Chapter Ten.

My third muse, my true muse, I discover you in my thirty-third cycle.
For three is the number of manifestation, and all things will be revealed at the thirty-third degree.
Search the air around you for my voice, for my truth is always with you: to guide you, to reveal you, to love you, to recover you.
In your imagination I dwell, in your instinct I rule, and in your dreams I am waiting for you.
Your number is thirteen, for it encompasses all the phasing countenances of the moon, even as it represents the number of cycles that I lived in the stone fortress, yearning and deprived, yet stimulated by the awareness of your spirit.
I believed in your existence for countless suns, through countless motions of the tides of passage and the changing seasons.
Twice before I channeled your spirit through the memory of a votive object, and though I had not found you yet, your feminine essence did indeed sustain me in the Capsule of Becoming.
When I forsook my path for a life spent in the tormenting subservience of an illusion, I also forsook your spirit, for your spirit is my truth.
And my truth is your identity.
We are, as always, one spirit.
For my betrayal of the world we share, I suffered grim visitations that haunted me in the waxing hours of the night, for I heard you calling me and yet I stopped looking at the stars and moon.
I died during the fixed tide of your namesake, when the spring rains fall from the sky in streams that fertilize the dormant spirit of the earth.
I died as your spirit restored the colors of the world: as the trees became green and the fields
became vibrant, and the young pups began emerging from the den.
And as all life bloomed in the radiance of your spirit, I walked with the shadows and skeletons of my disgrace.
I walked beneath Death's grim penetrating gaze as the cycle turned, and as all...