Chapter 2

Sadie left the room and walked through the hallways of the palace, the crown still upon her head. The marble floors were warm and slippery under her bare feet and they were massaging them at the same time. The beauty of the hallways overwhelmed her, and she had to hold onto her heart from leaping out of her chest. She spent hours looking at the majestic art and with every painting her heart leaped harder. There was music coming from the paintings, which evoked in her ideas for new books. She felt a pressing in her womb; things were growing inside her as she studied the art. She walked and walked, exploring parts of the palace, letting herself get lost in its grandeur and glory.

In a hallway made of rose-colored crystal walls, it began to rain. She drank the rain and it filled her with such joy that she danced along, lost in a trance of beauty. She found French and marble doors that led to a garden path surrounded by lilies of the valley and golden cobblestones. She ran along the path until it led to a rose colored pond. She sipped water from the pond and it tasted just like the rain. Now the joy was intensified so she ran, skipping through apple trees and patches of golden yellow grass growing with daisies. She blew through each daisy and the daisy petals flew toward to the violet smoke in the distance as she followed them. She went through what was seemingly a forest but it was within an oily light. The trees were made of air and light and when she touched them, they felt soft as water. She tickled her hands through the trees and took soil into her hands, the soil also made of air and light. Soon, the forest bled into a world of oily clouds of every color and at the end of these clouds was a cooling shade that came like the arrival of spring. Through these clouds, rows of baby poplar trees aligned a dusted driveway drenched in sunlight leading to a yellow house. It was the same house she had seen that time on the Road to Revelathia.

All its windows were open and its glass doors still wet from being polished. The air was crisp and the poplars grew before her eyes. Everything smelled so fresh. As the road curved upwards toward the house, she saw the distance as if it was directly in front of her. Purple speckles of light covered the earth, the light sprouting like flowers, and the light turned into grapes and a vineyard stretched for miles behind the house. Here was where all the violet smoke was coming from. She ran through the open doors of the house that smelled like fresh paint and wood. The house was empty of furnishings. It was newly constructed and no one was in it. There was only a warm breeze whose presence felt human.

Through the French backdoors of the house and up a small hill she came to the vineyard, covered by a sea of violet smoke.

As she moved through, her feet crushed the grapes and her feet drank the grapes, the grape juice like a river running up her body and into her head and the smoke became like sheets of satin falling all around her.

At the end of the vineyard, she felt so spiny. She lied down on the sheets of violet smoke, until the smoke cleared away with one breath. She sat up and in front of her, standing alone, was a giant weeping willow tree with a white wooden swing attached with two ropes. The branches of the tree were thick and wild with leaves the size of human faces. The leaves were in shades of green all wet. The roots of the tree went so deep that the ground burst with them, the roots rolling in waves above the ground, and they drank from a stream not so far away. It was the stream that Joseph swam in.

The swing was swinging in the gentle breeze and it seemed to be calling for her to come.

She came and sat on the swing and swung. As she swung she realized, before she even saw, that this beautiful tree had no hole.

The light from a sun she couldn’t see shone so brightly in her eyes it was nearly blinding and she looked to the ground to restore her eyes from the light.

Soon she swung higher than her own legs could take her, and she felt hands upon her back. She kept her face forward, swallowing the sweet air that still smelled of grapes.

She swung so high. As high as the birds go and back again. Higher than the top of the tree, although she didn’t know where the tree ended or how it began.

She was quiet as she swung. All the birds were quiet until the King walked off, his robe taking on the color that came from the center of the center dimension of gold. His ring shone like the sun was on his fingers. She leaped off the swing and followed him.

“As I walk across this empty field, Sadie,” the King said, his feet pressing into dewy green grass that didn’t move a blade out of place and rose up taller as he took the next step. She ran up beside him, he walked slowly, but each step seemed to propel them so forward, she skipped to keep up. “Without you here, I’d be truly alone, wouldn’t I? Alone with the land, and all that is silent within it, silent as I come, in my solitude. There is no one more alone than a King. And a King must be this way. He is the most private person on Earth.”

“But a King isn’t always alone because he is surrounded by his servants and everyone knows who he is,” Sadie said.

“Knowing who somebody is, and who somebody really is, are two different things.”

“I know that,” Sadie said. “You said I must know your prince to know you, and I was wondering...”

“You are most truly known, Sadie, into your deepest places, by the one whose own hands formed you. And by the one whose hands also formed—”

“Well whoever formed me did a shitty job because not everything works in me. Trust me. There are many problems with how I’m formed or whatever.”

The King smiled and looked at her out of the corner of his eye,

“I have never seen your deviation. Only your love.” He turned his head to the left as a golden bird swooped from above and began to shake some of its feathers down and sped away. The feathers turned into little golden starry light balls as they walked and the field went on.

“The closer you get to me, Sadie, the lonelier it becomes. There are many vanished places to pass through to come into my depths.”

“Vanished places? I left behind everything. It’s all vanished and gone, everything but me walking with you here.”

“As much as you’ve left behind, Sadie, is as much more there is ahead. As you pass through these vanished places, people will not understand where you’ve gone or who you’ve become. They will no longer be able to reach you, no one will be allowed in your secret places, and only certain ones will be allowed to come very close to you in your life. Sometimes you won’t even be allowed in your own life.”

They came to the beginning of three miles of colorful butterflies.

He stopped and a golden butterfly landed on his ring finger.

“The lonely girl is my girl,” he said, looking at Sadie who was looking at the golden eyes of the butterfly. With these words Sadie felt like butterflies were flying under her skin.

“She has the sound. She has the space. She has the passageways so empty no one can fill them. No one knows how to fill them, and for her King, this is his wonderful chance to fill her with his goodness and his grace and his loving kindness and treasures. For who can fill what is already filled?”

Sadie reached out and took a red butterfly on her finger, just like he did.

“Look.” He pointed with his other hand to a small patch of sand that lay between the green carpet grass. “The desert. It seems so big to the caterpillar, but look how small it is. Look, Sadie, how small this desert is. See the butterflies flying up above.” And they were, dozens of them especially flying over the spot.

“In the desolation, in your deserts, the ravens had trouble finding you. Finding you finding you finding you...” His voice echoed as she knelt to the spot of sand beneath her. “But they found you; they fed you, although you were not ready to eat. I saw you like you see the sand now, your monster was this small to me.” There was nothing there but the sand, which she took in her other hand, and when she looked up at him, he walked off. When she looked down at the sand again, it had become black, all light was taken away, but the butterflies still flew above.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, getting up and following him. After a mile of walking beside him through the butterflies, she felt a sinking as if her whole soul was pushing to get out but couldn’t. She fell upon her knees.

“How lonely I have been,” she cried. “MORE THAN YOU COULD EVER KNOW!”

She stayed there on her knees as he kept walking.

“The world would think me evil for the pain I let you endure,” he whispered to the butterflies that flew above him. “But the world does not think the way I think and their ways are not my ways.”

“Why must a King be so alone?”

The light was shifting into a deeper light, as a mossy green air descended through it. The King’s gold robe looked silvery and then gold again, and like it was suspended in the air around him. His ring shone red now, and butterflies, one by one, descend upon it, sipped something with their feet, and flew away in small tornado spins. They grew double in size.

“Because he is the King,” the King said.

Chapter 3

The King walked into an enormous chrysalis. The chrysalis was white with strands of butterfly silk made of purples and blacks and greens threaded throughout. It was wet and nestled under arches of trees with thick sturdy branches protecting it. Snuggling the chrysalis were flowers, asters, cosmos, thistle and buttonbush.

Nothing could come into the chrysalis and nothing could leave, many animals played around its outside, but never touched any part of its fibers. The King took something that was leaning against the outer wall of the chrysalis. It was a beautiful old wooden cane, glossed and with so many inscriptions not another word could be written. He leaned his right side against it and turned to Sadie, still on her knees in the distance.

He extended his cane to her. She felt her heart sink and a fire start to burn inside it.

“Watch me lean as you must learn how to do the same,” he told her. “This is no ordinary cane, but words and life, prophetically spoken over you. They are promises that you must hold burning in your heart, even when you have not yet seen their fulfillment.”

“What promises?”

“All you have seen and will see of my Kingdom is a promise. Sadie, when you lean on me, you will feel—I will never forsake my promise.”

She bowed her head in remembrance of how everybody leaves, and even the words “everybody leaves” came up from her heart in a stinging acid and her ears began to clog up but in the distance she heard the King say, “Spit them out.” And she did, she spit those words out of her, screaming that everybody leaves, and they went into the ground before her and caused a small fire that thought it to be a very big fire. Within seconds that fire sizzled away, and under the fire of those words, she saw five stones. They were the same five stones that Joseph planted that day during the war. And she looked at the stones and she looked toward the King and as she considered the stones, she considered the possibility of promises being kept. But the wound where those words had been in her heart was still so deep, the wounds themselves gave wonder to her mind if promises could actually be kept, since promises were such a tricky thing and no one had yet to prove a promise to her. She took one of the five stones on the ground and held it to her heart. She closed her eyes and she felt the King shake his head.

“The war that makes the wounds is not the same war that heals the wounds,” the King said. And not fully understanding what that meant, she put the stone back down on the ground with the others. “Although the wounds of war leave a deeper crevice for love to be poured into.”

She kept her eyes on the stones, watching them to see if something could be seen in them or something grow from them, something she could understand.

“Lift your head as the promises come to you now.” The King stood over her now and put the cane before her. She took hold of it and pulled herself up, and they walked together into the chrysalis, the most bloody but beautiful world she had ever seen.

The blood was an electric crimson liquid moving all around them in a hum that soothed her stinging heart, and there were silver lights like small flames glowing on a red snowy ground. There was something in the very center that seemed like death and birth at the same time. They moved into red snow falling through shutters of blood.

The King’s hand pushed away thick walls of blood around the thing in the center. A particular aroma began to come, a fragrant so mixed with saps of the human soul, not like flowers or spices, but more like the infers of wood mixed with the smell of a burning fruity incense. It saturated the tip of her nose and her tongue.

The things of death and birth that lay in the center started coming into view. She looked at the King as he spoke.

“As you were, in a chrysalis like you see, I longed to bring you here sooner, take you to my palace sooner, and keep you here instead of there. I would have killed you if I severed you. Severed you from your struggle. The great strength in you came from the struggle, because in that struggle, the substance of strength is released. And one day, I will tell you of mine.”

“One day,” she said, always hating those words, but now, it sat in a neutral place within her as the question arose, “One day will I be severed?”

She heard moans so deep it knocked through her heart and her heart began to burn instead of sting, the moans and the groans inside the chrysalis poured in and out her wounds.

When the King peeled away all the layers of blood from the center, Sadie looked deeper into the center of the chrysalis, and there she saw the most beauteous thing. Humans, in fetal positions, surrounded in blue liquid that wasn’t wet, groaning in sounds melodious and harmonized like birds on the seas. They groaned through a wind that came in and out of their breath, and they sucked the wind like it was nectar. Their hands raising up holding the wind between their palms and they turned over, their faces to the ceiling of the chrysalis and a great golden light shone upon them through holes in the shadows of the branches and their leaves above, their eyes slowly opening and then shutting again into more groans soft now delicate as cotton puffs, if cotton puffs had sound—their feet raising up now, toes spreading apart, and a cracking sound a crunching of a shell, and their chests spilt open and down to their wombs. Only a few people were there, but they couldn’t be numbered for though they were few their weight was of a powerful army, an army made of dreamers and ones who had survived the depths of earth and the depths of heavens caves.

The deeper Sadie and the King walked through them, the more dreamlike the people became and oh how they were dreaming, dreaming in colors and scenery only seen in dreams, and Sadie wanted to know what they were dreaming. She wanted to see into their dreams so much. She knelt beside them and touched their heads and then touched their throats and when she went to touch their hearts, the power and the discovery coming out of them was so much, so much, as if great heaping mountains capped in sugar were before her, and she had eternity to climb. She couldn’t take it all at once, all that was within them, and all that was within her. She wished she had a pen, something to remember this with, and something to see their dreams with.

She looked even more inside of them. She saw children thumping inside of golden eggshells that were inside their organs, and their organs looked messy and bright, but were playing music, organ like. Then it was like each organ had its own light and water, all different waters, some hot some cool, some woodsy, some floral, some full of swirling colors, some transparent and colorless, and coming up in waves were all the many fragrances of the waters around their soul and the fragrance of the soul itself still splitting with little cuts, so many little cuts, but the cuts were gold and before her eyes they arranged into symbols and scars that looked like honor. Sadie released herself and her need to recreate this into the experience itself, and their beautiful bodies in such a transcendental state began to penetrate every part of her. As she submerged into the heart of the chrysalis, a syrup came from her fingertips and it began to burn as the people began to struggle with something within themselves, and the wind, now at their sides, began to coo and became captivated within their glands for use at a later time. The wind filled them up and filled them up, but nothing, no wind, no flames; not even the King would stop what was happening. Instead, Sadie felt the King breathing in a deeper but more subtle, and more active way than he had when they walked. He seemed to hover, as if his feet were above the snow. As more and more white snow fell, he held his heart.

“I cannot say all I feel,” Sadie whispered and she realized this was not a place for words, but movement. Movement... and the eyes of the bodies opened, as if they were new born babies and their faces turned crystal rose and became explosive with blood that wanted to burst forth and they looked like they would die again and again and again and it would be so easy to lift them back into life again or forward into life, if only she could give them her cane and they could lean and stand and be cut out of themselves. But no, let them be, she felt, as she watched them moving, turning, slapping their hands against the snow, trying to hold onto the snow, and the blood, hold the blood hold the blood, oh anything that might lift them from their ground, and wrap their open souls back up, to cover all that was being exposed. They dug deeper into themselves as Sadie dug into them with her hands, searching for something, a treasure she innately knew was there, a treasure she couldn’t help but search for.

Her hands felt beautiful within them, the warm soft organs spreading apart allowing her to enter and look at what they had to give. Oh, she felt they had so much to give, who could take it all, where would she carry it all? She had no sack, no place to store these treasures. Did these treasures have a name? They were treasures so mysteriously hidden inside of these bodies that only struggle could form them and only struggle could birth them out.

“Birth them for me,” she said. “I am one of you.” As she searched her hands shook, a shaking electrical like lightening racing through her, breaking the ends of her nerves, breaking her nerves that they would begin to search for their other halves, in the search is the struggle. In the struggle are the treasures.

Breaking their nerves, neurons meeting and kissing and connecting, joining synapses and heat and light within her cells, within their cells. She searched but the search inside the bodies for release would push her hands away and her hands breathed like a mouth would breathe, sucking in the same wind that was captivated, erecting the wind. And a wind from the King’s breath came, almost like a razor, but before the razor cut, it went back into its own blades like the head of a turtle going back into its shell. The razor turned into something that the mind cannot put words to, but the thing that came from the razor was soft and only there like fuel, to give them all more mystery and this mystery drove Sadie to put her hands deeper into the bodies and search harder for the treasures.

Soon the struggle was turning into a fire and the smoke from the fire became incense that seeped through the chrysalis and into the trees above. The trees loved this incense so much; their branches began to melt, not from the flames but from the sensation of delight that the souls were excreting their deepest seasonings, their deepest nectars and juices. Oh the trees drank and melted and fell upon the chrysalis they were once protecting. And from the weight of the trees, the chrysalis spread apart with cuts made of gold mirroring the cuts in the people’s bodies, and parts of the chrysalis fell into the open chests and the open wombs. And when the chrysalis came together with the bodies, it formed a new skin so silky and fresh and protective. The people became like newborn babies and the expansion and contractions of themselves were so ecstatic. Sadie felt surges of death and life going into her and she began to expand and contract with them, at first holding onto her cane but then she fell on the ground within them, all the snow burying her.

She laughed under the snow and then the surge of all the struggle she ever felt hit her, as if someone was beating up every part of her, like vultures were stealing her heart and old words were coming up in gaseous stones. Her emotions became tangled into the snow and hardened parts of the snow into glacial knives. The glacial knives cut through her, their tips with hot poison that stung and tried to divide her, but she had already been so divided that the fallen chrysalis was sealing, and she had to fight now between the glacial knives and the chrysalis. Who will win her soul? And what was it, all this stinging and poking and stabbing now? Stabbing into her head, her soul fighting to give out its nectar but it couldn’t get to it. It was locked into fighting for a birth after death, to release a birth after death.

The snow began to melt as an unusual fire rose up in her, a fire that was yearning for the struggle.

“Give me more! The more pain, the more death, the more dying, the more of the beauty!”

Suddenly, the sharpest glacier knife pierced into her womb and she realized, in that moment, that the struggle was what made her. It dug out her beauty, it caused her hidden most magnificent character to come forth, a character that could endure, anything, for love. And this beautiful character would be birthed directly from the substance that holds every other substance from which beauty takes its form. Beauty is most beautiful when it comes from beauty’s roots. And it takes something to venture into beauty’s roots.

Oh the struggle, the glass that cuts the diamond. These glaciers can cut the diamond, the Daisphire within me.

The Daisphire within her, in an unknown place, began to rotate, as did the earth those moments in her room in the palace with the man in her bed. It was turning upside down now, pouring out its dust, so its new ground could be made of chrysalis. The chrysalis would cover it, when it returned to the position it was formed for. When the earth rises on her feet, her head held high to the sky, her silver axis clinging itself to heaven, let its dust be dispersed and form stars in the midnight skies and its early morning dew be made of silk, skinned with shadows from the branches above.

“Oh the stone that is within me,” Sadie said, her face red with blood. “For whose face this diamond shines!”

She pulled herself up with the cane and walked through the rest of the fallen chrysalis, leaving it behind her as she entered the most beautiful land of trees she had ever seen.

The trees were so wet and glowing, as if they too just came out of a womb. There the King sat upon a golden rock that leaned against a thick small tree, not very tall, but full of a shine that came from the apples flourishing within it. Sadie stood in front of him, and looked into his eyes.

“I saw you before I made the beauty,” the King said after his eyes filled with what looked like juice. “What wore you down is where I entered to dream. I do not want to dwell alone like you Sadie.”

“Are those tears in your eyes?” she asked, with a kind of timidity she hadn’t remembered she had. “I don’t think so.”

“You cried. All those nights shattered my stained glass windows. Through the shatter I saw you in your gray gown, the stench of decay upon your lips, flaming tears upon your tongue. Unbearable creaks within your ears and your eyes, such a wild branch needed trimming, such seedless grapes needed seeds, and such seeds were planted in wrong vineyards. I pulled out swarms of creatures that bit at your extremities and insides you didn’t know were inside of you. Insides I didn’t know were inside of me. You wanted to run, always to run, and leap back over the wall you came from, the wall I crushed. If you just stood like you stand here now. If you just stood. I couldn’t stop myself from letting you run to where you might run or fly to where you might fly, I couldn’t stop myself from molding you, and I couldn’t stop my own tears from molding me.”

He stood up.

“It is just now the beginning. It is just now knowledge of the beginning.”

He bowed his head to her.

All the words he wanted to say, collected in a giant tear that fell from his right eye and landed upon her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t stand.”

She knelt at his feet. He put his right hand on her head, the signet ring a fire through her skull. He whispered,

“Welcome to my Kingdom.”

Chapter 4

At his feet she stayed until he walked a few feet away and lifted a gold rock from behind a tree and put it beside the one he had been sitting upon. He held his hand out, she took it and stood next to the rocks, and he motioned for her to sit. They sat under the tree for some time, yellow jags of light falling through the forest like golden rods and tunnels. A golden rod of light sank into her spine and she sat up straighter, like the King did, and with gratitude in her heart to be there. At some point he spoke:

“We are in Silvacha des Antiquita. Forest of Originality. No two trees here are alike, no leaf is the same as any other, no color or vein of the leaf is the same as any other, and each grain of the tree, of its bark and roots are different from the others. Even the light that shines through shines through in various degrees and intensities than any other light.”

He was quiet again. So was she. Occasionally he’d glance over and give her a smile, and sometimes his eyes would be filled with great thought, which seemed like concern, but really there was no word to describe their quality, and sometimes his eyes joyfully twinkled the light around them. Even when he looked to other places, a leaf, the ground, the air, he was somehow still looking at her. One might think it was difficult for Sadie to remain quiet, with all the many questions that were always percolating inside her, but it felt like so much more was being said without the words. It was most enjoyable, most special and tender, for her to just sit beside him under the original trees.

When the King stood up, Sadie’s breath had changed to certain calm, as if breath had seasons, and a fireball of blood flew through the sky like a shooting star, with metallic blue wings coming out the sides. A blue fire began to flame from the top and drip down a silvery blue liquid, which turned into a warm rain. Caedmon the Cherub entered, his face moving inside fiery waves and his gaze was straight to the King and penetrating and intimidating. Sadie took a step closer to the King and he put his hand on her shoulder. Caedmon’s wings expanded and took on the appearance of arms. In his right wing he held a glistening white rib.

He landed in the forest and bowed before the King, one eye winking at Sadie.

“My King, what shall I do with this man’s rib?”

The King tilted his head to the side in a nod. Caedmon placed the rib at Sadie’s feet. When he turned around, he had no back—his face and his body and his fire and his eyes were the same in front of him as they were behind him. His eyes widened and looked at Sadie with such intensity. Her eyes began to burn, his fire entering her and his blue wings spread so wide she could feel them spreading even inside of her. She stood on the rock and looked down at the rib. Caedmon spread his wings wider. She could hear the trees stretching, their bark making small cracking sounds and the veins of the leaves sounded like miniature waterfalls. The King stood still, his hands woven before him, his head somewhat bowed.

“This rib does not belong to me,” Sadie said.

“Whom might it belong to then?” Caedmon asked.

She shook her head, feeling the stretching of wings inside her. It felt so good she closed her eyes and fell into the sensation. The silver rain eased her mind and she remembered, in one moment, all the rain she ever knew, all the rain she crawled in, all the rain she ran in, all the rain she saw out windows, all the rain that ever touched her. All that ever touched her was nothing like this; the rain itself was spreading into wider and longer pellets and as it spread it became softer.

“The rib belongs to Alasdair Astigan,” she whispered and opened her eyes. “Perhaps you might return it to him.”

Caedmon smiled with his eyes.

“A long journey,” he said. “But if the King says so, I shall make it.”

Sadie and Caedmon both looked at the King for his response. The King was looking down. A puddle of silver rain collected at his feet and he looked into his own reflection.

“Lord?” Caedmon said. “Do you accept the request of Sadie to have this rib returned to the man Alasdair Astigan?”

“Should you return this man’s rib to him,” the King said, “he shall not receive it. It is not his rib he wants. He wants for whom the hole was made.”

“For whom the hole was made?” Sadie asked. “The hole the broken rib made?”

The King knelt at the puddle and looked into himself harder. He decided not to answer her, as she already knew the answer. Sadie searched the eyes of Caedmon, but he just stood waiting for any orders from the King he would be pleased to carry through. Sadie picked the rib up with the cane and then took it in her hand.

“Looks more like a piece of some kind of armor than a rib,” she said.

“If you do not wish for this rib to be returned to him, my King, what should be done with it?” Caedmon asked.

The King stood up and walked away.

“King!” Sadie shouted. “What should be done with it?” Sadie leaped off the rock to follow him, but Caedmon stopped her with his wing. She stood there, the rain pouring harder, the rib in her hand, her right side leaning on the cane. Her heart that once beat violently for Alasdair, like her breath, had entered a new season.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5