Gawain stayed there for what might have been minutes or years. There was no marking of time in his safe cocoon of darkness. The painful strobe of the white and colored lights faded gradually. Venturing to open his eyes and raise his head from his hands, there was nothing familiar to him, but somehow it felt like there was a whisper of a memory.
Which is clearly impossible. Gawain tried to muddle it out in his barely functioning brain.
Through the veils of darkness and grey light, Gawain heard someone calling his name, very faintly as if from a great distance. With less effort than anticipated, Gawain got to his feet and cocked his head to see what direction the sound was coming from. He thought briefly of Lancelot, the Lady Nuina, and Alain and was unnerved to feel distanced from them, like people known once a very long time ago.
“They are no longer your concern or responsibility.” Ailim’s deep-timbered voice sounded in his inner ear.
“Ailim,” Gawain spoke aloud just to be certain, “are you here?”
Ailim poked Gawain with his big nose. “Right here, idiot man.” The big horse’s mind voice was filled with amusement.
“What happened? Is Alain safe?” Gawain rested his hand on Ailim’s grey neck to assure himself the horse was actually present.
“Alain is fine, and Lancelot and the Lady Nuina have returned to fetch him, and Arthur sends help as well,” Ailim reassured him. “Your fate is no longer woven with theirs, and it is time to return from where you were to where you are.”
“I am here,” Gawain said confused.
“Are you?” Ailim fixed Gawain with his huge dark eyes. “Think hard on how you came to this place before.”
Gawain opened his mouth to protest and then shut it caught up the fathomless depths of Ailim’s eyes. Scenes from places he should know, but did not, swirled there, and the faces of the Lady Nuina and the girl who was not the Lady Nuina but was somehow the same, came and went from his sight.
He saw in place of Ailim, a huge stallion that glistened brighter than the finest of Arthur’s jewels and with more colors. He allowed himself to fall further into the stallion’s eyes and the sound of a voice calling his name grew louder. Gawain took a hesitant step toward the sound before moving forward with more confidence. The great crystal stallion paced at his side.
Gawain walked but didn’t seem to get any nearer to the person calling his name so insistently. Ailim’s pale grey shape shimmered in the semi-twilight, and his hand jerked back from the stallion’s neck in surprise. The stallion was no longer the huge grey war horse Gawain was accustomed to seeing. In his stead, was a larger horse Gawain could only describe as being made of flowing crystal, more brilliant than diamonds or rubies. This was the horse from the vision in Ailim’s eyes. The horse stopped when Gawain removed his hand from his shoulder and turned his magnificent head toward him. The colors flowed and coalesced through the stallion’s body, and Gawain fought against the movement’s mesmerizing effect on his senses.
“This is who I am in this in place between the worlds, the essence of what I am.” Ailim’s voice was crystal ice breaking in Gawain’s head.
“Between what worlds.” Gawain’s voice was edged with fear and uncertainty.
“The worlds of what we were, and what we are now,” Ailim said gently. “Let go of worry and fear and allow all. Allow what will come and everything will be clear.”
“Who is calling to me, who is it that draws me forward when I have no wish to go there?” Gawain searched the huge whirling crystal eyes.
“It is one who has loved you before and loves you now. Our lives are circles and cycles that turn through the ages. We follow patterns that we have walked in other ages with no remembered knowledge of those journeys while we walk them again and hopefully make better choices as we go.” Ailim touched Gawain’s face with his nose.
“She is the one I keep seeing when my senses are askew,” Gawain said in amazement. “The one who is the Lady Nuina and yet is not her at all.”
“That is so,” Ailim affirmed. “Nuina is the name you knew her by in the long ago life you found your way to, out of the darkness of your pain. Just as Ailim, the silver fir is the name you knew me by in that far away time. Search your heart and know who you are and who I am.”
Gawain answered the command in Ailim’s voice without question and allowed the images to come at him as they would. Before him was the being which gave life to the beloved war horse, and he knew him as GogMagog, his anam cara. Gawain saw himself, Sir Gawain Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, confidant of the great King Arthur, the High King of All Britain.
The image was over-ridden by a series of images Gawain knew represented himself in different cycles of his life and finally his vision hovered over a bundle of rags lying on the floor of a dismal dark shack. Leaning over him was the girl from his delirium, and she was holding his head in her lap, her tears raining down on his slack face.
Gawain’s head exploded behind his eyes with a flash of light brighter than lightning and suddenly he knew. The girl was Aisling. The body on the floor was him, and his name was Gort. GogMagog leaned his head into his shoulder, and the boy-man leaned on him for comfort. Dimly the pain and terror beat like a faint echo in the space between where his spirit stood with GogMagog and the inert figure on the floor.
“You have a choice, you may step from this life now, or you may rejoin it and take up where you left off. Pain and all,” GogMagog told him gently.
“I don’t know if I can…if I am strong enough to bear all that sorrow and still survive.”
The girl, Aisling, raised her head, and her tear-stained eyes searched the dirty cobwebbed rafters above her. Gort looked down into her face, and lightening shot through him as his eyes met hers. The connection was so strong his spirit body reached out a hand across the shadowy distance separating them.
“Don’t leave me, please live. Coll has gone for help, and Sarie and Emily will be here soon,” the girl, Aisling, pleaded with him, heart to heart.
“You must choose soon, you have been gone from that body too long already,” GogMagog prompted and breathed his warm comforting breath down his collar.
The pathetic figure prostrate on the ground below him with its pale bruised face held his spirit in a strange thrall. The bond with that scrawny body strengthened with each passing moment.
His Uncle Daniel’s face loomed in his mind’s eye, and all the sorrows and pains that sent him running from this reality, back to his life as Gawain. A strong, proud man who could protect those in danger. Including himself. A strange, gnawing pull gathered in the center of his chest, silvery threads floated outward from the boy’s body, who still lay with his head on Aisling’s lap. The threads gathered into a ball, like a skein of wool, and the girl sobbed in desperation as the boy’s breathing grew shallower. A small brown man sat beside Aisling stroking her arm and whispering to her. The words were too soft to hear, but the piskie kept looking up at him. Recognition flared white hot in his mind. The little man was Aisling’s friend, Gwin Scawen. Gwin raised his arm toward the dark corner of the roof and crooked his forefinger at the hovering spirits with a calling motion, entreating the spirit to come back the tortured body that lay in Aisling’s lap.
“You must choose, or the fates will choose for you, and you will have to live with their decision.” GogMagog turned his luminescent eyes on his anam cara.
“Are you with me in this life?” Gort asked too confused to remember, existing in two planes of being and not fully in either.
“I am, and you know me as myself. You are not alone. You will never be alone again. Not when we both remember who we are,” GogMagog assured him.
The door burst open as three people rushed in and fell to their knees by the girl with his head in her lap. A uniformed constable trailed in the door behind them. The pull in his chest became more insistent. He watched objectively as the taller woman thumped on the thin chest of the boy and started to resuscitate him.