A Prophetic Quartet. Part 1 - Sophia's Dream

A mighty work, Nanchang 2023

This following work was channeled, one verse at at time, in 2023 - a hypersigil. It occupied exactly four orbits of the planet mercury, measured from north node to node node. During this time I moved across the world from HK to Canada, confronted a major betrayal, and many other things. The writing of it was healing, oracular. I still don't know everything what it all means, but it gave me comfort, and still does. Here is the first orbit. I had no idea what would happen or what it would be about. It wrote itself.

-P-

1. O Masters, spin to us a tale, of mysteries older than the seas.

2. In deeds the dawn of all's to come has humble routes - for here is a baker, up before the sun - preparing roles four paying players two pray four.

3. Here is a baker, up before the dawn - mixing secrets, for the times to come.

4. And look - the baker's cat (a master in a different world), whose murders keep us from the plague!

5. And so it begins, the roles all cooked - the lines'v 'rived - let's have a look!

6. There's a girl at the door. Every day she arrives before opening, and every day she buys a scone and feeds it to the pigeons.

7. This day, however, is different. This day she comes carrying a ring. She drops it onto the counter and it sings like a coin.

8. Held to the light, it is a simple thing - gold, and brilliant, and twinkling like a star.

9. The Baker held the ring for a moment, then handed it back to the girl. The cat meowed. "where did you find this", the Baker asked?

10. "It's a long story," she sighed. "Is it acceptable?". The Baker thought about it for a moment - looked at the cat and then answered: "Perhaps you'd better start from the beginning"....

11. She thought for a minute... "well I assume you don't mean THE BEGINNING - I don't think there was or is one - but if you MUST know, some strange things started to happen on the last new moon, while I was picking flowers by the banks of the Silver River."

12. "I had collected seven daisies, six tulips, five clovers, four daffodils, three begonias, two wild garlic flowers, and a rose, and I was singing a song to nobody in particular, when I came across a Bee."

13. "The thing about bees is that they are not very forthcoming - usually they reserve their words for matters internal to the Hive. Imagine my surprise, then, when not only did this bee speak - but they called me by name!"

14. "Sophia-Jane?""Can I Help you?""Sophia Jane, of the Elders?""I am Sophia Jane Elder - and who be you?""I am Messenger Yellow. You are to speak with the Queen."

15. I heard a knocking coming from within me and I closed my eyes. There I saw the most beautiful door. It was made of gold, like the sun, and shaped as a honeycomb.

16. And what happened then was astonishing. The door opened into a realm so vivid it defies thought. I passed into a living palace of golden, dancing forms - both a house and a language. It seemed to be both miniscule and enormous: in neither detail, nor in scope, could I fathom the end of it.

17. I soared through those halls - my flying mind carried along an invisible road, it would seem, through worlds and worlds and worlds, until at last, to the heart of things I was drawn. She waited for me there.

18. "Sophia-Jane, of the Elders" my name echoes. "can you remember our compact?" I felt a sensation like a stone of ice inside my heart - there lay something more solid than anything else, yet invisible to my memory. "you must help us now". And I saw my vision swept towards a place, or rather a layer, in all this Golden, living hive. On this layer there was a monster. No. The layer itself WAS a monster.

19. Imagine an infinitely thin membrane - drawn like a seive secretly across some fundamental level of everything. Sticky like fly paper. Rank like death. Insinuating, cruel. Rotten. Somehow intervening, imposing itself from this one simple zone onto everything, everywhere - globally. All at once. A sinister transparency, severing the world from the world. This what I saw. This was the monster - and the monster was hungry.

20. In and Beyond this vision, the voice called to me again. And SHE was there- She of the Hive's long memory - for they are one: chemical, electrical, spiritual. She returned to my heart, and I felt the fissure that ran through it. This hives heart was broke , and the Queen was asking for my help.

21. As quickly as that realization hit me, I found myself back by the river bank holding my bouquet of one rose, two wild garlic flowers, three begonias, four daffodils, five clovers, six tulips, and seven daisies. Messenger Yellow was nowhere to be seen.

22. I looked at the river and the river looked back at me. I was struck by the knowledge of the layers supporting everything, and somewhere in the depths, I could feel the monstrous plane, stretched taut beneath the world. If I am to address it - where would I even begin?

23. The answer came in the form of a canoe.

24. It floated down toward me from upstream - without a pilot - listlessly straddling the lazy current like a bored leaf on a journey into the sun.

25. As I stood there with my bouquet, the empty canoe drifted down toward me, making a slow, full rotation before getting wedged between two out-jutting rocks by the nearby riverbank and coming to a rest some three meters from where I stood, watching it.

26. It had a red hull, and golden brown ribs. It swayed gently and invitingly in its port. Perhaps I was rash, impulsive - or perhaps driven by a hand beyond my knowing. I boarded her and sat cross-legged between the gunnels as she swayed bay and forth in the ever flowing river currents.

27. I sat there for some time, just breathing and listening. Gradually I began to notice many many little fish swimming about in the waters. It seemed as if they were beginning to gather in a big school around my canoe.

28. As time went by, the school of myriad little fish grew and grew beneath me, churning the waters around my boat until at last they lifted it from out between the two rocks and carried it out into the midstream current.

29. And there I hovered, defying the force of the current - upheld by life in a bubble of moment that resisted the pull of entropy, like a soul made free of the body's mortality. There I hung, suspended - carried by myriad allies - for a moment, immortal.

30. And slowly, slowly, my magic carpet of fish began to carry me upstream.

31. I watched the riverbanks pass by for almost an hour - light forest giving way to rolling fields, giving way to to low foothills. In my vessel I gazed upwards at towering mountains in the distance - gradually drawing nearer as I approached. Carried, carried in my canoe by the invisible allies who swarmed beneath me and gave me their strength.

32. On and on I did float - carried upstream counter to the current. Soon the mountains loomed all about me, as I grew ever closer to what I assumed would be the river's source.

33. But the closer I got, the stranger my surroundings became. Instead of being held by its banks, it seemed instead to exist all on its own - like the trunk of a great tree, liberated from the ground. The myriad fish in its waters were spiraling around it, in helical ribbons - carrying me in my little canoe up and up and into the air.

34. Around and around until the trunk of the river-tree split forth into a thousand branches - a great, arboristic delta... tickling the stars.

35. I wound my way up and around- to the very tip of one of these branches. Little colored fish started to poke their heads out of the water like leaves. The whole river-tree bloomed brilliantly with fish. And they began to sing.

36. And this was the song that the river-tree sang:

37. "This is the Song of the One's before,Who sang thing's up by the Silver's shores.They sang things up when the world came down:When the Jade-faced Serpent turned around.

38. In and out of the evening's spire, we play our music for the sire.In doubt and dawn, we dance full-tilt.And not a drop of dew is spilt.

39. The falcon hears the falconer, at last the gyre comes to rest: upon the outstretched palm of aged-children borne from out the test.”

40. And as I heard the leaf-fish sing it, the song itself took on a body and hovered over the tree, silhouetted against the stary deep in the form of a great Crow. "what is your name, oh bird of the forever?" I asked.

41. And the bird that was a song just cocked its head and flashed its eyes and flew away into the endless night, dropping a perfect blue pearl into my open hand. On that pearl, intricately carved, there was a map.

42. I recognized immediately that it was a map, not of space, but of time, and it revealed a realm full of possibilities and infinite worlds - yet across it there run a thin, morbid line - a line of crimson that meandered painfully across the whole realm, glaring at me like a reeking scar.

43. This was the second clue, that something was terribly amiss beneath the voluminous surface of things. As I stared at the pearl-map in my hand, while I could sense its pain, I also felt a profound hope somehow radiating from a region of the map that I could only describe as a mountain. As I focused on the mountain, my canoe seemed to lift off from the branches of the river-tree and alight upon the starry sea of the heaven's themselves.

44. At last, aloft upon the infinite expanse, with my pearl of time and in my oarless canoe, I found myself free to navigate wheresoever I did think. And so I thought of a Mountain.

45. I know this now - all of what we call "the universe" is effectively flat - it is akin to a great skin - a surface with neither exterior nor interior. But it is not an even surface. It is profoundly poked and pocked and pocketed, curved and bumped. It is beyond fathoming in its magnitude - it has no edges at all. What I see also is a great mountain where the entire universe reaches towards a peak in terms. A mountain made of universe - and that is to where my little boat sails.

46. As soon as I had thought the thought, I was somehow transported to the base of this great mountain.

47. I was no longer "in" my boat - although it was part of me. I was operating now in a realm that subsumed the entire universe and presented it to another, almost unthinkable horizon - consequently everything and anything that could be even loosely connected to me in this world - up to and including the world itself - were fused into a singularity as I faced the Mountain.

48. And so the universe began to ascend itself.

49. Darkness. Density. Presence. I see nothing but I feel everything. I am feeling my way through an impassable barrier, yet I am blind. My grip shifts, I am holding myself against an unseen slope, searching. Searching for the next hand-hold by touch alone. I do not know if there is a way through, but I must persist. Persist.

50. Puzzle by puzzle, it begins to become clear. My heart flutters, but I take the leap, extending my weight - still blind- up and out of my hanging standstill. I am now in a new configuration - a new set of possibilities upon the mysterious cliff-face that is the world outside the world.

51. Each new position opens new positions. The courage to shift discloses the larger world. I began to clamber like a spider up and around the invisible wall. Deprived of sight, I learned the language of texture and inclination. My movements were an utterance upon the wall of the world, and with each new configuration, I spiraled closer to that ineffable peak - where the outside of everything surpasses even itself.

52. There was a point in my ascent, wherein like the dawn breaking, my vision began to return - and yet it was not as it had once been. I could see no things, I could name no names. Reality was visible, but it was not aggregated into unities - no, it was a great wash - an infinite cascade - and I climbed and climbed and climbed and the cascade became clearer and clearer and clearer. It was exactly what it was.

53. What is this I see? A dawning ‘top the mountain peak reveals something unexpected. It appears to be a city!

54. There is no way to perceive this metropolis, save with the eyes of the cascade.

55. It is a buzzing Hive of life, with majestic towers and vibrant markets - a commerce of worlds flows to and fro through its gates and its gardens are rich and fragrant. All this I know, yet none of it can I objectively identify - yet there I stood at its gates, the city of the secret mountain.

56. I approached those gates, knowing that what I would find on the other side would constitute a revelation of peerless scope. I ascended to the portal, steeled myself, and then crossed over the threshold.

57. As my left foot's foremost toes touched the cobblestones of the central boulevard, I was transported into a vivid and broad avenue bathed in mottled light that streamed through the branches of lovely great oaks that lined the way on either side. A man pulling a card full of huge spools of colored yarn was approaching me, and I could see that one of the spools must have fallen off some ways back, because a single, blood red strand of it ran out the back of the cart and meandered down the road only to disappear from sight. The man at the cart did not appear to notice or care.

58. I felt myself possessed to follow the trail left by the missing spool, and so I excused myself from any introduction and traced the path of crimson as it tangled through the gaps in the cobblestones like a languid river and led me ever deeper into this strange city.

59. The trail led around a corner and I followed - past five surly youths arguing over a potato. Past a stall selling ornamental wind-chimes. Past a woman seated atop a giant, chattering scorpion. And the trail of red yarn led on. It passed all the way through the curved chambers and out the other side of a nautilus shell that was sitting on a bench. It ran up the leftsleeve of a gentleman with a stovepipe hat - and out the right. It wound all the way around a tree and was woven into a nest containing five spotted blue eggs. finally it led all the way up and into the 3rd story window of a huge, crooked house that was so old, and so ramshackle that it was a miracle that it still stood.

60. The house had an old thatched roof and a frame of timber. Everything about it was crooked. The roof was crooked, the windowpane were of uneven thickness and at weird angles, and the four stories (plus a tower!) seemed almost offset from one another. It was a strange house indeed.

61. The door to that weird house was more unusual still. I couldn't concentrate on it - It is as if it wanted to be ignored. It was as if the house itself were only meant to be perceiveable as a backdrop - always a few streets away. The only thing, in fact, that told me that I was standing right in front of it was the line of red yarn that I was holding, which ran right up and into the window. It was as if that line were forcing a connection with something that would otherwise be inaccessible, like the interjected card that keeps a door latch from closing properly.

62. By squinting, and looking sideways our of my field of vision, I could barely make out the door - which wasn't a door at all: it was a mouth. And it wasn't a human mouth - it was like a horrible cross between a snake and a lamprey, with three forked tongues flicking in and out out of a round orifice, lined with hundreds of thousands of flint-like teeth, in concentric rows that seemed to spiral away into some lost abyss.

63. "Who are you?" I asked the House. "I have many names." came the reply. "Why are you here?" I asked. " Who wants to know?" replied the House.

64. "I am Sophia Elder, and I am on a quest to find the source of the monstrous layer that has insinuated itself into the ecology of the multidimensional everything." After a moment, the house began to laugh at me.

65. "well met, Sophia. I am House. It is perhaps possible that I can help you. But there would be a price." "What is the price?"I asked. The House laughed again. You would need to come inside, and uh.. meet me upstairs". There seemed to be a hint of malice and a touch of menace in this proposal.

66. And so it was that I took my life in my hands and I stepped directly into the mouth of House.

67. The passage was long and dark and warm, and wet, and what's worse, it stank. It made unappealing noises and undulated distressing. I picked my way across the rows of teeth and as I got further inside, the snake-tongues harassed me with flicks and taunts.

68. At a certain point, needless to say, the orifice snapped shut behind me, and I was left in total darkness.

69. I wasn't not expecting this. Just as the trap shut, I grabbed two of the House's flickering tongues - and it howled in surprise - opening it's door again to curse me with its last free tongue. I caught that one too, releasing the first, and the switched hands again, passing three tongues between two hands like a juggler - weaving them together into one long, snake-tongue braid. The House was Furious, but I held onto its braided tongue, like onto a leash, or a lasso!

70. And I held on to the devil's braided tongue as it howled and howled, and I shouted back at it: "Now listen here, you nasty peice of predatory architecture - if you know what's good for you, you will be inviting me upstairs. NOW." And just for good measure, I gave that tongue, a good, sharp yank.

71. The whole tunnel shook and there was a sound of rage. Then a crack opened up - a sliver of light that revealed a staircase going up.

72. I let go of the Devil's tongue, grabbed the crack, and held it open. I stepped up onto that staircase and ascended ascended ascended... up up up, and the darkness of that tunnel began to give way to a lucid transparency - like a field of glass. I could see many forms moving and taking shapes of different kinds and I realized I was on the laminar threshold between what House represented as a predatory animal and what it represented as a place of Refuge, hospitality, and warmth.

73. As the shapes that shifted around me began to coalesce, they transformed into the pillars of a long, wide hall with a single square window at the far end and a glass roof overhead, through which the solar radiance shone down upon a great, rectangular pool, the length of the hall. There were carvings all along the walls and over the pillars that looked like mother of pearl, or Ivory, and which seemed to move and dance and come Alive. The Pool, which was like an Olympic sized swimming pool, tiled with intricate mosaic work, was filled with many fish - one of which was a a carp so enormous that it was larger than a car. I ascended the staircase up and onto a delicate stone balcony that ran all around the hall, with spiral staircases leading down to the pool…

74. I made my way to the nearest staircase and descended to pool level. As I got closer, I saw that the Enormous fish was indeed crocheting a bright red scarf. I said excuse me, fish, but why do you need a scarf?". It look up, startled and said - "Oh, it's not for me!".

75. "I've been making this for you, to be honest!" and with that said, the end of the thread slipped through the great square window and was wound up unto the scarf in a matter of seconds. "Here," said the fish, and tossed the scarf up to me. "You're gonna need this". Strangely, for having been crocheted by a fish, under water, the scarf was completely dry - and warm to the touch.

76. "I know why you are here" said the big fish. "we call it the Disconnect - it is like a cut across eternity. It drives itself, like a wedge, into creation. Sometimes you see it, and it is like a layer that corrupts everything that passes through it. Other times it is like a knot, a tangle. We do not know why it is so - but we know it doesn't have to be there. We know that we can pass through it unharmed -under the right circumstances. Still, we have no solution - which is where you come in. You need to discover the cure". I took all this in without a word." First, though, I have something for you. Put on your scarf and get into the water with me".

77. So I did what the big fish asked, and the next thing you know, it swam on up to me and swallowed me whole!

78. It's dark inside the fish but I feel warm and dry. My red scarf comforts me. Somebody lights a match and it flares up. They wave. They are me. I wave wave back at me. I am holding the bouquet of flowers that I picked by the river, earlier. Off I go, skipping into the darkness. Needless to say, I follow.

79. Not far along, there is a great amphitheater. With the match a candle is lit, and another, and another and another - such that a dome of light illuminates a small, central stage. The candles alight - the play begins!

80. Three players Step out into the light, all wearing masks - the first a weeping child, the second a one eyed woman, the third, a grotesque monster. They spin a flaming baton between them and weave in and out as a rhythmic drum beat begins to rise. Do you know? Do you know? Do you Know?

81. And so a play unfolded in the dance, the firelight casting shadows that seemed impossible. We saw armies launched and great battles - the form of an enormous dragon. The rise and fall of Dynasties and the work of a figure, alone across aeons - continuous and shrouded in a shadow so dark it seemed unnatural - enduring across centuries in a work both strange and sinister - and the story emerged of the hidden one returning generation after generation to subtly sow a work of horror across millenia. Thus it becomes clear - this is the author of the disconnect - known not by any presence or action or record, but by a conspicuous anthropomorphic absence. The author of the disconnect is a 10,000 year old living, self aware hole in the fabric of everything. At this very moment of recognition, it turns its eye upon me. I have been SEEN by the Author.

82. And the eye upon me came the wave. Obliterating, disintegrating, suffocating - it was all these and worse. Inside it, there was a name. All Cold. A lister.

I have lost the way and I perish....

I have found the way and I flourish.

Let THESE two asses be set to grind stone. Amen.

83. A feverish dream betakes me, as I pitch myself into the strange contradiction, and worlds start to turn. There is a light that begins to kindle - a flame in the shape of a snake, a snake in the shape of a ring. I hear a voice say: "For the disconnect to heal, across the rift, the walkers go. Though the entrance be concealed, by this emblem, it be shown".

84. Donning the ring effects a change in my vision. Strangely now, I can see the Disconnect - where it was hidden before, and equally strange, it no longer seems smooth and impenetrable, but oddly fibrous. Stronger in some places and weaker in others. In my vision now I can detect its presence and guage its strength. An now I know - it isn't complete.

85. And in my sight I see a place as thin as half a hair - and I poke it. It recoils like a broken balloon and now through the hole I can see the amphitheater again, all lit in welcoming flames. I step through.

86. The myself is there, standing cavorting with the three, and the whole scene is set into vivid motion as we are spat all together out of the fish, through the window, over the city, down the mountain, and across the universe only to land in the fetal position at the bank of the Silver River, which had just a moment ago been a tree. Messenger yellow poked me - Hey Sophia, did you have a nice trip? I still wore the scarf, I still bore the ring.

87. I might have thought it was all a dream, of course - if I wasn't wearing that when I came to".Sophia pointed to the ring on the Baker's outstretched palm." So will that do, sir?" "Yes, thank you, Sophia, that will do perfectly".

88. And at that moment the baker's cat leapt up on the counter, snatched the ring in her teeth, and then as if she was trained for it - slipped it effortlessly onto her tail. Then, before anyone had time to react, she disappeared through an invisible hole in the universe.