Teaser: Ophia's Sister- Soul by Seth Mullins

 

Parting the Veils, Book One

 

Epic Fantasy / Visionary Fiction / Magical Realism

Date Published: 04-19-2025

 

 

Colleen Addison fears that the messages she receives from a place called Ophia prove she’s losing her mind. As she grieves for her lost twin sister, Earth’s civilizations, divorced from magic and wonder, crumble.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Partition, Esperidi Mon-Sequana discovers she’s the last surviving Sophryne, a Wakeful Dreamer cast adrift as Ophia convulses beneath the weight of atrocities done to Her, spilling Her anguish in fire and floods.

With naught but dreams and waking omens to guide her, Esperidi ventures across a ravaged land where marauders are a law unto themselves, and the Shetain priesthood demands that Ophia’s children appease the Rupture with penance and blood.

Lost and bereaved, Colleen and Esperidi reach for hope and salvation beyond the camouflage Veils, unsuspecting of the ties that bind them across lifetimes and worlds… 

Excerpt

 The sum of our dreams can be strung into a prop circle, casting our life journeys in the light of a stage production. Within such a play, we may see aspects of the plot that eluded us while we were identified with our roles within that drama. How many times have I witnessed this? The audience yells at the speaker on the stage, trying to awaken him or her to some crucial fact, despite knowing that such a ruckus can never alter the story’s trajectory. 

 The spectators can't help themselves. 

I hope you’ll forgive me for all this dramatist’s jargon. I was—am—a man of the stage, and I speak as my nature and training lean. And I’ve been conditioned by my tenure as a Sophryne, a Wakeful Dreamer. There are times—particularly during historical moments of great unrest, tension, and change—when the dreams of a multitude coincide, creating an even larger, overarching narrative. 

 I call that narrative living theater. Many others refer to it as myth. 

And perhaps (partly) because I'm accustomed to blurring the distinctions between "dream" and "reality," I've been asked to narrate—as concisely as possible—my people’s most beloved myth: "The Twin Souls and the Parting of the Veils." 

Within the context of this tale, the lines between dreams and reality are sometimes in stark contrast and sometimes scarcely discernible. On occasion, I daresay, they even seem to trade places. I've heard this is often a characteristic of twins. Who could resist the temptation to at least try it, to explore—to borrow a phrase from Colleen Addison's world—"how the other half lives"? 

For art and dreams are life's twin blessings. 

 Those not native to my home world of Ophia, who share Colleen's points of reference more intimately than mine, might feel that some information about my people, the Shaini, and the origins of our most revered teachers, the Sophryne, might be in order. 

Ah, but I ought rather try and catch a golden mahseer with my bare hands, were I currently possessed of fleshy hands, than try to satisfy this demand. You see, little history survives from our earliest ages. Only the most nebulous clues, clothed in symbolism, are preserved in oral traditions. That's because time itself was (is) malleable. Many possible paths were explored. Each of these, in turn, thrust roots into their own “pasts” and “futures.” 

During those earliest epochs, the Shaini tangibly felt and participated in Sorsajna, the fire of Creation. Later, when we no longer felt Sorsajna in the pit of our being, our Speakers, the Sophryne, were obliged to find more demonstrable ways to evoke its essence. They had to almost confound and beguile the minds of their kindred in the hopes of awakening them to old inner knowledge. 

They reminded us of magical inner movements we felt divorced from in waking. This was the birth of art and drama—and language itself—arising alongside the dreaming life of humankind. Primitive peoples, like the Oskwai tribes you'll hear about, could gesture towards objects in their physical world. But for those more intangible feelings of possibility, magic, and wonder that dreams awaken in us, words were needed. 

How else could that wonder be shared when it couldn't be related to anything in one’s surroundings? 

And so we early humans tried to convey what we'd experienced in our sleep-time excursions using sounds, gestures, and pantomime. Once upon a time, we'd inhabited a living dream. Then, suddenly, we were Ophia-bound, entrenched in material bodies, and subjected to the laws of Space and Time. We clothed ourselves in flesh as Ophia clothed itself in ground.

 And now we had to survive, to pluck Her fruits to sustain ourselves. Might humankind (Shaini or Oskwai) forget that the world's manifest beauty was a reflection, albeit a fractured one, of luminous Sorsajna, from which all existence flows?