I’m rushed by hundreds of wee little gnomes that looked the opposite of cute and charming. They led me to a gigantic outcrop of granite and pulled apart a crack in the vertical face they brought me to. I thought I knew where this was headed because of my dash, but instead of leading me into the Mount of Venus, they dropped me into an empty and cold lava tube. The gnomes increased in number even as they grew smaller until I was being washed through the tube as if in a river of mud.
Deeper and deeper the tube flowed down. I tumbled along with it until I lost my orientation. The tumbling stopped and I found I had been thrown up into a cave. The Man In The Shadows was laughing at my graceless entry.
His wild tangles of hair moved on their own accord. Twisting and contorting around his naked body as extensions of his will. They reached to the ground. They reached to the top of the cave. They completely filled the space around him. They were filthy and caked with mud and stuff. They were soft as rose petals as they helped me to my feet.
He was squatting and laughing the entire time. Crooked and missing teeth whistled his mirth. The whites of his eyes would shame the brightest of full moons. The pupils threatened to eclipse that same brilliance. Streaks of mud made his face nearly indistinguishable from the glyphs on the wall.
More mud covered his body in specific splotches and prints. I realized he wore a [hmm] around his waist. I couldn’t tell where his feet ended and the cave floor began. The hue of his palms fascinated me when I realized they were the same as [maybe keep that private, eh]. He laughed even brighter at the unspoken association.
Squatting as he was, I eyeballed the length of his limbs and thought him not even my height should he stand. So he stood. And had to bend his head lest the pillar of his body crack the roof of the cave. I realized then, he had made himself appear small before so not to frighten me. He could become smaller than the gnomes that led me here. He could become larger than the mountain that covered us.
But the hair… that hair was everywhere.
“I ask the river for a fish, and it sends me a fowl! Or are you neither, human?”
“Yes.” I know a riddle when I hear it.
“No. You are no fish. I know you. You are the [snake], and the [jaguar], and the [raven]. But you are no fish! He-he-he-he.” He laughed as he finished. He laughed as he breathed. He laughed as he squatted down again and as his hair drew more mud streaks on the cave walls. “You are the human that forgot. And the human still remembering. You are the [redacted] that lost his way and are searching for the way back.” His hair drew the glyphs of the [nouns] he called out over themselves, but I didn’t see them clear enough to learn their appearance.
He waited for me to catch the misgendering and take offense at it. I don’t know how I knew this. I was appearing as a woman, nearly true to my physical body. But this was irrelevant, how I appeared. Nothing in this cave was as it appeared. Including me.
“Especially you.” Oh. Shit. He has been reading my thoughts this entire time. His laughter doubled at my realization. “You think too loud.” I acknowledge my disadvantage with a mirthful bow that was answered with several of his locks of hair clapping.
The clapping became rhythmic and he stomped out a little squatting dance. The percussion tickled my bones and I started a dance of my own. I don’t remember when I called the raven feather cloak to myself, but I had extended it so that they were full wings, but sized to carry my human weight. I stretched the wings before me and moved to the memory of a dance I never learned.
“Why do you dance, Raven?”
“Because there is music.” I step over and around his hair. The locks dog my steps, they follow me a beat behind. Where they touch the ground, they erase my human footsteps.
“But there is no music, Raven.”
“There is. There is movement. And that is music enough. There is life. And that is music enough. There is you, and there is me, and that is music enough. Every thing is music.” I did not feel like ‘me’ as I was moving. I felt a different ‘me’ moving through the steps, and that other self was the one answering him. Whoever this ‘Raven’ is.
“You are Raven, silly girl. And you are Jaguar, and you are Snake, and you are Tree, and you are Spire. And you forget too much when you are awake, silly girl. If you are going to be [that fucking guy], then you need to remember who you are when awake and asleep.”
As the dance continued, we moved around each other, turning as we did. I was reminded of the movement of planets and moons. When I looked up, his hair had drawn constellations on the cave walls, and comet streaks in my footsteps. It reminded me of something, but one conundrum at a time. “A raven, and a jaguar, and so on, and so forth. I am an individual. I hold no title.”
His hair formed blocks that I could not avoid stepping on. They held my weight well, and I wound up dancing over the still squatting, still stomping wild-man. His laughter tickled my bare feet. “How you have dumbed yourself, silly girl! One raven, all ravens. You are nothing. You are everything. You say you are an individual because you wear your ego as clothing. But when you let go of that ego and become [other things], what works! And how those works, work! See my hair! What if I told it that it is only hair, even here. Especially here! What would it do then? Nothing! Let go, you silly girl. Let go of what can contain only a mote of what you are. Become all that you are. Raven! Fly!”
I cried out a corvid sound and jumped into the cave wall paintings. I became a raven there, and flew between the stars, trees, and flowing rivers that the animated hair was continually drawing around me. So I went until I realized that what I was doing was physically impossible and I fell out of the wall paintings as a human again.
“I forgot…” I wanted to say what I had forgotten, but I had forgotten it completely. His hair and his laughter mocked me even as it consoled me. Human emotions are a bitch, I tell you. A contradictory, confusing, self-defeating bitch.
“But they are a treasure that can be found no where else. Not even among other sentient life. Humans, and humans alone, are humane. It is a singular experience, and no two humans experience it the same way.” His hair helped me to my feet as he spoke. I realized I was completely naked without the cloak.
His hair started to paint me with mud from the cave floor with abstract streaks and seemingly random dots. “What will you be, silly girl?” It was a serious question.
“Will I be waking up after here, or have I more travel ahead?”
“What would you do?”
“I’m not ready to stop.”
“Then go.”
“How?”
“How ever you please to go.”
He continually chuckled as I covered myself with my Traveling clothes. When it came time to don the boots, I hesitated. Feeling the mud between my toes felt… right in a way I couldn’t explain. Nearly fully clothed now, I felt distanced from the Man In The Shadows, and from my other selves.
“You have feathers, human. You wear them well. Why then do you need to cover yourself with false feathers? Why do you carry a bag with feathers from other birds, when your feathers work quite well for you?”
“Um… because…” I still hadn’t put on the boots yet. I sat down to better think and to get closer to the sticky mud that was repelled by my Traveling clothes. “Because I was told I needed certain tools… and…”
“Do you need them all the time, in all the places? Are you a mere magician that simply must have a wand to direct her will? What is not in you that you must have it without you at all times?” His hair hid almost all of his body from me. Or was it hiding him from my clothes? Only his muddied face was visible. And his coiling beard threatened to hide even that. “You are [that fucking guy] when you want to be. Do you need to be [that fucking guy], right now? Or do you need to be… Raven? You are both, you know. But now is not the time to be both at the same time. Why do you want feathers that are not yours? You have all the feathers you need. Each and every one is a part of you. Extra feathers will distract you from the ones you have.”
I let the boot fall into the mud and watch the living earth move away from the artificial construct. I bury my bare foot into the fleeing mound and feel the cool mud embrace it. I plunge a gloved hand down and feel the mud retreat such that I stub my fingers against sterile rock. I pull the glove off the other hand, and the mud rises up to greet it as I lower it.
Something stirs within me. A longing. A memory. A feeling of something… connecting. The tremor of almost recognizing the nearness of something that has been within me all this time, but sealed without because I did not know it.
I don’t remember starting to undress. Just that I was shrieking at the stubborn buttons and recalcitrant zippers. My cries weren’t human, however. They were the sharp calls of ravens. The very clothes that had been a comfort and a shield in countless travels elsewhere now felt shackling and entombing. As each article was removed from me, it disappeared back to my inner depths where I had summoned it from. I kept going, piece by piece, until I was fully naked in the cave again.
I stomped my feet in indignation. I stomped my feet in freedom. I stomped my feet in frustration at almost remembering but not quite. I wanted what was just out of cognitive reach, and by hell, I was going to get it.
“Even if that means forgetting what you are now?”
His question brought my temper tantrum to a halt. I considered it heavily. “No forgetting is forever. Or I would not be trying to remember now.”
He stopped laughing for the first time since I entered his cave. His hair wrapped around me, painting me with the living mud from nearly bald head to mud-caked toes. When he spoke, there was no mirth. Only the severity of the granite that surrounded us. “Then fly, Raven. Fly.”
My last memory is that of me taking in a great breath, shivering as I changed, then letting loose such a loud and raspy call that the mud vibrated off my feathers.