"Sensational" part two

Rayen Aarons can't sleep. The problem isn't the miserable weather, in fact the gray and powerful storm clouds are a positive sight for her. It's also not the chill in the fall air, or the silence of her mountain home of Nahamston, Vermont.

These are comforting, safe, natural things. They move with the easy, silent rhythm of Ray's soul, unnoticed by everyone else. The storms and the wind and the peace and quiet of a sparsely-populated town are everything she's ever wanted.

No, the sensation that keeps her awake tonight is a faint buzzing, a tingling, nerve-wracking vibration at the very edge of her awareness. It's tiny enough that she wants to ignore it, but just noticeable enough to keep her from closing her eyes.

Not to mention the fact that it's eight in the morning and her mother is knocking on her door. Where did the night go?

"Wake up, Ray!"

"I'm awake, I'm awake," she mumbles at the vibrating door of her bedroom. "Isn't it Saturday or something?"

Her mother isn't phased. "You can still get out of bed at a reasonable hour, can't you?"

"Ugh. All right." Ray senses a resolute determination, her mother's default thought process. She decides she'll have to make her best attempt at getting through the day.

And so it's with great sluggishness and much drama that Rayen drags herself down to the kitchen table and starts slicing an apple. Her mother notices her half-open eyes and rolls her own.

"Why do you look so exhausted? You slept in."

"Stayed in, anyway. Didn't sleep." She bites into a thick section of fresh Cortland apple, and feels better immediately. Fall isn't a bad time of year at all.

"Something wrong?" Ray's mother pulls out a chair and straddles it, looking with genuine concern at her daughter. What Ray loves about her mom is the complete and total acceptance of her daughter's uniqueness, which was a pleasant surprise when Ray finally "came out" as an empath.

"I don't really know. I keep feeling this buzz, like some kind of electrical pulse. But it's not natural, like lightning or something. It's not balanced. Something is throwing off a lot of power, and it's man-made."

Eyebrows go up. "And that kept you up, all night?"

Ray finishes her apple and moves for another one, this time with some homemade peanut butter. "It sounds dumb, I know."

"No," mom says, shaking her head earnestly, "It sounds annoying. Well, if you want to try and get some sleep, I suppose you ought to go back to bed. But it's Nahamsfest today, and I know you like to go."

Nahamsfest. The harvest festival. Rayen laughs inwardly, feeling somewhat trapped. It's all sort of silly, in a town of a few hundred, to call anything a "fest". Her high school, where she is a senior, has a graduating class of twenty-two, all of whom she's known for literally her entire life.

"Oh yeah, good times."

Her mom spikes with an orange-red annoyance. "All right then, I'll just say it. Adam's going to be there and I'd like you to go."

Adam. Of course. Her suitor. "Mom, I'm not really into him."

"Things change."

"Ugh. Not this."

There's a moment of awkward silence, which Ray breaks by crunching into a third apple. Her mother rolls her eyes and stands up. "Well... I still need to take a shower and get ready, so you can have a while to make up your mind."

"Thanks."

Rayen is nineteen years old, but she never knew anything, as far as she's concerned, until she was almost seventeen. She'd just lost her father to a pointless accident, to alcoholism, to a tree alongside the road. To nothing except life and death in their infinite randomness.

What followed was a deep and abiding depression. She'd felt the touch of nihilism, of the sure and certain proof that nothing mattered. If you could just wake up one day and your whole life could be altered, irreversibly, well, why try to make any kind of life at all? It was all a tease.

But then there was a book.

Her basement, which had become a refuge against real life and everything that went along with it, was filled with old and moldering book that the house's previous owners hadn't taken with them. Shelves upon shelves of hardbound volumes that Ray had never even given a second thought, not being much of a reader.

In her deep funk, the dark and mysterious contents of the library had appealed to her. There were books of old magic, the druidic and pagan rites and rituals, books of the old gods and demigods and demons, creatures of the underworld. Books about anything a miserable teenage girl could ever wonder about.

Whoever had collected these things had a taste for the occult, with an emphasis on altered consciousness. Several tomes on the subject of astral projection, the power to leave one's body at will and explore the world invisibly, and even more regarding psychic phenomena. Ray dove into the world of the supernatural, at first only reading hungrily for some sense of the pattern of life.

Over the next few weeks, she realized she was doing something more. Suddenly her choices weren't random, the books she pulled from the shelves were carefully selected for their instructional value.

It was the middle of the night, on a Saturday, when she found the most important artifact of her life; a medium-sized leather bound book, titled Empathic Esoterica and Practical Applications thereof, by someone named Aerneric. She had no idea how to pronounce the author's name, but that didn't matter;

The book was pure magic. From the very first page, Ray was discovering a new side to life, a side she'd forgotten could exist, but it was even more than what she'd lost. She read for days on end, and it was only luck that this was summer because she wouldn't have gone to school anyway. This was learning, this was education.

Slowly, as the knowledge of Life seeped into her from that incredible volume, Ray began to feel the touch of living things around her. There were odd, ancient phrases that she learned to use, for describing extraordinary things with aptitude and grace.

The shining force called Aura, which she soon began to see and feel, lit everything alive from within. It wasn't long before Rayen could see in the absolute blackness of the forest night; the luminous gleam of Life lighting the leaves and flowers and scampering creatures.

Each chapter of the miraculous Esoterica enlightened her in some new way. One week, she taught herself to influence her own Aura, a skill called, in the old book, Suauram. A similar ability to touch and manipulate the Aura of others was appropriately named Hoauram. The old words seemed to be related to Latin somehow, and yet when she looked up translations in the Latin dictionary (which of course, was in the library) the words didn't quite make sense.

The greatest joy, though, came when she finally mastered the process called Adrifting. Out in the woods with her book, (she'd long since stopped hiding in the basement, simply dashing down to find reference works among the piles of literature) she felt the rapture of surrender and let the world in.

Finally, almost a year after losing her father and her faith in life, she felt alive again. She touched the power of Life, bared her own shining soul to it, and was healed.

From that day on, she was never completely alone, her life was never completely silent. The Aura of the people around her would flow and shimmer and warp, sometimes coming into focus long enough that she'd get a glimpse of actual thought.

People have a color, she discovered. The old beliefs that colors would influence emotions were only half true; relics of an age when the secrets of Life were common knowledge. Calm, willful people had a green glow to them, whereas angry ones would shine scarlet. Sadness glazed a person's Aura with blues, and annoyance or stress tinged them with oranges.

The inner workings of spirited Life made themselves clear to her, and she was never the same girl again.