a lowering of frequency, a panic of uncontrolled vibrations as Manu tumbled from the higher astral plane towards any signal he could call home.

"I’m dreaming," Prof. Taslim asserted to himself as Manu landed in the warm, coziness of the professor’s mind. "I made it!"

Manu found himself within the seer’s alcove in Prince Akbar’s palace after his return from the secrets held within the Colis shell. Manu look at the sacred waters that hid the shell in a slate blue mirror pondering the lives that he and Prof. Taslim had witnessed. There he had met Jasmine again as Lokmi during the fateful time they had spent in India. She had been correct that he had fallen for the illusions of his own mind, but that was her fault. It had all been her fault, now that he reviewed it. She had persuaded him into being her helper with praises for his untapped magical potential. She should have left well enough alone. He had been happy up until then. He had a family that loved him and that he belonged to. When she had finally bewitched him into staying with her in the palace, his family had mourned his decision. And once he had had a taste of sorcery, there was no going back. His family was afraid of him because they knew he was tainted. His wife paled when he approached. His children ran away from him. He had wanted a reconciliation with them. He had wanted to teach them that sorcery could be used for good as well as evil, but they hadn't let him. Even when he had become trapped in the Tower it had been his hope to get free and return. If Jasmine would not accept him as a fellow sorcerer then he had finally decided, as he lay trapped in his cell, he would put his magic away for his family's sake. That would have reconciled them to him, Manu believed. He had to find a safe home, either way. That’s all he had been trying to do when he had looked in the Colis Shell. He had wanted its magic to either pull him into Jasmine's world or expel him from its enchantments forever.

Now, he understood his progression. Maybe he had been a child back then, but he was an adult now. His acceptance of his own death, his family's death and his lives proved it. His lives were steeped in magic from ancient cave man shamanism to Atlantian spirit walkers. He could no more be a common peasant than a royal person bred to reign. There were few lives that had seemed devoid of all magic. One in a tribe within the land of Sheba, and another in Italy. And this, Manu reckoned, was Prof. Taslim’s ignoble birthright. He had been surprised to see not only Jasmine, in his lives, but he remembered Cynthia, Cameron and Yassov there as well.

As the lives passed in his mind, Prof. Taslim became lost in the thought as he felt Manu’s presence weakening again, the draining residuals of Ed’s energy ballast. The alcove became faint and lightened as Prof. Taslim lost his lucidity only to drift into another dream unawares that he was dreaming.

Cynthia heard Violet laughing near the front of the library, but she ignored it as she became engrossed, studying the book in front of her. She thought she had gotten there alone but in dreams it was hard to tell. Maybe there had been someone leading her there but she hadn’t seen a soul. She had only sensed a presence behind her as her consciousness awoke to her new surroundings. "Now, here’s something interesting," she thought as she looked at the title on the book’s binding. It read ‘The Sage of Sheba.’

It was then that Cynthia had become lucid enough to realize she was dreaming. And what an odd dream it was. Cynthia had only gone along with the idea that reincarnation existed when it could place Ed in her debt. The notion that Cynthia herself would conjure up the same "past life" was silly beyond anything Cynthia expected. She was already only too familiar with the limitations of Ed’s powers and it had come to the front of her mind that what he possessed was not supernatural powers but enhanced natural capabilities that lay dormant in everyone. It was the power of the subconscious mind, Cynthia was willing to bet, that was why it worked only when dreaming or haphazardly. Ed may have been the catalyst for the synchronizity of events but she was the perceiver of said events. She had affected her own reality with the initial premise that shared dreams were possible. Even if it was obvious to her that shared dreams existed if she experienced them, it had been up to her to decide whether she would risk her current reality by seeking to verify the experience with the people in her dreams. She could have continued to ignore the statistical aberrations but Cynthia had always wanted to understand her world in the most minute detail. Even if the details defied her current reality, the empirical evidence was enough for her to seek an explanation.

This is how she had gotten herself into this mess, Cynthia decided. And she wasn’t going to let her preconceptions rule what she experienced in the Tower again. Thus, no matter how many "past lives" she experienced, she could still think it was a clever illusion of the sort Prof. Taslim was so adept at. There had to be some other explanation that wasn’t as "spiritual" as Ed would like her to believe. After all, Cynthia reasoned, if Prof. Taslim, a hard core physicist, who would probably have scoffed skeptically at any magical powers, could now pull an illusion indistinguishable from a holographic reality from out of the ether - the power didn’t lie in being saintly it lay in understanding the mechanics of such powers. Karma was irrelevant.

Cynthia turned the leathered covered book in her hands. She had to investigate, she told herself. There was no danger it might persuade her into changing her beliefs. At this point, they were all up in the air anyway. As she opened to the first page, the writing began to swirl together, a miniature whirlpool of drowning images, focusing her consciousness to the middle of the page. Cynthia’s head spun from the velocity of the images enfolding her and then realized her body was being slowly sucked into the book. Panicking at the trap she had sprung, she resisted the tug of the book as it tightened its hold on her consciousness. But, it was too late. She lost consciousness as the book took over control of her dream time.

"She delays," the old sage muttered to himself aware that his time was short. The fire had died down within the grotto where the maidens had been there earlier to collect the sap out of the trees. Frankincense was the major trade for the land of Sheba where the climate and artificial canals allowed for the growth of the delicate trees. Now all the people were gone and the cooking fire had been scattered and had died down to the last embers. This is where the old man sat himself, his breech cloth tight against his crotch as he pretzeled his dark, thick legs upon themselves. He reached down to pick up a charred piece of wood and cupped his hands around it.

"Shala," the wizard pronounced and the ember obeyed the command to burst into a bluish flame that licked the outside edges of his hands. Pleased, the old man put it gently on the pile in front of him as he scooped the rest of the dead embers into a teepee around it. Soon a miniature funeral pyre lighted itself before him. Reaching to his left he picked up the two nuggets he had come to this grotto to get. The amber resin was hardened already having been left behind unwittingly just for this purpose. The sage flung the frankincense into the fire and awaited the aroma that would help him trigger his waking journey into the Fundido.

Inhaling deeply the sage began the rhythmic chanting that would take him through to his inner journey.

"Om bala, Om bala," his voice wavered in dips and waves as he voiced the intricate curves of the rising smoke in front of him. To get to the Fundido, the sage understood, one had to smell with the eyes and see with the throat, until all vibrations became equally centered and unified. It was the language of the Fundido, a chorus of color, scents and visions that twirled within the smoke. The whole was in every small thing just as easily as every small thing made up the whole. That was the paradox of the Fundido. One had to reach the whole traveling through the tiniest paths that would take one there. And there were hundreds of such paths, all around, but only visible to those looking for them.

"Om bala, Om bala," the sage continued his mind casting a web of sensors through the trails of the scented smoke. It was within the folds of the developing smoke where the pattern lay. The magic lay within himself and also hidden in the smoke’s graceful arabesques. It was a repetition of meaning and nuance available only to the seer trained to navigate the mind’s pathways. Soon the rollercoaster wisps of scent gave way to the visions of geometric flowers exploding one upon the other in brilliant hues of red and oranges. But, that was just the beginning, the sage knew, as his body began to rock slowly in tune with the whole in every twist emanating from the fumes. The flowers burst into bloom, one from within another, radiating lighter colors as they went as if they too were beginning to burn hotter. Finally, a golden white lotus was birthed and the sage lost consciousness for an instant.

He had traveled the span of realities and entered the Fundido, the home of the Verve. It was a world of floating mountains bereft of valleys where the four winds lived circling and contouring the mountains in eternal circles Each wind had a different color associated with it. The stale wind was the muddy brown roots of the mountains dangled supportless in the hazy air. The wind that breathes came next, carving out a chunk of flaming lava above the roots. The wafting breeze cooled the burning slab in a layer of refreshing lavender hues to be capped by the apex of the swift tornado, a blinding cap of white on each mountain.

The sage knew it was all an illusion.

The key was not to observe the winds but to be part of them because only then would their magic be revealed. The magic was lost in the observing. It was in the being that one gained the magic. The sage began to spin his astral body furiously into revolutions of dissipation designed to allow his essence to be swept into the winds. It was a dangerous undertaking for the uninitiated. But the sage had traveled this road before.

His essence splintered into a wave of light, a yarn of light unspun from its spool as it joined the four winds on the journey towards the source of their creation, the Verve. Once within their embracing folds the mountains vanished as the winds no longer held form, lacking an observer to hold the illusion stable. It was within this dizzying stream of wavelengths that the sage traveled back to the Verve where he found not only the source of the winds but his own existence.

It was not a point as location was meaningless in the Fundido. Once at the Verve all points were equal and interconnected. Time ceased to exist as a quantity and took on its true nature as a perspective of the observer. Consequences of actions unraveled in the presence of the Verve in a multiplicity of possible futures, each one true until one was chosen by the observer as their perspective. Thus parallel worlds were nothing but a single step sideways or backwards in terms of point of view. It was here that the sage had come to see his future.

He had believed Scintilla would fulfill her promise but for whatever reason she had failed to come forth. The child she had birthed was a child of the Verve and as such a powerful being, despite his lack of understanding. If Scintilla had brought him to the sage at the appropriate time, the wise man would have schooled him in the proper usage of such powers. Left unschooled, he would eventually tap the power and be tempted to abuse it. The old man had given Scintilla enough time to keep her word, now he had to take action. But what action was he to take?

The sage allowed his consciousness to float through the perspective of times, like a reflection of light on a multifaceted diamond. He turned the choices around in the light, hoping to see a choice that would not lead to disaster. He should have done this when Scintilla had come calling, he chided himself. He had always been too giving, he decided. He should have held back. In another time and another place, maybe he would learn how to perfect the wind that breathes. For now, the part of him that was the sage of Sheba was learning how to perfect the wafting breeze.

Here in the Verve he understood how little of a person’s whole was actually born in the physical body. The rest of the whole remained in the Verve or scattered among the personalities of the Verve’s time mosaic. Each soul was a conglomeration of perspectives, a continues melding of different vibrations designed to bring the whole into balance eventually, richer for the experiences. Outside the Verve, one was limited due to the necessary fragmentation of the soul as it studied different experiences. The world was full of these unbalanced pieces seeking out and practicing lessons vital to the whole each influencing each other in a delicate weaving of the Verve’s tapestry. Inside the Verve, one sensed the whole as it was, is and could be in the many possible futures. It was to this perfection that each Whole approached.

The sage’s vibrations jittered upset that his giving had put him into such a quandary. It was too late for the child of the Verve. If he took the man by force or trickery, he would be seduced into the abuse of his powers by the sage’s own actions, causing many karmic repercussions upon himself and others. If left alone, the child would be ignorant of his true heritage, at least, the sage thought, for this time fragment. Peering into the future, he leafed through the new soul fragments he would have the opportunity to experience hoping at some point to reach the child when his powers would manifest. Looking through the waves of time he laughed as the image of the Akashic library came to his mind. Cynthia had just pierced the paradox of the whole in the small part. She had looked into the book in the Akashic library and triggered the pattern.

"I finally get a pretty one!" The sage exclaimed pleased at his possible future. "I hope you’re not the ascetic I was. Spread those pretty little legs for me every once in a while, OK?"

Cynthia dropped the book in shock. If past lives existed, then the sage was dead. But he had just spoken to her. Or she had just spoken to herself, she corrected herself. This was better than past lives. Reincarnation was a folly thought up to explain something much simpler. The truth was all time and space coexisted at any one point in the physical world - the whole echoed in all of its parts. Life was not what came between birth and death, it was what was outside of these small slices of the larger cycle that mattered. It was only a matter of perspective. This was something she could believe. It had a pattern and a determined outcome, and that was all Cynthia’s data analyst mind needed to grasp to.

Picking up the book she sat down at the nearest table as her essence dove into the pages, unraveling the mysteries of the Verve. She traveled with the sage and in the sage as he carried on a conversation with himself explaining to her what the magic was she had forgotten and why she needed it most desperately now. As they came out through the pathway back to the grove of frankincense trees, Cynthia thought she smelled the flowers which were at the entrance to the Verve’s world as they floated by her vision. She reached out to pick one and carry it with her. She was beginning to understand the magic, she thought. Now all she had to do was convince herself that it could work outside a dream. She clutched the blossom to her bosom, a reminder of the sage’s world, as she felt her dream lighten and fade. Her eyes opened as she lay on her bed and she felt the pink lotus flower crushed beneath her. She sucked in her breath as she realized she had brought something back. She was convinced the magic was real. She reached down to grab it and hold on to it but she was not fast enough. In the next instance the glowing hand of the sage of Sheba appeared through a hole in her comforter as it picked up the petals of the Verve’s domain and vanished. Cynthia blinked and felt around for the flower. Her proof was gone and in that moment, she wondered if she had dreamt it anyway. Then she fell back asleep remembering that Sr. Mary still needed her help.

Cynthia stood within a re-creation of the palace garden as she remembered it within Agra Fort. The place would have familiar echoes that would pull Manu in, she hoped. And if that didn’t work, she had another plan. Manu had gained much with his time within Cynthia, but Cynthia had not been left unrewarded. As he had inhabited her, sharing the intimacy of her physical container, the sharing of essences had gone both ways. They had been married for years in only a span of hours. She had felt his likes and dislikes and especially his hunger for power over all the wickedness that had tainted his life. He felt the righteous anger within him directed at his enemies, the magicians - the keepers of the mysteries, and the indignation at not being counted worthy to share in those mysteries while being shunned by his own family as well. She understood the bitter gall he harbored towards Jasmine for not accepting his gift of love to her. She could have denied her sentiments and refused his love, and he would have kept trying to win her affection. But she had pitied him, and that had been the curse he couldn’t live with. Manu viewed himself as an equal, if not superior, to any enchantress and he would pay her back for the insult to his stature. Her and all the other so-called sorcerers who had despised his entrance into their fold.

Thus Cynthia understood, Manu’s weakness was his desire to belong to something or someone.

She began to focus on Manu’s essence bringing back the feelings of his vibrations within her mind. She internalized them making them her own and echoing them out from herself like a beacon. All he had to do was sense a like mind, and the temptation would be too strong to resist. He would investigate.

"Cynthia!" Prof. Taslim’s shape appeared startled, his soldierly teeth peeking a smile through the camouflage of his beard as he realized her vulnerability.

"Manu." Cynthia sensed the return echoes of Manu’s presence in Prof. Taslim’s figure. "Ed let me go. He’s a weak-willed sorcerer, like you said. I did my part, where is Sr. Mary?"

"The professor has quite a fascination with her," Manu’s voice echoed from Prof. Taslim. "I don’t think he wants to let her go."

"We had a deal."

"Had."

The professor walked up to her oblivious of her demands. His finger reached up to trace the curve of her lip fondly, "You made a lovely bride," Manu reminisced. "I sensed a sensual power in you that was very pleasing."

"My bird means a lot to me, " Cynthia confessed. "My sister even more."

"You liked my gift?" Manu’s hand stopped as this acceptance registered in his mind.

"You are very powerful. I like the way you used your powers to please me. "

"Ah, yes!" Manu remembered her thoughts.

"A man like you honors me with your attentions. You’re not like Ed who only gratifies himself, harboring the magic for his own pleasure and no one else's."

"I’m a better man than that charlatan!" Manu’s righteousness came through.

"I want to follow you, not him. You held my sister’s life to help convince me to allow Ed’s suffering. I tell you, he deserves anything you can send his way. He is the instigator of my misery."

"After I took a shot at you? How do I know you are telling the truth?"

"I’m here aren’t I? I want to leave the Tower as much as you do." Cynthia closed the distance between them letting her chest brush up against Prof. Taslim. "Release, Sr. Mary, and I promise you will have a more willing sexual partner on levels Sr. Mary will not go."

A gleam of lust filled Manu’s eyes as he saw the healer’s prize resting in his arms. It almost worked but her promise was not enough. Pressing her lips against his, he sucked her in passionately and then parted them with his tongues as he invaded the healer’s domain.

"Can I come inside you again?" Manu asked.

"If Sr. Mary is left unharmed," Cynthia issued the stipulation.

"Not just your body this time," Manu warmed to the idea. "I want to share your mind, everything, completely."

"Prove to me that Sr. Mary will remain safe and you can have all of me."

"Not tonight," Manu admitted."She is not sleeping, so she can not dream."

"Then tomorrow when we are back in Boston."

"I have to reach the seventh level," Manu organized his thoughts. "I would have to leave now to get her to you tomorrow. The snow will make the roads impassable by the morning. I don’t know if I like this."

"The healer is badly hurt, he will not be able to stop us. Prove to me you are the just man I think you are, and you will have not only power, but someone to enjoy it with."

"I don’t know..." Manu wavered.

"I have been through the Colis shell," Cynthia admitted pulling out her last argument. "It tells me I have lived a sage’s life. There is great power within me, if I could just remember. Ed told me so. That part of me would belong to you as well."

Convinced and also understanding that his energies were depleted for the night after the battle with the healer, Manu decided this was an offer too good to refuse. Cautiously, he arranged an "exchange" at a meeting place in the early hours of the morning. Prof. Taslim, Manu was surprised, agreed to the change of events with little rancor. Prof. Taslim had already found someone who he could belong to, Manu. His god promised him the religion of immortality. What did he care now about a wasted husk of a nun who refused to satisfy him with even the least show of obsequiance? If she had been one of his students, he would have thrown her out of his class.

CHAPTER 15