They are in the timeless vault of the cavern that to Dema is the womb of Gaia, the Earth Mother. It was in this cavern, very long ago, that she had first become the Lamia. Now, once more with the aid of Gaia, she has been reborn in Lamia form, her bodily substance restored after being sucked away by her ancient nemesis, most recently incarnated as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad is gone, and Dema has returned to her normal physical form. She and Cern, waiting for dawn before attempting the walk back to the fortress above, remain immersed in the realm of Gaia's global awareness.
Later, on the drive down the Olt valley to the plains below and the airport at Bucharest, Dema recalled the experience of the cavern, reluctant to let it fade.
"Cern, that is my cavern, the very one where I first became the Lamia. And long before that it was sacred to my people, and to the line of the Lamia. The awareness that is Gaia, the global awareness, has always resonated strongly there, and is part of my deepest heritage."
"Global awareness, that's how I felt it too. But it's not a focused awareness is it? It's not like she was aware of us at all as individuals."
"That's right. She's more of a guiding will or intention that favors biological life. What we tapped there was a resonance with that will, because our intention was aligned with hers, so we were able to draw on that to defeat Vlad."
"Gaia would never pay attention to someone like Vlad. To her he was a minor aberration. That's why he was able to perpetrate his scheme for so long."
"But somehow Vlad was influenced to establish himself in that cave, the worst place he could have chosen to confront me."
"I think it was his own hubris. Subconsciously he knew, and it symbolized for him the defeat of his old enemy. Except he wasn't planning on a rematch!"
"Or maybe he was, and that's what drew me here."
"You think he wanted you to come?"
"Again, subconsciously. Down deep the evildoers do not want to be what they are, but they can't stop themselves. So they arrange for help."
"But he was hardly cooperative!" Cern flexed his shoulder, still sore from when Vlad knocked him off the platform.
"I think that's part of the plan. They have to put up a fight, so when they lose they have a convincing argument to justify the loss; their opponent had a better strategy, one they should now emulate."
"One other thing. At the end you told Vlad he was evil because he lived off the substance of others. But don't we all do that?"
Dema thought for a moment before responding. "I think the difference is that he was a parasite. The more fulfilling mode is to be a symbiote, one who contributes to the fuller cycle of life, not focused solely on self-fulfillment."
Cern nodded, and Dema thought this had been a good answer, but she knew it was incomplete. Cern was right that life feeds on life as a matter of course. Where does one draw the line? If symbiosis is the ideal, how does one distinguish it in practice from parasites and diseases? Is there a simple answer, or is it necessary to take the long view, like Gaia, and not question or criticize short-term aberrations?
Later, when they were settled in their seats on the flight home, Dema closed her eyes and let herself drift into that timeless shaman realm where she was here with Cern but also in the cavern, and in the manor with Dame Agatha, with Sedna in Chicago, with Juan in Mexico, with Ryan in Seattle...
Her whole life, all her lives, opened up for her in this place. She thought of what her mother might say about the Bose postulate, the idea that quantum entanglement keeps individual energy resonances linked to each other after they have interacted, and about the superposition of states, the summation that defines the evolution of those interactions in the time domain.
