The Invitation Read Online Free PDF Page B

and then light push it back. Energies of all kinds charged through him, but they were moving so quickly, he couldn’t see anything clearly. The ether through which they moved was thick with souls—human, divine, demonic, animal—and all of them pressed against him, making him cry out, until he and the Stranger burst through the mass of entities into a brilliant blue sky.
    They floated gently above an island of gems and crystal, glistening in the moonlight. “It’s beautiful,” Tim murmured. “Where are we?”
    â€œWe are about fifty thousand years before your time,” the Stranger answered. “We are here to see the last and the greatest of the mage-lords of a land the people of your time scarcely believe existed. It was long since taken by the sea.”
    â€œAre you talking about Atlantis?” Tim asked incredulously. He watched as the waves below them began churning, sending up huge plumes of spray. “I thought that was just a fairy tale.”
    â€œYou’ll find that many a tale holds deep truth,” the Stranger said.
    Tidal waves rose up, smashing against theglittering buildings below them. They were too far away to see details; all they saw were structures toppling, and Tim could feel the sadness and horror of destruction emanating from the doomed island.
    â€œThere,” the Stranger said, pointing toward a small seated figure at the edge of a cliff. Thick mists obscured the cliff’s bottom—and even the mountain it jutted from. Or else , Tim thought, the cliff was floating in the air, like they were . He and the Stranger approached, and Tim could see by the seated figure’s change of posture that their presence had been detected.
    The wizened old creature—he couldn’t tell if it was male or female—seemed ancient. Wrinkles and very thin gray hair framed a thin and leathery face. The mage—for so the person seemed—wore a heavy tunic and sat cross-legged at the edge of the abyss, watching the beautiful city collapse into the ocean.
    â€œWhat you have to understand about Atlantis is this…” The mage’s voice quavered with age and emotion. “Are you listening, boy?”
    Startled, Tim turned to the Stranger, who kept his white eyes forward, not responding to his confusion. Tim turned back to the mage. “Can you see me?” he asked.
    â€œOf course I can’t see you,” the mage snapped. “But you ought to be here at this time, or so my spells have said.”
    Tim thought the ancient magician sounded cranky. He supposed that if he were that old, he’d be cranky too.
    â€œAnyway,” the mage continued, “where humanity gets it wrong, in your time, is in imagining Atlantis as having any kind of quantifiable existence. Which of course it hasn’t. Not in the way they imagine, anyway. There have been many Atlantises, and there will be quite a few more. It’s just a symbol. The true Atlantis is inside you. Just as it is inside all of us.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Tim asked. This creature spoke as enigmatically as the Stranger. Do they all talk like this? he wondered. “How can a city be inside us?” he asked.
    â€œIt is the sunken land lost beneath stories and myths. The place you visit in dreams and which occasionally breaks upon the shores of our conscious minds. Atlantis is the birthplace of civilization, the shadowland that is lost to us, but remains forever the true originator and true goal.”
    â€œYou mean…” Tim said, trying to figure it out, “it’s like what the Stranger said. That fairy tales can be true. Atlantis is just a name—forsomething else?”
    â€œClose,” the mage said. “Close enough for a start. It is a source. The source.”
    â€œOoookay,” Tim said uncertainly. He would just have to pretend he fully understood, otherwise they’d spend the rest of eternity trying to grasp this one