Chapter Seven-- Fluid Time

Looking at photographs on a laptop screen does not have the same impact as holding a book in one’s hands, feeling the texture of the paper, the leather, the coarseness of aged ink, the scent of age and hidden history. I find I can’t read the text now, but as I gaze at the graceful script, my mind starts clouding over with half-realized images, jumbled and cryptic. A great, shimmering city, domed and spired, partially translucent, white with deep cerulean depths, like arctic ice. Endless forests filled with ancient, sentient trees that branch and root in all directions, intertwining, a single entity. I stand before a group of old-young-old men in deep blue robes, their faces dour and hardened with cruel lines, their eyes cold and calculating, and I laugh in their faces and tell them I am free of you. They reach for me with clawing fingers, but I am gone like the North Wind, an icy gust in my wake. I see Trick again, and he is laughing with me. “Create your own name,” he says to me. “You are not Galatea. You are not their marble lady…”

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