Dire Misfortune Dungeon

Illusion is the bed-fellow of realities that are not real, and the Guv’nor, a being of the Light of Consciousness, second rank, was a consummate illusionist, one who preferred to be thought of as a play actor, one, strangely enough, who’d no desire to reveal to anyone who he really was. He’d always adopt other identities, dress himself in garbs that were suited for most occasions and guaranteed to put on a good show, and in that way he managed to divert attention away from what was important.
Aspects of form have their uses, especially when one was forced to associate with those of lesser worth. Such as now!
It wasn’t hard to discover where Witness and Questor had tried to hide, and in a snap the Guv’nor sucked them back into his presence, which was, on this occasion, in the Dire Misfortune Room, deep down in a cold, stinking, damp and desperately gloomy dungeon. The stone-block walls ran with fetid, caustic slime, guaranteed to rot through anything it came in contact with, and the smell of the place was so bad that W&Q wondered how they would be able to breathe. Noting their discomfort, the Guv’nor instantly kitted them out with a supply of tanked air and a couple of masks.
Somewhere out in the pitch dark, scary noises that sounded like skittering claws on stone and swishing, slithering bodies through water, assailed W&Q’s ears. On all sides tiny beady red eyes of unnamed but probably hungry pests, glittered and winked in the black gloom, giving the reluctant heroes a full-blown case of the creepy heebie-jeebies! The Guv’nor evidently hadn’t planned a fun time for them, this was a run through of what was likely to be their next assignment, and the chosen setting was probably a hint as to how nasty it would be.
The light from the vortex of raw energy that had spun W&Q into the vile conditions of the dungeon allowed them to make out two blackened and uselessly smoky lamps swinging and creaking haplessly from an iron cleat bored into a stone knob high above their heads. They saw too, much to their horror, that there were rats everywhere, huge brown fat ones, twitchy-nosed black ones, slinky-sleek white ones, and worst of all a clutch of starving and patchy baldy ones. The rodents had good, razor-sharp teeth that they grinned wickedly through, and their thick corded tails stuck straight up behind, curled round at the ends like hangmen’s nooses waiting for someone to try them out. Unannounced monster spiders dropped onto W&Q’s heads and latched on, curious to take a closer look and a few sample bites. Black beetles, striped and spotted ones, stirred so thickly about on the flagstone floor that their hard little legs made a thunderous racket as they pounded over the carapaces of their luckless comrades who’d become trapped on the bottom of the heap.

taken from The Blessings of Dis, the Second Book of The Gatherers Trilogy.

The Journey begins

Greatest Spirit as Keeper of the Light of Consciousness … the words of Rachael’s prayer, said as simply and lovingly as they could be, were carried out into the unknowable tracts of the unending Cosmos on the stream of the Light of Consciousness. The Life Source, defended every moment of the way by the deafening roar of the Truth of Intent, burst forth from Jake’s Cave travelling at incredible speed in every conceivable direction and on every plane of existence, and as the mega sonic boom at the moment of release tailed away to nothingness, the seemingly dead and dark interstices of blue-black space lit up with an indescribable scintillating and sparkling rosy pink glow and things began to happen.
Immobile slivers and shards and roly-poly bits of primordial matter that had unknowingly permeated every aspect and plane of existence suddenly had the thought to shift, discovering in themselves wholly unexpected urges to go somewhere. Vast clouds of that interstellar dust, thousands and thousands of parsecs across and as deep as that again, roiled and swelled to twice their original dimension, while universes of explosive gases sputtered fitfully, then ignited and burned with frissons of uncontrollable excitement that sparked and popped and brightly illuminated the space in which they lay.
The prayer, perfectly aware of its final destination, stubbornly pursued its purpose and raced further out and out from Earth, faster, faster and faster, beyond what was possible, revealing itself for the millionth part of a nanosecond as the soft pale orange of a spring morning on the planet Mars, and at the same time the momentary lingering of a single light photon ray on the perishing cold and perpetually dark side of Mercury.
In the wide, open galactic spaces which made Forever seem small and paltry, the orison rode super-galactic winds with wild whoopee freedom, crashing into and blasting apart seeding beds of violently hot stars; dragging on the straggling tag ends of nameless crowds of molecular clouds, vigorously encouraging enigmatic though grossly fertile nebulae to birth more stars than was strictly necessary.
Round and round the tall, stately Pillars of Creation it spun and gambolled, to spring forward again, picking out in searching clarity meteor-battered planets and moons that even Time had forgotten were there.

Taken from the Prologue of The Blessings of Dis, Book Two of The Gatherers Trilogy.

Off-planet

Concerning the presence of life out in the cosmos, there are three positions that are held;
One, there is nothing out in space; never has been and never will be.

Two, there definitely are beings out among the stars, but it’s such a big place, space, that it will be very hard to discover them.

Three, a largish number hope that there aren’t any signs, at least not yet, because they want to get out there first and plant a flag, as it were, to lay claim and declare the right to defend whatever they landed on.
Earth Law in force, of course, not Cosmic Law.

Earth’s huge populations constantly need resources; I can’t imagine it will be long before space ships will off-planet to get what we can’t find in enough bulk here.
Mars seems the most likely first choice. Little robots have been checking it out for years, and as it appears to be a planet that had passed its best, either ruined by once-upon-a-time dwellers, or battered to death because it was unfortunately in the path of meteor streams or the like, there’s not too much parleying to do with disgruntled home-owners.
This is all muck-a-muck stuff, likely to occur, sometime.

Writers, on the other hand, don’t have to wait for technology to catch up, they can go on out there and do it, inventing the rationale and the method in a few brain scorching moves.
For example, Greatest Spirit as the All One and the Premier Think Tank specialist of all Time, doesn’t ‘do’ anything, surely; he leaves that for others to accomplish, such as the Guv’nor, and his admin assistants, Witness and Questor, cosmic specialists par excellence, and utterly essential to the story.

Lumen

I realise that good readers want to get their mitts on a whole book. Read it, and pronounce upon it, yea or nay, or maybe. It’s tricky for this writer at this point to speak to the meat of the matter without letting the cat and the kittens out of the bag, but the solution is to get published in a big hurry, and parts of that process are underway. Readings, editings, writings and researching are all on the home burners, and it won’t be too long before something good happens.
I think working this way might well be quicker by years than following the traditional publishing route. That has become rather bottle-necked, navel gazing and bottom lining, to step out into the void in search of the unknown.

Truly another example of the monetising process of our world at present.

….Later that evening, after she’d finished her rounds, Rachael explained that the portal from Earth reality into Lumen was one of any number of portals scattered throughout the universes, and that according to the Tinkler Old Ones, the word ‘doorway’ in their ancient language, had referred specifically to the portals used in ‘space travel’.
“Modern day astrophysicists and mathematicians,” she said, “Louis for one, preferred to call those access points anomalies that were predictable in the space-time continuum, something their figurings had discovered to be definitely out there, but of which, they could never amass strong empirical information.” Rachael smiled, “If only they could have spoken to Tinkler Old Ones, they’d have been amazed; for not only was there irrefutable proof of the existence of those portals among our people, but the doorway between Earth and Lumen had been used regularly by them for ages past. Had they also inquired about how the doorways were formed, they’d have had confirmation of their own understanding that, as in a bowl of spaghetti noodles, each noodle may lean on one or many neighbours, and where those places of commonality occur, there are opportunities for movement between noodles in either direction. The Old Ones have always regarded these doorways as a natural condition of the universes; there’s nothing of fanciful dreaming or spirit journeying about those things, to them Lumen is another reality that intersects the one in which Earth exists.”
“How many doorways can actually exist?” asked Aletheia.
“Count the twisting of noodles in a large bowl.” Rachael replied. “Does it matter?….

Taken from The Blessings of Dis, Book Two of The Gatherers Trilogy.