The Big Meow

From where his head and uppermost body were coiled, the White Serpent’s body now stretched curving like a mighty silvery river right away into the distance of that vast landscape, as if it might stretch right around that world. Maybe it did; World Serpent was one of the shapes that Ith wore since delivering his people. But the anchoring he had built with his wizardry and now mediated in his own person was founded in more than just the idea that he might be spiritually or even physically wrapped around Earth’s old dream of itself. However the reality of Earth might quake, the Old Downside should not. Here there was only one continent, one vast plate with nothing else to grind against: and it stood fast.

Helen Walks Softly stepped out into that light, out onto what previously had been empty air but was now hot dry summer grassland. She lifted the condor-feather wands high on either side of her and began addressing the circles of the world in long, intricate words of song, not in the Speech, but in her own Chumash language. All around her, an impossibly deep echo of the words went up as if from the earth itself. “’Alchup’osh, White Serpent, Sky Serpent, Hutash speaks to you! Once more I’ve made the world from the Seeds of the World for our children – “

The power amassing around her, reinforcing Ith’s wizardry, was impossible not to feel. Helen didn’t stop her song or turn away from her regard of the West; but Rhiow heard her say silently, Rhi, this is as good as it’s going to get right now — !

Rhiow licked her nose one last time and spoke to the angry presence inside her. Elder Sister… let’s take this rat by the throat!

Yes, said sa’Rraah. Now. And if Rhiow had thought the Lone One’s presence in her before was difficult to take, now she knew better. It had taken sa’Rraah a few moments to consolidate her presence inside Rhiow properly and get Her teeth into the scruff of her soul. But now Rhiow felt as if she was simply being exploded from within. Her perspective on everything around her whited out, skewed, then resettled. Suddenly her eyes were on a level with the dark sphere and the pre-sentient un-stuff boiling out of it. She was larger than that, even; Rhiow found herself also seeing the world as if from a great height, and her mighty body crouched over the whole Los Angeles basin as if over some prey that she’d caught. There she towered up over the world, radiant with a pure and terrible darkness, the Fairest and Fallen indeed: but regardless of the Fall, she was still the Queen’s daughter, still in full possession of the glory of a God when She wanted or needed it. Now, in the face of the Outside One, sa’Rraah wore that glory for once not as a badge of insolence in her Dam’s face, but merely as identification, an ostensible mark of respect to a being more powerful than she. She bowed Her head humbly, for once playing the jackal instead of the outcast Queen of the Pride.

Above them the darkness continued boiling in through the incursion hypersphere’s surface from Outside, and Rhiow for the first time realized that only just now — when something with the power of a god manifested before It — had the Outside One’s attention actually been drawn to them. Even now It did not speak; it was the opposite of life and thought. But nonetheless It made Itself understood. Give me the gift You promised. Give me entry into matter, that I may abolish it, and end this rebellion from within, and be All.

“Here,” sa’Rraah said through Rhiow, and the hills around them shuddered with the power of Her words. “Here is the weak point, the way to the throat of the prey. Join with me and I will show you, and all this will be Yours.”

Everyone and everything seemed to hold its breath as the Outside One reached out to sa’Rraah discover the way into the world of matter. It meant holding still and allowing Oneself to be felt and fondled over by that terrible slithering touch, something that invaded her body’s matter in awful analysis. Away back in the core of herself that was still wholly a Person and a wizard, Rhiow turned her whole being to the purpose of holding still and letting the violation happen, horrified beyond all reason but still strangely satisfied. It and sa’Rraah are of one mind about matter, she thought. And It’ll share her blind spot. They see matter as contemptible, and this is why Its avatar Tepeyollotl always sought to shatter the Earth – because like sa’Rraah, It takes spirit to be superior.

We’ll see about that –

The violation seemed to go on and on, and Rhiow could do nothing but suffer it. But after endless time, the pain subsided, draining away and leaving her limp and wretched, wishing she could die though totally unable to, with hardly even a thought able to crawl across the pitch-black floor of her mind. For what seemed like forever, nothing happened, nothing at all, as the Outside One examined what It had learned.