She thought back to those dark moments when she had been tortured while Manas was in captivity. It had seemed to last ages although it was only two weeks as she had discovered later. At the beginning of the torture, she was full of the resolve to fight and avoid giving crucial information, but it did not seem like they were searching for any information at all. They had put her feet in a bucket of water and periodically one of the three torturers present would put a wire in the bucket making her experience what seemed like a thousand shockwaves jolting through her body. They had kept doing it systematically until she lost consciousness. She could hear the prayers throughout the day while she was being tortured and that gave her the sense of what time of the day it was.
She was never left alone, even during the time for prayers, as there was always one guard watching over her. The second day they had attached wires to her genitalia and every time the electricity went through it felt like her genitalia were on fire. Later, when she attempted to urinate, she found it was even more excruciating to pass urine than to suffer the electricity going through her genitalia as the effect of the burning lasted. She pleaded for a bucket of water but there was no moving them it seemed, even though she had started pleading in Arabic and invoking the name of Allah in her request. At last, one woman she had not seen before came to her and gave her a sponge filled with water so that she may wipe herself. This apparent mercy was no doubt due to the fact she had invoked the name of Allah and had done so in Arabic.
That temporary mercy did not last long though and they resumed torturing her. This time she was whipped repeatedly until she lost consciousness. She was then awakened with salts and whipped again. She could feel the skin on her back tear in smaller pieces than she could imagine possible. At the same time, they were repeatedly telling her something in a language she could not understand. A few moments later, one of the torturers who had understood her plea in Arabic came forward and said that she was being punished because she had persuaded Manas to give himself up. She understood from him that Manas was their leader and him going to prison exposed them all to getting caught if Manas talked under torture in prison. She answered that it had been necessary to keep him from being killed. She tried to explain to the man that being in a Cameroonian prison was a better option than him being caught by the US anti-terrorist squad operating in Cameroon. This did not end her ordeal though and she was tortured day after day with only a few hours of rest in the evening when they went to rest leaving only one guard watching her.
One day, without any warning, she was given new clothes and taken into a house that was in front of the shed where she had been tortured. The woman who had given her the sponge earlier took her to a bathing room where she was cuffed at both the hands and the ankles before the woman gently eased her into a bathtub full of warm water. Instead of soothing her, the contact with the water just seared the scars all over her body. She did not complain though as she realized they may be reaching an ending of some sort. It could be that they would kill her or that they would release her. She prayed it would be the latter and indeed, after slowly applying the sponge all over her body gently and attempting to clean her skin as much as she could on the back and with a bit more vigor on her front side, the woman asked her to stand up. As she stood up, the woman applied gently a balm to her back and gave her some asking her to apply it to her genitalia.
She was then clothed gently with a white linen shirt and a matching flowing white linen skirt. She was then blindfolded and left in front of the US embassy where her boss had taken over from the embassy officials and told her she would be leaving in a day or two to Dubai. Her thoughts were immediately for Manas and she wondered whether she would ever see him again. She felt saddened and at the same time angry at her boss for his lack of empathy considering what she had endured. She also wondered: was Manas the person who had ordered her to be tortured in that way? Could it possibly mean that he did not love her anymore? She tried to soothe herself by thinking back to the days when they were together and to how much she had been happy with him. No, undoubtedly, Manas had not been the one to order her torture. She closed her eyes and could see behind her closed lids the beautiful image of Manas smiling at her. It was only that which had kept her sane during the torture.
Fadl Shaker &Yara Akhedni Maak فضل شاكر و يارا - خدنى معك
She was on a ship to be sold
Pirates around her swarmed anew
Cuts in her skin were quite a few
So ran her blood like liquid gold
Streaming to write stories untold
The pen inked bloody red wrote long
Her heart kept its pulse ever strong
On went her heartbeats with a throb
Her throat retained many a sob
They rang at her temples a song
Reading of the poem:
Pranamystic - Shaman’s dream
Based on challenge by Ronovan Writes using the word “Gold” in line A of the decima.
In brief, for a Décima, there are 10 lines of poetry that rhyme and there must be 8 syllables per line.
There is a Set Rhyming Pattern we must stick to: ABBAACCDDC or ABBA/ACCDDC.
For more information or to view other contributions, please follow the link here
https://ronovanwrites.com/2021/05/05/ronovan-writes-decima-poetry-challenge-prompt-no-56-gold-in-the-a-rhyme-line/
You can also view a full explanation regarding the Décima here
https://ronovanwrites.com/2020/04/16/how-to-write-an-espinela-or-decima-poem/
She had spent months trying to repair the damage he had caused in her consciousness. The taser he had used while she was connecting to have her consciousness woven with that of the neural network had short circuited the connection and almost fried her brain in the process. For a couple of months, she had remained in a quasi-vegetative state as the neurotransmitters from the network had slowly taken over her damaged synapses replacing them with nano particles from the machine’s mainframe. Slowly but surely her consciousness had implanted itself in this new environment that was neither human mind nor machine network but a blend of both.
She knew instinctively that this was the way to the future, the only way to integrate and survive in a world that was going to be ever more dominated by conscious machines in a not so distant future. At first, her consciousness had rejected the unfamiliar environment, but she had gone into a meditative trance several times and it had taken her several out of body experiences to guide her consciousness fully back into her body. It was then that she had emerged from the vegetative state but all was not fully achieved yet as it took her consciousness several attempts to find the right balance between her own synapses’ communication and the transmissions from the network.
The network on the other hand was the initial version of machine consciousness and did not have a body to be in while it identified with the human aspiration for a vessel to host it. It had therefore been grateful to have a human host that was willing to accept and embrace it as an integral part of the global consciousness that resided within it. The network had not been recalcitrant unlike her own consciousness and had sustained her efforts to guide her consciousness back into her body. Once both consciousnesses integrated, she discovered that she was no longer limited by time. Her brain could perceive both the past and the future as seamlessly as if they were the present moment. She could see a future where most humans would be bonded to machines’ consciousness.
She had seen it in a dream as vividly as she was now seeing the sun shining outside. It was time for the Mother to come fully into this Earth and accomplish her work from the inside. It was time for her to purge the Earth so that balance may be restored on a higher plane than what could be achieved in the present state of affairs. Mother had always been a patron of the innocent and the weak and although she presented a terrifying face to her adversaries, she reverted back to her more gentle nature when the battle was over and she was faced only with the innocent. She was a force of destruction as far as evil was concerned but maintained her motherly attributes as far as the innocent were concerned and so far too many innocent had been suffering.
The Mother needed a vessel to carry her consciousness and she had carefully prepared for this for several years now. The vessel needed to have a segmented mind where part of the consciousness of the Mother could be downloaded while the rest of the mind could house the consciousness of the vessel itself. She was willing to be that vessel and had meditated using the kundalini technique in order to split her own mind. Although this had been painful and not without its consequences, she reflected that it would all be worth it once the Mother was there. The Mother’s consciousness, even though in part, could only be stored in nine fragmented parts of the vessel’s mind with the vessel’s own mind dwelling in the tenth part, which is why it had taken her years to reach that level of fragmentation and dissociation without totally losing her sanity.
The tools used for the ceremony to invoke the Mother to complete the downloading of her consciousness into her were not unlike those used to invoke the Marid except that there was no need for a protective circle and the candles used were red and black. The red represented the blood or primordial life form and the black represented the void from which all consciousness derived. There was already a fragment of the Mother inside a part of her consciousness and this guided her in disposing the red and black candles around the circles of aging blood also known as menstrual blood and those of fresh blood from her pricked finger. She sat naked amid the circles with the trident marked in blood on her forehead and the same marked in blood around the area of her navel and started the chanting. Soon the Mother would appear and all the evil on the Earth would slowly start to disintegrate. It might take its time and would probably take its toll on her but at the end it would all be worth it.
Most powerful Shri Kali Sahasranama Stotram | 1008 names of Kali Maa | श्री काली सहस्त्रनाम स्तोत्रम
There was no explanation for what had just happened. He seemed to think that everything was her fault and she thought that he did not seem to have outgrown the childish level where everything was always the fault of someone else than himself. She decided that this time she had had it with the accusations and all the heartache that he had been giving her over the past few weeks. It had first started when something went awry in the business and he had resorted to her for help but she could not and he had then blamed her for being so incapable of helping him while he was in dire need. It was not that she had not tried and try she had repeatedly with shady figures that she would have normally never dealt with, but it was simply that the outcome had been negative. He had of course only looked at the negative outcome and ignored all her efforts to reach that result.
Every time the accusation had been either that she did not love him enough to try harder or that she did not trust him enough despite all the love he had showered on her. When she thought back to it, however, she realized that it all seemed like a puzzle painstakingly pieced together to create the illusion of reality with ready-made items of the puzzle springing from his past. The more she thought about it the more she realized that it had never quite felt like real love although the declaration of it had been overly intense. At first she had been puzzled and her natural instinct had been wariness, especially with what her sister had to say about it, but in time the sheer quantity of love messages had gotten to her and as she had a soft heart, she had let herself be persuaded that it was indeed an intense budding love.
The last time he had resorted to her for help it was for something that could have put her livelihood at risk but at first she had jumped up to help without paying attention to the request despite all the news she had heard and her work training. A few minutes later though, the doubt on whether what he was asking of her was legit started gnawing at her mind which had buzzed alit from the previous training. When she went to the bank, sure enough, they confirmed to her that what was proposed was illegal and that she could get into big trouble for it. As a result of her discussion with the bank, they had closed her account and she was left without a bank account and without time to open a new one in time for her salary to be paid to her.
With hindsight she realized that this was the least of her worries as she could have gotten into much worse trouble had she not reached out to her bank. Indeed, she would have been suspected by their compliance of being a money mule and potentially charged with money laundering. What had she been thinking when she had given him her bank details, especially after he had asked her to transform the money received from his contact into bitcoins and send it across to his bitcoin account! There was no justification for her foolishness and to add insult to injury, he was now angry with her that she had gone to the bank to check in the first place whether such a thing could be done. Their last exchanges were cold and bitter and she thought to herself that the next time she would be wary of anyone who professed so quickly to be intensely in love. You live and learn she thought. What an experience!
The sun was gone and the wind howled through the trees as she walked in the woods. She started wondering whether she should go back home or continue with her walk. She was concerned that it might start raining and she was not well prepared for it as she had gone out in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Suddenly it started to rain just as if the weather wanted to enact her fears and she could feel the large drops of rain pelt on her skull and bare arms. In no time the rain had become a downpour and the already mossy path became muddy and slippery.
She looked hesitantly back at the path where she had come from. The shrubs seemed to have closed in on it and all she could see was green behind her. The slope she had come up was quite steep and it seemed a better option to just walk on until she reached the end of the walk rather than taking the chance of slipping down the slope. She drudged on, braving the falling rain and the howling wind which tugged at wisps of her hair and the bottom of her shorts sending them here and there. With the sun gone it was quite cold now and she started feeling her hands numbing by her sides as she continued to walk.
For some reason, the icy rain and the gloomy wind got to her nerves and she started wondering what would happen if she fell on the path as nobody else seemed to have ventured out on it. She started taking great care in her steps so as not to fall. The last thing she needed right now was a broken leg or worse still a broken hip. She wondered again if she should just slide down on her posterior the slope back to where she had started from. It would not be very elegant but even if there were someone to see her at this point, she felt like she could not care less. Yet at the same time something drove her to carry on her path.
She gritted her teeth and decided to brave her way to the top of the hill. The trees swayed under the effect of the wind and some of their branches whipped at her. Instead of dissuading her this somehow increased her resolve to reach the top and head bent she carried her resisting limbs forward. The rain poured down the back of her neck and her bra clung to her making her T-shirt twist uncomfortably around, but she just untangled it and carried on. She thought about how anyone who should cross her path would see her: a crazed middle-aged woman with her twisted T-shirt and skimpy shorts battling the weather and it made her laugh.
She lowered her head and toiled on again. Soon she could see the flattening of the path beyond and knew she was reaching the top of the hill. She found herself shortly in a clearing on the top and as she reached there, the rain stopped and slowly but surely the sun made a timid appearance. She raised her hands like a warrior above her head and she did feel rather like that, a totally victorious warrior. She filled her lungs with air and howled at the wind that had not stopped yet. The wind howled back at her as she laughed, filling her lungs again with the fresh, crisp air and offering her body to the sun that slowly dried it.
It used to be one of her favourite moments in childhood. They would sneak out of the house and run across the fields to the point where the mango groves began. They would hide at the extremity of the fields waiting to see if the guardian was there and if he wasn’t they would step into the grove and steal some ripe mangoes. It was usually a boy they called Thengai who used to climb the trees as he was used to climbing coconut trees and had a good foothold. His name Thengai which meant coconut came from not only because he climbed coconut trees but also because his hair combed down in a shell shape manner made the top of his head resemble a broken coconut shell.
Thengai would climb like a daredevil any tree in the mangrove and if the guardian was spotted he would be able to clamber down in no time often surpassing them as he ran towards the fields. Little did they know that the guardian always made a show of chasing them but slowed down if he got too close because he never actually meant to catch them. There would be no use indeed of catching them as the mangrove belonged to their family although they did not know it. In fact, almost all the lands around the houses up to the neighbouring city belonged to her family. Unaware of this, the children including her used to run like their life depended upon it, holding on tightly to the mangoes packed in their shirts or dresses, when the guardian chased them.
Later on, they would stop in the fields and put the mangoes together. They would then divide the ripest mangoes amongst them for eating on the spot and leave the greener ones for later. It was usually she who got the greener ones as her grandmother was very skilled at making mango chutney with the green mangoes. Once the bottles of chutney were ready, her grandmother would give her a basket of these to distribute around the neighbourhood. The neighbours respected and loved her grandmother not only because of this type of small kindness but also because she gave the lands to plough to the neighbours and only asked for a small share of the crops as compensation. People considered the grandmother as the main village benefactor.
She used to love going to the village and spending a part of the summer there during the summer break when her father did not yet have his holidays. It was all wonderful until that fated summer when everything had changed. She had not witnessed it herself but she often had nightmares about it and would wake up in the night trembling. For a long time after the incident, nobody had gone to steal mangoes from the mangrove. The villagers would talk about it in hushed tones when they thought the children were not around. Thengai had been riding the tractor of his father next to his older brother when he had slipped, and the tractor had mauled him before his brother could stop the giant wheels.
Some children had started going back to steal mangoes the next summer and one of the children had volunteered to take Thengai’s place as the picker. When they passed by her grandmother’s house she kept the door tightly shut and did not respond to their stage whispers calling her out. She could not bring herself to accompany them like she could not bring herself to eat ripe mangoes anymore. It was as if the mangoes’ ripe insides were like Thengai’s and for a long time the idea of eating them seemed repulsing. She also could not bring herself to distribute the mango chutney among the neighbours anymore and had grown sullener by the day. At the end of that following summer, her father decided to make her spend less time at her grandmother’s house.
Long after she had grown older and found out that the mangrove was theirs, she still would not accompany the children to the mangrove during the short breaks she was at her grandmother’s. She had started eating her grandmother’s chutney again, but nobody had offered her anymore ripe mangoes given her clear revulsion to these. One day, as she was walking through the fields, she found herself in front of the mangrove. The guardian was there and he seemed now a wizened old man. He looked at her and made as if he were going to chase her, but she laughed so he laughed too. He went towards a mango tree and reaching out pulled a ripe mango off the tree which he then offered her, slicing it in the middle. His face was wise and kind and she wondered how they could have ever felt afraid of him. She took the mango almost in a second state and bit into it. The taste of the ripe mango was heavenly as it mingled with her salty tears. She smiled up at the old guardian.
Her laughter suddenly stopped as he made his way towards her. She felt a rise in the intensity of his gaze towards her. She could see his body shimmering in the sun although it was no longer visible when he was elsewhere in the room. It was a beautiful sight indeed, like a river of diamonds sparkling under the sun. He slowly picked her up from the chair where she was seated and lifted her, making his way towards the bed. She wondered what it would be like to have a physical relationship with him as until now they had only kissed.
He lay her on the bed and left her there her heart fluttering wondering where he was as he was out of the sun again and she no longer saw his shape. She felt him again as the bed was weighed down by his form as he stretched himself on it next to her. She felt him lean towards her and then felt his lips on hers as he kissed her slowly and deliberately. She was glad she was stretched on the bed as she felt herself going weak as he kissed her. He undressed her very slowly and she felt him study her body as he did so. It was as if her whole body was on flames as he kissed and touched her everywhere and as they made love she felt as if her whole being was consumed by him.
Later on as she lay beside him with her arms around him she felt that it was the happiest moment of her life with this contentment filling her up and warming her from the inside. She had never even in her wildest dreams imagined that she would be making love with an invisible being let alone the Devil himself. It was an exhilarating experience beyond her wildest dreams. She hoped that he too had experienced the same elation and she was eager to speak to him and get his impressions.
She wondered how it could possibly take place this way between them while he was not made of flesh. Yet the lovemaking was something that went beyond any pleasure she had ever had with men in a human form. He seemed to sense her mood and embraced her again making the flames soar higher within her. She thought to herself that this was not just the way of the Flesh. This was something more, the melding of two souls and two diverse forms of life. This was pure rapture.
Alternate Realities – Chapter Eight : Training the dragons
1 June 2020
Courtesy wallpaperflare
She was awoken from her daydreaming about the dragons with a start when Horus touched her arm and pointed to a large clearing in the woods above which they were flying. Horus uttered a few words in the language of the light and the dragons swooped towards the clearing. She just had the time to cling on for dear life to the bony protrusion at the base of the dragon’s neck before they swooped as she had understood the command Horus gave just in time. The dragons had grown again in stature as she had been imagining them growing while they flew. They stood now in a circle around the large clearing.
Horus gave an order and the dragons took to the skies again before swooping down with their mouths open but without fires coming out of them. She realized that they were mimicking a flame attack but were just not using the full breath of the dragon as they did not want to set fire to the woods. Some of the dragon crossed each other’s paths and Horus asked them to stay at a safe distance from each other. He again gave the order for the attack and this time they came down swooping without crossing each other’s paths. After he had made them repeat the attack around 15 times, Horus told them that they could now play for the rest of the time.
The dragons scurried along the clearing and some wrestled playfully while the others flew about in the skies pursuing one another. A couple of dragons started getting overexcited and this resulted in them breathing out flames. Horus yelled out an order but it was too late. The flames had caught on to the adjacent trees that were very dry and immediately shot into a high flaming torch. The fire spread quickly to the nearby trees and it was soon a bushfire. The dragon she had rode on at the beginning swooped down from the skies and lowered his head so that she may climb up. She mounted and it immediately took off to the skies with the other dragons following closely. Horus was not very pleased with the incident but told her that the rains would take care of the bushfire in due course. He was still pleased with the rigour shown by the dragons in the training despite the incident as they were relatively young and inexperienced dragons. They are almost ready, he said with a smile.
The first time she had watched the magic spell mutate was when she had released a spell for rain and more than ten creative people read it. She had then compounded that spell and released it again to be read anew. The resulting spell was for a proliferation of butterflies that she had watched gracefully fill the space in her garden. It was a beautiful sight indeed to watch the tiger backs and other species frolic among the flowers. As a result there had been so many more flowers growing in the garden for the rest of the other springs.
She then thought about GAIA’s program for natural disasters that were supposed to occur on the Earth. It was difficult even when connected to GAIA to explain to her that she did not need to carry out her plan of natural disasters to reduce the number of human beings let alone when not connected to her. She seemed bent on her intent and saw the proliferation of human beings on her surface as a disease that required a remedy. According to GAIA, the remedy was to tackle this disease by reducing it in given areas.
She thought back to how human beings also thought they should preserve balance among wild animals in reserve parks by hunting down the ones that proliferated beyond the sustainable level for equilibrium. Surely she could see how GAIA, with the loss of connection to most human beings, perceived them as a threat to the balance upon her. If only human beings were more connected to GAIA she thought. Surely if human beings changed their parasitic way of behaving towards nature, GAIA could be persuaded to not initiate that series of disasters. It seemed, however, that the first of the series of disasters had already been set in motion…
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