The RealmStep: Soul Assassin Ch. 1-2

CHAPTER I: Death of a Thousand Deaths

  The nightmare never ends…

  That’s only if one was to use the term loosely because in a way it did end, but not in the traditional sense.  It was more of a transitional period, than an ending—like the time spent waiting for your favorite TV show to come back from commercials or the droning seconds it took for your favorite cassette tape to rewind or fast-forward to your favorite song.  More like that.  It was always your “favorites” that this happened to, but this nightmare was no favorite of mine.  Then again, it wasn’t even a nightmare.  This much I now know for sure just like I now know what I am and to what purpose I am to serve.  This was no nightmare.  There were no true dream-like qualities to this lucid screenplay.  As a matter of fact, it was almost absent of the many emotions one would experience in a dream—or nightmare for that matter; all except for a few.  These few were more prevalent; the bad ones most might say: anger, anxiety, despair, fear…but mostly anger.  The type of anger which promotes revenge.  The type of anger which harbors on the border of a malignant rage.  The type of anger which eventually mutates into a mental sickness—or spiritual in this sense.  To tell the truth, Vengeance is the only one I remember remaining a constant—the others noted during later recollections.

  The “nightmare” always starts the same; beginning with the same events which lead to that fateful night.  I’m 16 years old…(I’m always 16 years old…()…and I’m walking my friend home (I can’t remember his name for some reason) from rehearsal.  The three of us formed a rap group called “B.T.U.—Born Thorough Unit”. (It’s funny how I remember the name of my group, but not of my homeboys.  Maybe I’m not meant to remember their names; or even them for that matter.  Maybe they’re just meaningless characters in this never-ending “nightmare” of mine and serve no more of a purpose than that.  Nah, that can’t be right because I remember their relations to me if not their names.)  The friend and I walk through this small patch of woods, down a path which runs between Eastover Park (Eastover is the town we live in) and the graveyard of the Great Church of Mt. Zion.  Thinking back to those days, I’d always felt a touch of apprehension when walking through that cut; but in the “dream”, there is no fear—only a sense of dejavu.  We’re talking about the upcoming talent show, girls, or who has the tightest car—things of the type of nature teenagers discuss when the feeling comes…and then I hear it.  A voice calls my name. 
      “Tyelle”.
  I know the voice is in my head, but yet it has a sense of direction to it—seeming to come from the patch of woods which lay nearest to the graveyard.
      “Did you hear that?” I ask my friend.
      “Hear what?” my friend says; worry in his eyes.  It’s obvious that he feels the same apprehension that I was used to feeling when walking through these woods.  Over to the right, the park is desolate and the fog beginning to settle on the baseball field gives it an eerie atmosphere.
      “Somebody called my name,” I state matter-of-factly, but almost as if looking for an answer.
      “Man, hell nah’!” he says scoldingly, “Don’t you start dat’ trippin’ shit, man!  You know how yo’ black ass git’!”

  As we make our way through tree branches, brush, and other forms of vegetation, somehow no longer on the pathway, moonlight filters through the top of the tree canopy like white fingers of death.  There are traces of that same fog front that was beginning to settle over the baseball field, now hovering over the ground where we walked.  Behind me, my friend complains of this being the third night in a row that he’s missed his curfew and that his mama’s going to cut his ass and stop him from going to the talent show.  Over his tirade, I hear the voice call my name again.
      “Tyelle”.
  This time it was stronger.  I abruptly stop in my tracks and my friend stumbles into the back of me.
      “Damn Tye!  Wuzzup wit’ you, man?” my friend asks in an annoyed voice, “Why we out here like we Huckleberry Finn or somethin’ chasin’ voices and shit?  Probably aint’ nobody but… (When he speaks the name, it’s distorted) messing wit’ us.  You know how he likes to play games?  He probably left right after we did and cut in front of us.  Then…”
      “Then why can’t you hear him?” I cut in, taking a quick glance over my shoulders to check our surroundings.
      “Exactly!” he exclaims, “Man, I’m going home.  You know how my mama is and I plan on wreckin’ that talent show this weekend.  Aint’ nobody callin’ yo’ damn name out here in the woods!  Even if they was—and like you said, I would hear dem’ if dey’ was; we by a goddamn graveyard.  Didn’t yo’ peoples tell you dat’ if you walkin’ by a graveyard and you hear somethin’ callin’ yo’ name…don’t answer cuz’ it’s the devil?”
      “Yeah, I’ve heard that bullshit befo’”, I reply.
      “Well…dere’ you go.  Now if dat’ don’t count fa’ nothin’, you a damn fool.  You actin’ like one of dem’ damn white boys in dem’ scary movies and shit!  You can stay…” he reaches out his hand to give me dap.  I return the gesture pleadingly, because for some reason, I felt an overwhelming urge to stay even though I was scared shitless, “…but I’m out”, he finishes.  Instead of going back the way we came, he heads off in a diagonal direction back toward the path.  I watch his silhouette in the moonlight move through the tree branches…

  …I hear my name called again, but this time it’s not the uncanny voice—it’s my homeboy’s.  I run in the direction he left in, but then realize that his voice didn’t come from that way.  It came from near the graveyard.  I change direction and begin to become worried when I don’t see him.  Eventually, I spot him a few feet in front of me staring at the ground.  Before I make it to him, he screams my name again.
      “What’s up, cuz’?! What’s up?” I ask worryingly almost knocking him over in the process.
      “Look!”

  On the ground where he’s pointing, there’s a skeleton of a man.  Pieces of decayed wood which looked to have “dearly departed” from a coffin lay shattered around the bones.  I look to see how far we are from the graveyard and notice that we stand no less than ten feet from its border.  I wonder to myself what made my friend venture so far from the pathway if he was heading home.
      “I thought you were going home”, I state interrogatively.  He looks at me as if I asked him to explain Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ in French.  He looks back down at the skeleton and then responds.
      “I don’t know…I mean…I was…” He rubs his temples as if his head suddenly started hurting.
      “Well how’d you get way ova’ here?”
      “I…don’t know”, he responds.  “I was kicking my verse to make sure it was straight and then…here I was.  I looked around and saw this…”lump” which didn’t fit in.  So I walk over to it and it was…this.”  He points to the skeleton for reference.  As I redirect my gaze, something flickers in the moonlight over to the left, catching my attention.  About a foot away from the shattered coffin, at the base of a small bush, lays a metallic trinket which resembles a bird or insect’s wing of some sort—spread as if in flight.  It look to measure approximately 2 ½ inches in width and 4 inches in length and it seems to be big enough to cover the palm of my hand.  Through a small loop on the inside of the wing was a diamond-linked chain.  The wing and chain appeared to be made of gold.  I reach to grab it and…

  …I’m crossing the sewer ditch which runs along the perimeter of my backyard.  The gold wing-like medallion’s dangling by it’s chain in my right hand when I jump across and almost drop it into the recesses of the ditch.  As I approach my house crossing my backyard, an odd sensation comes over me.  One of the types which hang at the back of your mind like an itch in your throat.  You want to reach into your mouth to scratch it with your fingers, but it’s not easily accessible…so you wait for it to either go away or show itself as a nose hair which has retreated there for some unknown reason.  This sensation becomes the “nose hair”.  The fact that there are no lights on in the house is what alarms me.  On guard now, I creep around to the side of the house making my way to the front.  To my left, I see my neighbor through her kitchen window performing some monotonous activity like preparing to wash dishes.  She didn’t notice me pass beneath her kitchen window…the same way her daughter doesn’t notice me when I pass her in the hallway in school.  I’ve been trying to talk to her ever since we were 14; in the 9th grade.  I’ve written her numerous love songs, but either she doesn’t realize that they’re about her…or she just doesn’t care.  She just keeps telling me how sweet a person I am—all the things a boy my age don’t want to hear.  It doesn’t matter though.  She’ll notice me once we win this talent contest this weekend. 

  I make it to the front yard and my alarm jumps to a new height when I see my pop’s car parked in the driveway with the driver’s door sprawled open.  I walk over cautiously to inspect the car and notice that the keys are still in the ignition and the radio is on.  A song—“Fiendin’”, by Jodeci is playing:

      “I- can’t-leave you alone—
      You got me fiendin’…
      …fiendin’-for-you”.

  I turn around to face the house and fear creeps into every nerve of my body.  The front door is wide open and the innards of my pop’s briefcase are flung everywhere along it’s threshold; the briefcase turned upside-down on top of the azalea bushes which garnished the front of the house near the porch…

  …I can’t move.  I’m sitting in a chair in my living room struggling to move to no effect.  To my left, the front door is still sprawled wide open; light from the streetlamp shines in partly, illuminating a few family portraits along the left wall.  No lights are on in the house…still.  Across from me, I can see the outline of three people whom I immediately make out to be my mother and two siblings—my brother and little sister; Marquel and Lari, respectively.  They’re near the right side of the fireplace, obviously restrained somehow in their chairs, also.  Although I can’t see their faces clearly due to the lack of light in the room, I can feel the fear emanating from their souls; from their whole being.  I try to call out to them but my mouth is gagged (more like my mouth was broke).  I move my eyes around the room to find my pops, but he’s nowhere in the room.  My eyes focus back on the shape of my mama and I go to ask her where he is, but again…my mouth is gagged.  How quickly I forget.  She seems to understand and nods her head towards the hallway.  I direct my eyes down the hallway, but the angle at which I’m sitting won’t allow it.  Even though, I think I see what looks like a dull, fluorescent glow coming from one of the back rooms.  Again, I try to move but to no avail.  A sharp pain shoots into the right side of my abdomen and I realize it’s the medallion I found in my right pants pocket.  I try to lean to the left to relieve some of the pain…no haps.

  Like a feverish sickness, I sense a force so evil that the air itself seems to cry out in anguish.  An eerie, luminescent glow, much like the moonlight in the small patch of woods, begins to shine from the hallway.  My eyes become fixed on the corridor as the muscles in my neck tighten, preventing me the freedom of moving my head.  In a weird way, I knew that the same force which had overcome me had also taken over the rest of my family; like our souls were intertwined at that exact moment.  From out of the eerie glow, my pops walks into the living room.  No…not walk, more like glides into our midst.  To his sides, but a few steps behind, were the distorted shapes of two figures. Their bodies seemed to almost blend into the mesmerizing light which was shining from them like some internal, cosmic aura which reeked of death, leaving only a slight distinction of an outline which gave away their presence.  I knew then that this would be the last time that we would congregate as a family.  My father comes to a halt in front of the fireplace mantle sitting to the right of the hallway.  His skin looks pallid; void of color (pretty hard for a black man)—literally as if he had seen his own death.  Maybe he did.  On the opposite side of the fireplace, near where my mother and siblings are sitting, a chair mysteriously slides over to where my pops stands and he unrebelliously sits down.  My father.  My pops—one I always viewed as the strength of the backbone of our family, sits across from me looking terribly defeated and terrified.  A myriad of emotions plague his face: fear, pity, and others which ultimately amount to helplessness.  Even though I knew (somehow I knew) what was about to happen to us as a whole, I felt sudden sorrow for this man.  I try to reach out to my father with my soul, but the same uncanny voice I heard in the woods, echoes throughout my mind.
      “Give it to me!”
  My gaze turns to the center of the room where one of the distorted figures now hovers.  The other moves nearer to my mother and siblings.  I can’t actually see the figure’s faces, but their evil smiles are bearing down on me; almost infesting me with the sick pleasure they took in torturing us.  I can hear the whimpering cries of my family in my head—even my pop’s pleas do not go unheard.  I hadn’t noticed before, but in the midst of the nebula-like figure hovering in the center of the room, a gold bust of some predatory-like bird took it’s place.  I knew this object.  It was what I always took to be some piece of African tribal art or maybe South American—Incan or Mayan.  It hung on the wall overlooking my parent’s bed in their bedroom and I never really paid it much attention until now.  This was no tribal art.  I know what it is now…our ticket to death and these beings or whatever they were meant to cash them in.
      “Give it to me”, the “bird-bust” repeats demandingly.  Although I know what it wants, I act as if I don’t understand.
      “Give you what?” I ask.
      “Don’t do it, Tye!” I hear my father’s voice say pleadingly, “No matter what they do, don’t give them the wing!”

  I have no idea how my pops knew I had the wing medallion, but if he knew that much, ho knows a whole helluva’ lot more than I did about what was going on.  As if to dissuade this thought or any other interference from my pops, slender bolts of the eerie light separate from the aura of the ‘bird-bust’ like wisps of smoke and enter into my father’s body through his mouth and nostrils—some even seemed to enter through the tear ducts in his eyes.  An expression of surprise etches onto his face.  Before my eyes—and the eyes of the rest of my family—my father swells up like a blowfish.  First his feet burst out of his shoes (shoes that my siblings and I had bought for him his last birthday) and then his pants leg began to fill out like two deflated inner-tubes suddenly getting the air they so much desired; ripping along the seams.  In the horror of realizing what was happening to him, memories of a TV show I use to watch as a child called, “The Incredible Hulk”, came to mind.  It was about this scientist—David Banner played by Bill Bixby—who had been struck by radiation and anytime that he got angry, his alter-ego, ‘The Hulk’ played by Lou Farigno—would come out, mutating the scientist’s body into this huge, green, muscular man.  During the mutation, the scientist went through pretty much the same change that my pops is experiencing at this moment.  I close my eyes to shut out the horror, but the vision continues in my head.  His abdomen begins to swell in his legs, I the veins bulging like parasitic worms.  The blood flowing along the tribituaries in his feet begin to seep out of stretch wounds and the phenomenon was now moving into his arms.  My father’s screams are panic stricken, wails of excruciating pain; for him as well as me.  Now his whole body swells to the point that he looks to weigh about 500-600 pounds.  Without warning, his feet burst open; split like over-cooked pork sausage, spitting blood and gore all over the floor.  The cataclysm continues all the way up to his head; exploding that which was left of my pops all over my face and most of the living room.  My stomach retches from the sight of what I just witnessed and to the fact that my…father…just died.  Across the room, I can hear Marquel vomiting.
      “Now…do you wish for the same to happen to the rest of your family?” the ‘bird bust’ asks with a touch of pleasure in its voice.  The light surrounding it flickers from dim to bright casting ghastly shadows around the room, “I can easily oblige you if that’s your wish.”
      “No!!” I scream, more with my mind than with my mouth.  At this point, I’m too exhausted to perform even the simplest of physical actions such as moving my lips—at least opening them wide enough to scream.  My eyes flicker back and forth between the two mysterious lights looking for some sign that the torment would end.  Seeing none, I quickly add, “I’ll give you whatever you want if you just leave us alone!”

  The light around the gold ‘bird bust’ seems to brighten at this, “Good.  Good.  Give me the ‘Wing of Abaddon’”, it states plainly.  Suddenly, I’m able to move.  I feign to reach into my right pocket for the medallion and instead, dive towards the ‘bird bust’.  As if the air suddenly thickened, I stop abruptly as if I hit a wall and a force like that of a nuclear shockwave strikes me, flinging me to the opposite side of the living room.  I slam against it’s wall—a real one this time—with enough force that all of the wind is knocked out of my body along with the breaking of my right shoulder and a few ribs.  I drop to the base of the wall like a crumpled sack of bones.  A few feet in front of me, the gold wing medallion lay on the floor, shimmering in the auroraic light.
      “You must like to watch your family die”, said one of the distorted beings, this time in a female’s voice.  I figure it’s the one standing near my family since obviously the ‘bird bust’ was a male.  I was relieved of my wonder when my sister, Lari, begins to levitate out of her chair.
      “Lari!!” my mother screams, struggling against the force that restrained her with all her might.
      “You must enjoy it as much as we do”, continued the female tormentor.  My sister floats around the room like an inflated, helium balloon.
      “She’s only six years old!!  Please…leave her out of this!!” I yell at the top of my voice.  I try to get up, but the pain in my shoulder and side is too intense.  I fall back to the floor screaming in agony.  To prove to me just how helpless I am in overcoming all of this, the female-distortion levitates Lari extremely close to my face.  I look into my little sister’s eyes for a brief moment, wanting to look longer, but the fear and disappointment I saw there was too much for me to bear.  Tears stream down her coffee-brown skin along her cheeks and her eyes, red from crying, look extremely tired and scared.  (I’m her big brother.  I’m supposed to be able to protect her when pops isn’t around.  Maybe this is a little too much, but I’m to protect her all the same.)  The truth of my helplessness brings more pain, along with that of my injuries.  More tears burst from my eyes.
      “Pick up the ‘Wing’ and hand it to me,” the male-distortion says.
      “Why don’t you get it ya’self?!” I scream trying to gather some redemption with my new found courage for having failed my family so, “I can’t move!”

  To answer, the force controlling Lari slams her into the wall with tremendous speed using an invisible hand.  Lari cries out in pain; calling out for our mother.  Just as quickly, the female-distortion brings her back extremely close to my face to continue the tormenting taunt.
      “Because I told YOU to do it!!” the ‘bird bust’ bellows in answer to overcourageous remarks, “Now do as we say!  Pick it up and hand it to me!”

  Lari floats over to my left allowing me room to start crawling toward the medallion lying on the floor lying on the floor.  With each advancement I make, the room grows brighter from the light being emitted from the other-worldly beings.  I think to myself that the obvious change in the amplification of the light must be how the beings show their emotional moods; but this new revelation wouldn’t help me, nor my family, survive this ordeal.

  We are still going to die.

  If to prove this being the case, the intense brightness the room grew to when I finally grab the medallion made me feel extremely worst about what I was doing.  I pick it up and begin to hand it to 'Malevoicebirdbustdistortion', but Marquel’s voice disrupts the act.
      “They’re going to kill us a-…,” he says in a strained and distant voice.  The sudden chopping off of his last words made me immediately look towards my brother just in time to see those same wisps of ghostly smoke which engulfed my pops, extend from the female-distortion out to Marquel.  Instantaneously, what seems to be about a million lacerations materialize on his face and other exposed areas of his body.  I can tell that even the unseen areas have been wounded in the same fashion because blood starts to soak through his clothing.  I fling the wing-medallion at the gold ‘bird bust’ in an attempt to thwart the death of my brother…but the massacre continues.  Blood oozes from each gash making it’s head look like a decaying, spoiled tomato with weeping wounds on its surface.  My mother and sister cry out in unison making the teats literally jump out of my eyes.
      “Yes!” the ‘bird bust’ bellows.  “Thank you young man and be pleased because I usually don’t give thanks where they aren’t due.” I can feel it’s evil smile permeating my soul, forever etching it’s taint there.  “We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused, but you do understand that this had to be done.”
      “Why?!” cries my mother.  My sister had been placed on the floor beside me and I was hugging her, doing my best to give her comfort—she tries to return the gesture.  “Why did you have to kill my husband and son?!” my mother continues.  “Why did they have to die?!”
      “Because it gives us pleasure!!” the ‘bird bust’ erupts.  The house shudders from the reverberation of it’s voice.  Somehow, I knew that the commotion taking place inside--was being… and only being… heard by us.
      “As does this….!” The female voice says with such a finality that chokes my heart to the point that it almost stops beating.  I almost long for it to do so, for I knew…we all knew…what those words meant as far as our fate.

  Lari is suddenly ripped from my arms and thrust—head first—against the ceiling.  I reach out to grab her and am instantly gripped with grief to the sound of my mother’s torment.  I look towards her to see her arms and legs being torn from her torso by that invisible force.  I look around the room for my little sister and find her being ricocheted off of another wall, heading toward the floor.  (They’re murdering my family before me and there’s nothing I can do!)  Maniacal laughter engulfs the room from the two evil distortions with such immenseness that my head feels like it’s going to explode from it’s amplification.  I find myself begging for mercy through death.  I look back at my mother to find blood pouring out of the massive wounds her torn limbs left behind.  The crimson liquid puddles at the foot of her chair like spilled libation.  I look into my mother’s face—her fear (visibly) pouring out of her soul like the sweat which now beads on her forehead—for the last time.  As if that wasn’t enough, her head erupts, cutting short her beyond-panic filled screams, off of her neck like a cork from an aged wine bottle—a bad year.  More of the ‘spilled libation’, like red wine, shoots out of her neck like a geyser.  I stare at my loving mother’s corpse in disbelief.  I will myself to crawl over to her chair ignoring the pain coursing through my body from my broken ribs and shoulder.  Reminding me that my mother wasn’t my only concern, about three feet before I make it to my mother’s body, my sister’s body falls from the air and lands before my face in a solid thud.  She was motionless…her body battered and bruised from being pin-balled all over the room.  I scream in grief, anguish, and agony as I watch my family’s killers move to hover over me.
      “Hope you enjoyed the show we put on for you,” says the female-distortion.  The wing medallion was now jutting from the left side of the bust of the bird making it look like some incomplete puzzle or sculpting.  “And since you’re our honored guest,” she goes on with obvious evil intent in her voice, “You’ll receive the encore.”

  I push myself up to rear back on my knees as a last act of defiance and a sharp flash of light engulfs my vision…following with darkness.

  Then…I’m walking along the path with my friend…

  And…a sharp flash of light engulfs my vision…

  And…repeat…

  Then…repeat…

  And…repeat…

  Then…repeat…

  And…I will murder those that murdered my family.

CHAPTER II: Renee’

  Looking back on a time which seemed so long ago, I realize that each time my “nightmare ended”, the events that had taken place weren’t new at all.  I realized that the events that I was experiencing had already been experienced numerous—infinite—amounts of times; just that the period of recognition was so immediate and miniscule, that it’s memory went unnoticed throughout the “nightmares” re-enactment.  But the last time experiencing those events, I knew something was amiss.  Not only had certain things in the scenery changed—like the settling fog in the park and woods (which was now nowhere to be found) or the major fact that places in the “nightmare” where my friend had accompanied me before, he was not now—I felt more “lived”; more knowing and experienced.  All of this accounted for the feeling of dejavu I had experienced experiencing all along.

  The majority of the “dream” remained the same (except for the few things I mentioned) until I got to the part where I entered my house—which is weird because I never remembered doing this for some reason in the other “re-enactments”.  When I took the step across the threshold, I didn’t end up in the living room like I should have, but rather in a vast courtyard, rectangular in shape.  From where I stood, it appeared to be a little larger than a football field and along it’s perimeter were thick, Romanesque-like pillars which stood like gigantic chess pieces on a cosmic playing-ground.  Each of these pillars emitted it’s own soothing, solid-colored glow which alternated on each pillar from: red, blue, black, green, and then back to red.  In what I took to be the center of the courtyard were a cluster of these same pillars, configured in a circle.  Most of these were white and a pale light shined from them except for two positioned on the side facing me.  These were gold.

  I eyed the pillar nearest to me, which was blue from it’s light, from it’s base to the apex and determined that it had to be at least 2000 or more feet in height; it’s width approximately 20 feet across.  There were no intricate designs upon it’s surface other than deep grooves which ran parallel to one another from the pillar’s base to it’s top.  (I guess.  I couldn’t really see that far.)  A liquid, also blue in color, trickled (to my surprise) upward along the grooves toward a sky which was infused with the same spectrum of colors.  Shades of blues, blacks, reds, whites, greens, and golds intermingled with one another as if meeting each other for the first time—a family reunion of hues.  I thought to myself that I had never seen anything as mesmerizing as it in my life.  I t reminded me of the aurora borealis or “Northern Lights”—a phenomenon of the Earth’s northern hemisphere in which sunlight being jettisoned through an ionic, magnetic field creates a “blanket” or “curtain” of light across the sky similar to that of a rainbow.  Although I had only seen pictures of it, if it was anything like what I saw, then it’s truly something to marvel.

  The sky, which I came to think of as some sort of surreal ceiling—like a planetarium—seemed to be supported by the robust pillars and it’s then that I made the connection between the colors of the “ceiling” and the “law-defying” Kool-Aid which ran along the surface of the pillars.  The liquid was the source of colors in the sky.  To what purpose this served, I had no clue.

  Seizing the courtyard’s perimeter on all sides was a very dense forest which isolated it unto itself.  Even the area from where I possibly entered this “dreamworld”, was ostracized in the drowning darkness of the forest.  This revelation baffled me just as much as to realize the fact that what I took to be one unified forest encompassing the courtyard was actually two types of climate-induced growth.  To my left, a jungle so thickly dense with vegetation such as vines, tropical plants and trees, grew blockading this side and then as immediate as if it was natural; meshed into a forest on the right that resembled that of a more temperate region—harboring conifer and deciduous trees and low-grubbing shrubbery.  From the jungle, an apparent looming of evil emanated from it’s depths that was so absolute, that I felt compelled to keep my body facing it to stay on guard from danger which might emerge.  No light from the courtyard seemed to pierce it’s absorbing barrier of darkness and I found my attention being drawn toward the gold and white pillars gathered in the courtyard’s center.

  For some reason, these pillars seemed overwhelmingly “inviting”; almost beckoning me to them.  I make my way toward their comfort.  Overhead, the ceiling continued to flicker between it’s different hues adding a sense of euphoria to the courtyard’s ethereal ambience.  The further I went, the more I realized that something didn’t feel right.  The “itch in my throat” had returned—I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.  I paused briefly from walking and that’s when it dawned on me…I didn't feel like I was walking.  The familiar wobble I had become so use to all my life was gone, supplanted with a sensation of drifting—of disconnectedness.  I looked toward the ground at my feet to try to ascertain some sort of understanding of it’s cause and became shocked with at what my eyes found.  Not only was the ground a sea of what appeared to be black clouds, but my feet (or what I used to consider my feet) were made up of the same nimbus-like substance, barely holding the shape of feet.  As a matter of fact, realizing for the first time, my whole body appeared to be semi-translucent.  “Now this has gotta’ be a dream,” I said aloud not really expecting an answer.  To my astonishment, I received one.
      “Well it’s not,” says a female voice from the temperate side of the courtyard.  Apprehensively, I turn in that direction, but see no one.
      “Who dere’?” I ask warily, “Do I know you?”  Cautiously, I began to move in the direction of the voice, but halted when mysteriously the voice comes from behind me.
      “I don’t think so, not unless we met in a previous life or something.”

  I spun around to face the voice and before me stood a beautiful woman who appeared to be in her early twenties.  She stood approximately 5’5” and was adorned in a long, flowing gown which glimmered in all the greens of the spectrum which I saw allowed her to blend almost perfectly with the background of the forest.  Her hair, which was braided into a ponytail, hung over her right shoulder down as low as her knees and being the same complexion as her pecan-brown skin, it was accented at the temples by slender, black streaks which ran the length of her—all the way through the braid.  Long leather tassels, more like rope, were interwoven through to the braid’s end with three, “energy-like blades”—like the blades of daggers—with no hilt attached.  The “blades” shimmered with the same mesmerizing effect as her clothing.  Her eyes, hazel and shaped like almonds, hypnotized me with the depth they possessed; like enigmatic kaleidoscopes.  In her right hand, she carried a shoulder-high staff which was made out of one of the hardwoods like oak or walnut.  At the top, near the shoulder, a thicker but shorter piece of limb lay adjoined to the gnarled shaft giving it the appearance of having been cut from a larger, thicker limb of a tree.  The aged wood contained a few burls and from each of these knots, the same eerie, green light which emanated from some of the pillars, erupted like flares on the sun, dissipating into the air.  At a loss for words, I stumbled backwards as the female moved towards me, breaking the silence.
      “Well…they didn't tell me the ‘special one’ would be this attractive.  I’m glad I came.”
      “Who’re you?” I asked blushingly, not being able to think of anything else to say.  Besides, it seemed like a perfectly logical question to ask.
      “Oh, I’m sorry.  Where are my manners?  Your good looks startled me for a second,” she flirted.  “My name is Renee’ and I’m your ‘Receiver’.”  She walked—glided—closer to where I stood, “and you are Tyelle…correct?”  She extended her hand in greeting.  I took it cautiously, watching her and her big stick still enthralled by her beauty.
      “True,” I responded trying to sound more composed than what I really was, “What’s goin’ on and how you know my name?”
      “I’m your ‘Receiver’.  It behooves me to know certain things about you, especially your name.”
      “So what’s a “Receiver” and what other certain things do you know about me?” I ask with less apprehension because of her pleasant nature, “And again…what’s goin’ on?  What is dis’ place?”

  She looked at me with those deep eyes of hers for a brief moment before she responded, “Because you’re so handsome, there’re a few things I’ll take the liberty of explaining to you even though I’m not supposed to, but we must be on our way.  Even though it appears to be safe,” she glances towards the jungle-side of the courtyard, “this courtyard is an ‘interchange’ for all souls and therefore can be dangerous if we just hang around.  And yes…if you haven’t figured it out yet…you are a soul.