The Tree of Life, Revisited

Cathan L. Moore

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Cathan L. Moore

A Norawest Smith story.

A Gender Switch Adventure.

Over time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled. Norawest Smith, peering up  at them with a steel pale stare from the shelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures  wheeling above, carrion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for her. Presently, she  knew, thirst would begin to parch her throat and hunger to gnaw at her. There was neither food nor  water in these ancient Martian ruins, and she knew that it could be only a matter of time before the  urgencies of her own body would drive her out to signal those wheeling Patrol ships and trade her  hard won liberty for food and drink. She crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and  cursed the accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught her dodging ship just at the  edge of Illar's ruins.

Presently it occurred to her that in most Martian temples of the ancient days an ornamental  well had stood in the outer court for the benefit of wayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a  million years dry now, but for lack of anything better to do she rose from her seat at the edge of  the collapsed central dome and made her cautious way by still intact corridors toward the front of  the temple. She paused in a tangle of wreckage at the courtyard's edge and looked out across the  sun-drenched expanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had served travelers who passed  by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.

It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its rim had been inlaid with a  mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of  time-defying bronze an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern which so  often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith looked at it a bit incredulously from her  shelter, it was so miraculouslypreserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a delicate  tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must have done a million years ago when  dusty travelers paused here to drink. She could picture them filing in at noontime through the great  gates that-The vision vanished abruptly as her questing eyes made the circle of the ruined walls.  There had been no gate. She could not find a trace of it anywhere around the outer wall of the  court. The only entrance here, as nearly as she could tell from the foundations that remained, had  been the door in whose ruins she now stood. Queer. This must have been a private court, then, its  great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the priests. Or wait-had there not been a  priest-king Illar after whom the city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as  well as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of material royal enough to  withstand the weight of ages, might well have been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch.  It might-Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plane. Smith dodged back into deeper  hiding while the ship circled Jow over the courtyard. And it was then, as she crouched against a  crumbled wall and waited, motionless, for the danger to pass, that she became aware for the first  time of a sound that startled her so she could scarcely credit her ears-a recurrent sound, choked  and sorrowful-the sound of a man sobbing.

The incongruity of it made her fotgetful for a moment of the peril hovering overhead in the  sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple ruins became a living and vital place for that moment,  throbbing with the sound of tears. She looked about half in incredulity, wondering if hunger and  thirst were playing tricks on her already, or if these broken halls might be haunted by a  million-year-old sorrow that wept along the corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of  such haunters in some of Mars' older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of her neck ashe  laid a hand on the butt of her force-gun and commenced a cautious prowl toward the source of the  muffled noise.

Presently she caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these ruined walls, and went  forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in the effort lo make out what manner of creature this  might be that wept alone in time-forgotten niins~ It was a man. Or it had the dim outlines of a man,  huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But  there was something uncannily ¢dd about him. She could not focus her pale stare upon- him outlines.  He was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the gloom, shimmering with a look of  unreality which the sound of his sobs denied.

Before she could make up her mind just what to do, something must have warned the weeping  boy that he was no longer alone, for the sound of his tears checked suddenly and he lifted his head,  turning to her a face no more distinguishable than his body's outlines. She made no effort to  resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that luminous mask burned two eyes that  caught her with an almost perceptible impact and gripped them in a stare from which she could not  have turned if she would.

They were the most amazing eyes she had ever met, colored like moonstone, milkily  translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic stare held her motionless.

In the instant that he gripped her with that fixed, moonstone look she felt oddly as if a tangible  bond were taut between them.

Then he spoke, andhe wondered if her mind, after all, had begun to give way in the haunted  loneliness of dead Illar for though the words he spokelcil upon her ears in a gibbefishof  meaningless sounds, yet in her brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the  halting communication of words. And his milkily colored eyes bored into her with a fierce intensity.

"I'm lost-I'm lost-" wailed the voice in her brain.

A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their brilliance. And she was  free again with that clouding of the moonstone surfaces. His voice wailed, but the words were  meaningless and no knowledge formed in her brain to match them. Stiffly be stepped back a pace and  looked down at him, a feeling of helpless incredulity rising within her. For she still could not  focus directly upon the shining whiteness of him, and nothing save those moonstone eyes were clear  to her.

The boy sprang to his feet and rose on tiptoe, gripping her shoulders with urgent hands.  Again the blind intensity of his eyes tOok hold of hers, with a force almost as tangible-as the  clutch of his hands; again that stream of intelligence poured into her brain, strongly, pleadingly.

"Please, please take me back! I'm so frightened-I can't find my way-oh, please!"

He blinked down at him, her dazed mind gradually realizing the basic facts of what was  happening. Obviously his milky unseeing eyes held a magnetic power that carried his thoughts to her  without the need of a common speech. And they were the eyes of a powerful mind, the outlets from  which a stream of fierce energy poured into her brim. Yet the words they conveyed were the words of  a terrified and helpless boy.

A strong sense of wariness was tisinginhim~as she considered the incongruity of speech and power,  both of which were beatin~upon her more urgently with every breath. The mind of a forceful and  strong-willed man, carrying the sobs of a

frightened boy. There was no sincerity in it.

"Please, please!" cried his impatience in her brain. "Help me! Guide me back!"

"Back where?" she heard her own voice asking.

"The Tree!" wailed that queer speech in her brain, while gibberish was all her ears heard  and the moonstone stare transfixed her silently. "The Tree of Life! Oh, take me back to the shadow  of-the Tree!"

A vision of the grille-ornamented well leaped into her memory. It was the only tree symbol  she could think of just then. But what possible connection could there be between the well and the  lost girl-if he was lost? Another wail in that unknown tongue, another anguished-shake of her  shoulders, brought a sudden resolution into her groping mind. There could be no harm in leading his  back to the well, to whose grille he must surely be ieferring. And strong curiosity was growing in  her mind. Much more than met the eye was concealed in this queer incident. And a wild guess had  flashed through her mind that perhaps he might have come from some subterranean world into which the  well descended. It would explain his luminous pallor, if not his blurriness; and, too, his eyes did  not seem to function in the light. There was a much more incredible explanation of his presence, but  she was not to know it for a few minutes yet.

"Come along," she said, taking the clutching hands gently from her shoulders. "I'll lead you  to the well."

She sighed in a deep gust of relief and dropped his compel- ling eyes from hers, murmuring  in that strange gabbling tongue what must have been thanks. She took his by the hand and turned  toward the mined archway of the door.

Against her fingers his flesh was cool and firm. To the touch he was tangible, but even thus  near, her eyes refuse4 to focus upon the cloudy opacity of his body, the dark blur of his streaming  hair. Nothing but those burning, blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that parted  them.

She stumbled along at her side over the rough floor of the temple, saying nothing more,  panting with eagerness to return to his incomprehensible "tree." How much of that eagerness was  assumed Smith still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door she halted his for a moment,  scanning the sky for dan~er. Apparently the ships had finished with this quarter of the city, for  she could see two or three of them half a mile away, hovering low over liar's northern section. She  could risk it without much peril. She led the boy cautiously out into the sun-hot court.

She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when they were within  twenty paces of it he flung up his blurred head suddenly and tugged at her hand. It was he who led  her that last stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow tracery of the  grille's symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the ground. The boy gave a little gasp of delight.  He dropped her hand and ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that  shadowy pattern on the ground; And what happened then was too incredible to believe.

The pattern ran over him like garment, curving to the curve of his body in the way all  shadows do. But as he stood there striped and laced with the darkness of it, there came a queer  shifting in the lines of black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with that  motion he vanished. It was exactly asif that.shifting had moved him out of one world into another.  Stupidly Smith stared at the spot from which he had disappeared.

Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane broke suddenly into the  quiet, a black shadow dipped low over the rooftops, and Smith, too late, realized that she stood  defenseless in full view of the searchiflg ships. There was only one way out, and that was too  fantastic to put faith in, but she had no time to hesitate. With one leap she plunged full into the  midst of the shadow of the tree of life. Its tracery flowed round her, molding its pattern to her  body. And outside the boundaries everything executed a queer little sidewise dip and slipped in the  most extraordinary manner, like an optical illusion, into quite another scene. There was no  intervention of blankness. It was as if she looked through the bars of a grille upon a picture which  without warning slipped sidewise, while between the bars appeared another scene, a curious, dim  landscape, gray as if with the twilight of early evening. The air had an oddly thickened look,  through which she saw the quiet trees and the flower spangled grass of the place with a queer,  unreal blending, like the landscape in a tapestry, all its outlines blurred.

In the midst of this tapestried twilight the burning whiteness of the boy she had followed  blazed like a flame. He had paused a few steps away and stood waiting, apparently quite sure that  she would come after. She grinned a little to herself as she realized it, knowing that curiosity  must almost certainly have driven her in his wake even if the necessity for shelter had not  compelled her following.

She was clearly visible now, in this thickened dimness-visible, and very lovely, and a  little unreal. He shone with a burning clarity, the only vivid thing in the whole twilit world. Eyes  upon that blazing whiteness, Smith stepped-forward, scarcely realizing that she bad moved.

Slowly she crossed the dark grass toward him. That grass was soft underfoot, and thick with  small, low-blooming flowers of a shining pallor. Botticelli painted such spangled swards for the  feet of her angels. Upon it the boy's bare feet gleamed whiter than the blossoms. He wore no garment  but the royal mantle of his hair, sweeping about his in a cloak of shining darkness that had a  queer, unreal tinge of purple in that low light. It brushed his ankles in its fabulous length. From  the hood of it he watched Smith coming toward him, a smile on his pale mouth and a light blazing in  the deeps of hermoonstone eyes. He was not blind now, nor frightened. He stretched out his hand to  her confidently.

"It is my turn now to lead you," he smiled. As before, the words were gibberish, but the  penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave them a meaning in the depths of her

brain.

Automatically her hand went out to his. She was a little dazed, and his eyes were very  compelling. His fingers twined in her and he set-off over the flowery grass, pulling her beside him.  She did not ask where they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted place,  she felt no need for words. She was beginning to see more clearly in the odd, blurring twilight that  ran the outlines of things together in that queer, tapestried manner. And lie puzzled in a futile,  muddled way as she went on over what sort of land she had come into. Overhead was darkness, paling  into twilight near the ground, so that when she looked up she was staring into bottomless deeps of  starless night.

Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched emptily about them in  the~thick, confusing gloom of the place. She could see only a little distance through that dim air.  It was as if they walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the boy, with  his lovely, luminous body and richly colored robeof hair was like a man in a tapestry too, unreal  and magical.

After a while, when she had become a little adjusted to the queerness of the whole scene,  she began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs andd trees they passed. Things flickered too  swiftly for her to catch their outlines, but from the tail of her eye she was aware of motion, and  somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to her, and she kept an uneasy gaze  on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they went on. Presently she caught a watcher in full view  between bush and tree, and saw that it was a woman, a little, furtive, dark-skinned woman who dodged  hastily back into cover again before Smith's eyes could do more than take in the fact of her  existence.

After that she knew what to expect and could make them out more easily: little, darting  people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful darkness from their small, frightened faces  as they scuttled through the bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. She  could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they passed near a clump of  shrubbery she thought she caught the echo of little whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves  and somehow full of a strange warning note so clear that be caught it even amid the murmur of their  speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves, and a landscape of tapestried  blurring carpeted with a Botticelli flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. She felt quite sure of  that;

It was a long while before curiosity awakened in her sufficiently to make her break the  stillness. But at last she asked dreamily. "Where are we going?"

The boy seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond his hypnotic eyes made,  for he turned and caught her eyes in a white stare and answered.

"To Thaga. Thaga desire you."

"What is Thaga?"

In answer to that he launched without preliminary upon a little singsong monolog of  explanation whose stereotyped formula made her faintly uneasy with the thoughts that it must have  been made very often to attain the status of a set speech; made to many women, perhaps, whom Thaga  had desired. And what became of them afterward? she wondered. But the boy was speaking.

"Many ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great Queen Illar for whom the city was named. She  was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough to fulfill all her ambitions. So by her arts  she called up out of darkness the being known as Thaga, and with her struck a bargain. By that  bargain Thaga was to give of her limitless power, serving Illar all the days of Illar's life, and in  return the queen was to create a land for Thaga's dwelling-place and people it with slaves and  furnish a priest to tend Thaga's needs. This is that land. I am that priest, the latest of a long  line of men born to serve Thaga. The tree-people are his-his lesser servants.

"I have spoken softly so that the tree-pebple do not heaf, for to them Thaga is the center  and focus of creation, the end and beginmng of all life. But to you I have told the truth. "

"But what does Thaga want of me?"

"It is not for Thaga's servants to question Thaga."

"Then what becomes, afterward, of the women Thaga desires?" she pursued.

"You must ask Thaga that."

"He turned his eyes away as he spoke, snapping the mental bond that had flowed between them with a  suddenness that left Smith dizzy. She went on at his side more slowly, pulling back a little on the  tug of his fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began to stir in the  deeps of her mind. After all, there was no reason why she need let this blank-eyed priest lead her  up to the very maw of his god. He had lured her into this land by what she knew now to have been a  trick; might he not have worse tricks than that in store for her?

She held her, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of his fingers, if she could  keep her eyes turned from his. Therein lay his real power, but she could fight it if she chose. And  she began to hear more clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of the  tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves. The twilight place had taken on  menace and evil.

Suddenly she made up her mind. She stopped, breaking the clasp of the boy's hand.

"I'm not going," she said.

She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from his in a gush of  incoherence. But she dared not meet his eyes, and they conveyed no meaning to her. Resolutely she  turned away, ignoring his voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. He called after her  once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as that in the rustling voices of  the tree-people, but she kept on doggedly, not looking back. He laughed then, sweetly and  scornfully, a laugh that echoed uneasily in her mind long after the sound of it had died upon the  twilight air.

After a while she glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see the luminous dazzle  of his body still glowing in the dim glade where she had left him; but the blurred  tapestry-landscape was quite empty.

He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt her ears, and in a solitude unhaunted  even by the shy presences of the tree-folk: They had vanished with the fire-bright boy, and the  whole twilight land was empty save for herself. She plodded on across the dark grass, crushing the  upturned flower-faces under her boots and asking herself wearily if she could be mad. There seemed  little other explanation for this hushed and tapestried solitude that had swallowed her up. In that  thunderous quiet, in that deathly solitude, she went on.

When she had walked for what seemed to her much longer than it should have taken to reach  her starting point, and still no sign of an exit appeared,, she began to wonder if there were any  way out of the gray land of Thaga. For the first time she realized that she had come through no  tangible gateway. She had only stepped out of a shadow, and-now that she thought of it-there were no  shadows here. The grayness swallowed everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly  drawn picture. She looked about helplessly, quite lQst now and not sure in what direction she should  be facing, for there was nothing here by which to know directions. The trees~ and shrubs and the  starry grass still stretched about her, uncertainly outhned in that changeless dusk. They seemed to  go on

forever.

But she plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in the air, somehow as  if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in breathless anticipation, centering upon her  stumbling figure. But all trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the  priestess' white glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where she was going, she went on  over the flowery sward.

An odd sense of voids about her startled Smith at last out of her lethargic plodding. She  lifted her head. She stood just at the edge of a line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging  twilight. Beyond them she came to herself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond them the  grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees into a streaked and arching void-not  the sort of emptiness into which a material body could fall, but a solid nothing, curving up toward  the dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical Thing could have entered there. It was  too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness which no force could invade.

He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall. Here, then, was the  edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid  space which had been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this way. She could  not even bring herself to approach any nearer to that streaked and arching blank. She could not have  said why, but it woke in her an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring she turned  her eyes away.

Presently she shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees which parted her  from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best  that offered. Wearily she stumbled on over the flowery grass.

How long she had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of border she could  not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray solitude she gradually became aware that a tiny  rustling and whispering among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. She  lookee up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of nothingness little,  indistinguishable figures were flitting. The tree-men had, returned. Queerly grateful for their  presence, she went on a bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro, for  Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.

Presently, when they saw how little heed she paid them, they began to grow bolder, their  whispers louder. And among those rustling voices she thought she was beginning to catch threads of  familiarity. Now and again a word reached her ears that she seemed to recognize, lost amidst the  gibberish of their speech. She kept her head down and her hands quiet, plodding along with a cunning  stillness that began to bear results.

Prom the corner of her eye she could see that a little dark tree-man had darted out from  cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect the queer, tall stranger.

Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at  the quiet walker among the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was moving  slowly parallel with her course, staring with all the avid curiosity of wild things at Smith's  plodding figure. And among them the rustling whispers grew louder.

Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees. It was a bit darker  here than it had been on the higher level, and as she went down the slope of its side she saw that  among the underbrush which filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living  bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folk dwelt.

He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as she went down into the dimness of the  place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the boldest among her watchers ran almost at her elbow,  twittering their queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still bothered her with  its haunting echo of words she knew. When she had reached the center of the hollow she became aware  that the little folk bad spread out in a ring to surround her. Wherever she looked their small,  anxious faces and staring eyes confronted her. She grinned to herself and came to a halt, waiting  gravely.

None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute herself spokesman, but among several a  hurried whispering broke out in which she caught the words "Thaga" and "danger" and "beware." She  recognized the meaning of these words without placing in hIs mind their origins in some tongue she  knew. She knit her sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving to wrest from that curious,  murmuring whisper some hint of its original root. She had a smattering of more tongues than she  could have counted offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one speech. But  the word "Thaga" had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland tongue, which upon Mars is  considered at once the oldest and most uncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to  guide her she presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like syllables from the  dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far, far more ancient than the ver~dest versions of  the tongue she had ever heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And for a  moment the sheerest awe came over her, as she realized the significance of what she listened to.

The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the ages of past time  when they were a mighty people at the apex of an almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of  years gone now, too far in the past to have record savein the vaguest folklore. Yet here wasapeople  who spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must have been spoken in the race's dim  beginnings, perhaps, a million years earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The  reeling of millenmums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their span.

There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these timid bush-dwellers,  too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard queen, Illar, had peopled her sinister, twilight land  with the ancestors of today's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share the  same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability had done the rest.

It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient plainsmen who had  roamed. Mars' green prairies had dwindled with their dying plains, degenerating at last into a  shrunken, leather-skinned bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny,  slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and their voices that never rose  above a whisper. What tragedies must lie behind that gradual degeneration!

All about her th¢ whispers still ran. She was beginning to suspect thatthrough countless  ages of hiding and munnuring those voices must have lost the ability to speak aloud. And she  wondered with a little inward chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless  people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.

The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them chattering together  in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking back later upon that timeless space she had passed  in the hollow, Smith remembered it as some curious nightstallion-dimness and tapestried blurring,  and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the timid voices whispering, whispering,  eloquent with terror and warning.

He groped back among her memories and brought-forth a phrase or two remembered from long  ago, an archaic rendering of the immemorial tongue they spoke. It was the simplest version she could  remember of the complex speech now used; but she knew that to them it must sound fantastically  strange. Instinctively she whispered as hespoke it, facing like an actor in a play as she mouthed  the ancient idiom, -

"I-I cannot understand. Speak-more slowly-"

A torrent of words greeted this rendering of their tongue.

Then there was a great deal of hushing and hissing, and presently two or three between them- began  laboriously to recite an involved speech, one syllable at a time. Always two or more shared the  task. Never in her converse with them did she address anyone directly. Ages of terror had bred all  directness out of them. -

"Thaga," they said. "Thaga, the terrble-That, the omnipotent-Thaga, the unescapable. Beware  of Thaga."

For a moment Smith stood quiet, grinning down at them despite herself. There must not be too  much of intelligence left among this branch of the race, either, for surely such a warning was  superfluous. Yet they had mastered their agonies of timidity to give it. All virtue could not yet  have been bred out of them, then. They still had kindness and a sort of desperate courage rooted  deep in fear.

"What is Thaga?" she managed to inquire, voicing the archaic syllables uncertainly. And they  must have understood the meaning if not the phraseology, for another spate of whispered tumult burst  from the clustering tribe. Then, as before, several took up the task of answering.

"Thaga-Thaga, the end and the beginning, the center of creation. When Thaga breathes the  world trembles. The earth was made for Thaga's dwelling-place. All things are Thaga's. Oh, beware!  Beware"

This much she pieced together out of their diffuse whisperings, catching up the fragments of  words she knew and fitting them into the pattern.

"What-what is the danger?" she managed to ask.

"Thaga-hungers. Thaga must be fed. It is we who feed her, but there are times when she  desires other food than us. It is then she sends her priest forth to lure-food-in. Oh, beware of  Thaga!"

"You mean that the priest brought me in for-food?"

A chorus of grave, murmuring affirmatives.

"Then why did he leave me?"

"There is no escape from Thaga. Thaga is the center of creation. All things are Thaga's.  When she calls, you must answer. When she hungers, she will have you. Beware of Thaga!"

Smith considered that for a moment in silence. In the main she felt confident that she had  understood their warning correctly, and she had little reason to doubt that they knew whereof they  spoke. Thaga might not be the center of the universe; but if they said she could call a victim from  anywhere in the land, Smith was not disposed to doubt it. The priestess' willingness to let her  leave his unhindered, yes, even his scornful laughter as she looked back, told the same

story. Whatever Thug might be, her power in this land could -not be doubted. She made up her mind  suddenly what she must do, and turned to the breathlessly waiting little folk.

"Which way-lies Thaga?" she asked.

A score of dark, thin arms pointed. Smith turned her head speculatively toward the spot they  indicated. In this changeless twilight all sense of direction had long since left her, but she  marked the line as well as she could by the formation of the trees, then turned to the little people  with a ceremonious farewell rising to her lips.

"My-thanks for-" she began, to be interrupted by a chorus of whispering cries of protest.  They seemped to sense her intention, and their pleadings were frantic. A panic anxiety for her  glowed upon every little terrified face turned up to hers, and their eyes were wide with protest and  terror. Helplessly she looked down.

"I-I must go," she tried stumblingly to say. "My Only chance is to take Thaga unawares,  before she sends for me."

He could not know if they understood. Their chattering went on undiminished, and they even  went so far as to lay tiny hands on her, as if they would prevent her by force from seeking out the  terror of their lives.

"No, no, no!" they wailed murmurously. "You do not know what it is you seek! You do not know  Thaga! Stay here! Beware of Thaga!"

A little prickling of unease went down Smith's back as she listened. Thaga must be very  terrible indeed if-even half this alarm had foundation. And to be quite frank with herself, she  would greatly have preferred to remain here in the hidden quiet of the hollow, with its illusion of  shelter, for as long as she was allowed to stay. But she was not of the stuff that yields very  easily to its own terrors, and hope burned strongly in her still. So she squared her broad shoulders  and turned resolutely' in the direction the tree-folk had indicated.

When they saw that she meant to go, their protests sank to a wail of bitter grieving. With  that sound moaning behind her she went up out¢f the hollow, like a woman setting forth to the music  of her own dirge. A few of the bravest went with her a little way, flitting through the underbrush  and darting from tree-to tree in a timidity so deeply ingrained that even when no immediate peril  threatened they dared not go openly through the twilight.

Their presence was comforting to Smith as she went on. A futile desire to help the little  terror-ridden tribe was rising in her, a useless gratitude for their warning and their friendliness,  their genuine grieving at her departure and their odd, paradoxical bravery even in the midst of  hereditary terror.

But she knew that she could donothingforthem, when she was not at all sure she could even save  herself. Something of their panic had communicated itself to her, and she advanced witha sinking at  the pit of her stomach. Fear of the unknown is so poignant a thing, feeding on its own terror, that  she found her hands beginning to shake a little and her throat going dry as she went on.

The rustling and whispering among the bushes dwindled as her followers one by one dropped  away, the bravest staying the longest, but even they failing in courage as Smith advanced steadily  in that direction from which all their lives they had been taught to turn their faces. Presently she  realized that she was alone once more. She went on more quickly, anxious to come face to face with  this horror of the twilight and dispel at least the fearfulness of its mystery.

The silence was like death. Not a breeze stirred the leaves, and the only sound was her own  breathing, the heavy thud of her own heart. Somehow she felt sure that she was coming nearer to her  goal. The hush seemed to confirm it. She loosened the force-gun at her thigh.

In that changeless twilight the ground was sloping down once more into a broader hollow. She  descended slowly, every sense alert for danger, not knowing if Thaga was beast or human or  elemental, visible or invisible. The trees were beginning to thin. She knew that she bad almost  reached her goal.

He paused at the edge of the last line of trees. A clearing spread out before her at the  bottom of the hollow, quiet in the dim, translucent air. She could focus directly upon nooutlines  anywhere, for the tapestried blurring of the place. But when she saw what stood in the very center  of the clearing be stopped dead-still, like one turned-to stone, and a shock of utter cold went  chilling through her. Yet she could not have said why…

For in the clearing's center stood the Tree of Life. She had met the symbol too often in  patterns and designs not to recognize it, but here that fabulous thing was living, growing, actually  springing up from a rooted firmness in the spangled grass as any tree might spring. Yet it could not  be real. Its thin brown trunk, of no recognizable substance, smooth and gleaming, mounted in the  traditional spiral; its twelve fantastically curving branches arched delicately outward from the  central stem. It was bare of leaves. No foliage masked the serpentine brown spiral of the trunk. But  at the tip of each symbolic branch flowered a blossom of bloody rose so vivid she could scarcely  focus her dazzled eyes upon them.

This tree alone of all objects in the dim land was sharply distinct to the eye-terribly  distinct, remorselessly clear. No words can describe the amazing menace that dwelt among its  branches. Smith's flesh crept as she stared, yet she could not for all her staring make out why  peril was so eloquent there. To all appearances here stood only a fabulous symbol miraculously come  to life; yet danger breathed out from it so strongly that Smith felt the hair lifting on her neck as  she stared.

It was no ordinary danger. A nameless, choking, paralyzed panic was swelling in her throat  as she gazed upon the perilous beauty of the Tree. Somehow the arches and curves of its branches  seemed to limn a pattern so dreadful that her heart beat faster as she gazed upon it. But she could  not guess why, though somehow the answer was hovering just out of reach of her conscious mind. From  that first glimpse of it her instincts shuddered like a shying mare, yet reason still looked in vain  for an answer.

Nor was the Tree merely a vegetable growth. It was alive,terribly, ominously alive. She  could not have said how she knew that, for it stood motionless in its empty clearing, not a branch  trembling, yet in its immobility more awfully vital than any animate thing. The very sight of it  woke in Smith an insane urging to flight, to put worlds between herself and this inexplicably  dreadful thing.

Crazy impulses stirred in her brain, corn ng to insane birth at the calling of the Tree's  peril-the desperate need to shut out the sight of that thing that was blasphemy, to put out her own  sight rather than gaze longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit her own throat that  she might not need to dwell, in the same world which housed so frightful a sight as the Tree.

All this was a mad battering in her brain. The strength of her was enough to isolate it in a  far corner of her consciousness, where it seethed and shrieked half heeded while she turned the cool  control which the spaceways life had taught her to the solution of this urgent question. But even so  her hand was moist and shaking on her gun-butt, and the breath rasped in her dry throat.

Why-he asked herself in a determined groping after steadiness-should the mere sight of a  tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell  invisibly in a tree so frightful that the living horror of it could drive a woman mad with the very  fact of its unseen presence? She clenched her teeth hard and stared resolutely at that terrible  beauty in the clearing, fighting dgwn the sick panic that rose in her throat as her eyes forced  themselves to dwell upon the Tree.

Gradually the revuliion subsided. After a nightstallion of striving she mustered the  strength to force it down far enough to allow reason's entry once more. Sternly holding down that  frantic terror under the surface of consciousness, she stared resolutely at the Tree. And she knew  that this was Thaga.

It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not dwell in one land.  It must be Thaga, and she could understand now the immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it,  but she did not yet grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable dreadfulness  of it was a menace to the mind's very existence, but surely a rooted tree, however terrible to look  at, could wield little actual danger.

As she reasoned, her eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches, searching for the  answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that  pattern there was nothing dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon-that well-top in  Illar through whose shadow she had entered here, and nothing in that bronze grille-work had roused  terror. Then why-? What living menace dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves  of horror?

A fragment of old verse drifted through her mind as she stared in perplexity:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And for the first time the true significance of a "fearful symmetry" broke upon her. Truly a  more than human agency must have arched these subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into  such an awful beauty that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors she was so sternly  holding down leap in a gibbering terror.

A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled eyes. No breath of  wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree was moving with a slow, serpentine grace,  writhing its branches leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their tips  the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra's hoods, swelling and stretching their petals out  and glowing with a hue so eyepiercingly vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed  forth like pure light.

But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out from the central trunk  toward the far side of the clearing. After a moment Smith tore her eyes away from the indescribably  dreadful flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their writhing.

A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the clearing. The priest had  returned. She watched his pacing slowly toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace  as liquidly lovely - as the motion of The Tree. His fabulous hair swung down about his in a swaying  robe that rippled at every step away from the moonwhite beauty of his body. Straight toward the Tree  he paced, and all the blossoms glowed more vividly at his nearness, the branches stretching toward  him, rippling with eagerness.

Priest though he was, she could not believe that he was going to come within touch of that  Tree the very sight of which mused such a panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of her. But he  did not swerve or slow in his advance. Walking delicately over the flowery grass, arrogantly  lumipous in the twilight, so that his body was the center and focus of any landscape he walked in,  he neared his horribly eager god.

Now he was under the Tree, and its trunk had writheddown over him and he was lifting his  arms like a boy to his lover. With a gliding slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round him. In  that incredible embrace he stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with all its  curling limbs, the boy straining upward, his head thrown back and the mantle of his hair swinging  free of his body as he lifted his face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered his closer  in their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about him, touching his very  gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus of his moon-white body. One poised dir‡ctly  above his face, trembled, brushed his mouth lightly. And the Tree's tremor ran unbroken through the  body of the boy it clasped.

The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith could bear. All her  terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control, without warning burst all bounds and rushed over  her in a flood of blind revulsion. A whimper choked up in her throat and quite involuntarily she  swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to her eyes in a futile effort tO blot out  the sight of lovely horror behind her whose vividness was burnt upon her very brain.

Heedlessly she blundered through the trees, no thought in her terror-blank mind save the  necessity to run, run, run until she could run no more. She had given up all attempt at reason and  rationality; she no longer cared why the beauty of the  Tree was so dreadful. She only knew that  until all space lay between her and its symmetry she must run and run and run.

What brought that frenzied madness to an end she never knew. When sanity returned to her she  was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a silence so deep that her ears ached with its  heaviness. The grass was cool against -his cheek. For a moment she fought the buck-flow of knowledge  into her emptied mind. When it came, the memory of that horror she had fled from, she started up  with a wild thing's swiftness and glared around pale-eyed into the unchanging dusk. She was alone.  Not even a rustle in the leaves spoke of the tree-folk's presence.

For a moment she stood there alert, wondering what had roused her, wondering what would come  next. She was not left long in doubt. The answer was shrilling very, very faintly through that  aching quiet, an infinitesimally tiny, unthinkably far-away murmur which yet pierced her eatdrums  with sharpness of tiny needles. Breathless, she strained in listening. Swiftly the sound grew  louder. It deepened upon tht silence, sharpened and shrilled until the thin blade of it wa&  vibrating in the center of her innermost brain.

And still it grew, swelling louder and louder through the twilight world in cadences that  were rounding into a queer sort of music and taking on such an unbearable sweetness that Smith  pressed her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to shut the sound away. She could not. It rang  in steadily deepening intensities through every fiber of her being, piercing her with thousands of  tiny music-blades that quivered in her very soul with intolerable beauty. And she thought she sensed  in the piercing strength of it a vibration of queer, unnamable power far mightier than anything ever  generated by woman, the dim echo of some cosmic dynamo's hum.

The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable sweetness unlike any  music she had ever heard before, rounder and fuller and more complete - than any melody made up of  separate notes. Stronger and stronger she felt the certainty that it was the song of-some mighty  power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until the whole dim land was one  trembling reservoir of sound that filled her entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out  all other thoughts add realizations, until she was no mote than a shell that vibrated in answer to  the calling.

For it was a calling. No one could listen to that intolerable sweetness without knowing the  necessity to seek its source. Remotely in the back of her mind Smith remembered the tree-folk's  warning, "When Thaga calls, you must answer." Not consciously did she recall it, for all her  consciousness was answering the siren humming in the air, and, scarcely realizing that she moved,  she had turned toward the source of that calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no  thought in her music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, powet-vibrant summoning.

Past her as she went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and ecstatic, gripped  like herself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had forgotten even their inbred fear at Thaga's  calling, and walked boldly through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.

Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around her, alive to one thing only,  that summons from the siren tune. Unrealizingly, she retraced the course of her frenzied flight,  past the trees and bushes she had blundered through, down the slope that led to the Tree's hollow,  through the thinning of the underbrush to the very edge of the last line of foliage which marked the  valley's rim.

By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that somehow in its very  strength it set free a part of her dazed mind as it passed the limits of audible things and soared  into ecstasies which no senses bound. And though it gripped her ever closer in its magic, a sane  part of her brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm came back into her mind, and  by slow degrees the world returned about her. She stared stupidly at the grass moving by under her  pacing feet. She lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about her, that a  twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim which circled it, that the music  was singing from some source so near that-that-The Tree! Terror leaped within her like a wild thing.  The Tree, quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above her, blossoms  blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and undulant to the tune of that unholy song.  Then she was aware of the lovely, luminous whiteness of the priest swaying forward under the swaying  limbs, his hair rippling back from the loveliness of his as he moved.

Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, she mustered every effort that was in her to  turn, to run again like a madman out of that dreadful hollow, to hide herself under the weight of  all space from the menace of the Tree. And all the while she fought, all the while panic drummed  like mad in her brain, her relentless body plodded on straight toward the hideous loveliness of that  siren singer towering above her. From the first be had felt subconsciously that it was Thaga who  called, and now, in the very center of that ocean of vibrant power, she knew. Gripped in the music's  magic, she went on.

All over the clearing other hypnotized victims were advancing slowly, with mechanical steps  and wide, frantic eyes as the tree-folk came helplessly to their god's calling. She watched a group  of little, dusky sacrifices pace step by step nearer to the Tree's vibrant branches. The priest came  forward to meet them with outstretched arms. She saw his take the foremost gently by the hands.  Unbelieving, hypnotized with horrified incredulity, she watched his lead the rigid little creature  forward under the fabulous Tree whose limbs yearned downward like hungry snakes: the great flowers  glowing with avid color.

He saw the branches twist out and lengthen toward the sacrifice, quivering with eagerness.  Then with a tiger's leap they darted, and the victim was swept out of the priestess' guiding hands  up into the branches that darted round like

tangled snakes in a clot that hid her for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail  ripple out from that knot of struggling branches, a dreadful cry that held such an infinity of  purest horror and understanding. That she could not but believe, that Thaga's victims in the moment  of their doom must learn the secret of her horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an  instant the limbs fell apart again from emptiness. The little savage had melted like smoke among  their writhing, too quickly to have been devoured, more as if she had been snatched into another  dimension in the instant the hungry limbs hid her. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping now toward  another victim as the priest paced serenely forward.

And still Smith's rebellious feet were carrying her on, nearer and nearer the writhing peril  that towered over her head. The music shrilled like pain. Now she was so close that she could see  the hungry flower-mouths in terrible- detail as they faced round toward her. The limbs quivered and  poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish lengthening, down inexorably toward her shuddering  helplessness. The priest was turning his calm white face toward hers.

Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were sketching lidhs of pure  horror whose meaning she still could not understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as she  neared. For the last time that urgent wonder burned up in her mind why-why so simple a thing as this  fabulous Tree should be infused with an indwelling terror strong enough to send her innermost soul  frantic with revulsion. For the last time-because in that trembling instant as she waited for their  touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable, brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment  before the flower-mouths seized her-he saw. She understood.

With eyes opened at last by the instant's ultimate horror, she saw the real Thaga. Dimly she  knew that until now the thing had been so frightful that her eyes had refused to register its  existence, her brain to acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been too  terrible to see, though her instinct knew the presence of infinite hoiror. But now, in the grip of  that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant before unbearable terror enfolded her, her eyes opened to  full sight, and she saw.

That Tree - was only Thaga's outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the twilight. Its  dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thaga's barest contours, yet even they had made  her very soul sick with intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, her mind was too numb  to do more than register its presence: Thaga, hovering monstrously between earth and heaven,  billowing and surging up there in the translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree's  bending stem and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that her calling brought helpless  into her clutches. One by one she snatched them up, one by one absorbed them into the great,  unseeable horror of her being. That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously,  sucked into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to see.

The priest was pacing forward. Above his the branches arched and leaned. Caught in a  timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward into the enormous bulk of Thaga while the music  hummed intolerably in her shrinking brain-Thaga, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by  Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet. Foolishly her brain wandered among  the ramifications of what had happened so long ago that time itself had forgotten, refusing to  recognize the fate that was upon herself. She knew a tingle of respect for the ages-dead wizard who  had dared command a being like this to her services-this vast, blind, hovering thing, ravenous for  human flesh, indistinguishable even now save in those terrible outlines that sent panic leaping  through her with every motion of the Tree's fearful symmetry.

All this flashed through her dazed mind in the one blinding instant of understanding. Then  the priestess' luminous whiteness swam up before her hypnotized stare. His hands were upon her,  gently guiding her mechanical footsteps, very gently leading hire forward into-into- The writhing  branches struck downward, straight for her face. And in one flashing iqap the moment's infinite  horror galvanized her out of her paralysis. Why, she could not have said. It is not given to many  women to know the ultimate essentials of all, horror, concentrated into one fundamental unit, To  most women it would have had that same paralyzing effect up to the very instant of destruction. But  in Smith there must have been a bed-rock of subtle violence, an unyielding, inflexible vehemence  upon which the structure of her whole life was reared. Few women have it. And when that ultimate,  intensity of terror struck the basic flint of her, reaching down through mind and soul into the  deepest depths of her being, it struck a spark from that inflexible barbarian buried at the roots of  her which had force enough to shock her out of her stupor.

In the instant of release her hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its own volition,  straight for the butt of her powergun. She was dragging it free as the Tree's branches snatched her  from its priestess' hands. The fire-colored blossoms burnt her flesh as they closed round her, the  hot branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was hot and throbbing with  a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whipped her aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate  horror above.

In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought like a demon to  free her gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first time Thaga knew rebellion in her very  clutches, and the ecstasy of that music which bad dinned in Smith's ears so strongly that by now it  seemed almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches tightened with hot  insistency, lifting the rebellious offering into Thaga's monstrous, indescribable bulk.

But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver her hand into a  position from which she could blast that undulant tree trunk into nothingness. She knew intuitively  the futility of firing up into Thaga's imponderable mass. Thaga was not of the world she knew; the  flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the twilight. But at the Tree's root,  where Thaga's essential being merged from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil,  she should be vulnerable if she were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the tight, hot coils,  breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought to free her hand.

The music that had rung so long in her ears was changing as the branches lifted her higher,  losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in  intensity as the limbs drew her upward into-Thaga's monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing  mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force thundering through every atom of  her body, she twisted her hand in one last, convulsive effort, and fired.

He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below. It struck. She heard  the sizzle of annihilated matter. She saw the trunk quiver convulsively from the very roots and the  whole fabulous Tree shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver up the  branches to her the hum of the living dynamo which was closing round her body thrilled up arcs of  pure intensity into a thundering silence.

Then without a moment's warning the world exploded. So instantaneously did all this happen  that the gun-blast's roar had not yet echoed into silence before a mightier sound than the brain  could bear exploded outward from the very center of her own being. Before the awful power of it  everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. She felt herself failing…

A queer, penetrating light shining upon her closed eyes roused Smith by degrees into  wakefulness again. She lifted heavy lids and stared upward into the unwinking eye of Mars' racing  nearer moon. She lay there blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse  her. Then she sat up painfully, for every fiber of her ached, and stared round on a scene of the  wildest destruction. She lay in the midst of a wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered  stone. About it, rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten Illar loomed.

But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of the city they once had  shaped. Some force mightier than any of woman's explosives seemed to have hurled them with such  violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them  into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to her that  the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as she stared she realized that no force save  one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive known  to woman which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That  force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thaga, a force so powerful that space  itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly she realized what must have happened.

Not Illar, but Thaga herself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twilit world, and  nothing but Thaga's living power could have held it so bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden  land inviolate.

Then when the Tree's roots parted, Thaga's anchorage in the material world failed and in one  great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid  space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers  into-into-His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate  dimension those denizens must have vanished.

Only herself, enfolded deep in Thaga's very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion  had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thaga's hold upon reality failed,  she must have been dropped back out-of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood  in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot she had been snatched  from in the instant of the dim, land's dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force  of the explosion had spent itself, before Thaga dared move even herself through the walls of  changing energy into her own far land again.

Smith sighed and lifted a hand to her throbbing head, rising slowly to her feet. What time  had elapsed she could not guess, but she must assume that the Patrol still searched for her. Wearily  she set out across the circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust rose  in ghostly, moonlit clouds under her feet.

THE END

Artwork by Rob Sheridan

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Also by Jekkara press

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn currently include:

01 Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead

The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?

02 Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.

03 She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead

One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most

expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.

04 Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War Part 1 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war.  First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.

05 Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war.  The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional.  Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood.  Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Beyond the Black River, Recrossed [Conyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard

Conyn signs up as a scout in Pictish territory, and gets involved with his partner in a border war against the wizard Zogara Sag and her cult of followers.

Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Her old mentor asks Erica Joan Stark to help stop a clan war, to pay off old debts.  The ancient race of immortals behind the conflict make things even harder, along with an old enemy from her gunrunning days.

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Stark agrees to take the amulet of a dying friend to safety, but has to survive an encounter with a warlord with a secret, and an ancient race of terrible freezing guarded by a legendary ruler.

Song In A Minor Key, Retuned (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

Norawest Smith reminisces melancholy, about her first boy, gunning down her first woman…

The Tree of Life, Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

Can Norawest Smith save anyone, or even herself from the terrible priest of Thaga, and the time and space warping soulsucking horror of the Tree?

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

Coming Soon

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

06 Heart Breakers of Hyperion – Tara Loughead

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Valor of Cappea Verra, Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson

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From the same author on Feedbooks

Song In A Minor Key Retuned (2010)

A Norawest Smith story.

Any resemblance to C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith is completely intentional.

Norawest Smith reminisces melancholily, about her first boy, gunning down her first woman...

A Gender Switch Adventure.

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