They wanted me to find it. Some thing that was eating out his soul, some thing they could not find themselves. They asked me because I can hear words they do not speak, because I can understand the language of emotion, because I can manipulate the intangibles of thought. They were right to guess I could do more than I have shown them, but I do not know if they have over guessed themselves.

~Tyler knelt by the bedside and stared hard. Mystic was very ill, but no physical eye could have known. Sleep mimics death. Mystic had not moved since they'd laid him there in the healing room of the Palace, and they had not dared touch him but left him to the dreams that trembled behind his eyelids. He was being hollowed, and before even Tyler thought to do anything he could not be roused. The derkin's gray fingers felt the shiver of Mystic's skin and as he stared hard, harder than a man who sees flesh, he felt the beating of Mystic's heart. Like fireflies Tyler watched Mystic's thoughts fluttering, incoherent and scattered, and followed them into the hollows of the mind. These paths were familiar and he knew he sought a darker place.~

Often I had slipped into the recesses of the conscious, but rarely had I dared the unconscious. I can say I was nervous, but I would be more honest to say I was terrified. He had no coherent thought process. All I received were tangled smears of emotion on a canvas of numb unawareness. My worry over what would become of me once I pushed myself into the realm of his delirium was only outdone by my worry of what I could do to him. There are not many who recover from footprints on their memory.

~They left him alone, to concentrate. Tyler was not easily distracted, but this was no ordinary task. He stared at Mystic, unnerved and shaking, and sat for a long morning letting himself settle. It was not a meditation, but nearly, as if he were breathing in the sky around him to focus solely on the skyless world beyond touch.~

It is difficult to explain that first step from the physical to the abstract. There is no border, but suddenly I am seeing his unreality.

Hanging darkness all around, so thick I could hardly see through it, and suddenly blue mist and shadows of memories. A mosaic of faces, numbers, colors, places, images, voices, and infinite other memories still readily conceivable. Things Mystic may have forgotten still waiting to be remembered, dreams and nightmares that branch like cobwebs from his store of mental memoirs, the touch of a thousand emotions. I am not looking for these.

~He saw as if he were reliving Mystic's life. Flashes of memories rushed past him and he felt brief pangs of every feeling they evoked for Mystic, and yet Mystic was different from Tyler's experience because he remembered nothing in his state and those faces and emotions and events were stranded. Tyler moved swiftly through the forest of memory, past adulthood into the blurry fragments of childhood and finally the edges of what could consciously be recalled. The mind's eye rushed into the darkness of the subconscious. ~

I had been that far only once before, and I will never forget what I found there. There is no way to hesitate when searching through the psyche and so I plunged into the cold darkness full of shapes and colors and sounds and smells I could never quite distinguish, nor did I hear, smell, feel or see as I would have with my natural senses. Voices older than Mystic's existence spoke continuously and I felt them echoing in the chords of my own self. I moved as quickly as I could—whatever I was searching for had no power there, nor did I.

~Tyler saw into the unchangeable nature of Mystic. There, in that shapeless shadow, lay the pieces of Mystic neither he nor his experience had any part in creating. Here was the very essence of who he was, the basis for all his fears, the roots of his joy, the intangibles that shaped the life he remembered and how he remembered it. Still it was silent like no physical silence–no thub of heart or stirring of lungs, not beat of eyelids or rustle of skin. Only trailing wisps of unimagined instincts, the colors of existence. A deeper memory, one he did not live. Those places Mystic never touched but they were still dusty with the light of his memory. There were still deeper places.~

Past the darkness I could only hear and smell, I was standing in darkness I could see and cold I could feel. After moving intangibly and feeling the pressing of abstractions, the weightlessness of empty air is bizarre and to breathe it in is like drinking the sky. In truth, I could see nothing, for I was looking with real eyes into a blind blackness. I was walking into the intangible, standing suddenly in a dark corridor of his mind. Stone cold and wet, this place had lain dormant since his birth. I could smell and touch where before I brushed shadows. I could feel the closeness of heavy stone walls, however, and I guessed I somehow had come to a hall in the heart of Mystic's self.

~Tyler was standing in a hallway made of stone. He felt the cold floor as he had never felt life. The damp feel was real and he shivered. He was a body, physically inside Mystic's core being, standing in a path beyond imagination. He could see nothing for the blackness, but he hardly needed to. No longer did he need to strive to go further. He was as far as he could go.~

There was more to see, I soon learned, than blackness. A bobbing light, a flame, a torch, a hand, a face. A face was staring at me, holding his torch, a face with empty eyes. Curious, he held the torch closer to me, as if he can see through those hollow sockets.

It was Mystic's face.