I felt a throbbing sensation in my head, and my eyes closed tight. It was as if someone was pushing into my head. Pushing until my mind was no longer my own. A vision appeared in my mind. It was like a dream, but not.
Flying, I was flying over a forest, a thick grove of trees flashing beneath my feet. The sensation felt so real. I could feel the wind, could taste the moisture in the air, could see beyond my normal sight.
Turrets of an ancient castle peeked between the tops of the trees. Wings stretched wide, slowing my descent as I approached the roof of the castle. Within its walls, men in armor were scurrying about, preparing wagons and weaponry.
“Gwrhyr!” The name bellowed out of me as I perched atop the turret. A man in shiny armor, crested with a knotted wolf design that matched the one on my bracelet, appeared and greeted me with a smile. He pushed his helmet back, and the face before me could have been the same I saw in the mirror, only with a thicker jaw and without glasses. Surreal didn’t even begin to touch the strangeness of seeing myself in another time.
“Hello, old girl, what say you?” His voice was familiar, but the dialect was almost too thick to understand. Gaelic, perhaps. Welsh, maybe. I didn’t know, only that it sounded old. The other strange thing about the way he spoke is that he didn’t. His mouth never moved, but I’d heard it as clearly as I’d heard Aurelia in my own mind.
I was pulled out of the vision, leaving me dizzy and off-kilter, swaying in my seat. Blinking, my eyes adjusted to the overcast sky above me and the brightness of the present. Leaning back in the lounge chair, I put a hand to my head.
“What just happened?”
“I shared a memory with you.” Aurelia climbed onto my lap to watch my reaction. It was strange to see her looking up at me after feeling like I was a much greater size, and to have the knight tilting his head up at me… at her.
“That was you? But you were so big.”
She dipped her head. “We survive by adapting. Over centuries, I adapted by making myself smaller, to be harder to find in a growing civilization.”
“I don’t understand. Why did you show that to me? How? How did you do that?” She projected her memory into my head and made me feel as if it were my own. What. The. Fuck.
“Gwrhyr was a warrior under the command of King Arthur. He was the first of your kind, an interpreter of languages. His talents were recognized as valuable by the king.”
No fucking way. “King Arthur? Like… Excalibur and Camelot? That King Arthur?”
“The same.”
Holy shit! My fingers played with the cuff on my wrist, and I stared at the knot design in the shape of the wolf.
“You wear his crest.” Aurelia nudged her head against my hand.
“The wolf? What does it mean?”
“It’s a symbol of strength, intelligence, and loyalty. More specifically, given your bloodline, it represents a connection to nature and the spirit realm.”
I traced the familiar lines of the knot, seeing it with new eyes. A connection to nature and the spirit realm. What did that mean…spirit realm?
“Does that mean I can talk to ghosts?”
The twinkling of Aurelia’s laugh sounded in my head. “No, young one. Not with the dead, but there are spaces between what is seen and what is not. What is heard and what is not. You are able to open doors of communication. You began when you were young, yes?”
“Talking with animals? Yeah. As soon as I was old enough to understand human language, I knew the animals around me spoke, too. I tuned into them, learning their languages.”
“You are very perceptive, young Bowen. You saw the door and you opened it. It is the same now.”
“With you in my mind?” Aurelia dipped her head in confirmation. “But I didn’t open the door, you did.”
“Not so. I gave a little nudge because I knew where to look. You might not have noticed, but you let me in. Now that the door is open, you can use it anytime.”
This was so much to wrap my head around. The spirit realm. Doors in the mind. I thought back to the image of my ancestor and the way his mouth didn’t move. Holy shit! “Does that mean I can communicate without speaking out loud like Gwrhyr did?”
“It may take some practice, yes.”
I lay my head against the back of the lounge chair, trying to process it all. Never in my life did I imagine my secret would be this fucking big. What was I even supposed to do with it all? Would I be able to communicate at a distance, or would I need to be in front of the creature? Would I be able to speak with Rudy like this? Would I want to?
Aurelia climbed up my chest and nudged her head under my chin to get my attention. The look in her eyes told me to pay close attention to whatever she was about to say.
“You must take care not to share this with those you don’t trust.” Her words had an ominous tone.
