Pandora's Box

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In beauty, may I walk.
All day long, may I walk.
Through the returning seasons, may I walk.

Beautifully I will possess again.
Beautifully birds…
Beautifully joyful birds…

On the trail marked with pollen, may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet, may I walk.
With dew about my feet, may I walk.

With beauty, may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty,
lively, may I walk.
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty,
living again, may I walk.

It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.




- Excerpt from the Navajo Night Way Ceremony

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Up at the Astronomy tower, daylight was just peeking over the edge when Pandora tossed some pollen into the air and spoke under her breath greeting the day. While she hid many things from her culture, this was an hour few were awake enough to be suspicious about and already being dressed and ready she made a point of doing it while her friends finished with make up, something she avoided using much of unless she had a job to do. And now was school time, she didn't have any photo shoots for weeks now, something to be both sad and happy about. The stress of fitting it in was a mess with all the permissions and such, but she did enjoy the feeling of being wanted.

Right now was time for balance.

Clearing her mind, she chanted softly to herself and Father Sun, ears alert for movement in the stairs. As she chanted, her mood shifted slightly from carefully alert to cheerfully expectant of the day and all it brought with it. When done, she felt good, in balance with the world around her and she headed back down to the seventh floor to wait outside the Ravenclaw dorm for the slack-a-beds. To run a successful con, one had to always be up on top of things which meant her being raised the way she had been was an advantage. But with homework done (like any good Ravie) it just meant right now she had free time.

As they trickled out all dolled up (she had herself only a little blusher on) they fell together and headed for breakfast, two of them giggling about a guy in the common room with unmade hair fast asleep sitting upright on the couch. The descriptions made her grin despite her effort to appear above that because it was a good description of the behavior of many guys in school, something she had never realized before. By the time they got to the table though the four of them had gotten better control and sat down, Suzanne whispering about a boy who had eyes for Luci. Luci was trying not to look alarmed, but a nudge from Pandora and a knife fell off Luci's side and she grinned at her before using the opportunity to glance that way as she picked it up...

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Deeply asleep in her room, Pandora formerly known as Mirah lay peacefully still like a carved statue of alabaster. The light from the moon cast on one of her arms caused a glow in her flesh which seemed unearthly. Her eyelids flickered slightly, but she made no other movement. In one hand lay a piece of very old volcanic rock in the shape of a lizard roughly from the sacred bear lodge, naturally formed not made by any human hand. It was from her own personal sacred bundle assembled when she was only nine by her own request after a series of dreams told her she needed to start early. There was nothing easy about a sacred bundle, an arduous task even for the young as much a mind puzzle as a spiritual and physical one.

Hers had, oddly enough, been finished and blessed only days before her visit from the con artist.

Now it sent invisible tendrils of spiritual awakening through her veins, leading power to the vision she was seeing. She knew it was not magic, but a power far beyond it from the earth itself, her ancestors funneling the lessons she needed to learn on her unique path in life. Even as a con artist herself now, fooling those around her, she was still of the People and her world was closely intertwined with the mysteries of the other side. Her fingers twitched slightly in her sleep, relaxed a moment, and then folded around the stone protectively. About a minute passed as her breathing increased and her eyelids actually began to show signs of opening, wakefulness. When she did wipe one back of a hand across her eyes, her breathing was still slow and calm. It was not something to take lightly, shaking off the other world in such a sacred moment.

After a moment of lying there, looking at things only she could see in her eyes she stretched and slowly leaned up on one elbow and pulled a small journal over. A series of words she wrote then, some in a line, others on another, some scribbled over others with an arrow pointing to another spot as things of importance came to her. She wrote from memory, the book filled with another two dozen pages of the same with no explanations, only words to trigger her memories and remind her of importance. Things like "Change Environment, rainbow frill neck, advantage to con, most resistance is at the end, strike forward and upward, the four fathers pipe," filled up line after line before she stopped, her forehead furrowing with effort to remember. She looked over it, remembering the pattern of events in the vision, the voices in her ear, Salmon so loud and wet feeling in her head.

Chameleon's dry wit had her reaching for the water cup, sipping thirstily as he always left that effect in her mind. Cupping the stone after she had drunk, she whispered to it a prayer in her native tongue, praising and thanking them for the opportunity to learn and grow. Curled up on the fancy bed and in such a room, she made an odd vision herself if there had been a watcher. When she had finished and tucked the stone away in the bundle around her neck, replacing it carefully, she slid off the edge of the bed and stretched again before pulling an old body pillow odd a shelf and laying it careful and with respect on her dresser. Undoing the end she pulled at the interior which turned into a well worn thin mattress wrapped around a blanket.

The blanket was clearly a prize as she took it carefully out leaving the rest on the dresser. Carrying it again with respect to the patch of floor the nearest to the moonlight she laid it out, inhaling the old smells still associated with it and then stripped off her top and slipped onto it carefully, sitting up in the moonlight to run her hands over inch of her arms and upper body, feeling the moon light grace her, in her eyes making her beauty, filling her with the light of the holy ones. The difference is while a person on this side of the world might have thought of it as the light making her beautiful, she saw it as filling her with harmony, making her one with the web of life, a renewal. After she had exposed all of herself to it, she lay down on the familiar sleeping blanket and curled into the fetal position, wishing she could still feel her mother stroking her hair almost three thousand miles away in another world...