Cosmic Mushroom 3

Chapter 5 The Heart and the Egg

Merlin flew out of the water and toppled head first over himself. He found himself in a narrow cave with a path leading downward into the darkness. Standing up, he remembered he was still holding the stone orb he’d found in the river. Something inside him wouldn’t let go of it.
After having breathed water for so long it took a moment to get reacquainted with breathing air like he always had but when he was ready he stepped forward, trusting his heart to know where it was going.
He walked down the corridor past moss that cast a glittery rainbow aura as it ate the rock face, mushrooms whose mycelia wove geometric patterns in the cracks of the rock-face and crystals that seemed to shimmer and vibrate slowly like viscous fluid.
After some time walking through the shadows the tunnel got narrower and darker but after stumbling several times he began to come across flowers that danced and lit up like flames, living torches growing in the walls and flickering like fireflies, lighting the path.
In the dim light he realized the walls of the tunnel were made of crystal formations, gemstone more transparent than glass. On the other side of this crystalline window, bat-looking moles swam like fish through solid rock between forests of hair-like threads of bioluminescent mycelia.
Finally he reached the edge of a vast chasm, a cavern that stretched away too far off to see, even the fire-flowers faded from view. Far in the distance a tiny spark of light glowed warmly, seeming somehow as if awaiting his arrival.
He called out to the light, expecting his voice to echo in the chasm but it faded away instantly, smothered by the darkness, and he wondered if his voice could even be heard.
To his surprise the spark responded, sending sparks flying struck by a hammer fresh out of a forge. It swayed slightly then began to grow rapidly, expanding into the shape of a serpent that wrapped and circled around in every direction, slowly making its way closer as it grew.

After what felt like hours or years, Merlin reached the heart of the void. Within moments the spark that had reached out to him seemed an endless trek away but eventually he began to feel the heat emanating from it and when the light grew so intense its pulses blinded him and the heat grew unbearable, the heart before him spoke to the heart within him.
"At long last my child has returned to me. Countless ages of your world I have felt you reaching out for me, but could not reach back. Know that I have longed to hold you, child, but you were not ready to meet my embrace."
Merlin was stunned. Scrambling for words, he stammered and then gave up. At a total loss he managed, "what are you?"
"I am the lifeblood of this world. Long ago I planted the seeds of life on a desolate planet, a river flowed forth from my sanctuary here to feed the children of this world with the lifeforce of the cosmic All.”
“I have tended to these seeds, watched them blossom into the people of your world, the trees and creatures, the moss which spreads nutrients beneath the soil. All is fed by myself and my siblings who have come here from other realms beyond your reach. You grew among them, learning from their mistakes and knowing they would become ready, some day, for the trials that lay ahead of them."
Merlin looked inside himself and wondered, and spoke aloud, "What am I?"
A gentle laughter met the question before he even uttered it. "You are my egg, child, my vessel. You have been nursed for aeons and now, returning home to me, you are ready to hatch and return to your world a new being, a dragon born of the infinite light of the cosmos. Come closer child, you will not be harmed. I am your home."
Merlin hesitated, the heat would surely sear his flesh if he swam any further. He hadn't taken a breath of air in hours, perhaps days. This place seemed unreal, even time itself bent to the unknowable will that lurked behind all he'd seen.
He stepped forward and was sure he'd boil in the heat but nothing happened, he felt his heart beckoned forward and it yearned to reunite with this being he'd never seen before. As he grew closer the pain grew more intense but he was filled with a burning need to reach the heart, just to touch it one last time. He pushed himself further, swam forward faster, ached and squirmed in the agony but then, suddenly, it stopped and he was home, wrapped in the infinite bliss of his heart at last.
"Welcome, my love, to my embrace."
The orb of this heart expanded within him, around him, he couldn't tell the difference anymore. It took the form of a toroid, a 4-dimensional sphere wrapped in the shell of a 5-dimensional sphere. He could feel the limbs of the Tree of Life expand out from his arms, the roots from his legs, each wrapping around to touch each other at the central plane, a current running each way through his spine, wrapping around in a spiral to turn back and through him once again.
He understood, the currents of this lifeforce, the fibres of the Tree of Life, the lifeforce coursing through his veins from distant stars, from galaxies and universe bubbles he would never see, these were the dragons dispersing life across the cosmos. He could feel it flowing through him, everything, through him the planet itself was sustained, his people partaking of life from the infinite All, everything living in this world and beyond could be felt within his heart.
Deep inside him, something ancient stirred, ready to burst forth and bring his light into the world.
"Release the orb, child."
Merlin instantly remembered the stone that had dragged him into the whirlpool outside, it felt like lifetimes had passed since then and he couldn't believe it was still in his hand, how could it possibly have lasted these centuries since he'd entered this place?
He held it out and released it, it hovered before him and resonated, neither sound nor light but somehow both, it echoed the words and deeds, the love and loss of times long past, it brimmed with the endless cycle of life and death that consumed all, birthing only to again consume. Within this stone, the knowledge of the universe was waiting to be remembered.
In his mind's eye, he could see all that would ever be passing by in flashes of blissful anguish, of love and hatred and war and birth, all was speaking to him, echoing the words of his heart, of the Tree of Life around him and within him.
There were no more questions and no more answers, no beginning and no end. Only the cycle. Only the heart and its egg, whispering secrets long forgotten into the void.

Nothing mattered but his presence here, an instantaneous eternity. This space, this entire time-less world Merlin was wandering through, was an inter-dimensional sanctuary for the heart of this dragon. From here it could experience fractal seeds of its consciousness across time-space through quantum filaments, negotiating fate with the infinite will of the collective universal consciousness to further the progression of evolution into light.
In order to play this game, the dragon had split into two halves, one male and one female to mirror the division of the polarized universe. Thus it maintained balance in a dance of charged waves of electromagnetic potential, dispersing life force through interstellar ion storms and solar winds. It had planted seeds of itself across the universe to form a neural network that would transmit information across the cosmos as its heartbeat raced from the depths of this womb.
“I have awaited this longer than you can imagine.” It was always the plan, that this vessel would be the first to return home to this portal, this gateway into the higher dimensions of consciousness from which he’d been sown. Since the times of the ancients on his world, Merlin had been a guide, a teacher, opening the minds and hearts of his siblings to the flow of cosmic love that would help them remember the way home into light.