As they entered the dining room, Nyx kicked a few dark gray latex balloons into a back room behind another curtain before pouring some tea into two goblets out of an French-style teapot with golden ornaments hanging off its top rim.
"My name is Nyx. I'm a woman of this forest. I was born and raised here. Everything I know in this world is here. I've been in Shrewsbury, but it's not the same there. All the concrete slabs sever the natural environment and make it like living inside a show. Anyway, what's your name?"
"I'm… Amber."
"I wonder how you learned about us." The woman took a short breath in and a long exhale. "We don't make ourselves easy to find."
"I know. It's… a long story. It's like you said, I… I wanted to get away from the show. I wanted to go backstage." Amber could feel her cheeks reddening slightly.
"It is a show, isn't it?"
"Sometimes I feel like an actress."
They both started giggling uncontrollably, and Amber thought back to all the times she had to act disingenuous. Like a fraud, like someone she wasn't because she wanted to get somewhere she was told she had to get to in order to attain success.
"I suppose the first action that led me to finding you was freeing myself from the way most people think. People have so many limiting and fearful beliefs. I guess that's what you all tried to get away from."
"Yes, we did. People conjure a whole reality using their beliefs, don't they. Consider money. Its value is inflated, fueled by a collective belief that the piece of paper has value even though it might not be backed by anything other than faith in the transitory insititution issuing the paper. In a way it's a form of shamanism."
"Shamanism?"
"Yeah, Western shamanism is more rampant than you'd think, but it's mostly evident in TV commercials and the news - the last place you'd intend to look. We try to do some shamanism here, too."
As they chatted idly, everything Nyx said during that conversation struck a cord with Amber. It felt special, like an answer to lots of the questions Amber had asked during her life but rarely received full answers to. Years ago, Amber had listened to a livestream on the internet dealing with similar topics to the ones that Nyx liked to talk about. But it wasn't as detailed or as genuine as the way Nyx worded things, which was as if she was imparting her pure, direct experience. Eventually the subject drifted towards the collections of objects around the house.
"Oh, all this stuff? She would always visit these faraway places, secluded temples, and she picked up objects like dust. She told me she always left a little bit of herself in those places too. I'm not sure what she meant by that." Nyx smelled a bouquet of wildflowers sitting on the chair next to her and her eyes relaxed, fell into a stupor, and returned to alertness.
"She?"
"My wife. I wish she was here right now with me. She could take me anywhere she wanted and I would take her hand and fly like being carried by the beating wings of a fairy. But now I'm left here with all these significations of her. I'm afraid to touch them. I'm afraid to disturb her crystallized presence. It's like disturbing a grave. I can't do what I'd like to do in fear of disturbing her presence."
Nyx turned to look behind her, at a bunch of balloons that had fallen out of the door to the room behind her. She tried to get up and almost fell out of her chair, then tripped and fell on the floor. Amber walked over, took hold of her back, and gently patted it. The postcard was still in Nyx's hands, close to her chest. Amber placed her hand on the postcard too.
"It's rather private to me."
A few seconds went by.
"Okay. Okay."
Nyx opened the postcard and they both saw the photograph again. The elegant, cursive handwriting on the inside said:
"Dear Nyx,
Greetings from Wewelsburg, Germany.
I am happy to have expanded my circle. It comes naturally for a soul's evolution - constantly moving forward but always twisting back upon itself. Like a spiral staircase, or the shape of DNA. Viewing new environments through the lens of old traumas. You know them well, don't you, Nyx?
To garner well-defined in-groups and out-groups. To delineate my language, its vocabulary and grammar, to allow others to reach the same state I have reached through adopting it. To build the language of my life in the image of what I consider to be "beyond" this world - of what is four-dimensional, or acausal. To either eschew, deconstruct, or appropriate social abstractions that are irrelevant to the functions of my language. To never cease evolving in sync with the cycle of the ages, to continue reaching ever further states.
By ages I refer to Aeons - the cosmic fluctuations that govern the energies imparted to us by the wandering stars. They are the reason the day and night are different from each other, and they are the reason the seasons have different weather patterns. They cycle and unfold with the ceaseless turning of the wheel of fortune, which those without a magnetic center are whirled around by like crushed bits of plastic. Only those with hard strength and a calm composure - only those who have learned from suffering - can bear its ravishing twists and turns.
You and I know a great deal about solitude. To be under the black sky, with terminal lucidity of the body and every slight motion of the surroundings, to come to incrementally know the secrets of the night. To be fully in contact with that ineffable force that society projects its logographic flames onto, superimposing its subtlety.
Yet I felt I was swept away by an urgency foreign to me, the same sense that causes a virgin to want to conceive a child - filled by a divine mission. I would attempt to persuade or would have even given you some warning, but I fear you could not be brought to understand the nature of the purpose of why I left, and why I could not have taken you with me. How might I even begin to explain the New Aeon to you, Nyx? Even if you were to understand the mechanics of it, you would be overwhelmed in every way by its power.
To collide with it head-on would be so much to bear - too much, and most people would block it out, or cry and yell and scream until they figured out a way to cope with its presence, using ever-more elaborate methods sometimes involving self-mutilation. Does that even console you? Well, try this. You may imagine it simply as a hand extended from the clouds, not commanding or beckoning - pointing to what was always there, but which none of us had the fortune to see.
Love, Eulalia."
The page was stained with faint wet drops that Amber realized were tears.