Chapter Fifteen: Meresin

Another commonality between love and gold is they are both elements of transition. Gold is a transition metal because it can bond with other elements much more easily due to the properties of its electrons. I feel that is precisely the clue behind the use of gold as the ink. Gold and love transmute.

I opened a window to look into the present reality. I felt like a human returning to work after some time off. A vacation. The Void felt like home, a safe place from all the Devils in the universe. A black cold nothing where I had some amalgam of control. I peered into the watery portal to look at Noah. I opened the portal by feeling the thread of his vibration. I followed it, a familiar pathway of our contracts an agreements. Once I found him I looked at his present timeline. I could see exactly what he was doing in the rainy afternoon.

He was miserable. I wasn't surprised. I slithered into his bedroom through the usual portal in his bedroom closet. I stepped over all of his clothes and papers. His room stank of old food and unwashed things. There was now a small hole in his wall, apparently from rodents. It didn't seem as if he had noticed. I looked around and could see that he hadn't cleaned anything from I had last seen him, since the date. I attempted to process how much time had passed since I had been in the Void.

I am the best at Void navigation in all of the universe. It is possible I have knowledge that not even the Creator currently processes on the subject, since the Creator has divided all of his knowledge into different consciousnesses in the universe. However, it seemed as if I had missed two weeks time from the moment I left the Void until I returned. My navigation wasn't perfectly precise, it was just the best I could do. In that two weeks without my influence, Noah's mental health took a hard drastic decline. It seemed counter intuitive since my presence was usually what anchored his depression in the first place.

This was a mathematical anomaly I have observed time and time again. The physics in our universe were still an unsolved puzzle. One would think that Noah's mental health and mood would improve without me. Instead, it was the opposite. Sure, other attachments and entities came and went since I was gone. Yet, that did not explain all of the darkness in Noah's aura. Something was different. Something seemed drastically odd.

I enjoyed the mystery. I intended to pick up the pieces of where I left off to solve the puzzle. I made sure to cloak myself in layers of protections and charms. I did not want to be seen by anyone, especially Raziel. I knew I was just careless before and would not make that mistake again.

I love to observe the smallest and most minute of the Creator's work. I have a strong desire to solve the greatest math problem-- how the scaffolding of the universe is constructed. I believe it to be located in the framework of the human mind, and thus I study a single linage of humans for infinity to deconstruct how they work. I was desperately curious as to why Noah seemed so depressed. I had a suspicion it was due to his brief exposure of Wendy's love energy. It seemed to have irradiated him from the inside out.

I was also interested to see his work. The information from Noah's creative output was more indicative of the state of his soul than anything else. I drifted across the room to his drawing station. Even before I came upon what I was looking for I could feel a plethora of his energy. I followed Noah's strong vibrations until I found the piece of artwork I wanted. I wanted to know if he had worked on his personal fantasy map in the two weeks I was gone.

I found the map on a heap of other drawings. I could feel that he neglected it. It was as if the imaginary world he was building with Wendy had stagnated. The fantasy world had the energy of a dead bog. It felt like he was no longer interesting in building anything with Wendy.

Noah himself was both in the room and outside of it. His body was asleep on the naked floor mattress. His consciousness was elsewhere in the dreamworld. It wouldn't be hard to find him but it required me to open a portal and seek his essence. Once again, I drifted into the darkness and shadow of his closet and opened a window, this time into Noah's world of dreaming.

I was familiar with his place. It was normally gray and shifting, moving from one childhood room or house to a friend's backyard. Sometimes he would twist them with brushes of anxiety and nightmare flavors. Yet, Noah rarely ventured into the unstable Low planes or fairyworlds when he dreamed. As predicted, I found Noah in his personal land of dreams, in a friend's backyard. As I approached, I could feel he was mildly conscious.

I came upon a scene of two Noah's. Noah's soul, his consciousness that was mortal and dreaming, stood in the background and watched his younger self play with so-called neighborhood 'friends' in the backyard. In the dream, child-Noah was getting teased mercilessly. The bullying was brutal, both physically and verbally. As this unfolded, Noah's soul watched and wept. I could feel that he was not only crying about the childhood trauma, but was choosing to watch it as a result of his depression with his waking-life. It seemed he was punishing himself for difficulties he was having in his current situation.

This was not-so-unusual human behavior. A sad mortal will usually have sad dreams. He wanted to kick himself while he was down. I approached Noah and sat beside him. We were in a typical suburban neighborhood. The house seemed large and smelled fresh and new. We sat on a red brick stoop outside a sliding glass door. The grass in the backyard was a overly saturated green, the colors in the dreamworld were often exaggerated and artificial. The sky was printer-ink cyan and the clouds looked pasted upon the sky. The backyard was defined by a 6 foot privacy fence, and I had the impression that there was absolutely nothing on the other side. The background of Noah's dreamworld seemed ominous and unstable.

Noah's soul only vaguely acknowledged my presence. He seemed too preoccupied in feeling deep, dark pain. I could read his aura and see that he was wrapped up in depression. It was a cottony, black substance all around him like a cocoon.

Dreamers were easier to communicate with directly, since they were able to absorb abstract concepts and information without a language barrier. However, since it was only a section of the mortal's consciousness, it was also like speaking to a person with only half a working brain. Most human souls were comprised of three parts. The 'dreamer' was only one of the pieces.

I was familiar with Noah in the dreamworld. I had spoken to him several times while he slept. Sometimes he was able to listen, sometimes he was not. When he was emotionally distraught, it was very difficult to make him become receptive to any information. I was breaking my own 'hands off' approach to my experiments. But, I needed to know what I missed in the last two weeks.

"Noah, what is the state of your relationship with Wendy?" I inquired as plain and direct as I could. I know that he was working with a communications handicap since he seemed so hurt. Dreamers usually lacked focus as they were processing great quantities of emotional energy.

"Wendy? What Wendy?" sobbed Noah's soul. "I don't want to talk about Wendy," he grumbled, hiding his face in his knees.

"Why?" I asked coolly, as pointed as the tip of an arrow.

"I don't deserve Wendy. I don't deserve her," he wept.

"You're talking nonsense," I said impatiently.

"No I'm not," he bawled like an infant. I could feel that he was simultaneously feeling the pain of the bullied child in the background as well as his own inflicted pain about the status of his relationship. As he wept, I gathered the spilled information in his aura. It wasn't hard to piece it together, either. In the two weeks I missed, Noah had missed every text and every phone call from Wendy. He didn't touch his phone. He missed work and opportunities to make money. He ran. He ran from everything in his life. Without me around, he broke down.

I usually do not leave my human experiments alone. They are mine and mine alone. I select them because they have a long history of the diseases I had invented. I follow them to track the viruses and gather information. I use them as my eyes and ears if I ever need to make use of a mortal body, which is rarely. The congestion of having just five senses is too alien to me. It feels confining, claustrophobic. Though I concede that it is sometimes necessary to have a human's perspective, if only to gain perspective.

It is strange what happens when I leave. It as if an element becomes missing in the structure of reality. Every thread of consciousness counts. Like in a garment if one line of stitching goes missing, the entirety can come apart. Perhaps Noah needed me as much as I needed him. There was no reason for him to become even more deeply depressed without my presence. With all logic, the opposite should have been true.

"Is the reason you stopped speaking is because you felt unworthy of the love she gave you?" I asked to confirm my understanding.

"Yes," affirmed Noah. I could feel that he was shaken into the core of his being. The love overwhelmed his soul. It nearly tore him in two. It was like observing a small rodent getting cleaved with an ax. It caused him to basically break up with Wendy without telling her. He simply stopped answering her messages in the waking world.

I could do nothing to 'make' him reverse this unfortunate turn of events. I could not have a debate with a dreamer. They did not possess the ability to absorb a lecture or respond to logical arguments. Without Wendy, however, I could not continue to chase the elusive clue given by the Lord to me. 'Choose love' was absolutely lost without the element of love. Like gold, it was exceptionally was rare and took the smashing of stars in order to create it.

Mortals threw it away all the time. It was in their nature. They threw away valuable, edible, precious food. They threw away unique opportunities presented to them. They threw away love when it was freely given. Noah was not exceptional in this.

It was I that did not want to let this lucky chance go. The quality of energy Wendy was emitting was scarce. I had analyzed nearly every molecule of her aura and was astonished at its purity. We would never find one like it again. I considered more drastic action to salvage it. Raziel had astutely pointed it out, first. Possession.

"I know what you're hiding, Meresin," I heard his hollow voice echo on the wind. "You're on the wrong path," I remembered him say. His voice filled me with doubt. It made taking drastic action even more incalculable. Taking direct, kinetic action could put me even more off the so-called path.

But that was assuming Raziel knew my intentions, which I knew he could not know-- or rather unlikely. He just wanted to sow the seeds of chaos to gain my secret knowledge, I reasoned. He wanted to know my intentions, but did not. He wanted me to betray myself. I knew I was a creature that was hard to trick. I was used to anticipating Azazel's antics, and he was the true trickster in the universe since he flaunted his abilities of time travel.

"Noah," I said, speaking hard and direct to his dreaming soul. I could feel I was losing what little connection I had with him. It was as if he had a bad antenna and was not able to receive my messages. "You've given me permission to possess your body from time to time. I wish to borrow it again, if only a little while. I do it with good intentions. That is the agreement we made. I wish to do it one more time upon your waking. Do you understand me?"

"You want to possess me?" answered Noah, barely lucid. "again?"

"Yes," I answered, hoping not to lose him. I could feel trepidation. Mortals did not respond well to possession. Their bodies were coded specifically to their consciousness. They responded with an inner immune system. Angels, even fallen angels, were not designed to fit into a body. We had senses, knowledge, and personalities that simply did not translate into concentrated human forms.

"Why?" asked Noah. I was stricken at the question. Usually he did not ask or put up much of a fuss.

"To better your life," I answered. Depressed mortals usually gave up the reins to their bodies easily. But with Noah I kept an explicit contract to keep a distance. I did not want to destroy his life, as most demonic possessions did. He was one of my experimental subjects. I just usually did not effect things so directly.

"Yeah," he finally said, giving permission. I could feel that he was only partially lucid. His consciousness began to shift. I could feel him grant me access. I did not have full control of everything. There were doors I could not enter, information that I could not access. It was like sitting in the driver's seat of a great control room. There were portals for Noah's mind only, like an employee's access. I did not mind. I took possession as a great responsibility. I knew not all of my brothers were this way, some were reckless or purposefully destructive. Admittedly, I had never piloted a body with an agenda from the Creator in mind. This time felt different.

When I woke up in Noah's body I could feel Noah still there. I could see out his eyes and smell out of his nose and hear his thoughts. Yet I could also feel his consciousness, his soul, hanging over me and scrutinizing every decision. Were we going to wear the white socks or the red? Were we going to brush our hair and teeth and take a shower? I did not want to feed his negative energy. I pushed for the red socks, while his soul wanted to wear white. I tried to impress upon the decision to take a shower, there was no reason to skip it except to wallow in his own misery and filth.

Noah's inner voice wanted to continue to go unwashed and accept bad hygiene. This was not right. He wanted to belittle himself and give in to his monkey impulses. I wanted him to be better. We would more likely win Wendy's affections with the use of toothpaste.

I was testing the boundaries of control. Like most humans with attachments, he wasn't allowing me much. He wore the white socks and went the afternoon without showering. How was I going to convince him to say and do the right things if I wasn't allowed the smallest decision?

I also had to acclimate to the human's narrow five senses. I could not see all around me. I no longer had the bird's eye view of his timelines and the trajectory of his decisions. Everything was claustrophobic and concentrated in his body. Luckily, the permission continued if I decided to pull away for a while. I had the ability to come and go from his point of view as I needed. What would make it easier was more control. Thus far, I had to fight for every choice he made. He deflected me the way white blood-cells did to an infection.

I knew I could wear him down somewhat if I continued to impress upon him thoughts of Wendy. What was she doing right now? Where was she? I tried to get him to remember how wonderful it felt to kiss her and be in her aura of love. I tried to recall the energy she exuded, ribbons of red and white that shifted and danced in the air all around them. Her offered love was a force that was masterfully crafted and given without pretense or expectation. I tried to get him to recall her smell, lilies, soft soap, and campfire. I tried to get him to remember her laugh.

I felt a long shadow of depression waft through him. I expected that, as well as the strong return of my presence bringing him lower. I felt that my forcing him to think of Wendy could be working. It didn't matter that he was sad. It had a reason and a solution behind it. All he had to do was act and return her calls or texts, and then the bad feeling could be brushed away. I felt like I had him under control, like pressing a gas and break pedal.