On the fifteenth day she became convinced that her consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet—the germination of the smallest flower to the eventual death of the largest tree. She saw an endless process of energy transfer, growing and dying, and she was part of every stage of it.
She saw bursts of color and animals that probably didn’t exist. She did not see visions, precisely, because visions would have been far more vivid and concrete. But nor were the apparitions merely thoughts. They were like dreams, an uncertain plane of realness somewhere in between, and it was only by washing out every other thought from her mind that she could perceive them clearly.
She stopped counting the days. She had traveled somewhere beyond time; a place where a year and a minute felt the same. What was the difference between finite and infinite? There was being and nonbeing and that was it. Time was not real.
The apparitions became solid. Either she was dreaming, or she had transcended somewhere, but when she took a step forward, her foot touched cold stone. She looked around and saw that she stood in a tiled room no larger than a washroom. There were no doors.
A form appeared before her, dressed in strange garb. At first she thought it was Altan, but the figure’s face was softer, its crimson eyes rounder and kinder.
“They said you’d come,” said the figure. The voice was a woman’s, deep and sad. “The gods have known you’d come.”
Rin was at a loss for words. Something about the Woman was deeply familiar, and it wasn’t just her resemblance to Altan. The shape of her face, the clothes she wore . . . they sparked memories Rin didn’t know she had, of sands and water and open skies.
“You will be asked to do what I refused to do,” said the Woman. “You will be offered power beyond your imagination. But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain. The Pantheon controls the fabric of the universe. To deviate from their premeditated order you must give them something in return. And for the gifts of the Phoenix, you will pay the most. The Phoenix wants suffering. The Phoenix wants blood.”
“I have blood in abundance,” Rin answered. She had no idea what possessed her to say it, but she continued. “I can give the Phoenix what it desires, if the Phoenix gives me power.”
The Woman’s tone grew agitated. “The Phoenix doesn’t give. Not permanently. The Phoenix takes, and takes, and takes . . . Fire is insatiable, alone among the elements . . . it will devour you until you are nothing . . .”
“I’m not afraid of fire,” said Rin.
“You should be,” hissed the Woman. She glided slowly toward Rin; she didn’t move her legs, didn’t quite walk, but simply appeared larger and closer with every passing moment—
Rin couldn’t breathe. She didn’t feel the least bit calm; this was nothing like the peace she was supposed to have achieved, this was terrible . . . She suddenly heard a cacophony of screams echoing around her ears, and then the Woman was screaming and shrieking, writhing in the air like a tortured dancer, even as she reached out and seized Rin’s arm . . .
. . . Images spun around Rin, brown-skinned bodies dancing around a campfire, mouths open in grotesque leers, shouting words in a language that sounded like something she’d heard in a dream she no longer remembered . . . The campfire flared and the bodies fell back, burned, charred, disintegrating to nothing but glistening white bones, and Rin thought that was the end of it—death ended things—but the bones jumped back up and continued to dance . . . One of the skeletons looked at her with its bare, toothy smile, and beckoned with a fleshless hand:
“From ashes we came and to ashes we return . . .”
The Woman’s grip around Rin’s shoulders tightened; she leaned forward and whispered fiercely in Rin’s ear: “Go back.”
But Rin was enticed by the fire . . . she looked past the bones into the flames, which were furling upward like something alive, taking the shape of a living god, an animal, a bird . . .
The bird lowered its head at them.
The Woman burst into flame.
Then Rin was floating upward again, flying like an arrow at the sky to the realm of the gods.
When she opened her eyes, Jiang was crouched in front of her, watching her intently with his pale eyes. “What did you see?”
She took a deep breath. Tried to orient herself to possessing a body again. She felt so clumsy and heavy, like a puppet formed badly out of wet clay.
“A great circular room,” she said hesitantly, squinting to remember her final vision. She did not know if she was having trouble finding the words, or if it was simply her mouth that refused to obey. Every order she gave her body seemed to happen only after a delay. “It was arranged like a set of trigrams, but with thirty-two points splitting into sixty-four. And creatures on pedestals all around the circle.”
“Plinths,” Jiang corrected.
“You’re right. Plinths.”
“You saw the Pantheon,” he said. “You found the gods.”
“I suppose.” Her voice trailed off. She felt somewhat confused. Had she found the gods? Or had she only imagined those sixty-four deities, spinning about her like glass beads?
“You seem skeptical,” he said.
“I was tired,” she answered. “I don’t know if it was real, or . . . I mean, I could have just been dreaming.” How were her visions any different from her imagination? Had she seen those things only because she wanted to?
“Dreaming?” Jiang tilted his head. “Have you ever seen anything like the Pantheon before? In a diagram? Or a painting?”
She frowned. “No, but—”
“The plinths. Were you expecting those?”
“No,” she said, “but I’ve seen plinths before, and the Pantheon wouldn’t have been too difficult to conjure from my imagination.”
“But why that particular dream? Why would your sleeping mind have chosen to extract those images from your memory compared to any other images? Why not a horse, or a field of jasmine flowers, or Master Jun riding buck naked on the back of a tiger?”
Rin blinked. “Is that something you dream about?”
“Answer the question,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “Why do people dream what they dream?”
But he was smiling, as if that was precisely what he’d wanted to hear. “Why indeed?”
She had no response to that. She stared blankly out at the mouth of the cave, mulling these thoughts in her mind, and realized that she had awoken in more ways than one.
Her map of the world, her understanding of reality, had shifted. She could see the outlines, even if she didn’t know how to fill in the blanks. She knew the gods existed and that they spoke, and that was enough.
It had taken a long time, but she finally had a vocabulary for what they were learning now. Shamans: those who communed with the gods. The gods: forces of nature, entities as real and yet ephemeral as wind and fire themselves, things inherent to the existence of the universe.
When Hesperians wrote of “God,” they wrote of the supernatural.
When Jiang talked of “gods,” he talked of the eminently natural.
To commune with the gods was to walk the dream world, the world of spirit. It was to relinquish that which she was and become one with the fundamental state of things. The space in limbo where matter and actions were not yet determined, the fluctuating darkness where the physical world had not yet been dreamed into existence.
The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm . . . they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.
They were the elements that constituted the universe itself.
She saw now that reality was a facade; a dream conjured by the undulating forces beneath a thin surface. And by meditating, by ingesting the hallucinogen, by forgetting her connection to the material world, she was able to wake up.
“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.”
He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad.
He might, in fact, be the sanest person she had ever met.
A thought occurred to her. “So what happens when we die?”