"Okay, first of all, how did you know I would be here?" I asked.

Rita shrugged. "I didn't. You found me. I just wanted to be here, to watch the stars go by. You wandered up and started speaking philosophical poetry to me."

"Not to you."

"Yeah, I know. But you get what I mean, right?"

I sighed. "Yeah."

"Which means you're deliberately slowing me down and avoiding the answers, right?" Her tone was light, teasing.

I couldn't keep the smile from my face. "I guess so."

"So. The beginning?"

"I'm given to understand that that's a very good place to start."

"Heh. Musicals are more Soleil's thing than mine." She hesitated, and I waited. "You know, for all that this 'seer' business is kinda awesome, I get a lot of knowledge without a lot of direction."

"Well that's fine," I answered, "since it feels like I have a lot of direction without a lot of knowledge."

She laughed. "Okay, okay. Early this year, my now-friends Lyric and Tempest took a little drive. They were both stuck on creative projects and couldn't seem to move forward. Middle of nowhere, dead of winter, the car inexplicably stalls out, you understand? And after a bit, Tempest has to get out, and when she doesn't come back, Lyric follows her, and then the two of them are out there alone in the snow and the cold and the full moon. Lyric stumbles onto Tempest, and she's naked, just standing there in the snow, and she, Tempest I mean, says... Uh..."

I waited as Rita trailed off.

"I'll just be a little abstract about it. Tempest says a name, the name that we, the six of us, now euphemistically call The Presence, because actually repeating the name is difficult. Context is everything," she explained quickly before I could ask what makes saying a name difficult. "I can't just make a series of sounds with my breath and my mouth that will convey everything that goes with the name. Everything around it matters. The feeling between us, the space we occupy, the wind, the temperature, what colour you're wearing. It all matters. I couldn't just write down a few letters and start passing around pamphlets on campus that said 'Come meet the name with us!' and have anything near the same effect."

"Okay." I didn't really follow, and I think it showed in my voice.

"Doesn't matter, really. That's not the important bit. What comes after is pure, unadulterated inspiration. All their creative efforts bypassed their blocks and just started going out into the world in a new and exciting way. All the restrictions on their ideas just loosened and they started to emerge easily, without fear or nervousness, and what they made was so much better, and it started to spread."

I blinked. "To spread."

I could see Rita's nod in the dim light. "Their work started to reach out and bring The Presence to others. First Erynn, who heard Tempest at an open mic night. She showed up at Tempest and Lyric's apartment a few hours later and pledged her loyalty."

"Huh. And you know this because..."

"Because they told me. And they don't lie about things like this."

"That's an awfully specific phrasing."

"It's an awfully specific concept. No, The Presence demands a sort of... radical honesty. You've heard the quote that art is a lie that tells the truth?"

I bristled. "Picasso," I said, trying not to snap. "'We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.'" I'd heard the quote in its shortened form too often to not be annoyed.

"Okay, yeah, my bad, I've never heard the full thing. Thank you." The apology seemed not only sincere but earnest, like she just enjoyed being corrected because it meant she was learning something. "So yeah, anything Lyric or Tempest, or any of the rest of us, create has to illuminate reality in some sense, even if it's not physical reality. We're not able to... to lie in a way that makes people realize lies, you see? People can keep to their lies, or ignore the truths, or just not be receptive to them, but we're not allowed to lead people astray, not deliberately."

"What do you mean, 'not allowed'?" I asked, curious.

"Uh... it's... that's a bad phrasing. Ugh. The inspiration that comes with a responsibility, you know? Not that anyone's really tried to cross it. Maybe we could, but there's an ethos, a morality that comes along with being touched, you see?"

I thought back. Silence filled the air for a moment. I couldn't think of any moment where I'd been trying to be dishonest in my poetry, ever, or really where I'd been trying to impart something via poetry. "I'm... not sure how to lie through art, you know?"

"Uh, well, false advertising? Propaganda? Slants or biases that lead people to bad conclusions? Apart from, say, outright lying. Deepfake videos, photoshopping things that never happened, writing fictional stories to mislead people into believing a fictional event... I dunno, I'm not a maker, I'm a performer."

"So... wait, you can still lie..."

"Yeah, yeah, but I can't do so through my performances, right? Like, if I was supposed to portray a real person, but the script falsely described them as someone who, I dunno, drowned puppies for fun, and the audience might come away with that impression..."

"Okay, sure, yeah I could see that. And you just... can't do that?"

Rita scratched her forehead over her eye. "It's... it would be a moral offence, you know? The scale of it is kinda stupid, but to me it feels like it would be like actually knifing that person in the back myself. I couldn't bring myself to do it. It's not like I wouldn't be capable of it, but I wouldn't allow myself to take that work."

The two of us sat in silence for a bit.

"No, it's more..." Rita continued, with a sigh. "It's a hard-line personal boundary, slander like that using the gift of The Presence. I would starve, first. But of course, I don't have to starve, which is kind of the point, I think."

"You think? Wait, where are we now in this discussion?" I closed my eyes, trying to map the trail that the conversation had blazed.

"I think we're at the point where Erynn showed up, about seven months before me. You wondered how I knew that, and we wandered off on why the group wouldn't lie about things like that."

"Oh yeah. I guess."

"Next up was my sweet baker." Rita's voice changed, only a little bit, but it was noticeable. "Emi was entranced by one of Lyric's images, and just... walked away from their job."

"Just left?"

"Right in the middle of the day, yeah. Because the job, and who they were in the job, just weren't right. Weren't them. Their existence was a lie, so when they were exposed to this radical honesty, and they accepted it, they couldn't continue being who they were and had to live out their new reality. To the outside it could kind of look like an... uh... an erasure. All of our changes could. Lyric left her job, too, but after her design work started to make enough money combined with Tempest's music so that they didn't need her job anymore. Erynn... well I guess Erynn didn't really lose much? Everyone sacrifices differently. And Tempest kind of continued on as she was, though she stopped playing covers. I'm getting sidetracked again. Emi's changes were so total, so complete, that it might have looked like the power just wiped the old Emi away, this... I've seen some of their old life, they were spicy, hyperfeminine, argumentative, even cruel sometimes, these are all sides of them I've never witnessed, not in person. Their family even says they're completely different, that all the troubles that they'd had starting in their teens had just sort of gone away overnight."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and it came out as, "Wow." An image of fire flickered in my mind, burning away the old Emi and leaving behind essentially an adult newborn. No job, no identity, no history, no deceptions. Just being everything that they were, always, and always had been, but had covered up with something else.

"And if I can be allowed some editorializing, they're fucking wonderful." There it was, in the tone in her voice. Love. Not just adoration, appreciation, not even lust. Love. My dormmate was in love, and the sort of love that drives risk and threatens selfhood and hollows you out to make an eternal space for another person. She adored and appreciated Lyric and Tempest, and lusted after Erynn, I could hear it, but there, in Emi, she had love.

I envied that, then. Envied it in a way that made tears come to my eyes, and my heart plummet, and my breath catch, and my legs shake with the urge to get the fuck away from Rita and her story of her love so that the only thing keeping me on that bench was the absolutely intense curiosity and the need to know more about what was going on.

Rita shook her head, embarrassed. "Heh. Sorry. Tee-em-eye, I know, and I can see what it does to you, and I'm sorry. Sometimes this stuff just slips out, right?"

"Uh huh." I kept the bite out of my voice, somehow, but that didn't stop Rita from hearing it all the same.

"Anyway, then Emi made some cookies for Erynn to take to her job for a company party, and that's what brought Skye in."

"A cookie?"

"Baking is an art form, and Emi expresses themself very well through cooking. And Rita was in the right moment and she was just drawn to Erynn for more information, and suddenly the group had a house next door to me, and..." Rita shrugged. "That was how I met them."

"And suddenly you're a kinky polyamorous sapphic exhibitionist seer?" I asked.

She laughed. "The phrase stuck with you, eh? Yeah, though I wouldn't say it was 'sudden,' exactly. More like that, or at least eighty percent of that, was always waiting inside me for the... uh... hm. Well, the 'seer' part was new, anyway, and that was the gift I was given."

"So... kinky?"

"Yeah, my childhood games being tied up kinda make more sense now."

"Poly?"

"Super check. Emi and I are... well, yeah, but we're also so far apart, and Soleil is here, and Erynn and Skye are there, and I know they don't want it but I'd totally bang Tempest or Lyric, too, and I know Emi would, and Erynn and... Y'know, I think it's just easiest to say 'polyamorous' and go with that."

I smiled at her statement, still looking out into the darkness. "Sapphic?"

"Look, I'm in love with an enby, I can't really call myself a 'lesbian,' right? But I love everything about them, their body, their mind, their soul, their ... them-ness. But yeah, until I..." I heard the hesitation there, not a breath, but a consideration for how best to tell her story, "met the Presence, I never really considered my sexuality much? I'd had a couple kisses and a couple lovers, but that was so far before that it feels like it was a whole other lifetime, which it kind of was."

"Okay, sure. So you're bent entirely towards femininity then?"

"Now, yeah. I mean, I might consider sleeping with a guy again, if it was the right guy at the right time and he was kind of great, but since I got a taste of the other side..." She shook her head again, this time to clearly indicate 'no.'

"Right. Exhibitionist?"

She stood up and turned to face me and for a moment I was worried that she was about to strip off right there. Instead she just put a hand on her tummy and one behind her head. "There is no shame in this body anymore. I was always a little reluctant to let people see me, hiding a little in the shower, being a bit slow to get in the pool or in the lake, you know." Her eyes locked onto mine in the dark. "You know," she said, re-emphasizing the words.

I did. I wore oversized sweaters all the time, and loose pants that didn't shape themselves to my figure. I was maybe less uncomfortable with nudity, when I didn't have someone there who might be attracted to me, but I did have a weird relationship with myself when it came to other people who might like it for some reason. "Okay, so."

"Seer."

"Yeah."

"Tougher to explain." Rita turned away and looked up, seemingly searching the sky. "Heh, in some ways it's easier to explain that I just like being naked around people, and that I want to fuck girls, plural, you know?"

"Well," I said, trying to be understanding, "what you're describing is... I mean I guess it's normal? I don't want to fuck girls, and I don't like being naked around people, but I at least get those things. But having this weird, supernatural... sight?"

"Comprehension," she corrected. "And yeah, that's the problem exactly. But at least you're in the same ballpark, right? You have your recitations."

"That's..." I was about to object, but then I thought about what it would take to explain what was happening to me, how long it took to get it all out to Manu.

Rita waited for me to think that out. "Yeah, you get it."

We were still and silent for a while, me looking at the back of Rita's head from the park bench, Rita standing up and staring at the sky.

"Hey," she said, and I barely heard her.

"Yeah?" I replied.

She turned back to me, fire burning in her eyes, and I could see it brighter than the pre-dawn light. It was... fascinating. Transfixing. But it wasn't frightening, not this time.

At least, the fire in her eyes wasn't frightening.

The fire that rose inside me, meanwhile, the fire in my mind, in my heart, that was scary. That's what I shrank back from, even as I leaned forward.

"Tell me," Rita said, and her voice was flames, and echoes, and an abyss so deep that I would never climb out of it. "Tell me about me."

I heard my own voice ringing out of that abyss.
Mistress in fire
Submitting to fire
Dancing in fire
Speaking from fire
Knowing the fire
Spreading the fire
Gifting with fire
Teaching of fire
Calculating fire
Hiding fire
Holding fire
Being fire
Housing fire
Showing fire
Living with fire
Living in fire
Living of fire
Loving with fire
Loving in fire
Loving of fire
Loving fire
Living fire
Living fire
Living, living fire

I saw a group of naked dancers moving in wild ecstasy around a massive bonfire. I couldn't see the figures, but I knew who they were: the Artist, the Servant, the Giver, the Mother, and beyond, out of frame, the music was coming from the Maker. And in the fire, standing in the flames, shouting truths in time with the beat of the guitar and the dance and the crackling, popping flames, was the Seer. Truth-as-fire wrapped around her and spread out from her. I felt myself falling, though the image didn't change for it, I was just suddenly and unspeakably aware of gravity.
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
And they will prophesy,
the young will see visions,
the old will dream dreams.
Wonders will be seen in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below.

It was scripture, not my own words, but it felt more than appropriate. I could relate that moment of ecstasy in the dance with the moment of ecstasy as tongues of fire descended from the heavens and the crowd could all hear the speeches in their own languages. It wasn't a religious awakening, more... an awareness that this, that what was happening right now, was not unique in this moment in time and space. It could not be the first time, and it would not be the last time. The Seer before me, and her friends, were connected in kind to a line of ... of humanity that began at the dawn of time and would continue at least until the end of humankind itself.
Knowledge is not fire
Knowledge is the start of fire, the spark of fire, the beginnings of fire
The Potential for fire
The Seer holds Potential, Knowledge, Understanding
The Seer can light the fire
The fire in herself
The fire in others
The Seer knows how to make fire
And knows the fires in others

"That knowledge isn't easy," Rita said quietly, almost interrupting. And then, "Knowledge itself isn't easy. Knowing things that people keep from others, knowing things that people keep from themselves, and knowing what they would have to do to bring themselves to the creative space they want to be in, and knowing what they would need to be part of the Presence... and knowing what I can and cannot do or say..."

I nodded, looking up at her.

The dawn was breaking. I was on my knees. Her hand was stroking my cheek. I didn't know how we got there.

I understood.

"So," I said, the first word I'd said in my normal voice since the sun started to rise, "this is like one of those things where the main character is fighting the big bad, and all their friends are around ready to jump in, and he stops them, and says, 'This is something I have to do for myself'?"

Rita smiled. "That's pretty much it. And I have to carry the burden of the knowing that."

"Am I... am I doing well?"

She shook her head. "No."

My heart fell, plunged deep into my stomach, into my knees. "What—"

"Don't ask. I can't tell you." She sighed, her smile sad. "I could tell you everything, you know."

"Yeah."

"But if I do that..."

"It's not real. It's not me. It's not... it's not my triumph. Without my discovery, without my decisions, it's hollow, it's..." I couldn't come up with a word.

"If I tell you all that I know, it could—probably would—hurt you, make you resentful. Drive you away, probably from us, possibly from yourself."

I took a breath. I was ready, but I didn't know what I was ready for. "What can you tell me?"

She was still stroking my cheek. I was still kneeling. She was thinking. It was calm, quiet. Behind her, I watched the sun rise, light in streaks across the soft cloud cover, like fire.

"I can tell you," she began, her sad smile brightening a little, "that we need some better metaphors, some better creative concepts. You have a history and trauma with fire, and there's really no other way we have to communicate artistic ideas outside of... well, fire."

I had to laugh, a little softly, a little bitterly.

"And speaking of fire..." she sighed. "The one you run from will almost certainly overtake you. You can maybe, maybe outrun it, if you run the rest of your life, and Manu will definitely help you, if running is what you want."

"Fighting fire with fire," I breathed.

"Yeah."

The sun was almost up, and in a moment or two the light would be directly in my eyes, and I would have to look away, or be blinded; either way, I would be pushed away from that blazing gaze.

Just before that moment, Rita continued. "You have to decide if what you want is to keep running."

I half expected her to have vanished when I stood up. To have dissolved into the morning light like a phantom. But no, she was still there, still smiling, even as the moment broke.

And even as that moment fell apart, I still wrapped her in the biggest hug I could, and she reciprocated, and we stood there in the cool early morning just holding each other.

"Thank you, I think," I said.

She laughed. "Honestly, it's going to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better at all." We separated, but still stood close, holding both of each others' hands. "And I think, somewhere, you already know that."

I shook my head. "If I know that, I don't know that I know it."

We started walking back towards campus, side-by-side but no longer physically touching. "It doesn't feel like it's all bad," I said. "I haven't written this much in... probably ever. Manu and I are suddenly super close. I don't really believe in the whole meant-to-be thing, but... yeah, kinda, it is?"

"It's never all bad. Nothing is ever all bad. Nothing is ever all good, either."

"Deep."

"Look, I've got information, not philosophy," Rita replied with a giggle. "I'm not a creator, just a performer."

"Hm?" I was curious about that last statement. "But you're an actor."

"Sure, I'm a performer. I'm an actor, not a playwright. There are creators, and there are performers. I perform. Emi's a baker, so she makes things, she's a creator. Lyric, too. Tempest, though..."

Tempest, right. "Singer and songwriter?"

"Yeah. The whole package. Creator and performer. Like you."

"Like me? I'm a poet, not—"

"You were a poet. Now you're a poet and also someone who recites poetry. That's different. You can transmit ideas much more directly."

"Like Tempest, then."

Rita nodded. "Look, I... You're kinda scary, you know? I think—no, I can tell you this certainly. You have the potential to be at least as powerful as Tempest is."

I tried to hide how intrigued I was. "Yeah?"

Rita had the courtesy to not point out how dumb I was to try to hide my curiosity from a seer. "I don't fully understand that, what makes the difference, what you can do with it; I'm trying to learn, but even spending most of the summer with Tempest I don't get it."

"Fly from the Flames blanked my mind out for nearly a minute," I pointed out.

"Well, sure, it's awesome. It also took her almost four weeks to bash out three minutes of music, and it's something you're closely attuned to. Not everyone who's receptive to the Presence's influence will find their way there through that song. You recited a poem off the cuff that had eight of us in an erotic trance. Do you understand?"

I felt the impact of that statement as we walked. Kammy, Regina, Levinia and Azure, Soleil, Rita, Preiya, even Tabitha?

"Then why did you stop me?" I asked, softly. And before she could answer, a thought occurred. "Wait, how did you stop me?"

"The same way you cast your spell," she replied. "Except I have a little more experience and a little more practice and a... deeper connection to the presence."

"You... acted at me?"

Rita laughed. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. I delivered a performance from that divine fire that affected you directly, so... sure, I acted you back to your chair."

"Wait... wait wait..." I tried to process what I was hearing. What I was feeling. What I had done. "So you can just... make people do things? By acting?"

"You think you can't, by poetry?"

The weight of what I was hearing started to fall on me, and I slowed my pace, muddling through as best as I could. The exhaustion of not having had enough sleep started to press down on me, too, and that too-familiar feeling of gravity, of falling inevitably inward. I started to think about Manu, about what my words could and did do to him.

"And when you dive into that flame yourself," Rita continued, matching my pace step-for-step, "you open yourself up to the influence of others. It can't be any other way, you see? Art is communication, and communication is a two-way street. So when you were in the throes..."

"Yeah, okay. I... yeah." I had stopped walking without noticing. Rita was standing beside me. "Okay."

"The wordsmith is speechless."

"Weren't you, when you started to figure this stuff out?"

Rita laughed. "Oh yeah. And a bunch of times since. We all have those moments. Doubt, self-doubt, confusion, astonishment, imposter syndrome, even a sort of survivor's guilt sometimes. Questioning is expected. Even disbelief. But we stick together. There's no shame in walking away if things get too hot, temporarily or even permanently."

My turn to chuckle. "Suddenly you're pitching this whole creative-commune thing to me."

"Could sound that way, yeah, I understand." She turned to stand in front of me and face me. The sun shone directly on her, giving her a beatific glow. "We're kinda getting into things I can't tell you, though, just as a warning."

I nodded. "Still don't want to influence my choice?"

"Choices, yeah. I don't want you to grow resentful."

"What if I used my poetry to get answers?"

She raised an eyebrow. "How?"

I blinked. "Huh." I didn't know how to respond. Rita was right, I had this incredible power, apparently, but I had no way to direct it towards a result I wanted.

"You recited a poem that had eight of us in an erotic trance, and you didn't mean to," Rita pointed out. "That's... I mean, it's not... This whole thing, it doesn't work like that."

"But you—"

"Different. I had something to get, I had intention, I had direction, and I had a very simple task. You were open and receptive and brimming with the Presence's power."

I thought on that for a half-second. "I was an easy target, then?"

"So easy."

We shared a smile.

"You..." I took a breath. "You don't really know what you're doing either, huh?"

"I mean, more than most, I guess?" Rita shrugged. "I have comprehension, but not insight. I can understand a lot about the now, but not a lot about the future. I saw something that needed to happen, and I made it happen." She turned around and started walking, and I took a few quick steps to catch up to her.

"What needed to happen?"

"It wasn't time," she said. "You had to stop."

"Time for what?"

Rita shrugged again. "Think about it this way. What would you have done if I hadn't stopped you?"

Silence walked with us for a while. I didn't know how to answer that, mostly because I didn't know the answer to the question.

"No one knows what impact an artwork will have on the world," Rita continued. "Once you send something out, the audience will react how they're going to react, right? Tempest didn't write that song knowing that you were going to hear it and be so affected by it. You didn't recite poetry to Manu expecting the reaction you got, right?"

I flushed. "Okay, yeah, I see, okay." I took a breath, calming myself again. "So, what happens if you walk away? You said it's okay, that you could, right?"

"Uh huh. Well, there are consequences, and I wouldn't be a seer anymore, and it would be hard to keep my friends, what with being constantly reminded about what I was giving up."

"And your lover."

"And my love, yeah." I noted the change of word, and tone, in Rita's reply. "If Emi was still with the rest of them, that would make leaving so much harder."

"You know that doesn't make it sound less like a cult."

"Yeah, I know." Rita's shrug was becoming a familiar part of our conversations. "My parents kinda feel the same way, but they're too busy with their own bullshit to be too worried about it."

"Oof, that's a bit close to home."

"You too, eh?"

"Don't really wanna—"

"I know. It's fine. I don't mean to pry."

"From what you've said, though, you don't have to pry, right?"

She sighed. "I can see the impact of it, and work back to some of the cause, sure, but I don't know about them, I know about you. I can tell that some of who you are, some of your choices are due to conflicts with your parents, but I can't really tell what those issues are, or if it's because of them, or because of you... I'm not a therapist, right?"

"Sounds like you have some issues with your gift," I said lightly.

"I do."

"Oh."

"Nothing is ever all good, right?"

"Mhmm. What trouble—"

"Just what I've told you," she said as we rounded the corner of the road got back onto campus. "I get all this ... information, this comprehension, but no guidance for what to do with it. I have... there's a lot of good I could do, I guess, and I have, but now that I'm here, with hundreds of other people, and not there, with five other people, it's really... different." She sighed again. "Maybe I should switch majors to, like, psych, or social work, or something."

I stopped, causing Rita to stop a step later and turn. "Isn't the point that you get to do what you want, artistically?"

"Maybe what I want to do is to use the gift for—"

"Uh uh. No. What you want is what you want, not what the gift wants. If you're working to accommodate it, then it's not a gift, right?"

She blinked. "Did you just out-seer me?"

"Out-therapisted you, anyway. I've seen a couple now and then."

"I probably should."

I laughed. "Think they'd believe you? Think you could stop from telling them their own secrets?"

Rita laughed with me. "Well, belief follows sight, right?" She yawned. "Gotta say, I'm pretty tired, and I left a cute musical theatre geek in my bed that I should probably deal with."

I nodded. "Yeah, I should probably get some rest if I'm going to have some time with Manu tonight."

We resumed our walk towards the dorm. Around us, the campus was waking up with the soft but insistent noises that flowed from early Sunday morning awareness. Subconsciously, I think, we started moving faster, despite our tiredness. There was an eagerness for my bed in my mind and body.

"Hey," Rita said as the dorm came into sight. "Two things I think you should do. Not as a seer, but..." She hesitated. "Okay, maybe as a seer? It's hard to know where the seer begins, really."

"Okay, sure, what's up?" I asked.

"First, I think you need to talk to Soleil, yeah? Well, 'need' is a strong term, but it'd be a good idea."

"Sure, what about?"

"I just think it's important. Make friends. For a sheltered theatre kid, she's pretty insightful."

"Okay." I had no shortage of friends, but it was nice making new ones.

"Second, there's a class I think you should sign up for."

"A little past—"

"Nope! There's still time." Rita put her foot on the front step. "Only been one class gone by. It's a Thursday evening class. I'd take it but it doesn't fit with my schedule." She waved her ID card in front of the scanner and held the door for me.

"Thank you. If you're not in it—"

"One of my theatre profs teaches it. They were wondering if anyone in their other class wanted to sign up, since the class is small. It's called 'Poetry in Performance,' they only teach it every other year, and... well, at least consider it, okay?"

Too tired to argue and a little overwhelmed by Rita's sudden enthusiasm, I nodded. "Okay. I'll give it a look."

"Great." She stopped at the elevator. "I'd walk up the stairs with you but I'm on three and—"

"Don't worry about it," I said.

I gave her a hug. I think we both needed it. The elevator dinged, we parted, I walked up the stairs, crashed into my room, stripped down and flopped into bed.

I was asleep in seconds.