Genevee's Dream

An excerpt from my novel

Isadora Duncan at Erechtheum, photography by Edward Steichen, 1920, in Athens, Greece

The temple rises.

Ruins are rebuilt into song.

Myth, interlaced with memory, build the blueprint for what has never before existed.

This temple has come through dreams and imagination before it has come into reality.

🏛️

Today, I offer you an excerpt from my novel—a speculative fiction saga set 5000 years into the future. This excerpt is raw and real and unedited. I don’t know if this will go into the final, but here is a thread from the living weave. Genevee is eleven. Her father disappeared when she was six.

This is a scene that delivered me the temple before the temple began to be built.

When you come visit Aionia, or step into an outer gate—such as the Listening Stone, where you will be heard, held, and mirrored back with crystalline clarity—this is the mythic space you enter.

With love,

Saga

🏛️

Excerpt from Book 1:

That night, Genevee dreamt herself into a large, light stone room.

The air is warm and smells slightly spicy, and the stone under Genevee’s bare feet is warm as well. Somewhere, fresh bread rises from an oven. Somewhere, a bird sings a song that makes Genevee’s heart ache. It sings of the ages, it sings of all that has been, and its lament drifts through the air - mourning, but not without hope. Genevee feels the longing in the bird’s song as her own longing, and part of her yearns to curl up on this warm floor and sleep forever.

She looks around: four large stone walls, hollowed out with the indent of a perfect circle stand as sentinels on a compass. She knows instinctively: they mark the four directions. In the middle of the circle is a pool of crystal clear water, still and solemn. The bird has stopped singing. The silence is thick and present. By the pool, is an old crone woman, bent over a loom and weaving. Her eyes are down, focused on her work.

Is she aware of me? Genevee wonders.

The thought is as loud in Genevee’s mind as if she had spoken it, a bell echoing in her skull.

Genevee steps forward, and notices even her footsteps are silent. Only the sound of her breath can be heard, each exhale a whisper that seems to move out of her, and beyond her, echoing in the stone sentinels—or are those other voices?

The woman continues her work.

Genevee walks towards her, slowly at first, then more quickly, as if pulled by a chord of longing. She approaches the basin and looks into the water. The water is as smooth as glass, but infinitely deep; it seems to have no bottom. She is only a few paces from the woman now. The crone’s hair is black and silver, braided with river reeds. Her weathered skin is creased as if time itself were written upon her face. Her clothing is light but worn, a second skin with emblems of faded gold. Genevee instinctively knows this is a language, a language she perhaps knew once, but has forgotten. The memory itches in her mind.

The woman weaves. She does not look up.

Surely she must know I am here? The bell-thought chimes in Genevee’s skull. The stones around her whisper.

Genevee does not feel afraid, although she does not understand. She observes the loom: a simple wooden loom, but the threads she is working are not threads at all, but streams of words, made from the same glyphs upon her robe. The crone is weaving a long fabric, infinitely long Genevee now sees. It flows from the loom and behind her bent figure. The weaver’s fingers, though old, work tirelessly. With a jolt Genevee sees the Blue fingernails that mark her as a Queen. There is Power in this room: palpable, ancient, and undeniable.

In its presence, Genevee feels her smallness and her youth upon her frame, perhaps for the first time.

I am just a child, she thinks. I am so tired, she feels.

There is something like her grandmother in the weaver. Is it the concentration? The steady commitment to her craft?

Genevee approaches the weaver and kneels at her feet. She puts her head in her lap. She rests upon the creased folds of her clothing.

The woman weaves.

The pool is silent.

Genevee rests.

A question.

A question in her heart begins to rise, like a flower from soil, arcing towards the sun.

“Where is my father?” Genevee speaks the question to the woman and the woman stops her weaving. It is not loud, but it is true. A question spoken clearly into silence.

Then the crone woman speaks, but her voice does not come from her mouth. Her voice comes from the stones and the pool, the wind and the bird, and even from Genevee’s very own bones. It is a voice that holds Knowing of all that has been and all that will be.

The voice says, “He is beyond the threshold. In the archive. He is searching for the lost manuscript, the one that holds the spell that he believes will awaken Source.”

As she speaks, her words settle themselves into Genevee’s body, and her own Knowing is awake now. Yes, the woman is right. Yes, Genevee knows exactly where he is, and exactly how to find him.

She understands now: she has carried the map all along.

The woman looks at her now, their gazes touch. One eye is filmy white, with a blue pupil of flame. The other eye is black as obsidian: it pierces through to Genevee’s spirit. Genevee feels stripped naked in her sight and then she is dissolving, dissolving into light and space and time.

Genevee awoke with her heart thumping in her chest, a black obsidian eye still in her mind’s eye.