Birth Funeral

Further adventures of a dream traveler on the paths of soul remembering

The path is strewn with blue lotus petals. The flowers become perfume under the rhythmic steps of the mourners, and their high keening reaches the stars. The familiar scent stirs memory and desire. I am filled with longing for what I am about to leave.

They have laid me out as a corpse on the bier. It tilts like a boat in a strong sea as Maatkare joins me, beautiful and golden.

She is around me and over me, inconsolable. She embraces me as the vine grasps the tree, wrapping delicate tendrils around each of my curves and angles, shooting down suckers to clasp every nerve ending. My senses quicken and proliferate at her touch, and my form shifts to receive her and pleasure her. I burst, with her, into fields of flowers. I rise through the spray of her kisses as a shoal of silver fish, leaping the falls.

We become many, multitudinous. Her vines sprout ripe, heavy bunches of fruit and I taste them with many tongues. We shapeshift beyond gender, beyond species, she inside me, I inside her, in ways and places beyond counting, all in the same breath. We turn within and around each other in the spiral dance that makes worlds.

You cannot leave this. Her voice walks through my mind. You cannot leave me.
The song of the mourners deepens as a powerful tide, carrying the process towards the first gate of the Limiting.

A second presence flows into the bier. Tefnut is with us, fierce and knowing. We become a pride of lions, ranging a steep grassy embankment below the city wall, which shines as electrum. I stalk with my heart-sisters, romp with them, and flop down, dozy and magnificent, under a hot sun.

Tefnut nuzzles me back to alertness, goading me with little nips and shoves towards the city on the hill. I bat at her lazily with my paw, then see that the Limiting has begun. My hand is soft and pink. I am becoming a man-being, something merely human. I snarl, willing myself back into lion form. My shape is becoming fixed, as a biped confined to the ground. I will myself to change into a bird, and beat my arms, and lift up – and come down with a bone-jarring thud. Very well, if I am bound to earth, I will sink roots into earth and sprout a green canopy, like the great tree that stands beside the river. I will myself to become a tree, until my veins make an ivy lattice, pushing up under the skin. But I remain a man, or something on its way to becoming man.

Maatkare lies in the grass in her tawny hide, watching me with her golden eyes.
There is sadness in Tefnut’s green eyes, but also the strength of recollection.

You have walked this path before. You have chosen to walk it again because the Cloaked Planet is in need. You remember.

I remember. I have agreed to die again to all that I love, in our home world, to help to sustain our experiment with a primitive life form on a world that is many light years and several dimensions away.

Accept this form.

Awkwardly, resisting the need to operate such a crude and limited form, I extend a human arm and fan the fingers. I curl them and pull Maatkare’s whiskers. It is a curious sensation. I crouch and rub her chest, seeking a sweet spot between her front legs.

She purrs and begins to accommodate my new form, becoming a sphinx with lovely woman’s breasts. I feed and caress until Tefnut growls a warning.

You must go now, to the Hall of Memory.

I hear the mourners’ voices again. We have wonderful singers on Akarmatet. The razor-edged beauty of their songs would be too much for human sensibilities, though the softer versions we play in our music schools on Luna inspire jazz chanteuses and fado balladists.

At the first gate of the Limiting, I am seized with violent trembling and hug myself against the sudden cold. Something more has been stripped from me. I see it, for a moment, as a lionskin lined with the night sky, a sky full of stars. I have given up something that was never a burden, something that lifted my essence in skeins of light. Without it, in this graceless simulacrum of human form, I am skinless yet limited, formless but confined, a vulnerable jelly of quivering energy.

I may be slightly drunk, on the fumes of blue lotus. I yearn for a last glimpse of Maatkare, before they offer me the Cup of Forgetfulness. I reach back with my mind to the place of the lions. An aching distance away, through blue mist, I see the lionesses flanking my lion self, his mane shining golden as the sun. I know the pain of deeper loss, seeing that I must leave not only my heart-sisters, but a vital depth of my being, a royal and shining self.

I will find you, Maatkare reaches to me. Whatever you become, I will know you and come to you.

The Limiting has begun.