“Is that understood?” Liz asked. When everyone had voiced their consent, Liz directed us to join hands. When the circle was complete, I felt the surge of energy as a sizzle at my core. Liz began a wordless chant – kind of like the om my yoga teacher used to begin and end class but made up of different sounds. As the others joined in, the sounds merged into one liquid rush – like water flowing or wind blowing – and I found myself joining in, my own voice merging seamlessly with the rest as a drop of water in a flood or a gust of breeze in a storm as if I’d been born knowing this wordless music. Just as my voice merged with the voices of the others, so my energy – all that prickly tangle of conflicting urges – spun out into the circle and joined the flow.

I saw the energy racing around in the circle, a gold band of light created by each of us, but feeding off the Aelvestone in the center. The Aelvesgold was filling each member of the circle, suffusing their faces with light. Skald no longer wore the ironic scowl of a teenager. Leon had let go of his hipster pretensions. The lines of pain and anxiety had fallen from Ann’s face, leaving her looking twenty years younger. Even Moondance’s face, drained of her perpetual annoyance and skepticism, was as radiant as the heavenly orb she had taken as her name.

I wondered for a moment what my face looked like, what freight of worry might have fallen from me, but then I was filled with a greater wonder as the band of golden light began to spin up from the circle, spiraling into the air above our heads. The spiral rose into a cone shape, the energy moving faster, the voices growing louder, the light burning brighter, obliterating the faces around me. I heard, among the human voices, the ululations of owls and the howling of wolves and saw in the light every color of the rainbow – and a few colors that weren’t. There was moonlight and sunshine, the tender blush of dawn and the cobalt blue of twilight and the whirl of stars before they became stars. The spiral contained all time. Just as it reached its peak, a voice – perhaps all our voices – cried out. Now!

The spiral cone hurdled into space … and I went with it.