The next morning, I managed to drag myself to breakfast—enduring a few blush-causing comments from friends about my slow pace, aching muscles, and bright smile—and then to class. I even managed to get dressed and keep myself awake during classes. Manu and I exchanged a few text messages during the day, and just before my 1 PM class I sent him that topless photo I had taken and had not sent two days before.

He said that he loved my freckles.

I asked if that was all he was staring at.

He admitted that, no, it wasn't, which pleased me probably more than it should have. Except that, no, I was enjoying it. I was enjoying the attention, I was enjoying being the object of Manu's desire. I was really enjoying the power I held over him. And I had never felt so creative! Whenever I had a spare moment in a lecture, I was tapping out a line on my phone or scribbling something in the margin of a textbook. I was still participating fully, and enjoying my classes, there was just this... other part of me, coming up with fun ideas that had to come out.

I wanted to spend some more time with Manu, working out just what was going on. And also just spending more time with Manu. That would have to wait until Thursday, unfortunately, between my classes and his schedule, though we had planned a video chat on Tuesday evening.

I was stupidly, foolishly, ridiculously in love, too, and I recognized that. I knew from experience, and from other people's experiences, that that could make me do some pretty dumb things.

The whole of Monday, I didn't feel the fire. The other fire. That Presence of Rita's wasn't anywhere near me during the whole day. Maybe it was a limited resource, and I had used it all up yesterday with Manu, and it wouldn't be back for a while. Or maybe there was just enough going on that I couldn't pay attention to it.

I went from studying in the lounge to my room, saw the picture on my desk, ignored it, and got ready to have my nightly shower, finally getting back into my usual routine thanks in part to needing two late-night clean-ups the two nights before. Something else I had Manu to thank for.

The first indication that anything was unusual was the relief I felt when I slipped my robe off in the shower room and stood there naked in the warm, humid air. An unknown, maybe even undetected stress lifted off me when I stripped. The dampness wrapped around me like a second skin, like a close embrace, like a silk bedsheet. I let out a slow sigh, and my breath seemed cold, somehow; it should have been steaming, I thought, though that was backwards. I was familiar with the effect of hot damp breath into cold dry air, but a cold breath into a warm humid environment seemed like it ought to be the same.

I stood there for... I wasn't sure how long, just revelling in the feeling. Enjoying? no, that wasn't it, but it was enjoyable. I was experiencing it. The good, the bad, the normal, the unusual, the mundane, the magical. I wanted to know what my nerves were telling me. I inhaled, and I could feel the air around me rushing in to fill the void that my breath had left; I exhaled, and I could sense the change in air pressure in the room, the way the air currents shifted all through the room.

I wondered if I was high. I wondered how I would have got high. I'd passed by someone who was vaping weed at one point in the afternoon and the smell stuck with me for a bit, but that was hardly like having a joint or taking an edible. And this was a different high, a more... stable feeling. Still, I moved my hand and I could sense the mist trailing around me as I did. I took a step and it felt like I was wearing a long cloak made of fog. I felt... regal. Noble. In control, as if I could move those air currents to my liking with a twitch of my fingers, or a puff of air, or...

Or a word.

My fingers traced through the air.
Spin and swirl
Twist and twirl
Paths in wind and water
Poet's loom
Weaving bloom
Using what you've taught her

Something felt strange, off, incorrect about the verse, even as I could imagine the air tracing out lines of flowers on the walls and floors. A hint of that breath carved itself out of the condensation on the mirrors. Still, instead of feeling the burn, the terrifying ecstasy of power, the poem made my skin crawl, brought a bit of a chill to the warmth, dissolved the illusion a touch. If anything, I felt unsexy at the words I'd spoken. Uneasy. I had done something wrong.

I walked carefully among the mist-made garden towards the shower stall. An anger I didn't understand welled up inside me as I did, and I slammed the door of the stall shut. "Just tell me the rules, damnit!" I shouted.

The air currents drifted on without me, bringing the faint smell of a meadow, evidence that something had happened, assuming I wasn't just imagining it. It was washed away by the stream of half-warm water that also served to blast off the day's dust and grime. Rita's comments about radical honesty came to mind, and I wasn't sure why. Maybe I needed to talk to someone about it? But that meant Rita, generally, or Manu, and Rita wasn't talking except to tell me that Manu wasn't helping me achieve whatever it was that she thought I wanted to achieve. Radical honesty about this meant either talking to a brick wall that already knew the answers but wasn't saying anything, or taking the wrong path down the road.

It felt like the trick question on an exam. There was no apparent way to answer it correctly, and puzzling it out was occupying a large part of my thought processes, when they weren't being hijacked by lovesick-teenager-level adoration or unexpectedly passionate mind-altering poetry.

More than just mind-altering, I reminded myself, thinking of the tattoo-like mark of fire on Manu's hand and the whispers of air currents cutting floral shapes in the condensation. It would really help, I thought to myself as I washed my hair, for all of this to be even a little predictable.

I heard the shower room door closing just as I finished rinsing off. I wondered who else might be coming in to shower that late. I hesitated, considered waiting until whoever it was was in a stall themselves, but decided against cowering and letting myself get cold after I'd spent that time getting warm. I wanted to towel off, put on my fluffy robe, and take my warmth to bed.

Besides which, cowering in a shower stall isn't really all-powerful sorceress behaviour, right? I laughed internally at the thought as I stepped out of the stall.

Standing there in her nightgown, looking in the mirror—no, looking at the mirror, I realized—was my friend and mentor, Rita. She didn't have anything with her to suggest that she was there to shower, no towel, no soap or shampoo or anything else. And of course, her room was on the third floor, not the second, so she had deliberately come downstairs.

"Let me guess," I said.

"Hm?" Rita turned. She seemed a little spaced out. Maybe it was just the hour. "Guess?"

"You're not here to shower, right?"

"I... shower?" She blinked and looked around. "Oh."

"Rita..." I was concerned, legitimately. "Are you alright?"

"Mmm," she slurred. "Felt you... uh, speaking poetry. Changing. Thought I should..." She shrugged. "Come see, I guess?"

"Are you... is something wrong?"

She shook her head. "No, I... yeah... um..."

"Are you... drunk? High?"

She shook her head again. "No, and... nothing happened, just..." She took a deep breath. "Flowers."

An image formed in my mind, from the movie of The Wizard of Oz. A field of poppies, and Judy Garland and a guy in a lion costume passing out in the middle of them.

"Did I... was it me?" I asked. "Did I do this to you?"

"You and Her, yeah," she said, her eyes starting to clear. She took a deep breath. "I needed to know what... what you're..."

There was a pause. I was starting to get a little impatient.

"What you're... capable of doing," Rita finished her thought. She moved with something like a whole-body shiver, like she was physically shaking off the effect of my poetry. "I saw the flowers on the mirror and I tried to put myself in a space of what they might do. Went a little bit far, probably." Her clear expression twisted into a wry smile. "Art doesn't just affect the audience, right?"

"So wait..." I tried to puzzle that out. "You... the other day, you 'acted' me back into my chair, and today you 'acted' yourself into..."

"Into a trance, yeah. Into an open, receptive space." She closed her eyes with a serene expression. "Just... trying to be closer to the Presence, through your work, and mine. And this is the first time I've seen you make a tangible thing that I could experience without being there to hear the reading."

I shivered a bit. The warm air was cooler than my skin, and I was drying off. My intent of keeping warm until I got to bed had been forgotten in the conversation, and lost completely at that point. "So.... wait. The... I don't—"

Rita's eyes opened, and there was that terrifying fire in them, that warmed me immediately from inside and stopped me from speaking. "The words were wrong, weren't they?"

It took me a moment to understand the question through the fire in her voice, and I couldn't help but answer. "Yes." There was a pause as I didn't look away. "You know why."

"I do."

"You're not telling me."

"No."

"Then—"

"What do you see?"

I took a sharp breath, and—
I looked to the heart and the dark of the flame
I saw past the fear and I saw past the blame
And heard in the black of her eyes was the Name
That I knew from the air all around me

—I could see some piece of the power Rita was talking about. I could see, I could feel and understand, what she could do to me. What she had told me as the sun rose. Her voice echoed back to me. Well, let me just say, if you want it, it'll happen. And if you don't, I'm not going to waste my energy bothering you, you know?

She couldn't just stop me. She could make me. If I wanted it—even if I didn't want it—she could smooth over all my hesitations, she could walk right past my objections, she could act me right into her arms and into her bed. She could rely on that Presence, on the knowledge she could draw on as a seer, to seduce me through art and artifice and...

I was trembling. I wasn't cold, I wasn't scared, I was excited. I could feel just a small piece of what I was doing to Manu when I recited poetry to him. But there was something else in there, in that look, in the Name, in the Presence, in the terrible truth that Rita was trying to show me without showing me.

I couldn't take it.

I fled. Wet, naked, tired, I ran to my room, not thinking about what I was leaving behind, not worrying about being seen in the nude by my dormmates. I just needed to be away from her, away from the fire, away from the flowers I had drawn with my words and away from the power and the truth and the awareness that I wasn't so totally opposed to Rita's powerful seduction as I might have wanted to believe.

The picture on my desk looked back at me with the same darkness that I'd seen in Rita's eyes. I learned, then. I studied. I traced the lines of the picture, standing there, bent over the desk, with my eyes and my fingers. I studied my own drawing, found intricacies in the texture, sounds in the words, that I had never noticed. Negative-space illusions that I hadn't been able to see before began making a strange kind of sense the longer I puzzled over it.

Honest self-awareness started to leech in to the cracks in my psyche. It wasn't Rita I was attracted to, not specifically. She was attracted to me, that was clear, but I was attracted to what she could do. I was attracted to her power. What it could do. What it could do to me. And what it could teach me, what I could do with it.

What I didn't know was what I should do with that knowledge. I felt a bit like Rita, having information without guidance.

There was a soft knock at my door.

I knew who it was, and so I had no worries about opening my door.

Rita stood there, holding my towel and my robe. "Thought you might want these back."

"Doesn't really take a seer to see that," I replied. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. Have a good night."

"Yeah, you too."

The interaction was almost shockingly mundane. I watched her go, still in her nightgown, and felt nothing particularly attractive about the image. She didn't look back, just walking to the elevators, and I closed my door behind me. The towel was largely unnecessary, I had drip-dried already. I decided that I didn't care about the robe, either. With my thoughts thoroughly interrupted, over and over again all evening, I decided it was time for bed. Light went out, there was a momentary scramble to get myself under my blankets, and my head hit the pillow.

I started dreaming almost as soon as my eyes were closed.

I felt the heat, first. It was a sudden blast of heat that I knew couldn't be real; it was blazing like a campfire on my naked ass, and that would have meant that it would have had to have come through my bed. Knowing it was a dream didn't make it feel less real, or less frightening.

There was no light, only heat, and I was making my way blindly through... somewhere. I couldn't tell where, or even if I knew the space, I was just stumbling, feeling the heat behind me. Chasing me. I tried to go faster, but I couldn't run. Not just because of the dark, I felt hampered. Restricted. Bound up. I pushed against whatever was holding me back, moving as quickly as I could from a fire that threw no light.

I kept going forward, but the heat didn't get any less intense. In fact, the further I got, the warmer the rest of me started to get. I could feel the sweat on my face, on my chest. I could feel heat between my legs that wasn't just from the fire. The nerves in my fingers lit up with the soft texture of the paper, my ears rang with the poetry I had created in the shower, facing the darkness in Rita's gaze. I was surrounded on all fronts, trapped, and still moving as quick as I could through that swamp of sensation.

Despite my history, my trauma, I didn't fear fire. It was the stuff of nightmares, but awake, in the day, it didn't scare me. But it was all around me. All of these things, the sounds, the feelings, they were all around me. And...

And closing in.

I took a shuddering breath. I could feel Zeyla's arm over my shoulders, the embarrassment of asking Manu to reach across the elevator and press a button because I couldn't move. That feeling was dragging me down, freezing me.

I could see the walls. Feel the bodies near mine. There was nowhere I could go, nothing I could do, to escape any of it. The door slid closed in front of me, and the walls were made of heat and flame, and the paper I could feel in my hands turned to ash, and all the sounds everywhere became an echo, over and over again, of those seven words that had dominated the background of my life since I'd returned to school.

We cannot call one such as you.

I had the presence of mind to stop myself before I bolted into the hallway, still naked. The cold metal of the doorknob stopped me, and I threw my bathrobe on and tied it tight, and grabbed my purse, and shoved my phone into it. The walls of my room were too close, too confining, and when I walked out into the student lounge, the walls of the dorm itself felt impossibly near. The stairwell was cold and unfeeling and drove me on faster than I usually moved.

I breezed past security, bolted outside, and put my bare feet in the cold, damp grass. Dew had fallen, and it wasn't cold enough to be frost, not yet, but against my skin it might as well have been liquid nitrogen. I kept moving, getting as far from that solidity as I could, getting physically out of the path of the memory of the fear I had felt three nights before. My body felt like it was absorbing the light from the streetlamps as energy, fuelling my adrenaline and the burning under my skin. I needed darkness, openness, solitude. There was a small park near the university, open grass, kids' play structure, no lights, it was a pretty common place for students from the nearby high school to go to drink or for anyone who didn't want their activities observed to go use stronger substances, and I moved in that direction, just to get away from the light and the heat and the sounds—the dim beeps of walk signs on traffic lights in the distance, the soft roar of the occasional car driving down the highway at four in the morning, the way the soft south breeze hit the walls.

It wasn't far, but every moment, every movement, felt like I was pressing through time itself, fighting a clock that seemed to want to press pause on me and leave me in an impossible loop, stranded in the middle of the harsh unyielding road, with the occasional loose pebble over asphalt tearing into my sole over and over again on repeat for an eternity, leaving me there walking in circles forever in my bathrobe for people to gawk at and wonder at and avoid and try to catch a peek at something more lascivious.

I wasn't sure if I was still dreaming or not. I couldn't pinch my arm, couldn't bring myself to use what little agency I felt I had in that way, but walking down the middle of the road with no shoes on provided far more pain than a pinch.

The little unlit park was quiet, empty. Technically I was trespassing, there was a sign saying that no one was allowed on city property after 10 PM. My phone popped easily from my purse and into my hand to give me a little flashlight, again aware enough that I didn't want to step on any broken beer bottles or used needles without any protection on my feet; fortunately, I had nothing to worry about, at least in that regard. I made my way to the edge of the fence, as far as I could be from light or road or people, where I could feel alone with the universe.

I lay on my back, looking up at the stars, undoing the belt of my robe and lying bare and exposed, trying to cool the heat that had penned me in.

And there, in the safety and unsafety, security and insecurity, privacy in the midst of a public space, I took a deep, sharp breath of cool air, and I started speaking to the universe.
Let the light turn aside
Let the silence cover me
Let the world look away for just one moment
Let me burn alone, undisturbed
Let time stop around me
Let this moment collapse on itself
Let no one know but the stars themselves
Let me be here
Let me be
Let me

Somewhere around the third line, my arms slipped out of the sleeves of the robe.

When I asked for the moment to collapse, my right thumb found its way to my clit.

And I repeated the last line seven, eight, ten, fifteen, forty times, louder and louder and louder, faster and deeper and lower, lost in the heat and passion and the adoration of myself and my own words, enamoured with the thought of the stars watching me cum, a billion billion observers unable to see the light of my blazing body for millions of years, looking down with wonder at one small person, one chubby, tiny redheaded poet loudly and lewdly exclaiming joy and terror and art into the universe, the cry echoing out and expanding through ages and aeons like a radio signal.

As I lay there, naked, now legitimately cold, the dampness of the dew soaking through my robe, covered in darkness like a blanket, the perfect silence embracing me like a lover, I wondered... Is this who I am, now? I thought of Rita, self-proclaimed 'exhibitionist seer,' and of that first night when she came into her power. I thought of the Artist, the Servant, the Giver, the Mother, all dancing naked around a fire in which the Seer stood unburnt, to the music of the Maker. Was this the lesson I was to take from that image Rita showed me, from the story she told? That I could exist in darkness, fuck myself in secrecy, and create poetry from it?

And while I was thinking, daydreaming, whispering to myself in a voice hoarse from screaming, the first glow of the dawn started to inch over the horizon.

There was no fire in my body. I was cold, wet, naked, sore. But I knew what I needed to do, and somewhere from deep within myself, I pulled up some ancient reserve from a depth I didn't know I had.
The stars lose their light in the glow of the sun
Soon will the world wake to a new day begun
With knowledge to bear and with secrets to keep
I go now in safety, the world still asleep.

A bird chirped, once.

I felt the warmth of the words moving through me, moving through the ground and the air, reaching out to the stars.

It wasn't far to walk. I didn't bother putting my robe back on.

I didn't see or hear anyone at all. I just made my way casually back to my bed, lay down in it, and slept through my first two morning classes.