The Orpheotelest held the rocks
with sacred charakters painted on in red
with white dots encircling them,
in each palm, their weight a comforting reminder,
even in this realm of dream and madness.
Then she began to feel the bay leaf
tucked under her tongue, and the Δ inscribed
upon her forehead in hallucinogenic anointing oil,
and the apotropaic phylacteries she’d wound
round her forearms while chanting prayers to Lusios
in mixed Greek and Chaldaic, and the black fleece
she was kneeling on back in the Bakcheion’s adyton.
These were the anchors she’d woven herself into
so that she could find the path back
no matter how this katabasis to the Spirits
strained and warped her. She’d stepped
into so many streams
– time, longing, forgetting, etc –
as she chased down the slippery entities
that were tormenting her client
through these vast, winding,
everchanging corridors
that it would have been very easy
for her to get lost here,
in the place where the Labyrinth intersected
with her client’s mind.
But she wouldn’t,
because Oinophile was a professional,
trained up by the very best.
And she knew the contours and contents
of her own mind as surely as she knew
every inch of the modest cell in the Bakcheion
where she lived, so when errant thoughts
began floating through, she knew
one of the snouted suckerbeasts had attached
itself to her soulbody; an easy fix.
She vibrated the seven mystic vowels,
the cords of hero Orpheus’ Lyre,
and felt the Four Heads of the Godly Beast
flower around her, the last,
Thunderbolt Serpent,
engulfing the parasite in the flames of pure devotion
which transform all abomination into ash.
Her mind and form restored, she pressed on
bringing the fight to the enemy invaders,
and she would not stop
until her client had been truly cured.
