…a man with a scar running up and down one of his shoulders stands, panting, in a bamboo hut located somewhere in the Eastern jungle. Sweat is pouring down his face, dripping off his shaven chin and soaking into the fired grass that passes for the building’s floor. His teeth are clenched. His hands are balled up into fists. His eyes are closed in concentration, and every muscle in his body is tensed to the point of popping veins beneath his skin as he struggles with his latest test. The place is sweltering. Midday sun beats down on a roof made of banana leaves, bouncing off the puddles and swamps freshened with last evening’s rains, without so much as a breath of wind to help circulate the air. His bare feet curl their toes in and around the sheets of grass, seeking purchase on their surface, or perhaps only fidgeting.

He collapses. Physically collapses, falling forward on his hands and knees, and buries his face in the grass. He groans and pounds the grass with his fist.

A second person sits on a three-legged stool set into the corner. Sunlight filters through the window to their right, illuminating a thin, frail body swimming in a silken robe. Its hair has lost all trace of color, but it’s long, enough that it could reach the waist if its owner stood erect. Its face is sunken, pallid and wan. Its jaw wags slackly in its mouth, jostling from side to side on hinges tethered incorrectly, revealing the sutured stump of a tongue flopping around at the back of its throat. Black crusts rim its mouth, the end of some grotesque infection which has eaten away much of its flesh. The scarred man is not sure of this person’s gender, only that it is feisty, far more than it ought to be with but a few

(days? The scarred man thinks it must be days, as ravaged as its jawline is)

days left to live. That it is feisty, ravaged, old beyond measure…and has lived a life the scarred man needs to emulate.

Smack!

It reaches out with a rapier-like instrument and strikes the scarred man on the head, using its broad, flat design to annoy more than to harm. It grunts furiously, forming whatever noises it can with its rotten jaw and severed tongue, noises not assigned a meaning by any language of the land. But they are easy to interpret:

Lazy donkey! Why so weak?! You keep face down in the grass! You eat grass like donkeys do! Get up! Do it again!

Or something to that effect.

The scarred man groans to his feet, using his hands to prop himself up and throw his weight back to his heels, and stands, brushing debris and bits of grass of his knees, shins, forearms, face. Very little off it moves. He picks at if for a moment, plucking some of the larger strands and shaking them off and onto the floor, but gives up before too long, and instead prepares to try again.

He breathes. Once in, once out. Once in, once out. Once in, as much as he can, swelling up like a buoyant bladder, and hold, letting it get to know him, to be a part of him, and calm the bedlam in his body, once out, as slow as his burning lungs will allow letting it cleanse him to his soul. He closes his eyes, and sees distractions breaking up and flaking away in the wind his exhalation generates. The grass, the hut, the sun, the heat…the sweat, freshening again upon his brow after drying on his trip to the floor, about to trickle into his eyes. The second person, whatever they are, striking him again and again, and gurgling admonishments. The dull aching in his shoulder, lessened in this jungle heat, but which is omnipresent now, ever since he took the scar. All dissolving, flaking away. He feels his spirit emptying, accepting silence, the things that make him who he is giving themselves back to the world, the barriers he holds within him thinning, turning, opening to what may come. The rhythms of his body slow, stutter, crack, and shatter. Predictions, expectations cease. His next breath is now unscheduled, a thing which may take seconds or years, his next heartbeat not assumed. The fields his body generates, magnetic, gravitational, strong and weak, become uncycled, ready to sync up with any input he desires. He gives himself to nothingness, and, at last, he is prepared.

He clenches his fists again, and holds them out in front of him, wrists curled, palms outward, in his classic power stance. A Greek god cast in chains, struggling eternally against his bonds. Or perhaps a newly favored mortal, ready to receive their boon.

He sees himself in this state of preparation, of openness, of complete and total lack of self, standing before an empty landscape. He sees deserts, mesas, arroyos and boulders, all beneath a midnight sky. He sees lightning in the distance – heat lightning, far too far away to spoil the peace with any sound – and, paradoxically, the moon, as bright and as clear as ever it was despite the roiling of the storm. And to this barren waste of a dream, from someplace neither inside of him nor out, of neither this world nor the next, something comes a-sauntering. Out from behind his consciousness, this tiny little pocket of existence he has never dreamed was there, it strides, bounding along with its carefree gait, whistling its sprightly tune.

The scarred man listens.

He listens with his ears, of course, tilting his head, stretching his drums, tightening them as much as he can trying to pick out every note, every little nuance of tone, but he listens with the rest of him as well. He listens with his eyes, watching the something jounce along, taking note of where it peaks, valleys, is sharp or is flat, searching for some causal ground. He listens with his face and neck, feeling the vibrations, the resonance, as they strike against his skin. He listens with his tongue, his nose, his fingers, his toes. Listens with his heart, his head, his gut, his intuition. Even listens with his cock, vulgur as that seems to him. But it’s true, and, what’s more, it is necessary. Every part of him must strain, every single cell must feel, let the rhythm fill him up, give up all the emptiness, all the openness he has created, to the melody and flow. And, gradually, he aligns. He senses the timbre of the Voice, and he copies it exactly. He feels the pitch to which it’s tuned, and he matches with his own.

It’s happening, he thinks, acknowledging the idea bot not allowing it to form fully, not wanting to break the equilibrium with words. This is where I lost it last time, but…not here. Not now. This time I’m going to hang in there. This time it is mine! It almost dumps him even so, just from that seed of a roil of a thought, and he has to slue to keep his bearings, turning himself on the dreamscape, tilting perspective this way and that. His body stumbles, almost collapses as it did before, pitching face-first in the grass, but it recovers, warily, and it resumes its focused stance.

He takes it deeper, delving further. He feels himself backing away this time, letting it happen more than he is making it happen, giving every part of himself the freedom to align this way, and wonders as they fall in place. The fields his body generates begin re-form, re-focus, syncing with the thing that’s joined him, matching signature and spin. The vibrations of his cells adjust, until they, too, are in accord, lining up like a nonillion compasses, straining, twitching, yearning towards their one true north. He backs off further, removing his buttresses and guards, trusting the pieces of himself to hold the balance in his absence, retreating deeper into the caverns hidden from his conscious mind, until, like someone building a house of cards, placing the final two at its peak, he removes his touch completely, and marvels that the house still stands.

And then, when every last part of him is following their marching orders, and down to the tiniest molecule is syncing with the chosen Voice, he returns. Re-emerges from the caverns, calls his minions to his side, and, with full support of everything inside of him, as one with the Voice they’ve tuned, he parts his lips and…