He was just a stupid boy. Let him run to the off sphere by himself. I had to find Paulo. Stupid boys. Stupid off sphere. With her long twisty hair and everybody talking about her. Even Paulo went to see her. He slept on her hair! Gross! Where is he today? He’s my mirka, not hers!

  He’s not at Bennen’s eating peppers. He’s not at the sauna. Oh! There he is coming down monastery lane! I can feel him. He’s so happy to see me! I’m happy too, Paulo! I found you! He says he wasn’t lost and jumps into my arms. I’m not grumpy anymore.

  - Sibsil Creed, Stories of Shurwinn, (2856)

  "Okay, let’s see. . . The Delphic Sibyl?" I muttered to myself as I ran the photos I’d taken in the Preservation Library through a translation program. It described a painting called the "Delphic Sibyl," extolling the craftsmanship of the artist of the Sistine Chapel, but it didn’t really explain to me what a Delphic Sibyl was.

  I had several other pages to look at. Hmmm. . . more Sibyls. And more paintings of naked people and pale dudes in robes.

  I needed more information on the Sistine Chapel. Sorchen had been right, I needed to spend a lot of time researching because I had no idea what any of this was.

  Search: “Ancient Earth Sistine Chapel”

  Whoa, too much information. I searched for a summary. Hunh. If I understood it correctly, the Sistine Chapel was an Ancient Earth Temple to their gods. A thousand years old!

  It had paintings of all different kinds of gods on the ceiling and had been old when the Earthens joined the Known Cosmos a few centuries ago. So, that was long, long before they had star travel or advanced technology. And yet, an artist had painted a glorious temple standing on scaffolding.

  Hmm. There was a close up that caught my eye labeled “Creation.” A naked pale man was lying on the ground looking dazed, and a grandfatherly figure reached out to him from a uterus, surrounded by children and women.

  I wasn’t sure how two men touching fingers was “Creation,” but something in it tugged at me. Like the grandfatherly man was in a womb, not on the ground, and he was reaching down to someone who was listless, trying to give him a spark of life.

  It was beautiful.

  But I couldn’t study all of the artwork of the Sistine Chapel and learn Ancient Earth traditions. I needed to focus on the Siblin connection to the Delphic Sibyl because I was getting close to something that Sorchen had wanted me to see.

  Search: Ancient Earth Delphic Sibyl

  I went cold.

  Numb.

  How could it be? How was this real? There were stone pillars, round, and etched with lines from top to bottom. The Temple of Apollo, Delphi, Earth.

  I had seen the scene before. IN MY DREAM.

  When I was in the coma, I saw those columns, and then I saw—wait. . . the symbol. The T with an O on the top of it.

  Was it there? It wasn’t in the picture.

  Search: Ancient Earth Symbol T with an O on top

  An Ancient Earth symbol called ankh, from temples over 5,000 years old! Egyptian symbol of life. Death was not the end.

  How could I have seen ancient temples, thousands and thousands of years old, and an ancient symbol of life beyond death? I didn’t know anything about Ancient Earth. My subconscious mind couldn’t have given me those images.

  But I had written the dream in my journal weeks ago. It was recorded right here in my handwriting. I really saw that scene in a coma. And I had no prior knowledge of it.

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  How? What had happened to me?

  Calm down, calm down, and breathe. I could figure it out; think it through.

  I was nearly dead, probably dying. Then I saw a symbol of life after death. And I wasn’t the same when I'd woken up in Jensen University Hospital.

  Did I die or almost die, and then—didn’t?

  And I saw something, but I put it out of my mind because I woke up to trauma, and pain, and people who didn’t know what had happened to me when I was dying. Did I forget something important?

  I'd been getting clues all along that I wasn’t the same Ryst, and I was fundamentally altered. So, what did I actually see? It couldn’t have been a dream. Was I seeing something beyond Andromeda Galaxy? Was it. . . another world?

  That was a lot to take in, but it made an odd kind of sense, and that helped me focus. I’d known for a while that I wasn’t crazy, but I just didn’t know how to interpret the strange things that'd been happening to me since the coma: the dreams, the sensing people, knowing their intentions, and hearing their thoughts.

  All the overwhelming sensations. . . even the orgasms. I’d developed senses that weren’t touch, taste, sight, smell, or sound. It was beyond biological definitions, but it was just as real.

  So my senses were something more now.

  I was something more.

  And I couldn’t expect anyone else to explain it to me. Brain scans wouldn't give me answers because it was something beyond technology, or at least, beyond our known technology.

  What else had happened when I was on the threshold between life and death? I saw the two pillars and a symbol of eternal life, and a voice had said, “No!”

  I needed to know more about the Ancient Earth Temples and Sibyls.

  Search: “Ancient Earth Delphic Sibyl”

  Woah. The Sibyls were women who three-thousand years ago—unh uh. No way.

  They were priestesses, prophetesses. THE SIBYLS SAW THE FUTURE. Predicted it and wrote it down in books that'd been lost in fires, but historians had confirmed that what they saw came to pass.

  They even predicted events that happened centuries in the future. Wow. They'd been well-respected, and kings used them as consultants. And everything I was reading discussed those events as historical fact.

  No one called it “Legend of the Sibyls,” or “Myths from ancient cultures.”

  What would it have been like to live amongst people who understood you that way? Who didn’t think having special senses was weird?

  I kept reading and found out the Temple of Apollo was the seat of the Delphic Sibyl, a prophetess known as Pythia, and Apollo was the god of prophecy, healing, music, and light.

  On the threshold of his temple was carved, “Know Thyself” into the floor. That knowledge gave me pause. The “Know Thyself” was a warning to people about to walk into the Temple:

  “I warn you, whoever you are. Oh! You who want to probe the arcana of nature,

  that if you do not find within yourself that which you are looking for,

  you shall not find it outside either!

  Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures.

  Know thy self, and you shall know the universe and the gods.”

  Search: “Arcana definition”

  A deep secret, a mystery.

  Search: “Know Thyself Ankh”

  A picture of an Ankh and a proverb inscribed in the walls of Ancient Temples of Egypt.

  “Know Thyself.

  The kingdom of heaven is within you;

  and whosoever shall know himself, shall find it.”

  “Know thyself.” Words inscribed in the floor of the Temple of Apollo. Whose columns I had seen in the coma. And the symbol of the ankh. When I had fallen onto the ankh, at the threshold of death, a voice had said, “No!”

  Or had it said, “Know? ”

  Did I hear, “Know Thy Self” when I was in a coma? And who had been talking to me?

  I fell quiet. Awed. Reverential. I looked around me. At the stone floor, at the shiki I was sitting on. I realized I was holding up my hand, marveling at it, reaching out.

  It reminded me of the first moments I'd arrived in Shurwinn, sitting in the porter, looking through the window at the village. My fingertips touching the glass.

  Like I was looking at the village as though it was a painting, marveling at it. Like the nude pale man painted on the Sistine Chapel, reaching out to something beyond.

  Like that man, I was always reaching.

  In my dreams, I reached out, searching, trying to find something. I had been between life and death, and something had reached out to me from the womb of creation. It may not have been a grandpa in the sky, but I was changed.

  I’d been trying to understand it from the point of view of someone who had no frame of reference to be able to understand it. Like a foreigner in a new sphere, not knowing the language, not knowing the customs.

  Wandering around and trying to learn the new shape of my life. I had been searching for something, and what I'd found was my self.

  A self who refused to die just because someone wanted to take my life from me, who didn’t give up, and didn’t like my old life. A self who was lonely and dreamed of a lover beyond imagining.

  A self who kept going despite finding everything around me confounding.

  And when I did, I found the JOY of who I was, and my inner beauty as a woman.

  I’d journeyed into the heart of the Temple of Apollo, the god of healing, and found that my life was a treasure beyond treasures. And that was a gift even greater than I’d imagined. Life and so much more.

  Like the Pythia of old.

  It was a life I truly wanted now, and I could be like those ancient Sibyls.

  Even if I was the only one.