The old souls’ chronicles 5 : grief’s stronghold 2 November 2025
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When Aron reaches his house, he feels that strange foreboding though laced with excitement. He had not spoken about the foreboding with Tony as they had only worked on the initial feelings of grief together but he could recognise it from the scriptures of it that he had got on the black market. Tony did not know it but he and Hegat were not the only ones who carried the forbidden feelings that were not to use with the youngsters. There were other old souls that did not abide by the rules because they lived in between the old and the new worlds. They did not go completely against the system like he had attempted to do by aging and actually resorting to real food. They just lived in between, got sustenance from the transformation of energy and slowing their aging process but without keeping the chancellor’s prescribed liquid in their veins to remain young forever.
Aron opened the door and once again the preternatural form of his wife came to greet him at the door. He took the pulse tube and shot the grief into his veins. The sorrow that ensued was unsurmountable, and he caved in like a wick abandoning its flame, dragged under by the liquid released by the candle. All life seemed to have escaped his body and there was no healing to come from Tony’s hands like when he had first administered grief to him through his hands, mind and heart. His eyes searing with pain, Aron looked around the room wondering where the ethereal form of his wife had gone. All of a sudden, it seemed like she was darting in and out all over the room, jumping from one place to another. Each time he saw her, it was like his heart was yanked out of his body and the tears were like flames dousing his cheeks, his throat and his heart just below.
He winced and tried clearing his eyesight each time but the searing was back every time he saw her. He tried to rise from where he had fallen but to no avail. It was like he did not have legs anymore but was just a mass of grief, flames and a jellylike body. He wished he had not given in to his folly of experimenting such a strong sensation on his own and what more in the house where his wife had died, as she no longer wanted to continue living. It was strange that his wife, such a young one who was much younger than him, had given in to the same troubles that Tony had been going through. She was no old soul so why had this nostalgia and desire to die befallen her? Aron had thought that through the knowledge of grief he could understand what she had gone through but it was all too debilitating for him. He felt his heart burn with the grief until he could stand it no more. I am going to die here all alone, he thought before he fainted….
Soul Fillet 20 September 2025 (translation of a short story called “Filet de soul” written in French on 8th March 2011 – See the original here or copy and follow this link https://geethabalvannanathan.com/2011/03/15/filet-de-soul/)
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She struggled, but it seemed useless, as the net enclosed her on all sides, fitting her body like a glove. The antimatter of its braiding was of the same ilk as her own immaterial body, and so she was unable to go through it. She watched helpless the ectoplasms of the ghost ship slowly hoist her towards them. She remembered the advice of her grandparents, who had been her guardians since her parents' death, and told herself she should have listened to them and not ventured so far from her sweet native soulitude.
It was all the fault of that cursed spring, of that nutty unicorn illusion, and of her tightrope-walker nature, which never resisted the urge to swing in the air between two equally deep chasms. The black holes of the fiery soular system she had entered by mistake or stubbornness—she no longer remembered—and which had finally disembodied her after a burn a thousand times more intense than unicorn fever had struck her down.
Yet all the signs had been there: the panicked looks of those who had just learned the rite of passage from the customs officer, the biting cold escaping through the only window to the other world—placed so high that it was impossible to look through the glass, the smell of sulfur that accompanied each explosion of the beings passing through the door, of which only a pyrography remained, each aligned alongside the others made before it. In short, a spectacle that would have dampened the fantasies of even the most ardent pioneer, but she had carried on, drawn by the idea of this stellar discovery.
The snub-nosed customs officer who sat counting his money at the edge of the two worlds had kept making her fill out so much paperwork that she almost ended up with the wrong papers. "What are all these delaying tactics?" she had exclaimed, exasperated, to which he replied that this was the price—yes, one always had to come back to the price in this world—of passage to the other world. They had to think carefully, and these weren't so much delaying tactics as preparatory tactics for a decision that would be final.
As a good intermediary for the overlord of this world who transmitted his orders to him through the hollow horn of a unicorn of other times, he took it upon himself to tire out those determined to pass into the other world so that only those who could no longer be malleable puppets would finally take the plunge. In any case thought the lord, looking at his navel, which needed a lot of vassal care to keep it from detaching itself from his body, this kind of people would be of no use to him because they would not be obedient vassals. For it took blindly obedient beings to caress the motionless body of the lord, which was becoming more and more flaccid and incapable of containing this quivering bit of flesh in the middle. The massage had to be done in concentric circles starting from the extremity of the body and in tighter circles to get closer to this purplish navel and the task became not only more exhausting but also more repugnant. Indeed, through immobility the lord became an enormous fatty mass whose deadly effluvia were exacerbated by the arrival of spring and reaching the extremities to attempt to execute at least one circle became an increasingly impossible task during the lifetime of each vassal. Suffice to say that the overlord was very difficult for any being to grasp, and she told herself that any other fate would be better than being condemned to grasp this monster, especially since spring was fast approaching.
The manoeuvres continued for quite some time, and the bitter retorts from both sides almost put her in the bad books of the customs officer with the snub-nosed face and the dead eyes, but in the end she managed to finalize her efforts. All that remained, the customs officer had told her at the end, was to get rid of the rest of the sinful confessions in order to complete the rite of passage. Turning to him to ask what that meant, she saw a sadistic glint finally rekindle the dead fish gaze of the customs officer who told her with a grim smile that she was going to be burned with a blowtorch so that the sinful and the flesh would detach from her and she would return ethereal to the other world leaving her remains as an ornament on the wall of the "lament asians". She had a moment of panic but it was too late, it was the price to pay she told herself, resigned, and moved forward towards the door made of blowtorches.
She remembered an unbearable burning sensation accompanied by a deafening explosion, and the next moment she was floating weightlessly in a hushed space whose silence and thick darkness were broken only here and there by gentle lapping and rays of intense luminosity that strangely illuminated nothing but themselves, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. She barely had time to feel, or even see, other immaterial beings floating near her before a mass of ropes had been thrown over her and she was being pulled inexorably toward the ghost ship. Once hoisted aboard, she was roughly lifted, and what was her surprise to come face to face with a now-familiar face—a rhinopithecus, she thought, before losing consciousness.
When she came to, an ectoplasmic version of the overlord stood limp before her and beside her the ectoplasm of the customs officer was slowly and deliberately rubbing a huge blade against a black hole. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he turned to the overlord and asked him.
The old souls chronicles 4 : pulsing grief 29 April 2024
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Tony wonders whether Aron is aware that he has now fully become a different being from the other youngsters and young adults. Aron sees in his searching eyes the unspoken interrogation.
- I always was different and even wondered if I was a freak because I had these stronger feelings that were considered as undesirable within my community.
- You are not a freak, Aron. You feel more than others although nothing as near to what we old timers felt, the feelings that all of the world had before strong negative emotions were frowned upon. We never imagined that things would go as far as to stop us even from grieving the death of our loved ones. Now we are just relegated to the role of donors of “funny feels”, “happy feels”, “quirky feels”. In brief anything that is more on the happiness scale and nothing that can touch the extreme sadness scale
- I know what you mean. I have been studying you and your wife for some time now before you went rogue and disappeared. It was a godsend when I learnt of your presence in that restaurant. What an opportunity to finally meet you and make the request for the deeper emotions.
- Why did you want to access this range of emotions?
- Ever since my wife died, I have been having this strange bubbling of emotions that felt like nothing I ever experienced before. Sometimes it’s like a rock was laid on my chest while I was sleeping. I could barely breathe and felt like a pit in my stomach but nothing near what I felt when you gave me the pulse.
- We normally don’t give that range of emotions to youngsters like you because they have a very strong effect on your psyche. With the seclusion of the deeper range of sad emotions, there aren’t many psychologists left so it is difficult to get regular appointments with one.
- I don’t need a psychologist. I can handle my emotions
- Very well. Here is the pulse tube which I have filled with the energetic imprint of the grief I pulsed through to you. Make sure nobody else puts their hands on it and call me if you are in too much pain. I will come as quickly as I can to grant you the solace.
Aron takes the tube containing the precious pulse and bids Tony farewell before leaving the library. As he is on his way back to his home, he thinks about his wife that he might see again in her preternatural form. He decides that he will let himself feel the full extent of the grief as experienced with the help of Tony. This time, he would be using the pulser and would not have Tony’s rapid intervention with soothing solace but he knows he needs to do this for his own sanity. No more half-lived emotions dragging him into a recurring downward spiral. It is now the time to experience it fully within his own house, while looking upon the ethereal form of his wife and put this behind him forever.
The Cleopatra Tales 10: Elevating the sah
24 February 2023
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Rise up thou Geetha, this. Stand up thou mighty one being strong. Sit thou with the gods, do thou that which did Hathor in the great house in Annu.
Thou hast received thy sah, not shall be fettered thy foot in heaven, not shalt thou be turned back upon earth
Hail to thee, Geetha, on this thy day [when] thou art standing before Nut [as]
she cometh from the cast, [when] thou art endued with this thy sah among the souls.
[Her] duration of life is eternity, her limit of life is everlastingness in her sah.
I am a sah with her soul.
Reading of the Egyptian prayer / incantation
Elixir part 1 – The Truth of the Elixir29 May 2022
Courtesy Daily Telegraph
She looked behind her fleetingly trying to assess how far her assailant was. Not more than 90 seconds before he would be able to seize her. She stomped with her right foot the earth under her feet while thinking at the same time of being inside the earth. No sooner had she done that than her body sank into the ground dropping at a very high speed. She thought of the steps of soil and they materialised under her feet. She ran quickly using one step after the other and leapt onto the one leading her out, on the other side of the river where her assailant, general Stein, had been stalking her.
The Elixir was within a vial knotted closely into the hem of her shirt. She clutched at it frantically, needing to assess whether it had opened and spilt over. It was safely knotted, lid intact, into her clothing. Her eyes grew misty when she remembered how her mother had sacrificed the remaining years she had to live just so that she could be able to make the Elixir and work on making more so that more people who were dying could be saved.
The Elixir had a restorative nature allowing it not only to provide more years of life to those dying but also to heal the organs within the body of the sick persons it was administered to.
She had seen time and time again how the elderly were happy to grant the remaining years of their life to their ailing children or grandchildren. All the Elixirs she had made had been used. Only the one she had made from her mother’s remaining years was kept close to her heart. Nobody had ever been able to understand how she made the Elixirs and she had kept the secret close to her. When the word had started coming out, she had received offers from pharmaceutical companies but she knew well enough that they would only buy her technique in order to bury it as those companies thrived on the sickness and death of people and had no intention of actually making Elixirs to heal people.
She thought again about what she had created. It would seem like the holy Grail when you thought of it but it did have some side effects: it held some of the memories of the deceased and it seemed that those were in majority memories of trauma or other levels of pain. These memories kicked in when anyone given the Elixir was experiencing any level of anger or stress. Upon studying this phenomenon, she realised that these memories were stored in some pockets of the Elixir which had a slight discoloration of the pearls of blood around it. She needed to be able to isolate this from the rest of the Elixir without foregoing any of the years contained in it.
She looked at where general Stein was looking at her, seething with anger that she had again escaped him. He had never pursued her with any offers, unlike the pharmaceutical companies. He simply wanted to get from her the secret of creating the Elixir so that he could use it on the children of his elite clientele. Ever since he had left the army, his only scope in life had been to earn as much riches as he could and Amelia’s invention represented a fantastic opportunity to do so. Back in Melancholy where he visited his rich clients, the parents were dealing with a very difficult situation as all their children were either neurasthenic or suicidal and he knew from observing Amelia’s work that the Elixir would not only extend the life of those who took it but would also make those who took it wish to live a beautiful life
Al-Nil - Armand Amar
Bitter happenings
of bleak landscapes of the mind
frozen in the core
Crisp thoughts of morrows
numbing the flow of heartbeats
biting raw of flesh
Icy winds swept fast
through the ebb and flow of time
They spelt love’s decline
Cool winter mornings
Chill of a frosty sunshine
dawned upon our souls
A dip into hope
Drops of wonder cut through doubt
A dive into faith
Your hands are so cold
Warm them upon my bosom
Pray fall into heart
Reading of the poem:
She looked around her taking in the leaves in the small pots and the small budding white flowers growing slowly in between. This was not exactly what she had expected when she had emerged from her sleep like state. She knew this would be temporary, however, so she was not too worried about it. The flat was neat and sparsely decorated. It was a far cry from the wilderness she was used to or the luxurious surroundings she had dwelt in on occasion, but this would do for now. She wondered how her twin was living and whether he had awoken too from the sleep like state that he must have been in too. This was not the first time that she would be awake before him though, so she did not dwell too much on this thought nor did she attempt connecting with him. She would have time to do that later.
The last time she had awoken before him it had not been a good age. The world had been in patriarchy mode and her ways of the old did not seem suited to the times. She remembered with some displeasure the difficulties of that era and the near helplessness she had experienced where her physical body had not only been a point of weakness, but an actual hindrance given the limited freedom that women had then. She had travelled long and far to reach the area where recounts of her twin had emerged. She knew quite well by then the tell-tale signs: The fantastic tales, the miracles, the huge gathering of followers and the automatic unrest that accompanied this within the rulers of that time. Every time her twin had manifested on Earth, whether it was in Mesopotamia or Ancient Egypt or the land of the two seas, he could not help but provoke the established order and create problems for both of them.
In comparison her methods had always been more discreet, working within the shadows, mostly with the female population, never basking in the light. There were always two sides to a story like there were two ways of approaching matters and hers had always been the way of the silent stream that slowly erodes the foundations of mighty dwellings rather than the direct towering waters that her twin had always loved to raise against the norms of each era. Well she thought to herself, the last time had not gone so well for him and even their father-mother source had not saved him from the trouble he had got them into. As a female with child, she had been spared and did not go through the fate her twin underwent. In fact, barely anyone noticed her contribution to the upheaval of that era and she did not even figure in any historical recounts or barely as a side figure, an afterthought and mostly in a negative light. It was always her twin who was in the limelight and she realised that he might as well given how he loved it while she preferred the shadows.
The keepers of the secrets of the Source had sent them as messengers, each in their own way allowing humans to discover themselves, to allow them to delve into their light as well as their shadows until they could realise that neither was more worthwhile. The idea was for them to allow humans to understand that each being or inanimate object was just a manifestation of the flux that emanated from the Source, that both light and dark were just different perceptions of the same energy that encompassed all and permeated from within everything. She naturally identified with the female side of humans as her star soul was the moon and had therefore chosen the shadows. Her twin had chosen to represent the light and he had gotten so infatuated with it that he no longer remembered at every human manifestation that he was only partly light. She on the other hand had never been dazzled neither with the light nor with the shadows and remembered that their original mission was to allow this Universe to achieve balance. In every era she had incarnated within, she made it a point to achieve that and in the age of patriarchy, this had mainly become a work linked with liberating women from their bondage whether internal or forced upon them externally. Wherever she went, the liberation of women ensued whether slowly and steadily or in outbursts.
It pained her to think that this play of light and dark had made human beings reach incredible levels of hate and bigotry and that the rules that the source had enacted within the minds of the initial messengers had all been diverted into rigid and ridiculous sets of dogma that allowed humans to fight and kill each other in all impunity. She was not very fond of bloodshed, not even when she knew that it was sometimes necessary to rejuvenate the planet they were on and allow for the recycling of those souls which had gotten too dense to allow the others to progress. She was of a playful nature in general and had found it very funny to diffuse in the minds of humans a representation of the world of shadows. Owing to the way patriarchy had been dominant in the world, however, this representation took on a male nature rather than a female one and with the fertile imagination of humans, it became a monstrous figure with horns and hooves, something between an animal and a human being.
She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at the thought of it. According to humans, the one who lurked in the world of shadows was a wicked being called the devil and he had a pointy tail, cloven hooves, wild looking horns and terribly pointy teeth. Above all he was supposed to tower over human beings and roast them with the fires of a place humans had fearfully invented and named hell. At the opposite side of that, there was supposedly a place where all souls that had been redeemed would be taken if they submitted to and worshipped their saviour, her light-loving twin. The humans had lovingly named that place heaven and each of them had their own personal idea of how beautiful this place would be although for most, it was likened to a garden with everlasting bounties. She laughed at the thought of this childish inclination but then sighed at the thought of the task that awaited. Perhaps she should have incarnated into something more akin to what they were expecting so she could be more convincing in her task. After all, better the Devil you know…
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