and so he dies.

Richard Levasseur

This is how Richard spends what could be the last days of his life:

He reads quite a bit. He spends hours reading in bed, his feet crossed atop the pillow-padded box he put there to extend the insufficient length of his bed -- not textbooks for class or treatises on magic but books that he reads for pleasure, novels and surveys of subjects he finds interesting. He skips class quite a bit too. He calls his family. He sees his friends. He hangs out at the many independent cafes dotting the campus and its vicinity; stays there late into the evening hours, has conversations about atoms and shakespeare and the origin of life, about hopes and dreams and what they want to be when they all Grow Up. He meets old friends. He makes new ones. He does not, even obliquely drop hints of what he might like to be said about him at his funeral, or what they should remember him for, or ... any of it. Any of it.

He swims, too. Particularly the day before they leave. He does not fast, not strictly, but he eats less because he does not want to eat. He goes to the gym late at night when the treadmills and ellipticals and weightracks are all quiet, when the pool is abandoned. He floats on his back, eyes closed, moving his arms and legs with the same instinctive thoughtless slow regularity of sea-mammals, sharks. He clears himself this way. Clarifies himself. Purifies himself.

--

It is Friday evening, and they are flying out of DIA. They are in business class again, which is an expense his Agama Te has made for him, and which is again an expense he argued against and then accepted with grace and gratitude.

She stares out the window. He has the aisle seat. His hands rest on the armrests, too symmetric to be natural. He is, of course, nervous. He stares straight ahead and he obviously isn't listening to the flight attendant giving her safety spiel; his thoughts are his own, and they are far from here.

"If I don't make it back," he says quietly, "will you find some way to tell my family? Some story they can understand?"

acarya

[Despair]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )

acarya

Eleanor has died many times. She has died as Eleanor but she has died as many others. She remembers some of these; they come to her in flashes. One was a little child, attacked during a home invasion, killed not as a bystander but by brutal intention. Once she was a palm reader and a bit of a madam, and she wore the pendant that Eleanor now keeps against her skin, found after generations of being lost. Once she had a twin brother, and they were both dark of eye and hair and pale of skin, they were beautiful and terrible and Eleanor knows how broken she was in that life, how blackhearted, just as she knows that the palm reader trusted strangers too much and loved ones not at all, just as she knows that her soul may always carry a remnant of the helpless terror she once felt as a child being murdered in their own home.

When they go to Seaside, Eleanor will die again. She will go on the sojourn with her student and with a master of their Tradition, and this means that she will die one more time. The preparation is different for her. She meditates. She holds yoga poses for endless counts, a spinal twist that never ends, a sense of openness in herself. She lifts her chest and her throat and herself to the sky until she trembles from the vulnerability of it and curls into the fetal position on her mat, tucked in on herself until she feels safe again, permitting herself to weep slightly. She eats less, too. She spends a great deal of time alone, often outside until it is too cold to do so.

Some days, the losses she has suffered and the loneliness she feels are too much, and she at once fears the shadowlands and longs for them.

During one of those days in between, she goes dancing. She dances with her hair whipping out and her feet flying, twirling in and out of her partner's arms, til her cheeks are flushed and her breath is ragged. She goes for a run so long and so hard that she throws up by the side of the trail. She gets on a swingset, for fuck's sake. She feels herself in her body every way she can.

But she also works. She makes her dinner, she grades papers, she goes on with life as though nothing is changing and nothing has changed. People die every day. People can die any day.

--

When they fly out, she is quiet and she is dim. He's seen her like this before, the edges of her seem strained, the corners of her eyes are tight. She looks so weary, she looks almost ill, she looks

like maybe she's thinking of not coming back.

He speaks, and she turns, looking up at him because even seated, he is much taller than she is. He asks her a question that makes her brows furrow together. "If there's any way to do that, I'll try," she says, her tone a bit flat as is, but hopefully by now he knows it has nothing to do with him.

Richard Levasseur

It is one of those days for her. Not the worst he's ever seen her -- and he's only seen her that way the once -- but close. Yes, close. The flatness to her affect. The flatness in her eyes. The flatness of her very presence, as though what was vital in her, what was alive and beating and struggling and breathing, was already gone. Long gone. Torn away.

Here is where I felt him.

He has known her long enough that he knows it has nothing to do with him. He has known her long enough that he tries very hard and usually succeeds in not taking it personally. There were times when he wondered -- was it something he said, something he did, something he could have changed? But as with all rhythms of the heart, this one is its own master. It comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and some days she can hardly get out of bed, and others she is snapping and vibrant, a live wire of icy energy.

She'll try, she says. He glances at her, sideways and down. Smiles a little.

"Thank you," he says, and means it. It is all he can ask for, that she tries.

acarya

That was cold. That flatness, that distance, that frown even. She realizes it a moment later, recognizes it because Richard doesn't take it personally, looks at her and smiles a little and means what he says and she feels bad. She feels bad anyway but this is just... sadness, too. Guilt, a bit.

Eleanor reaches over with one of her hands, which is cool today, like her heart just doesn't have the energy to send warm blood into her extremities, and touches his, holding it for a moment. "Do everything you can to make it back," she tells him, with as much earnestness as she can muster, as much affection as she is capable of showing. It's exhausting. She wants to curl up and cry and sleep after the words are out, after the energy has left her. But she holds his hand so tightly, and looks him in his eyes, and gives him something to hold onto in return.

"I will do everything I can to get you back," she promises him, too. This does not exhaust her to say, does not take earnestness she has to drum up to share with him. This is a hard promise, a truth. She is his acarya. And this is why she doesn't tell him that if he doesn't make it back, then chances are, she isn't, either.

Richard Levasseur

His hand grips hers. He is at once holding on to her and giving her something to hold on to.

"I will." This is a promise he makes. And this, a promise he acknowledges: "And I know you will."

A little later, the plane lifts beneath them. Pushes them into the air. It is not a long flight to Oregon, or at least: not so long as the flight to Vienna. Still, Richard leans his seat back and closes his eyes. Tries to rest.

acarya

[I AM CHANGING NPC's NAME. It is not Joy Sharpe, it is Sunitha Khare.]

acarya

Eleanor doesn't rest. She is exhausted. She is very tired, and she doesn't want to be awake, doesn't want to be aware. But she is. And she can't sleep for some reason. So when Richard leans back, she keeps holding his hand. She seems to forget about it, but she hasn't. Right now, awareness of their hands held together is part of what keeps her tethered to life and to wanting-to-live, as the plane rises and the world drops away.

--

It is very late at night when they get to Portland International and disembark to get on the much smaller plane that will take them out to Seaside. It's a resort town, and this is the off season, so the plane is mostly empty. They take their carry-ons and cram into the smaller seats and then it's just a hop, a quick zip out to the town that is home to fewer than seven thousand people. They pick up a rental car. They have to drive south, all the way to the southernmost tip of Seaside, past some houses that border on palatial, all along Sunset Boulevard til they reach a house that is more reminiscent of the bungalows that used to be enough for oceanside living, before everyone wanted a mansion to go with their expensive property.

Everything here is wet and chilly at the moment. But they can hear the sea, smell the Pacific everywhere. It is pitch dark but for stars and a few dim, widely spaced street lamps. The light is on beside the front door. The walls of the house are a faded teal blue that peels in places, that looks almost colorless in the dark. Eleanor and Richard park the rental and pop the trunk to get their suitcases out, and by that time a woman has come to the door wearing a casual black, maroon, and orange sari. She is marked with tilaka on her brow and her forearms, white ash and red and yellow pastes dried to her skin. Her hair is tied back, and though her nose is pierced it bears only a single gold ring. Something about her -- though she looks different from every single one of her neighbors and only looks even moreso like this --

does not seem strange at all.

Sunitha is a little taller than Eleanor but nowhere near Richard's height. She is quiet as they come up the steps, holding the door for them as they go inside. The surfaces are clean, the rugs thick. It is a normal house; there are no knives or swords displayed. Just Sunitha, no pets or children or others coming running. Sunitha, and Sunitha's home, feel suffused faintly with a darkness, a cloudy and drugged-feeling depth to it, as though darkness and nightfall were an incense that could be breathed in through the nostrils. And yet: cleanliness. The feeling of a slate erased, a counter wiped clean,

which makes the feeling of a knife being shoved into one's chest seem so at odds. Yet this is the feeling, a visceral penetration through the heart, that one gets in her presence. She is dark, she is pure, and she is deadly, and she is reverent. All these things -- the darkness, the cleanness, the violence -- are given up in service of something else, something high and holy. They are offerings. They are a part of her, this woman who serves the Wheel.

When the door is closed and they stand in her entryway of her coastal, comfortable home, she puts her palms together, inclining her head. "Namaste," to both of them.

Eleanor has taught Richard what this really means. Especially among the magi, especially among the Euthanatoi. That which is divine in her, that which is Awakened in her, bows to that which is Awakened with in them. Her soul, her avatar, her atman, recognizes and appreciates and bows to their souls, their avatars, their atmans. And Eleanor, who used up almost everything she had to reassure Richard, delves a little deeper now to touch her palms lightly together, incline her head to Sunitha, and say in response,

"Namaste."

Richard Levasseur

Here they are so close to the sea that the sea pervades everything. Gives a certain moisture to the planks in the porch; peels paint from wood as though to reduce everything, everything down to its most fundamental form. The ocean is vital and powerful and everlasting and mercilessly, endlessly erosive. Each grain of sand was once a stone. Each stone, once a mountain.

It seems familiar to him. The deep boom in the night. The wet wind. The smell of the sea. All these things, they remind him of childhood trips to Monterey and down the highway to Big Sur. Reminds him, on a more instinctual, half-remembered level, of infancy and toddlerhood on the Normandy coast, a couple hours' drive from Paris. These are the memories, imprints, that follow him in his life. He didn't compete in saltwater sports. He doesn't swim in the ocean now. And yet when he casts, it's the scent and taste and rhythm of the ocean that fills the air around him. Cool and blue. Deep and shimmering.

Vital. Patient. Erosive.

They meet Sunitha Khare there on the coast. They follow her into her simple, spare home. She greets them; that which is divine in her bows to that which is divine in them. Richard follows suit. His murmured Namaste lacks a little in pronunciation, but not in sincerity.

He adds, "Thank you for doing this for us."

acarya

They have something in common there, Richard and his acarya, but it is not the same. He feels like the ocean; she feels like the sort of death you find there. It lacks the vitality but not the power, the eternity but not the mercilessness. But to feel her magic is to feel frozen in it, drowning and drowned but not eroded, not becoming one with the sea again, returning to it as one returns to the Wheel. You are not dead, you are not rebirthed, you are dying, halted at the moment when you know that your lungs will never pull in another blessing of air, halted at the moment when the water rushes in and you stop fighting it, because you can't anymore.

Eleanor does not carry an ounce of panic in her, though. There's no fear of that. Even if a part of her soul is forever standing in that moment, she has come to peace with it. She has learned to live in it, and she feels no terror at it. Imagine the strength that comes from that acceptance.

Look at the strength that comes from that acceptance.

--

They stand on a rug, and there are others in the living room and dining room, which they can see to either side of the entryway. Thick rugs, intricate and colorful and deep. There are photographs everywhere, landscapes and family members and friends and memories. There are also, yes, images of gods both carved and painted, but they are household gods, friendly gods with smiling faces and bright bindis. They are not Sunitha's only gods. They are the ones that protect the home, though, that promise the things that life needs. Those gods, the ones that slaughter and the ones that drink blood and the ones that hold swords, also live here, but not in the living room and dining room.

Sunitha has lowered her hands. She simply nods to him. "Let us eat tonight," she says. "Then we will fast for a night and a day, before we enter the underworld. There are rooms upstairs for you both. Eleanor has told me that you swim," she adds, specifically to Richard. "Perhaps tomorrow you will go into the sea."

Richard Levasseur

So that is what they do.

They eat tonight. It is late, and later still by Richard's body-clock, and the fare is as meatless as Eleanor's is. He discovers he has an appetite all the same, and it is prodigious: he devours whatever is set before him, lentils and rice and millet and peas and spinach and cheese and buttermilk. He mops his plate clean with his naan. He goes for seconds.

When they're done, it's late in the night. There was perhaps a little conversation over dinner. Mundanities. Or perhaps they spoke little if nothing at all. Richard doesn't mind either way. He is becoming accustomed to silence. Used to unburdened quiet.

He helps with the dishes, and then they are shown to their rooms: clean and neat, but comfortable. Everything they need, plus a little extra. Nothing wasteful.

Richard doesn't go immediately to bed. He showers and he brushes his teeth and then he sits in Eleanor's room for a while, crosslegged on the floor beside her bed. He stays there for her company, and to provide her with his. It is all he knows how to do when she is like this.

--

They fast the next day. They eat nothing; they drink only clear water. In the morning Richard meditates a while, but his heart does not calm easily today. He soon gets up, and then, for lack of anything better to do, he helps out around the house: the minor daily upkeep necessary when one lives so close to the ocean. Sand gets on the porch. Salt must be wiped clear, lest it crust and corrode.

In the afternoon he wades into the ocean. He swims, and this time it is swimming. He pushes himself: cuts through the surf, pulls himself stroke by strong stroke through the choppy coastal waters. The salt spray that flings in his face. The waves that pound over his head, rolling him under again and again. When he breaks past the surf it is calmer. It is cold and it is bottomless, and when he turns on his back to float, the waves bear him back to shore, beat by beat.

The sun is beginning to set when he washes up. When he walks up from the edge of the sea, tired, weak from exertion without sustenance. Mind emptied; that silence, that unburdened quiet. In the evening, he reads.

acarya

[Despair]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

acarya

The meal is a surprisingly fragrant and filling one. Eleanor is a good cook, and since coming under her tutelage Richard has likely found himself eating more meatless dishes than he ever really had an inclination to do otherwise. Sunitha, however, knows what she's about in the kitchen. Unlike Eleanor, it seems that Sunitha does not keep or tolerate meat in her house even for guests, but unlike Eleanor, Sunitha's vegetarianism is religious. They eat richly seasoned food that has a kick, but not as much of one as it could.

They eat quietly, for Sunitha is not a talkative person and because all three of them are preparing for a ritualized death the following night. There is a funereal air, particularly in the lateness of the night, as though they are holding a wake. Eleanor does not eat as much as Richard, nor does Sunitha, but Sunitha keeps placing food before him, keeps nodding when he looks at the spoons and platters as though to inquire if there is more. She smiles less than Eleanor does, sitting on the floor cushions around the low table that they eat at. When the eating has slowed, when most of the food is gone, they clean. Richard clearing the table, Eleanor putting away leftovers, Sunitha loading the dishwasher, Richard wiping the table, Eleanor wiping the counter, Sunitha then guiding them up a narrow staircase to their rooms.

Soft and comfortable. Quiet. The windows are cracked and the air has a chill to it, breeze moving the drapes. There are quietly ticking clocks. In Richard's room, there is a god standing atop a desk that faces the bed. There is a mirror behind the god, also facing the bed. Brahm is large, and made of sandstone. He has four heads, four faces, four arms, his clothes painted red. He holds prayer beads, a book, a scepter, and the Vedas. Parts of the god are accented with gold leaf, chipped in places. He rides a swan, and atop his crown is a lotus flower. Laid out on the desk before him are flowers, freshly cut flowers that have not yet, not quite, begun to wilt. This was prepared for him. The Creator, to watch over him.

Sunitha bows to him before she leaves him there, Namaste again. He has time to bathe and to wash up and then he is at Eleanor's door, coming in to find a similar altar in her room, but this one is not to Brahm . On the desk, which has no mirror, there is a large god, but this one is Shiva. Shiva the Auspicious one, the Simple Lord, the Destroyer, the Transformer, slayer of demons, father and householder, both fearsome and benevolent. The god in Eleanor's room is also surrounded by flowers, red and yellow and white. He is a yogi in lotus position, watching the room with his third eye, wearing a serpent around his neck, and the crescent moon and the river Ganga both flow from his hair. His hands hold a trishula, which resembles a trident, and a damaru, a small drum. He sits on a tiger's skin. His wrists are encircled with bracelets made of human skulls.

Eleanor is already laying in bed when Richard comes; she doesn't get up but tells him to enter, and when he hesitates, she tells him to come in. So he sits on the rug beside her low bed, and if they speak, perhaps they speak of the gods in their rooms. Perhaps she tells him, if he does not know, who they are, and how they connect to the eternal forces of Dynamism and Entropy. Perhaps she tells him, because she knows, that Sunitha is one of those Euthanatoi who almost never kills, that this is why she wanted Sunitha to take them on the Re sojourn, among other reasons. But perhaps they do not speak at all, and simply listen to the ticking of the clock, with Richard's head leaning against the side of the mattress and Eleanor reminded, on each breath that sometimes hurts to take, that she is not really alone, not entirely.

--

The morning comes early. Sunitha is up before them. The kitchen has been cleaned. She has already washed herself, dressed, braided her hair, re-applied her tilaka. She is wearing a dark blue sari that looks to be dotted with stars and trimmed with gold braid. There is water set out on the table, a tall pitcher and a tray of glasses. There is no broth, no gelatin, nothing else.

Eleanor is also awake before sunrise as well; she is washed and dressed simply, in charcoal-grey leggings, bare feet -- as Sunitha -- and a loose, long top of muted yellow. She and Sunitha have saluted the sun and practiced yoga, and when Richard leaves his meditation, he is quietly offered water. There is almost a joyful, anticipatory air; Eleanor seems refreshed, seems more alive today. Her hands are warm when she touches Richard's arm in greeting, there is more color in her cheeks and no darkness beneath her eyes. She likes it here.

They go about their day, sipping water here and there. Richard sweeps the porches, front and back, head ducked to not hit the overhang at the very edge. There's a rainy wetness to everything. Sunitha plays music, and the windows are opened. When he goes to the ocean, the older Euthanatoi do not follow him, not at first. They leave him to the sea, into the salt water that purifies, that saps his strength and cleanses him deeply, washes him with the rituals of heartbeat and livelihood.

When he leaves the water he finds Eleanor standing on the beach, her feet still bare, her hair loose and windblown, the way it seems to be most of the time, always a bit chaotic near the ends. She has a huge towel for him, because it is autumn and it is cold outside. They don't speak, until they're back at the house, and she tells him -- though surely he knows -- he should drink some more water.

--

At sunset, flowers are cleared from the house. Sunitha takes them to the living room, atop the enormus rug. Furniture has been moved to the sides of the room. They are clean. Their bodies are purified with rituals both shared and individual. The windows are closed. Incense is lit, and the three of them sit together on the rug, meditating.

Sunitha took him aside before this. She told him some of what would happen to him. She told him to breathe deeply. She told him to break down his outer walls, to let himself be taken by whatever comes. She told him that the injection would take him to the very edge of death, and by magic they would cross that edge, and by magic they would return. She told him that Eleanor will go first, so that she will be waiting for him when he crosses over.

She is speaking now, in this dark room with the waves pounding the shore outside, with smoke filling the room. After a day and night in such a clean, crisply-aired home, it is becoming oppressive trying to breathe here. It is becoming difficult to focus. It feels like they will die like this, asphyxiated on the floor.

Sunitha is speaking in English now, not in Hindi. Richard must help her lay Eleanor down. Eleanor has the tiniest of holes in her inner arm where Sunitha has removed the needle. Eleanor is growing limp, and does not fight, does not resist, as Sunitha places her hands over her heart in prayer position. Sunitha is chanting mantras still, pouring something from a small vial into Eleanor's mouth; it only looks like water. Sunitha's magic, pure and reverent and clean and violent, is warping the room, turning it dark at the edges, making it hard to see anything through the shadows, through the smoke.

His acarya is dying, and dead, and motionless on the ground, a searing picture with her hair spread over the rug and her face at peace. He smells flowers and ashes; Sunitha is smoothing something on his brow with her thumb, his head swimming. It's hard to breathe. Sunitha, who is very strong, is gently easing him to lie on his back beside Eleanor. Something is tight around his upper arm, and something cold enters his veins, rapidly heated by his body. He can feel his heart pounding in every limb, feel it in his head, feel his life, his beautiful creative athletic funny friendly life slowly draining from his limbs. Even if he wants to resist, it is difficult.

For there seems no other way out. The room is dark and the air is thick and difficult to breathe; if he lets go, if he gives in, perhaps then he will find relief.

Sunitha is holding his hands over his heart in prayer position. All he can see in the darkness is the gleaming white of her tilak, the thin white lines that meet between her eyebrows and streak upward to her hairline, the red dot between them pulsing like the heartbeat, like the life

that is slowly

leaving him.

Richard Levasseur

At sunset the flowers fade. There is something in Richard, something older than his years, older than this brief span on earth from the normandy coast to the californian bay to those young jagged mountains of colorado to this point here, again, at the lip of the sea,

something ageless, something endless, something ever-dying and ever-renewed, that understands that. He helps with this, as he has helped quietly and unasked with all other things since his arrival. Gathers the flowers and takes them outside. It seems disrespectful to toss them in the trash when some of their number lay offerings to the gods, and so Richard takes them to the sea. He lets the surf take them as the last of the western light clears from the skies.

They are far from major cities here, and as the horizon turns red, then purple, then black, the stars overhead seem innumerable. Their light is cold and clear. He stands there a moment in the night, breathing in salt and wind, thinking of the time it takes for those stars to shine on his face. Eight minutes from the sun to the earth. Years, years, decades, centuries, millennia for those far-flung astral bodies. The light that reaches him now left those stars when rome rose, when carthage fell, when the first aryan sects painted their faces and bodies with the first ritual marks of their gods,

when dinosaurs roamed the earth,

when life began in the sea.

--

Inside the room is filling with incense. It feels oppressive; it feels a little like the way Eleanor's magic can sometimes feel, though smokier; hotter. Eleanor's magic is so cold. Like those benthic depths he knows he can sink to if he swims out far enough, if he flags, if he just

lets him go.

He helps Sunitha lay his acarya down. He helps Sunitha arrange her body, lay her hands. Sunitha is chanting a mantra and there is poison in his acarya's veins, something-that-is-not-water on his acarya's tongue. Sunitha's magic rises, clear as the water they drank, deadly as the salt in the sea. The edges of his vision are warping and shredding, and his acarya is dying,

his acarya is dying,

he is suddenly and entirely overcome and he cannot speak of it, he cannot say why, why now when he has prepared for this for a night and a day, a week, nearly a month. He cannot say why. Only that it is. There are tears on his cheeks. He is overcome and weeping in silence, his hands gripping Eleanor's as Eleanor's hands gently, gradually, slowly grow still and slack and cold. He bows his brow to his knuckles, and he knows it is his turn now but he cannot. He needs a moment. Surely Sunitha understands: it is grief and it is sorrow and it is the panic of being left alone. He is briefly ashamed; is he not a death-mage? is he not a student of the Wheel? why should he weep, when god has decreed for him and for her,

another and another and another?

It does not matter. He forgives himself: when Henrik was taken from Eleanor, she pulls the very moorings of reality loose in her wrath and her grief. She was a stronger mage then than she is now, and a stronger mage then than he can imagine being now. It was a transgression, and a sin, but: it is for forgiveness that we are made to sin.

--

And then it is his turn. His breath has evened. His eyes have cleared. It occurs to him that he gets his wish after all: to die in a house with those he cares for and those who care for him. He does have an audience, true, but it is a small one and one cannot expect everything.

He does not resist as he is eased to the floor; he helps her at first, and then he does not do even that. He lets go, passive, trusting, letting her strong arms set him down. Once upon a time he was not so tall, he was very small indeed, and once upon a time his mother and his father bore him easily from place to place. Laid him down to sleep. It is like that. There is a brief sting and then a brief chill. He shivers,

and then it is only instinct to fight. It is the great struggle for survival, which is what burns alight in us all. It is what gives the Wheel its momentum. He is not ashamed of this,

not ashamed of the way his limbs tremble and convulse, not ashamed of the way his lungs gasp for air, not ashamed of the way his heart pounds and pounds and races and fights until it begins to skip,

and skip,

and flutter,

and fail.

There, the gleaming white of Sunitha's tilak. Those thin white lines streaking up toward heaven. There the red dot between, beating like a heart, burning like the setting of a sun. The light fades. The stars have grown silent. Night falls; and so he dies.