The shamans at the end o.., p.23
The Shamans at the End of Time, page 23
You are obstinate. Are you so eager for that Communion? “I will not stop you.”
“How do you think that I have more chances to seduce the young man? Talking to him dressed or naked?” the old woman asked with a crooked smile.
This time, Mina could not stop her laughter. “Faro, you are teasing me. I must be in a dire state of mind to be so blind.”
“That’s what I assumed too. Your mind is ... drifting, searching a path toward that young man.”
“He is my mate.”
“That will help keeping you under the same roof, nothing more. Without a bond, things are not easy, but they may be also more ... interesting. It’s a challenge, a fight in the good sense. Winning such fight is rewarding, or so I heard from women and men who were able to win, a new life for them, together. It may take time, though.”
“That’s what I am thinking too. I am not yet accustomed.” Mina sighed.
“With seducing a man? All women are good at that, the shamanes even more. I tell you, under his bitter-sweet dreams about the woman he lost, the young man wants to be seduced and start a new life. There is no way to have Selma back, and he doesn’t look stupid to me. He is a good match for a woman like you.” Faro smiled, and her hand stroked Mina’s hair. “You are not Nara,” she whispered.
The young woman leaned her head against Faro’s shoulder. “It may be that he is also an important match,” she said, without thinking. The worries about Nara’s evil plans, which stirred her all the last six days, subdued her mind. Realizing the slip of tongue, Mina bit her lip and stayed silent.
“I think that I never told you. My initiation happened only a few months after the last shaman had died. I was seventeen,” she said, and took a deep breath. “It’s like it was yesterday. I was a good prospect, and the Grand Shamane performed my initiation. Everybody expected me to become a nine Amber Stones, after the second initiation performed with a man and, in time, a member of the Amber Stone Ring. I’ve got only seven stones, and I was mindless for a few months. Eventually, I recovered. They considered it a bad luck, but for the next ten years, all the new initiated shamane received two stones less than it was forecasted. Some of them even died because of that; they could not cope with the ... loss. The Ring had to change the way it predicted the power of a new shamane. That gave young girls a different perspective, and they no longer died. Today, we still calculate the stones in the new way. That did not stop the Ring’s worries - there was no new shamane with at least eight Amber Stones, which was considered the minimum for a leader. Who could take as Grand Shamane after the last eight or more Amber Stones would die? At that time, there were six shamanes having nine stones, and all the shamanes in the Ring had at least eight.” Faro remained silent for a while, her mind drifting in the past. Sensing that the old woman’s memories had a meaning, Mina stayed silent too. “Seven years after the rules were changed, Nara received eight Amber Stones, one more than it was forecasted with the new rules, and for a while, everybody was relieved. It did not last long, and no one else got eight stones until six days ago when you had your Communion with Vlad. Nara is now fifty-eight.” Faro looked at Mina with squinted eyes, then stood up. “Long talks make me tired.” She stretched her old body and yawned. “I let you wait for that young man.”
Did she try to tell me the same thing I am thinking about? That the shamanes lost some of their strength when the shamans vanished? That the Vlahins need both women and men to survive? Mina thought, watching Faro walking slowly away.
Chapter 21 - Vlad
Each time I enter Edna’s hut, Selma comes back to me. It’s not that her memory has left me, it’s just a reminder, an enhancer of what was mine and I lost. At the beginning, I contemplated to leave the place, to find another shelter. I did not. Selma has betrayed me. I would not do the same. My bond to her is still alive, and I don’t want it gone. It’s a futile ‘want’, I already know that - despite of what everybody has told me - for whatever reason, my bond will endure. The shaman in me knows it. Each piece inside the hut reminds me of her, and my mind lives suspended between past and present. I kept her in my arms in that corner. I kissed her in this one. We talked there. We dreamt here. Her voice is everywhere and, sometimes, I even think to remember her scent. As any shamane, she always smelled of wild flowers. Selma likes violets. Some would say that this is not life, yet it’s the only one I have. In a corner of my mind, I still hope that she will be able to defeat Nara’s conditioning and come back. That keeps my mind from crumbling, a mind which never fully recovered after everything I lost when I arrived in this prehistoric world. The only nuisance in this hut of lost memories is Mina. She still pretends to be my mate. She is not.
“Her place is not here,” I tell Edna for the tenth time.
She looks at me, then comes closer, her hand touching my face. “Mina belongs here, Vlad.”
“Selma belongs here,” I almost growl.
“How much I hate it, Selma belongs now to the other side of the river. You stay here; your mate stays here. This is the rule.”
“What rules were respected when they did that to Selma and me?”
“They respected nothing, but why should we do the same? Why should we behave like them?”
Each time I requested the same thing, in the last seven days, Edna always found a way to silence me. I don’t want to be like them. The thought slows my mind for some moments. Yet, I want to act like them and punish them. Defeated again by Edna, I chose to leave the hut and wander in the mountain behind the village. I find a place from where there is a fine view over the river. Under the bright sun, it gleams like a metallic band, and I remember that I ate nothing this morning. Each day I came here, I stayed until it was almost dark; now I have to return earlier. I take my shirt down, and let the sun play on my skin.
My mind slips in the past, yet this time instead of Selma, it’s Mina who disturbs my thoughts. I still remember the first night she came into Edna’s hut. She wanted to join me inside my sleeping bag. I refused her, and she placed a fur along me, and lay there. In one moment of inattention from me, she placed her palm on my neck. Our minds linked, but I shook my head in anger and the link dropped. She did not disturb me again, before I fell asleep but, in the morning, I woke up with her hand on my neck. I pushed it away, and ignored her when she asked me if I wanted to eat.
A few days later, she found how to open my sleeping bag, and I woke up with her naked boy leaning on me. For a few moments, I thought that she was Selma, and my hand moved to caress her. I was lucky that she did not wake. I don’t think that I would have been able to reject her, if she would have started to stir me. It was not only my memory of making love with her during our Communion; it was that she was the only woman with whom I made love with in more than a year. There was no way to keep her away, but the next morning I was aware of who was lying next to me.
From the day when Selma left the village, each evening, Nara came and pissed me off with a request for a Communion.
“We are stronger together, Vlad,” she says, her eyes boring into mine. She is like a cobra waiting for an opening to inoculate her venom into my mind, and I feel the tendrils of her mind searching for a weak spot. By whatever reason, I escaped unscathed from her attempts, just that today I feel her more desperate than before. She will leave tomorrow.
“You, me and Selma?”
“All of us. Selma will help the Vlahins and Kalachs to come closer. She will deliver the peace we need. She is a strong woman.”
Her voice is so genuine yet, deep inside me, I know that she has a second agenda, one that touches me, in a way that stays hidden. Once, Mina hinted to me that Nara has not much love for me. I don’t know why she warned me, maybe because she also has a second agenda that matches Nara’s. They work together; it was clear from that night when they perverted Selma’a mind during a Communion. A good cop, bad cop strategy. In fact, what Nara wants from me is a Communion that will give her even more power to pervert even more minds. I am precious to them only because I can help them gather more Amber Stones, but nothing would convince me to help this witch become even stronger. I already did a mistake with Mina but, at that time, I was unaware of their evil minds.
“We need all the strength we can gather, and the shamans have an important game to play.” Nara comes closer and takes my hands in hers. Before I could react, she speaks inside my mind. “I can take you inside the Third River of Thought and show you the Moon and what you name the Milky Way. You are a strong shaman, Vlad, but you need my help to evolve.” Her voice is so unctuous and gentle when pronouncing my name, is as if she wants to create some invisible bonds between us.
But it’s not her inner voice or that insidious promise of evolving which paralyzes my mind, it’s that mention of being able to see the Milky Way. The temptation is so strong that I feel too late the tendrils of her mind sneaking inside my mind.
“Stay we me, Vlad,” she whispers. “Together we can accomplish so many things. Like this:” An image of Earth seen from space fills my mind. “You always wanted to fly. Your people use things to fly. We use our mind. It’s easier. It’s clean.” Her arm moves around my neck, pulling me closer to her. “See how beautiful is our place seen from above.” The image changes, and we move around Earth. I see now North America, then East Asia. Logically, I know that we are not traveling through the Rivers, and those images are from her memory, but I feel subdued. I want to see more. Her lips touch mine. I try to move, but she keeps me in her grip. “Let’s have the Communion, Vlad, and then we can travel together as far as you want.” I can’t move, but that at least helps my last vestige of self preservation to keep them tight. “After that you will decide if a High Communion will help us even more. There is nothing more pleasant and more enlightening than it.” She is restraining me inside a delicate net of filaments that stretches across my mind, and any hope of easy escape vanishes. “You and I were born for a high purpose, Vlad. The Mother gave us power to set things right in this world. That’s why she sent you here. Moira and Edna saw you in their Trance Dreams, but they never understood your higher purpose. Join me, Vlad.” Her lips are trying to incentivize me, as is her hand caressing my neck.
“What about Selma?” I am finally able to speak inside, and I am trying the same strategy I used to disconcert the Head: ask unexpected questions.
“Selma was only stopping your evolution, and her purpose was to change the Kalachs. You need a stronger shamane. I will set now the course of your evolution, and Mina will help you further. She will be a good mate for you. She is your mate, Vlad. You have to honor her. That’s the Mother’s will.” The pressure inside my mind is growing; Nara has more tendrils to insert in my brain than I even thought.
“How can we have a Communion without that potion Moira gave to me?”
“I am stronger, Vlad. I don’t need a potion to navigate the Rivers. Join me, and you will become stronger too. Any effort of evolution is rewarding. Join me, Vlad.” Her voice is no more seductive, she speaks now like a mother to her child.
“I still have a chance,” I say in a language that she can’t understand. That disconcerts her, for a moment, and the pressure from that net of tendrils enclosing my mind becomes weaker. It takes her no more than a few seconds to tighten it back.
A tingle plays the skin on my back, another hand is pressing on my spine. “Stay calm,” Mina whispers inside my mind too, and some more tendrils sneak inside me. “Don’t oppose me. I am here to help you.” Her voice is as seductive as Nara’s, and I am split between two shamanes each stronger than me.
“Mina joined us,” Nara says, and before I could react, pain shots to my brain. Profiting from my weakness, Nara inserts herself even more inside my mind. “I asked you to reason; now I ask you to obey.”
“No!” Mina says in a fierce voice. “You must not give in to the pain.” I struggle to bring myself under control, and I hope that something can be done. “You need to build a defense wall. You already built one when she entered your mind that night. You know how to do it.”
I don’t know exactly what I am doing, but the pain seems to subside.
“As the Great Shamane, I have other ways to bring you to senses. I’m going to open you up, Vlad, and learn any secret you possess,” Nara promises. “Mina will help me and we’ll see how resistant you are then. Communions can be done through pain too. I offered you cooperation and help, now you will learn pain and obeisance. I will not leave until you obey me and accept the Communion.” Her face appears in my mind, the same way the Head was torturing me before.
Nara smiles, her eyes sparkling as if she detected my defenses and found them worthless. “Such a weak wall will not help you much. Let’s see what else you have to protect your mind,” the shamane whispers, and my body whirls around and then flattened against the floor. I know that I am not moving, and that everything is just a mind game, yet the impact leaves me breathless in the real world. And the pain feels so real. A circle of fire engulfs my waist, the flames black and noxious. They climb slowly toward my chest. The pain is unspeakable, but before the blackness could take me, the fire vanishes. “Join me. Now!” I have the feeling of entering, against my will, into the second River of Thought. “See, Vlad. It was not so hard.”
“River send me back,” I whisper without knowing why, and I feel two forces acting on me. One tries to expulse me from the River, the second tries to pull me out. And the River seems to help me too.
“I am behind you,” Mina whispers, and I understand that she is the one pulling me.
Nara roars with anger, and she sends a shock of fire through my brain. After that, there was nothing but pain and fear, and a need to sleep forever.
“She is gone.” Mina caresses my face. I am lying down, my head in her lap. “Few can resist the pressure of Nara’s mind.” I try to stand, but I feel too weak. “Don’t try to move.”
“Did we have the Communion?”
“No.”
“Are the Ring Shamanes so evil to use torture?”
“Nara doesn’t mean the whole Ring,” Mina says, evasively.
“Nara is the Grand Shamane and you two are the most powerful shamanes in the Vlahin world. You used your power to torture me for your personal advantage.”
“I helped you how much I could.”
“You did not help me; you played me. You are so young, and even worse than Nara. I wonder how much evil will spread from you when you reach her age.”
“I am sorry that I could not help more, but I stopped the Communion.”
“You stopped nothing.”
“She is right.” The Head appears right in front of me, and our eyes lock. “You are weak and ignorant and Nara would have broken your mind without Mina’s help.”
“You just want Mina in my bed. It will not happen,” I retort, remembering his past comments about Malva and Selma, when he pushed me to seduce them.
“That was a test not a push. One of the few you had passed.” He eyes me speculatively, like a wolf scrutinizing a deer.
“And now?” I growl, and even to me looks strange that I can fill a soundless communication, happening inside my mind, with a characteristic of a real sound. Everything feels discordant and wrong. “Is this another test?” I ask, my voice normal again.
“You need to grow up.” His words stir a tightness between my eyes, as if my third eye tries to become awake. “Ah, you remember it.” The Head grows arms, and his forefinger touches a place between his eyes, which look now larger. “Are you afraid of your mate?” The Head laughs, and his laughter looks warm to me, as if he did not really tried to mock.
“I love another woman, and Mina is not my mate.”
“Vlad, with whom are you talking?” Mina asks, and I realize that she is inside my mind.
“Get out of my mind.”
“I am healing you. With whom are you speaking?” she repeats.
“Nobody.”
“I see a floating head who is speaking to you.”
“It’s just an unwanted excrescence of my mind. A boring one.”
“No, it’s something foreign, and it’s not for the first time I see it.”
“She helped you, and she still tries to help you, but it will be useless if you don’t want to help yourself,” the Head says and vanishes before I could speak again.
“Mina, why did you help me?” I ask, involuntarily.
“You are my mate.”
You did not want Nara to become stronger than you. As with the Head, I think in my mother tongue, so she can’t understand, pretending to believe her. I am too tired and weak, and before I can think more, and curse her, I am falling asleep.
Chapter 22 - Vlad
Two days later, I decide that I had enough, and went to see Moira. I don’t want to be a pawn in anyone’s game. Mina is more powerful than me, and she may use her power like Nara did it. The pain is still fresh in my mind, but is not pain which frightens me the most, is the feeling that I can become like Selma, an automaton guided by the wicked will of the shamanes. I still trust Edna and Moira, but there is no way to let a Ring Shamane sleeps so close to me.
“Can I move into your house?” I ask.
“We are glad to host you, buy Mina will move here too.” Moira guessed from the first moment what I really want.
“Is there no way to escape her?”
“Mina is a better person than I thought a few days ago, and she is your mate.”
“She is not,” I growl.
“Vlad,” Moira says gently, “you are mated. I know how it happened, as well as you, but it changes nothing. A union made by the Grand Shamane, can be annulled only by her. You have six months to decide. It’s up to you to make them pleasant or not, or at least civilized.”
Moira shuns me the same subtle way Edna does each time I ask her to evacuate Mina from our hut. How can I ask more, after Moira implied that I am an uncivilized man? Nervous, I do as in my other days before, and find refuge in the mountains behind the village.
“How do you think that I have more chances to seduce the young man? Talking to him dressed or naked?” the old woman asked with a crooked smile.
This time, Mina could not stop her laughter. “Faro, you are teasing me. I must be in a dire state of mind to be so blind.”
“That’s what I assumed too. Your mind is ... drifting, searching a path toward that young man.”
“He is my mate.”
“That will help keeping you under the same roof, nothing more. Without a bond, things are not easy, but they may be also more ... interesting. It’s a challenge, a fight in the good sense. Winning such fight is rewarding, or so I heard from women and men who were able to win, a new life for them, together. It may take time, though.”
“That’s what I am thinking too. I am not yet accustomed.” Mina sighed.
“With seducing a man? All women are good at that, the shamanes even more. I tell you, under his bitter-sweet dreams about the woman he lost, the young man wants to be seduced and start a new life. There is no way to have Selma back, and he doesn’t look stupid to me. He is a good match for a woman like you.” Faro smiled, and her hand stroked Mina’s hair. “You are not Nara,” she whispered.
The young woman leaned her head against Faro’s shoulder. “It may be that he is also an important match,” she said, without thinking. The worries about Nara’s evil plans, which stirred her all the last six days, subdued her mind. Realizing the slip of tongue, Mina bit her lip and stayed silent.
“I think that I never told you. My initiation happened only a few months after the last shaman had died. I was seventeen,” she said, and took a deep breath. “It’s like it was yesterday. I was a good prospect, and the Grand Shamane performed my initiation. Everybody expected me to become a nine Amber Stones, after the second initiation performed with a man and, in time, a member of the Amber Stone Ring. I’ve got only seven stones, and I was mindless for a few months. Eventually, I recovered. They considered it a bad luck, but for the next ten years, all the new initiated shamane received two stones less than it was forecasted. Some of them even died because of that; they could not cope with the ... loss. The Ring had to change the way it predicted the power of a new shamane. That gave young girls a different perspective, and they no longer died. Today, we still calculate the stones in the new way. That did not stop the Ring’s worries - there was no new shamane with at least eight Amber Stones, which was considered the minimum for a leader. Who could take as Grand Shamane after the last eight or more Amber Stones would die? At that time, there were six shamanes having nine stones, and all the shamanes in the Ring had at least eight.” Faro remained silent for a while, her mind drifting in the past. Sensing that the old woman’s memories had a meaning, Mina stayed silent too. “Seven years after the rules were changed, Nara received eight Amber Stones, one more than it was forecasted with the new rules, and for a while, everybody was relieved. It did not last long, and no one else got eight stones until six days ago when you had your Communion with Vlad. Nara is now fifty-eight.” Faro looked at Mina with squinted eyes, then stood up. “Long talks make me tired.” She stretched her old body and yawned. “I let you wait for that young man.”
Did she try to tell me the same thing I am thinking about? That the shamanes lost some of their strength when the shamans vanished? That the Vlahins need both women and men to survive? Mina thought, watching Faro walking slowly away.
Chapter 21 - Vlad
Each time I enter Edna’s hut, Selma comes back to me. It’s not that her memory has left me, it’s just a reminder, an enhancer of what was mine and I lost. At the beginning, I contemplated to leave the place, to find another shelter. I did not. Selma has betrayed me. I would not do the same. My bond to her is still alive, and I don’t want it gone. It’s a futile ‘want’, I already know that - despite of what everybody has told me - for whatever reason, my bond will endure. The shaman in me knows it. Each piece inside the hut reminds me of her, and my mind lives suspended between past and present. I kept her in my arms in that corner. I kissed her in this one. We talked there. We dreamt here. Her voice is everywhere and, sometimes, I even think to remember her scent. As any shamane, she always smelled of wild flowers. Selma likes violets. Some would say that this is not life, yet it’s the only one I have. In a corner of my mind, I still hope that she will be able to defeat Nara’s conditioning and come back. That keeps my mind from crumbling, a mind which never fully recovered after everything I lost when I arrived in this prehistoric world. The only nuisance in this hut of lost memories is Mina. She still pretends to be my mate. She is not.
“Her place is not here,” I tell Edna for the tenth time.
She looks at me, then comes closer, her hand touching my face. “Mina belongs here, Vlad.”
“Selma belongs here,” I almost growl.
“How much I hate it, Selma belongs now to the other side of the river. You stay here; your mate stays here. This is the rule.”
“What rules were respected when they did that to Selma and me?”
“They respected nothing, but why should we do the same? Why should we behave like them?”
Each time I requested the same thing, in the last seven days, Edna always found a way to silence me. I don’t want to be like them. The thought slows my mind for some moments. Yet, I want to act like them and punish them. Defeated again by Edna, I chose to leave the hut and wander in the mountain behind the village. I find a place from where there is a fine view over the river. Under the bright sun, it gleams like a metallic band, and I remember that I ate nothing this morning. Each day I came here, I stayed until it was almost dark; now I have to return earlier. I take my shirt down, and let the sun play on my skin.
My mind slips in the past, yet this time instead of Selma, it’s Mina who disturbs my thoughts. I still remember the first night she came into Edna’s hut. She wanted to join me inside my sleeping bag. I refused her, and she placed a fur along me, and lay there. In one moment of inattention from me, she placed her palm on my neck. Our minds linked, but I shook my head in anger and the link dropped. She did not disturb me again, before I fell asleep but, in the morning, I woke up with her hand on my neck. I pushed it away, and ignored her when she asked me if I wanted to eat.
A few days later, she found how to open my sleeping bag, and I woke up with her naked boy leaning on me. For a few moments, I thought that she was Selma, and my hand moved to caress her. I was lucky that she did not wake. I don’t think that I would have been able to reject her, if she would have started to stir me. It was not only my memory of making love with her during our Communion; it was that she was the only woman with whom I made love with in more than a year. There was no way to keep her away, but the next morning I was aware of who was lying next to me.
From the day when Selma left the village, each evening, Nara came and pissed me off with a request for a Communion.
“We are stronger together, Vlad,” she says, her eyes boring into mine. She is like a cobra waiting for an opening to inoculate her venom into my mind, and I feel the tendrils of her mind searching for a weak spot. By whatever reason, I escaped unscathed from her attempts, just that today I feel her more desperate than before. She will leave tomorrow.
“You, me and Selma?”
“All of us. Selma will help the Vlahins and Kalachs to come closer. She will deliver the peace we need. She is a strong woman.”
Her voice is so genuine yet, deep inside me, I know that she has a second agenda, one that touches me, in a way that stays hidden. Once, Mina hinted to me that Nara has not much love for me. I don’t know why she warned me, maybe because she also has a second agenda that matches Nara’s. They work together; it was clear from that night when they perverted Selma’a mind during a Communion. A good cop, bad cop strategy. In fact, what Nara wants from me is a Communion that will give her even more power to pervert even more minds. I am precious to them only because I can help them gather more Amber Stones, but nothing would convince me to help this witch become even stronger. I already did a mistake with Mina but, at that time, I was unaware of their evil minds.
“We need all the strength we can gather, and the shamans have an important game to play.” Nara comes closer and takes my hands in hers. Before I could react, she speaks inside my mind. “I can take you inside the Third River of Thought and show you the Moon and what you name the Milky Way. You are a strong shaman, Vlad, but you need my help to evolve.” Her voice is so unctuous and gentle when pronouncing my name, is as if she wants to create some invisible bonds between us.
But it’s not her inner voice or that insidious promise of evolving which paralyzes my mind, it’s that mention of being able to see the Milky Way. The temptation is so strong that I feel too late the tendrils of her mind sneaking inside my mind.
“Stay we me, Vlad,” she whispers. “Together we can accomplish so many things. Like this:” An image of Earth seen from space fills my mind. “You always wanted to fly. Your people use things to fly. We use our mind. It’s easier. It’s clean.” Her arm moves around my neck, pulling me closer to her. “See how beautiful is our place seen from above.” The image changes, and we move around Earth. I see now North America, then East Asia. Logically, I know that we are not traveling through the Rivers, and those images are from her memory, but I feel subdued. I want to see more. Her lips touch mine. I try to move, but she keeps me in her grip. “Let’s have the Communion, Vlad, and then we can travel together as far as you want.” I can’t move, but that at least helps my last vestige of self preservation to keep them tight. “After that you will decide if a High Communion will help us even more. There is nothing more pleasant and more enlightening than it.” She is restraining me inside a delicate net of filaments that stretches across my mind, and any hope of easy escape vanishes. “You and I were born for a high purpose, Vlad. The Mother gave us power to set things right in this world. That’s why she sent you here. Moira and Edna saw you in their Trance Dreams, but they never understood your higher purpose. Join me, Vlad.” Her lips are trying to incentivize me, as is her hand caressing my neck.
“What about Selma?” I am finally able to speak inside, and I am trying the same strategy I used to disconcert the Head: ask unexpected questions.
“Selma was only stopping your evolution, and her purpose was to change the Kalachs. You need a stronger shamane. I will set now the course of your evolution, and Mina will help you further. She will be a good mate for you. She is your mate, Vlad. You have to honor her. That’s the Mother’s will.” The pressure inside my mind is growing; Nara has more tendrils to insert in my brain than I even thought.
“How can we have a Communion without that potion Moira gave to me?”
“I am stronger, Vlad. I don’t need a potion to navigate the Rivers. Join me, and you will become stronger too. Any effort of evolution is rewarding. Join me, Vlad.” Her voice is no more seductive, she speaks now like a mother to her child.
“I still have a chance,” I say in a language that she can’t understand. That disconcerts her, for a moment, and the pressure from that net of tendrils enclosing my mind becomes weaker. It takes her no more than a few seconds to tighten it back.
A tingle plays the skin on my back, another hand is pressing on my spine. “Stay calm,” Mina whispers inside my mind too, and some more tendrils sneak inside me. “Don’t oppose me. I am here to help you.” Her voice is as seductive as Nara’s, and I am split between two shamanes each stronger than me.
“Mina joined us,” Nara says, and before I could react, pain shots to my brain. Profiting from my weakness, Nara inserts herself even more inside my mind. “I asked you to reason; now I ask you to obey.”
“No!” Mina says in a fierce voice. “You must not give in to the pain.” I struggle to bring myself under control, and I hope that something can be done. “You need to build a defense wall. You already built one when she entered your mind that night. You know how to do it.”
I don’t know exactly what I am doing, but the pain seems to subside.
“As the Great Shamane, I have other ways to bring you to senses. I’m going to open you up, Vlad, and learn any secret you possess,” Nara promises. “Mina will help me and we’ll see how resistant you are then. Communions can be done through pain too. I offered you cooperation and help, now you will learn pain and obeisance. I will not leave until you obey me and accept the Communion.” Her face appears in my mind, the same way the Head was torturing me before.
Nara smiles, her eyes sparkling as if she detected my defenses and found them worthless. “Such a weak wall will not help you much. Let’s see what else you have to protect your mind,” the shamane whispers, and my body whirls around and then flattened against the floor. I know that I am not moving, and that everything is just a mind game, yet the impact leaves me breathless in the real world. And the pain feels so real. A circle of fire engulfs my waist, the flames black and noxious. They climb slowly toward my chest. The pain is unspeakable, but before the blackness could take me, the fire vanishes. “Join me. Now!” I have the feeling of entering, against my will, into the second River of Thought. “See, Vlad. It was not so hard.”
“River send me back,” I whisper without knowing why, and I feel two forces acting on me. One tries to expulse me from the River, the second tries to pull me out. And the River seems to help me too.
“I am behind you,” Mina whispers, and I understand that she is the one pulling me.
Nara roars with anger, and she sends a shock of fire through my brain. After that, there was nothing but pain and fear, and a need to sleep forever.
“She is gone.” Mina caresses my face. I am lying down, my head in her lap. “Few can resist the pressure of Nara’s mind.” I try to stand, but I feel too weak. “Don’t try to move.”
“Did we have the Communion?”
“No.”
“Are the Ring Shamanes so evil to use torture?”
“Nara doesn’t mean the whole Ring,” Mina says, evasively.
“Nara is the Grand Shamane and you two are the most powerful shamanes in the Vlahin world. You used your power to torture me for your personal advantage.”
“I helped you how much I could.”
“You did not help me; you played me. You are so young, and even worse than Nara. I wonder how much evil will spread from you when you reach her age.”
“I am sorry that I could not help more, but I stopped the Communion.”
“You stopped nothing.”
“She is right.” The Head appears right in front of me, and our eyes lock. “You are weak and ignorant and Nara would have broken your mind without Mina’s help.”
“You just want Mina in my bed. It will not happen,” I retort, remembering his past comments about Malva and Selma, when he pushed me to seduce them.
“That was a test not a push. One of the few you had passed.” He eyes me speculatively, like a wolf scrutinizing a deer.
“And now?” I growl, and even to me looks strange that I can fill a soundless communication, happening inside my mind, with a characteristic of a real sound. Everything feels discordant and wrong. “Is this another test?” I ask, my voice normal again.
“You need to grow up.” His words stir a tightness between my eyes, as if my third eye tries to become awake. “Ah, you remember it.” The Head grows arms, and his forefinger touches a place between his eyes, which look now larger. “Are you afraid of your mate?” The Head laughs, and his laughter looks warm to me, as if he did not really tried to mock.
“I love another woman, and Mina is not my mate.”
“Vlad, with whom are you talking?” Mina asks, and I realize that she is inside my mind.
“Get out of my mind.”
“I am healing you. With whom are you speaking?” she repeats.
“Nobody.”
“I see a floating head who is speaking to you.”
“It’s just an unwanted excrescence of my mind. A boring one.”
“No, it’s something foreign, and it’s not for the first time I see it.”
“She helped you, and she still tries to help you, but it will be useless if you don’t want to help yourself,” the Head says and vanishes before I could speak again.
“Mina, why did you help me?” I ask, involuntarily.
“You are my mate.”
You did not want Nara to become stronger than you. As with the Head, I think in my mother tongue, so she can’t understand, pretending to believe her. I am too tired and weak, and before I can think more, and curse her, I am falling asleep.
Chapter 22 - Vlad
Two days later, I decide that I had enough, and went to see Moira. I don’t want to be a pawn in anyone’s game. Mina is more powerful than me, and she may use her power like Nara did it. The pain is still fresh in my mind, but is not pain which frightens me the most, is the feeling that I can become like Selma, an automaton guided by the wicked will of the shamanes. I still trust Edna and Moira, but there is no way to let a Ring Shamane sleeps so close to me.
“Can I move into your house?” I ask.
“We are glad to host you, buy Mina will move here too.” Moira guessed from the first moment what I really want.
“Is there no way to escape her?”
“Mina is a better person than I thought a few days ago, and she is your mate.”
“She is not,” I growl.
“Vlad,” Moira says gently, “you are mated. I know how it happened, as well as you, but it changes nothing. A union made by the Grand Shamane, can be annulled only by her. You have six months to decide. It’s up to you to make them pleasant or not, or at least civilized.”
Moira shuns me the same subtle way Edna does each time I ask her to evacuate Mina from our hut. How can I ask more, after Moira implied that I am an uncivilized man? Nervous, I do as in my other days before, and find refuge in the mountains behind the village.
