Legacy of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [12]
“Come to me,” said Mosiah. “Not your body. Leave that behind. Let your soul rise from its shell and walk with me.”
I had no idea what the man was talking about.
I think I would have laughed—in fact, I am afraid that I did giggle, perhaps from nervous tension—except that I felt his dire urgency. Bewildered, I lay in my bed, wondering what I was supposed to do, wondering if my master knew what to do. Mosiah—or perhaps I should say the “shadow” of Mosiah—took form in the darkness, standing at the foot of the bed.
He held out his hand to me. “It is quite simple,” he said. “You are coming with me. Your body is staying behind. My body is downstairs right now. Yet here I stand before you. Picture yourself rising up out of bed and walking with me. You are a writer. You must have traveled like this in your imagination many times. When I read your description of Merilon, I could see it again in my mind, it was so vivid. You are a professional day-dreamer, one might say. Simply concentrate a little bit more.”
And when I did not immediately move, Mosiah’s tone sharpened. “Saryon will not leave without you. You are putting him in danger.”
He knew that would rouse me. It would have roused me from my grave. I closed my eyes and imagined myself rising up from my bed and joining Mosiah. At first, nothing happened. I was in such a flutter of excitement and fear that it was difficult to concentrate.
“Relax,” Mosiah said softly, hypnotically. “Relax and slough off the heaviness of the body that weighs you down.”
His words no longer burned in my mind, but seemed to flow through it like running water. I found myself relaxing, letting the water run over me. My body did, in fact, feel very heavy, so heavy that I knew I could not lift it. And yet, there was the imperative that I bad to leave!
I stood up and I walked over to join Mosiah. When I looked back, I was not surprised to see the heavy body still lying in the bed, slumbering soundly, to all appearances.
My fears were forgotten in my wonder and awe.
I started to move toward the door, thinking to go through it and down the stairs to my master’s bedroom, as I was accustomed, but Mosiah stopped me.
“You are no longer constrained by physical barriers, Reuven. A thought will take you to Saryon.”
And he spoke truly. The moment I thought about being with my master, I was there beside him. At the sight of me, Saryon smiled and nodded and then, hesitantly, as if having to relearn skills long forgotten, his soul left his body.
I was not surprised to see his spirit suffused with a soft radiant white glow; a distinct contrast to Mosiah, whose spirit seemed cloaked with the same black robes his body wore.
My master was pained by this, as I could tell. And so could Mosiah.
“Once—you remember, Father—my soul was bright and crystal clear as Reuven’s. The dark and terrible things I have seen since have left their mark upon me. But we must hurry. They will wait only until they think you are asleep. Don’t be afraid, I will not let them harm either of you.”
Mosiah’s soul slid back into its body. He spoke a word, reached out with his hand as if to some invisible door, pushed on nothing, and walked inside.
“Hurry!” he commanded. “Follow me.”
The mind thinks of the strangest things at the most inappropriate times. I remembered, suddenly, a television cartoon I had seen as a child, in which the character—perhaps a rabbit, I’m not certain—is being chased through the forest by a hunter with a gun. The rabbit is cornered, apparently, until he opens a hole in the cartoon, crawls inside, and pulls the hole in after him, leaving the hunter extremely befuddled.
Mosiah had done the very same thing. He had opened a hole in our bedroom and was urging us to crawl inside!