The Mysteries of the...Onion-verse-Part 1

(The following is an account of just one of the many lessons I learned as a student of Merlin. This lesson was particularly important, as well as particularly strange, so I feel it is a good place to start the next adventure...)

Merlin’s home was a series of vast caverns, each one unique in its own bizarre way, each home to more mysteries than I shall ever be able to explain here. Shortly after I had found my Key and released myself from the chains that had bound me to that damnable rock, I found myself strolling with the old coot in one the larger caverns. He seemed to favor this one more than most because of the bright, almost Sun-like light that allowed the place to be full of green grass, flowering bushes and trees, and a bewildering array of birds, rodents and even larger animals like small deer.

We were walking along a path that meandered through a particularly thick part of the ‘forest’. We had been walking in silence, something Merlin seemed to prefer over small talk, until I blurted out a question that had been gnawing at me for almost as long as I have been aware of the existence of ‘other worlds’...since John Red Bear had first talked about the Three Worlds of Spirit.

“Merlin, how can there be so many different damned worlds?”

He stopped, turned to face me, and replied with a question of his own, “How can there not be?”

“Huh?”

“How can there not be so many different worlds?”

“Well,...uh...I would think one would be enough...”

“Do you now? So you think there should just be the one world that all of us should be born into, and die in eh?”

“Yeah, why not? It would be so much simpler to understand everything.”

“And just why should everything be simple for you? Must everything be understood?”

“Dammit old man, things should be a Hell of a lot easier to understand! How the Hell can there be a world in which we live and breathe, and then have three different Spirit Worlds for Spirits to go back and forth from, and then for there to be places like this strange-assed place and that’s not to mention Zulu’s freaky-assed Fun House Mirror World? Then there was this weird Void like place I was at when Ma Grendel and I were killed by that blade...damn I can’t keep track of all of these damn places!!! How do you make sense of any of it?”

The old coot cracked a smile at my exasperated expression, and then used his walking stick to prod me to move aside. “Ah yes, now that, my boy, is a good question. But before I answer that, I’ll ask you to kindly step out of my little garden here.”

As I moved aside for him, I looked down to see a small patch of dark loamy earth which was now marked by some boot marks. There were several rows of neatly ordered garden vegetables lined up. I could’ve sworn there was only a path through the woods here before.

The old guy got down onto his knees and fussed with a couple of tomato plants that I had apparently damaged, and then after clucking his tongue, he reach over to a row of mounded earth with some green stalks growing up from each little mound in the row. He dug his hands deftly into the dark earth and came up a large, round onion. Using a small knife he quickly removed the green stalks at the top, and the little pointy root at the bottom, leaving a nice, full onion which he tossed over his shoulder to me without looking back.

Still puttering about with some of the other plants, he looked back briefly at me and said, “Study that onion. It is a fine specimen.”

“Study an onion? What the f...why?”

“In that root, you shall find many clues to the mysteries of the Universe.”

“How am I going to learn more about the Universe by studying an onion?”

He snorted as he looked back at his garden. “Another good question, so go study it and see if you can come up with an equally good answer.”