The Immortals

כ״ח באדר תש"ע
Keowulf 30

I subscribe to Smithsonian magazine. Until last night, my latest issue had been laying around waiting to be read. Last night before bed, I picked up the issue Discovering Our Ancestors, Researchers Trace the Human Family Back 7 Million Years. Within the context of the main article, there are two particularly interesting sentences that stand out in my mind this morning:

"Their work inspired American and European researchers to sweep through the Great Rift Valley, a geological fault that runs through Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and exposes rocky layers that are millions of years old."

"White explains that the team returns to this hostile spot year after year because it's the only place in the world to yield fossils that span such a long stretch of human evolution, some six million years."

These two sentences are particularly interesting to me this morning because last night I dreamt a dream which immediately reminded me of them when I woke up. The dream ...

With a few companions, I was walking in the daylight down a path which led by fields of rocky earthen layers which exposed mass graves of people who had been killed by the ruling powers over eons of time. The killing fields revealed a holocaust of humanity. So many had died over time, so very very many. The layers were composed of bodies stacked upon bodies stacked upon bodies stacked upon bodies intermingled with the treeless barren soil and rock of the earth. It reminded me of pictures I've seen of this century's holocaust only on a much larger scale encompassing eons of ancient time and layered like fossils into great rifts of earth.

The killing fields had been to my left as I walked down the path. To my right as I walked down the path, was a special graveyard consisting of iron body-sized silo-like tombs standing upright, squeezed together side by side, and hidden among a grove of trees. As I entered among the trees, I discovered that the ruling powers had hidden this special graveyard and that it was not really a true graveyard at all. The people entombed here could not die, they were the immortals. The ruling powers had entombed the immortals here to contain them, since the rulers were powerless to kill them. The immortals were the only ones in existence who posed a threat to the power of the rulers.

I felt the presence of awesome power emanating from within each of the silos built like an upright-standing iron coffin. [It occurs to me now that this detail is important - the iron coffins all stood upright, suggesting that the rulers were not only incapable of killing the immortals, but were also incapable of burying them on their backs laying down as the bodies in the killing field had been stacked.] I climbed up onto one coffin-silo and penetratingly peered down into it, communicating eye to eye with the immortal inside. I had the power to unlock and open up the silos and to release the imprisoned immortals. I had the power to do it. I could release the terrifyingly awesome power of the immortals. I did it. I unlocked the silos and released the immortals.

I and my companions were gathered among the group of immortals. I noticed that each immortal had a mark on the side of his or her neck. The mark was in a artery-like stave form of Ogham writing, the specific written code unique on each immortal. The mark was beautifully radiant under the skin of the neck and sparked like glowing light-filled blood.

As I was watching the heartbeat of one immortal's mark pulse with eternal life, he told me that I had the mark too. I looked - I had the mark of an immortal too. I am an immortal.

Together, we left the grove of trees and stepped upon the path between the killing fields and the grove where the iron prison-coffins had been hidden. We turned toward the direction opposite the direction my companions and I had initially been walking upon the path (away from the civilization controlled by rulers). We were immortals and we were no longer imprisoned. We went to reclaim our rightful place on the Earth and in the Universe. The rulers ruled no more.

As we walked back toward civilization, I was to learn how to control the power I had released in myself as an immortal. I watched my hand shapeshift like a werewolf's might and then return back to its human form. The immortal beside me explained the werewolf-like form arose when the power was not fully controlled. I looked at my human-formed hand, and woke up.

Related writing - The Witch's Staves