Chapter 10

Looking back on this moment now, I realize what a fool I was. Not because I dared to say what I did and not because there were negative consequences. There weren't. Still, I was so very young and newly incepted, I didn't know what a risk I was taking. I didn't realize that Thiede didn't normally take aruna with just anyone, let alone newly incepted hara with zero caste training. If I had been more informed I would have been more intimidated or even frightened.

At the time, I didn't feel the need for caution, only the need for aruna. Thiede didn't deny me. In fact, he gave me more than I'd expected, more than just about any aruna I've ever had except perhaps one, which I'll get to later.

First let me think back to that first time. I'm not sure if he was flattered or just utterly surprised, but his face flushed as he crawled onto the bed and straddled me. Sharing breath with him was liking sharing breath with the universe. Such power! At the time, so inexperienced, I felt he was engulfing me, but at the same time, I was not afraid, for I felt his concern; he was going to be gentle, protect me, and I wouldn't get lost at all.

The journey he took me on was amazing. It was a journey into something I'd never experienced: Sound. It began in the sharing of breath, filled with its shared emotions, flitting thought-forms, mind pictures, but also now filled with a wonderful something, not what I thought were words, but something else.

Thiede was singing into my mind.

As we went along, I realized it wasn't only a song of his own voice, although it was that, too. No, it was also the sound of the world. There were choruses of joy, flutes of sorrow, babbling streams and cracking thunder. It took me many, many years to even know these things, to learn what was what. That first time, it was wild sensation but beautiful, oh, so beautiful, and I never thought I'd get enough of that sound, that sound, that sound!

He took me up to the higher planes. Again, it was years before I went that high again. I could see him in my mind, his ethereal form, and he could see me too and together we walked on a plain of purple sand. My hair was flying past me in the wind and his was flying as well, red flames, and then we were running, soaring with the immense sound, and finally our bodies shuddered and peaked as our souls rocketed into the turquoise sky with its blood red sun.

Afterward I swear there were flames in his eyes. Fortunately I didn't feel scorched myself, only replete, full of joy and wonder and intense thankfulness.

I was so spent that I could barely form thoughtforms. "That was... That was..." It was too much effort.

"The best?" Thiede asked, again writing it out in my mind. I nodded, not too tired to receive his messages. He, meanwhile, didn't appear tired at all.

It was then that I learned my destiny. He intimated that I had immense potential, something he'd sensed from the start, and he wanted me to reach that potential, for my own benefit as well as Wraeththu's. Being the first, he had worked to reach the highest levels of power and at least explore what he found there. Now that he had done so, he realized there were many varieties of power to be explored -- telekinesis, the transformation of matter, aruna energy for industrial uses, telepathy and more.

Naturally I would become a master of telepathy. I would push it to its farthest limits. Other hara were limited by their paradigms, used to the speaking and hearing they'd grown up with. I would have no such difficulties and my experience in the past day was proof of that. I was very far along on the path already. Did I want to go farther?

I became a shaman.

It didn't take Thiede to bring me there. In fact we didn't share aruna again for years. I remained in Nova, pursuing my caste training, while Thiede remained, as he always has been, out in the world working on his plans for the elevation of our race. He did come back to Nova from time to time, as for some years it was the base for his explorations of caste training, but we never knew when he would be around. He allowed me to live in his house and I remember those days when I'd go downstairs for breakfast and find him at the table or wake in the night to find him in the chair by the bed, wanting to talk to me.

I had a lot to tell him. As everyone had expected, I rose very quickly in the ranks. At the end of five years I was Algomalid. In addition to mastery all manner of telepathy and communication, I managed to learn the other arts as well. I had very good teachers, as other hara in Nova were focusing on their own specialities -- rearranging matter, creating three-dimensional visions, healing the body, and on and on so that it was an academy of learning for the individual and the group as well, all of us learning from one another and then passing on our learnings and finding to Thiede, whenever he'd come by.

Thiede came to each of us for reports I'm sure, but I always felt special. Unlike the others, I knew Thiede's secret.

I also was Thiede's secret.