Part III: Burying the baku

Jhlen ushered the baku's body to small glen in the forest before sunrise. Stoically he slit small slivers in the hide of the baku removing organs, some which had no name. He moistened his hands with cool aloe gel and sprinklings of myrrh. His hands worked the mixture into the baku's small inner cavities, around bones, kneaded it into its hide. It was a noble beast and deserved to be laid to rest. Some people hunted baku. They ground up the hide with their tusks into mixed it into caustic powder that when taken offered a heady mashup of the various dreams that the baku had eaten over its lifetime.

Jhlen did not want his dreams shared. The notion of shards of his lifetime leaking from a junkie's glassy eyes haunted him. So many time he had shared those dreams of his own volition. A bridge created to shuttle his dream. Too often the bridge crumpled into dark valleys. Bridges are often dreams he thought. He thought of valleys that smoldered with clippings of her hair, soured words, the grip of his son's finger on his shoulder blade, courting, marriages of the mind, harems.

His beloved. His beloved. His beloved.

He covered the dream eater in dirt. The dirt ate his dreams yet he held the renewed residue of dream paradises and nightmare terrains like static on his skin. The sun gently brushed over the horizon dropping sundrops on the tips of branches. It was at this one still moment that he draped the dew drenched grass with his Cyresean rug. Early morning exercises under the sun; within the sun.

Jhlen's ancestors had worshiped the sun at some points in the past in the form of golden discs covered in glyphs. The wise amongst those ancestors eventually realized that the sun is naught but an extension of their mental and physical landscape. So they developed ways to share the throne of with the sun and draw it into their self for the sun is them. Methods that were lost in time yet eventually renewed by the Brotherhood of the Purple Gourd.

He drank the sun in with his eyes feeling his body fill with warmth; his mind becoming as light as tension melted away. Things became clearer. He took a moment to feel it dance throughout his body. Then he performed sun salutation. To his ancestors it was a prayer to the sun yet even before them it was a way to unlock his body's life force. His body pulsated. His muscles became fluid. Normally Jhlen didn't think like this yet he knew...it was going to be a long day. He took his ceramic bowel out of his back satchel, poured in well water mixing dihe and date sugar until he had pate eating his morning meal underneath the eye of the sun.