The Storytellers

Here are the next few chapters of Book 2 of the Enanika Series.

Enlan was angry and hurt that Anu stayed away for six years. We find out why.

Chapter 3: New Anu

In Enanika:

Six years ago, after the three-day Sirius alignment, Anu had been invited by Nadhir to begin storyteller training.

Earth was still vivid inside her. Milkwood, the winter solstice dark, the sound of Fat Cow Creek below the falls, and Enlan’s torchlight falling across the path ahead of her as he said, “Goodbye, my love.” 

She felt the pull of it clearly. She felt, just as clearly, what Nadhir was offering. She held them both, and then she turned towards Enanika, and the training began.

Contact callers open the bridge between worlds. They are the first point of call. They help worlds attune to frequencies not yet known to them. It is essential work, foundational work, the kind of work that has to happen before anything else can.

Storytellers come after. Their work is different. Whereas contact callers connect worlds, storytellers venture into their interior, into the dreams they dream about themselves, into the patterns they return to again and again without knowing why. Storytellers learn to feel worlds from the inside. They know that stories are not simply entertainment, nor history, nor even mythology, though they wear those forms. 

Stories are the way consciousness transfers itself from one being to another. They move beneath the seen. They enter through emotion, through instinctive understanding, through archetypal recognition, through ancestral markers. They cross every barrier. They survive the collapse of the worlds that made them. And they reveal, more honestly than any record or document, what a species actually believes about itself at its deepest level.

One of Anu’s storyteller teachers said, “Show me the stories a world tells, and I will know who they are — their present, past, and future.”

Anu travelled across the contact regions. Sometimes, if appropriate, in body. Sometimes in pure energy form. Sometimes as something between the two. She had to stretch until her own consciousness was supple enough to receive frequencies completely new to her. And then she began to hold those stories.

A storyteller does not return to Enanika with a collection of narratives or a catalogue of archetypes. They are not Earth librarians. What they bring back is the living essence of what has been experienced — the emotional and symbolic truth of other worlds, held the way a crystal holds light. 

On Enanika, these essences become available to all who need them. Any Nanik who needs a particular kind of understanding — not necessarily information or instruction, but the felt experience of another consciousness — can enter that field held by an accomplished storyteller and receive it directly. The storyteller is a living vessel. A portal between worlds, between realities, between understandings.

And so, after six years, not laid idly by but spent in expansive reaching, Anu was a different person. And it was that person, that new Anu, that returned to Earth. Dense, luminous, suffering, astonishing Earth. 

And somewhere in that density and transformation, Enlan waited… though he no longer knew what he was waiting for. 

Chapter 4: Sideways Glance

On Earth:

Winter rain hammered against the train windows all the way into the city.

Not the soft drifting rain of Enanika’s mountain regions, where weather moved almost musically through the landscape, but heavy, grey, cold, ill-tempered rain that bounced off tram tracks and gathered in gutters already overflowing with brown leaves.

By the time Anu reached Dynamic Dancing, the legs of her pants were soaked through. The studio windows glowed against the dark street. Inside, the room smelled faintly of deodorant, damp clothing, and body heat.

“Five-six-seven-eight!”

The instructor clapped loudly as couples rotated awkwardly around the room.

Anu thought with a smile, Earth people apologise constantly when dancing.

On Enanika, movement is learned through resonance. Bodies adjust naturally to rhythm. But on Earth, humans crash clumsily into one another, including Anu, because here she had a human body, not a Nanik one. But there was something strangely, humorously beautiful about it.

When the class finished, the rain had not. She ran to Enlan’s cafe and stood underneath the awning.

Enlan looked up immediately. He always seemed to sense who was walking in with only a sideways glance. That way, if he didn’t want to talk to someone, he could easily pretend not to see them. 

This time, no smashed glasses. Just a nod and a smile.

Well, at least, he’s not angry anymore, thought Anu.

“It’s pouring,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How was your class?”

“Fun!” said Anu. “Thanks for asking.”

The cafe was quieter today. The rain was keeping people indoors. 

Anu wrapped both hands around her chai. The warmth moved through her fingers.

A woman at the window stared pensively into the rain, and Anu stared pensively at the woman.

Chapter 5: Small Rhythms

Enlan was taking the opportunity of fewer customers to wash the dishes.

After a while, Anu stood, gathered her things, and moved to the counter. The girl at the register looked up.

“I’ll take it,” said Enlan, already walking over.

He wiped his hands on a tea towel.

“So,” he said, “what have you been doing?”

Anu looked at him carefully.

“This past week? Or…”

A faint flicker crossed his face, and then he looked down at the register.

“Anything,” he said, still not looking at her.

He pressed a button and held the payment machine out towards her.

“I went back to my old flat,” she said.

“The one near Fat Cow Creek?”

“Yes.”

“How are you paying rent?”

“I’ve never had to pay rent for that flat,” she said. “It has always somehow been paid.”

Enlan nodded. 

“And what else?” he asked.

“I’m working one day a week at the Reading Rooms.”

“The old bookshop?”

“Yes, for Michael.”

“How is he?”  asked Enlan.

“Good,” said Anu. “You should come and see him. He would love that.”

Enlan turned his gaze towards the door, although no one was there.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Coming here takes almost an entire day,” she smiled. “Bus to the station. Train to the city. Another train. Dance class. Then you.”

“See you next week,” he said. “Goodbye, my …” 

And then he stopped.

More about Book 2 of the Enanika Series