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By Root 1219 0

own will, but he stayed conscious, his mind alert within the dying lump of flesh. Even though his body of light would be useless in a few minutes, he summoned it as a bridge to the etheric and transferred his consciousness over to the simple thought-form, a slender man in a plain tunic. The relief of finally being free of his huge and deformed body was so great that he swooped up to the sky and fluttered once round the hilltop. He could see Pachela, a dim shape inside her pale aura, making her slow, proud way along through the waist-high waves of grass. When he flew off to the north, he glanced back to see that the silver cord joining him to his body was growing very thin and pale. It was time to change levels while he was still somewhat alive and in firm command of his mind.

He pictured a circle divided into quarters, each a different color: olive, russet, citrine, and, in the bottom quadrant, black. He held the image in his mind until it stayed clear and solid, then slid it out so that the circle seemed to hang like a vast curtain before him. Just then, he felt the silver cord snap. Like pieces of unstitched cloth, chunks of his body of light slithered and fell away, leaving him a naked bluish form hovering amid the billowing energy waves of the etheric plane. He bent all his concentration to the circle, which now changed from a painted-looking figure to a solid disk. The blackness was swirling within its bounds like trapped smoke. In thought only, the Old One called out the names of the Lords of Husks and Rinds, but there at the gate between worlds the thoughts seemed to boom like gongs. On that quiver and rage of sound he slid forward into and through the swirling blackness into the Earth of Earth, the lowest point of the world that knows the Light.

He felt it more as a smell than as a space, a thick mustiness of decay, yet perfectly benign, like leaves crumbling to enrich good soil, perhaps. As he burrowed his way deeper in, he felt pressure, as if the earth grasped him with firm hands. It became harder and harder to move, even though he was now pure mind scrabbling molelike into the astral plane. A desire filled his being, a lust for sleep, for resting there forever in the clingy dark, but he had trained his will for a hundred years in preparation for this exact moment. As he clawed onward, he envisioned himself going down, pictured in his mind that he was digging his way through to a darkness that lay below the universe and that touched it only at this one point. Earth of Earth began to fight him, as if its King had somehow discovered his evil intent. The dark turned crystalline and hard, gleamed briefly with an oily copper light, formed into vague faces and hands that clutched him and whispered with voices that all cried, “Go back! Go back to the Light!” Yet raging and cursing he smashed his way on, hammering at the faces and crushing the little hands with the huge steel clubs he visualized for weapons.

With one last howl of rage he broke through. Since his mind was still bound by earthly concepts, he saw everything very concretely. He was a tiny naked human figure clinging by its fingers to the bottom of a vast black sphere. Below, storm-tossed and infinite, spread a black sea. There were no stars, only currents of greater darkness, no true forms, only shifting pale images that alternately beckoned and menaced. The Old One felt his terror like a biting cold, smelt it as an acrid stink. This was the gate to the Dark of Darkness, the world of Husks and Rinds. Here, if he could claw and fight his way to power, he would exist forever as a separate soul, beyond all judgment of the Great Ones, beyond death though beyond all life as well. During every moment of his unnaturally long life, he had trained and planned and longed for this moment, but now he hesitated, stunned by the loathing that welled up within him.

For those moments beyond time he wanted to turn back. Earth of Earth would receive him; even as he had the thought, he felt his grip upon the sphere grow more secure, as if something had reached out and caught