God's Dogs Book 2

Loving people is the highest level of spiritual warfare that we could ever do.

Joyce Meyer

The interrogation of the prisoners they took gave the team no more than they were expecting. The Nebula Guild for Psychic Research started on Berndt and slowly expanded its membership to all ten worlds of local space – the ten worlds a nova wave front devastated in the remote past.

In recent years, the study of psychic power came under scientific scrutiny, when the instruments to detect the subtle energies involved were finally available. With the ability to confirm, in an objective way, a psychic event, the training of practitioners became easier, while at the same time forced charlatans out.

The guild was loosely organized, rather than tightly controlled, which was impossible across more than one world. Even so, the oath a new member swore upon joining was one of secrecy and apprenticeship.

The structure, then, was apprentice, journeyman, and master. The guild’s terms for those stations were: initiate, adept, and lord or lady. Additionally, as with most groups of sentient beings, there were good ones and bad ones. The good ones derived satisfaction for their lives through fulfilling a personal destiny. The bad ones became addicted to power over others, which was a quicker route to success.

The ‘power over’ route, though, tended towards a pyramid organizational structure, while ‘pursuing one’s destiny’ tended towards a more horizontal structure – more sharing, uplifting others, and egalitarianism.

The ‘power over’ faction, as a result, was more dominant in terms of numbers. It was they who saw Timi as a threat to their power. The others did not. Indeed, they welcomed the idea of more help for those who suffered. Not to the point of breaking their betrothed loyalty to the guild, but their sympathies were with her.

Two lords on Nadira, one of each faction, discussed the failure of the assassination attempt at their weekly luncheon in an upscale restaurant in the city. They had known each other for decades, having apprenticed together under an eccentric lady.

Lord Birac was a stuffy, pedantic man, fussy about the many details of life and easily displeased. Lord Aron hid his playfulness behind a wall of Socratic questions. He delighted in life, especially in its unpredictable twists and turns.

Birac was saying, “The reports are discouraging. They easily resisted Moro’s command voice and even broke his control over the leaders of parliament.”

“Have you met your match?” Aron wondered.

“We have tested them, and they are stronger than we realized. We will combine our power and overwhelm them.”

“And when that doesn’t work?”

Birac scoffed at the idea. “We know of no other program in the galaxy that is as comprehensive as ours.”

“That you know of,” Aron restated the flaw in his friend’s thinking.

“You’ll see, Aron. After the ritual tonight, there will be no further threat to our guild.”

“Well, I guess that’s good news. Although, I don't see it as the threat you did.”

The ritual was held in the guild’s local chapter house. There was a large open room in the basement that allowed substantial gatherings. Lord Birac and many of the lords and ladies of this planet, along with their adepts and initiates gathered that evening to perform this specific ritual.

Ritual, Coyotes were taught, was a way to make an intention concrete, to bring an idea into form. As such, a simple exhale could be a ritual. Secret societies, though, liked their rituals to be more complex, as that sparked arcane reverence in the practitioners and awe in others. A good ritual was a goal unto itself. That, however, was a perversion of the relationship between form and function.

Low magic, for example, imbued form with magical qualities: get the form right and magic happens. As in, ‘If I love him more, then he will quit hitting me.’ It was magical thinking in the way psychology defined the term. Magical thinking assumed that by getting the form of the ritual right, the gods could be coerced somehow into doing one’s bidding.

By contrast, getting the intention right, a more difficult proposition, required a ritual to focus the intent. Once focused into reality, the intent gained a kind of psychic gravity that drew to itself the energy to ‘manifest’ in reality. Wiccans termed this ‘high magic.’

The gathered, gnome-like Nadiran lords and ladies, six of them, and adepts, twelve of them, built a circle on the floor of the basement room with pebbles of different colors. In the north to east quadrant, the stones were various shades of amber. In the east to south quadrant, they were yellow. In the south to west, they were red. In the west to north, they were black.

They gathered inside the circle and sat in concentric rows facing the center, where the lord chosen to lead the ceremony sat alone. Outside the circle, about forty initiates began singing a monotonous chant.

The lord at the center made a show of dropping from consensus reality to the nature realm by exclaiming, “The portal is opened by our power. We summon this false Camtok for judgment.”

At the embassy, Timi felt the call. She was chatting with her mother in a sitting room in the suite they were assigned.

“A moment, mother,” Timi said and stood. “I believe I’m under psychic attack.”

She hurried to the door and told the elf-guard, “Bring the Coyotes.”

He ran to fetch the team in a nearby room. Within minutes, the five of them were sitting cross-legged on the ornate rug in the sitting room. The queen and two elf-guards sat in silence on a sofa near the far wall.

Quinn took charge of the meditation. “Guide their energy to the place for distant communication.”

They all shifted to that discreet location in the realm of nature and drew the energy projected by the guild’s ritual with them. The location they targeted showed itself as a large meadow. The five of them envisioned themselves at its edge before a tree line.

The energy of the guild’s summoning coalesced in the middle of the field, and the gnome-like lord shimmered into view.

“Your show,” Quinn prompted Timi.

She took a breath and let it out, steeling herself for the confrontation.

River murmured, “Trust the universe. Let the words you speak flow from a deeper place.”

Timi nodded once and called out, “Hail, shaman!”

She stepped forward a few paces and continued, “I am Timianulos, princess of Masul, and recognized by your guild at my birth as the Camtok. You seek audience with me. Speak your request.”

The lord looked around, momentarily confused. Then he composed himself and shouted back, “You have deviated from the true path. You are corrupted by foreign teachings. You are sentenced to death for your apostasy.”

Energy swirled around him and shot out from his hands in two blood-red streams.

Timi envisioned she was inside a diamond-like crystal. The lord’s energy impacted it and flared to nothing.

The Coyotes moved forward to stand with Timi, and Quinn said, “Let’s follow him back to where he came from.”

They envisioned ropes wrapping around the lord. Then they dissolved the meadow. The lord, with no anchor left in the nature realm, snapped back to his body, bringing Timi and the Coyotes with him.

The transition to each realm of creation meant accepting the laws that governed each reality. The Coyotes and Timi were in the nature realm, but the lord was back in the consensus or physical realm, back in the basement with the crowd who were themselves stunned back to the physical.

Consequently, Timi and the Coyotes were seeing or perceiving the qi-field in that same room. Beings were condensed qi of varying colors. Emotions were swirling like light fog. It would have been disorienting had they not trained for it.

“Speak to them, Timi,” Quinn directed.

“Don’t worry,” Moss chuckled. “We’ve got your back.”

Moss’ humor strengthened her focus and she spoke, “I am the Camtok! I bring healing to all our people. I dispel the darkness that for ages has crippled us. Stand with me or get out of my way!”

Quinn told her, “Go to your anchor in your sacred area. Then come back to your body when you’re ready.”

Timi disappeared, shifting to that location. The Coyotes lingered for a while in the basement to watch the confusion. After that became boring, they shifted back to their bodies with a long releasing breath.

“Well, that was fun,” Moss grinned. “I guess these guys are amateurs.”

“On this planet,” Pax cautioned.

“Yeah,” River said, “I think they’ll give up on psychic attacks and stick to physical ones. On this planet anyway.”

Then Timi took a deep breath and released it to come back to her body.

She smiled timidly, “How did I do?”

Quinn reached over and took her hand. “You did good. How do you think you did?”

“I was more dramatic than I thought I would be.”

“Join me or get out of the way,” Moss paraphrased her with a chuckle. “Over the top dramatics do get the point across.”

Timi blushed, and Moss relented somewhat. “Besides, you’re a teenager. You’re supposed to be dramatic.”

“Not helping,” River rebuked. Then she turned to Timi. “When you channel energy or empower your words, it has a dramatic effect all its own. It takes some getting used to.”

Timi nodded, ready to move onto a topic not centered on her alone, and asked, “Now what?”

“Like we planned and the ambassador announced,” Quinn answered and looked at the queen who was now standing uncertainly, flanked by the elf-guards. “You will meet with people that need healing.” The queen nodded to her daughter and smiled.

Pax said, “We’ve got a room set up on the ground floor near the main entrance.”

River added, “We’ve also set up a schedule that shouldn’t be too tiring for you.”

“Will anyone come?” Timi worried.

“Oh, they’ll come,” Moss assured her. “People love free stuff.”

The next day, Timi began her healing ministry. One team member stayed in the room with her, and the others prowled through the crowd. The elves worked guard shifts at the entrance, and the Guardians stayed mostly in the background.

An organizationally-minded elf suggested a list of times people could sign up for through this planet’s version of the internet. Once that system was in place, the traffic jam caused by the first-come-first-served schedule lessened, and an orderly progression of patients entered and left Timi’s healing room every half-hour.

Timi put them on a massage table, face-up, and scanned them first. She passed her hands over their bodies and sensed where their qi was off. Then she determined which form of healing was best suited to restore their balance – nature or spirit. The majority needed nature healing.

She envisioned those patients on the table in the crystal cave. Then she built the circuit of energy through her body, out her hands into the patient, and then back to the ground.

Healing in spirit addressed different maladies – sicknesses of the soul. For those, she envisioned them on a table in the cathedral of light, which was in the spirit or archetypal realm, and was as majestic as the name suggested.

Here, though, there were spirit helpers that aided in directing, or even amplifying, what Timi did.

With the constant practice, Timi’s capacity to channel healing energy increased at an exponential rate, and by the time they concluded their stay on-planet, she was no longer a timid teenage girl.

The stay ended after two-weeks. They left the planet without fanfare. It seemed wise not to let the guild take another shot at them. Even so, the embassy received messages of gratitude from all parts of Nadira.