The Shadow Council...Conclusion

Luckily, Jim had been on the ball, recognizing the changes in Naomi as she went under her trance. He had pulled out a small pad of paper and taken down the verses for us to analyze in more detail. He read them back to us.

“Wow, I said all of that? I’ve never heard any of those lines before.” She looked down at the sleeping toddler (Alexa was now nearly 15 months old) and back up at us again. “I never did finish what I was going to tell you about what I saw when I was dead.”

Ravyn nodded. “We’d certainly like to hear about what you saw.”

Naomi cleared her throat and began her story again. “As I was saying before I got so rudely interrupted, I went down the steps in that funky smelling cave at the base of Rusty’s tree and came to the reflecting pool. I bent down to look into the pool and I saw all sorts of images moving around in the pool, there were so many and they were moving so fast at first, that I couldn’t make any sense out of what I was seeing.”

Jim was leaning forward over the table, bent over his notebook, scribbling notes, but he glanced up long enough to throw out a question. “Do you remember anything of those early images?”

Naomi paused, concentrated and nodded. “Yes. I remember seeing lots of images of war. Tanks, planes, soldiers fighting other soldiers. Soldiers shooting women and children. Lots of bombs. Missiles striking cities.” She stopped, her voice catching as she realized what she was remembering and what she was saying. A tear trickled down her cheek. “I...I...I saw so many people dying. Dying from war. Dying from disease and starvation. It looked like the end of the world. One of the last of the flashing images that I saw was a bunch of nuclear bombs going off, each over a different city, just like we saw in all of those crazy movies ten or fifteen years ago.”

Jim, furiously scribbling, glanced up again as he asked another question in a calm, clinical voice. “Did the visions stop there?”

Naomi shook her, her eyes now full of tears. “No.” She sobbed before continuing. “The images stopped flashing, but a new image came up. It was the image of a beautiful face. I know it was Alexa’s, all grown up. Her eyes were so big and sad. She looked right at me and spoke to me.”

The Frau’s face was beaming as she interjected. “What did she say to you?”

Naomi looked down at the angelic face of our sleeping child and brushed a small dark curl from her forehead before looking up again. “She said, ‘Mother, what you’ve just seen is the most likely future. It is a view of a day that will dawn all too soon, unless we do everything in our power to change it.’ I was crying then, just like I’m crying now, I tried to tell her that I was dead, that I wouldn’t be able to change anything about it, but she kept speaking. ‘Mother, soon, you will wake up, and when the time is right, you will remember what I am saying to you now. Know this, that there is a chance, however small that chance might be, for that future to be averted. But for that to happen, you must not yield to the normal maternal instincts to shield me from all possible harm or dangers. As I grow up, I must see and experience everything that I can of the human condition. I must know both Good and Evil and everything in between if my Dance is to have the power to change this future towards which we hurtle even now.’”

The silence in that room could not have been deeper when she finished speaking. Each of us sat there absorbing the words of the blissfully sleeping child who had not yet spoken her own first word.

I was the first one to break that sacred silence. “Well, I guess Drake gets his deal then. You can’t get much more evil than that bastard was and still be human.”