Miriam in the Middle | Chapter Two
a standalone novel in The Justiceers mainline saga
Miriam in the Middle
By Ophelia Everfall
Part One | Rejuvenation Station
Part Two | Murderous Memoranda
Part Three | Echoes of Eternity
Part Four | Violence Is Golden
Part Five | Synchronistic Syllabus
Part Six | God’s Sexiest Librarian
Part One | Rejuvenation Station
Chapter Two
Dreamscapes were recognizable instantaneously to Miriam upon her conscious recognition of their visions bearing to experience. She’d find herself most aware of their unreality. In past she’d seek to fly and control or change things towards fun of all sorts upon finding herself awake in dream, but then experience would cut short. She’d learned to just enjoy the show and step forward until a more distant ending unplanned.
This one felt different—serious.
Miriam knew this instance of her soul who was walking ahead, she’d met them before in ways, their planetary origins still unknown through time, sharing dreams from her past which contained the woman as a feature had been a memory rediscovered in their travel downward. She’d played partner with the broken woman before, held her dearly.
Shaaro would be the name written in Miriam’s journals for quantifying identity of this woman she’d live within, beside, and contain always henceforth by loving feeling. She’d been broken even more—lacking needed reassembly in time after trauma the way Miriam had beside Arthur in Yemi.
Dream swept lovers they’d been; Miriam and a woman real, somewhere in the backwards, of each other in a soulfully holistic fashion. That other would move and look so differently, of innately defeated presentation, yet powerful and even more.
This woman felt and travelled with, now seen straight on and with more clarity than before was unique for a Scribe. They’d been alone far too long—far longer. She reminded Miriam of her own rogue visage, tortured through time, who seemed the same, yet Shaaro proved worse by frightful signs of body; a heavier foot to step upon—her planet hosting gravity overabundance towards ideals by enough to negatively affect everything physiological.
Miriam couldn’t know if Shaaro had been aware of these connections in slumber while living. The belief was she had in some way—especially this one they led her on now. Internal reception of understanding were that they’d been the one guiding Miriam in their dreams together all along—this unique woman.
No one understood what it meant to dream.
Best guesses from Miriam’s journals and pounding her analytical sense of forging rightness into form brought conclusions. Dreamscapes had proved of more beyond and soulful separations most real—teaching of selves in timelessness that were not bled to purest light and would remain a unique intelligence eternally—gods and goddesses all were the people of this universe in perpetuity.
Torchlit corridors proved to be Shaaro’s first undeniable exhibit her own—they were leading Miriam deeper—fists were tight—jaws locked and eyes of some judgment formulating in minds. Miriam’s goddess had spoken at last in shudder.
“You will know this place.”
It was a whisper to ears of her fullest assertion—something obvious about the blatant intentionality of Shaaro’s mind witnessed within them; Miriam could tell her some tortured genius.
Tunnels gave to chambers then passages and an underground river winding deeper into the darkened, unknowable earth. Eventually there’d be a staircase.
Miriam held something in hands—a case.
There’d been a rumbling force of shake which erupted within it at random—again—again.
Miriam heard not a sound but the windswept eliciting of a stormy sky’s enormous breadth of power brought wholesale into to her dream-dulled ears by this chamber which had no hope to project such sounds naturally. She could imagine a little growl inside the box—something furry to cuddle perchance.
Cyclical dreamscapes had seen Shaaro a one to hold and kiss most perfectly. Preciousness was found beyond Miriam each time their lips would touch—she’d become Shaaro in feeling—she’d grasp back their whole through sensual sublimation. To see through Shaaro’s eyes was a feeling and remembering it on their journey had shot her to some other place.
Miriam’s own form in this dream was not her own. She made segway back into a repetitive affection poured through over in lifetimes, seen and held, tasted before but not felt through eyes—unexpected and crass in some dingy place—Shaaro’s own life by clarity Miriam simply knew—some woman there was the vision. Miriam had seen them before too.
This was different though. Miriam was somehow of feeling beyond that experienced in life or dreams beyond. Her soul’s timeless vantage of Shaaro’s lifetime was blaring of heart beyond realms of feeling Miriam even believed possible.
She felt immaculate but broken being witnessed by this darkened and beautiful woman before Shaaro. Some most unique moment of the universe rediscovered to become Miriam’s own—something cursed for how precious and cruel the singularity borne through a life lived in whole for this single and shortest blast of ecstatic love to be the purpose.
There would be no greater moment for Miriam to absorb through all of time.
Every soul was here for this—gods and goddesses all would peek to feel—yet Miriam herself would ride it wholly. It was a most important sign to point the way for knowing this dreadful truth of her soul. Miriam simply understood there’d be some way to help this woman—a version of her but so separate through life lived of greatest difference. She’d already fallen more deeply in love with them on this journey of sharing experience than she ever loved before.
The power of spirit brought into Miriam’s presence would create action and intent that would hold Shaaro to live in power within her own lifetime.
Miriam would look at her differently while walking deeper into the voided blackness of the underground. She did know this place. They were the same after all. Her and Shaaro were one woman above and to transcend would have them become again with far more than two—each lesser self a facet remaining wholly inside a goddess of etheric timelessness.
This sharing of space with one other would seem enough for Miriam—yet experiences of true soul would change a person in material no matter. It was unavoidable when the more she took created paradigms within which made her unable to handle wrongness from harmony with heaven’s way in reality.
Humanity’s subconscious workings could fall in line with divine truth of self—people might become consumed by unavoidable rhythm with them—results would show a person who’d be meant for expression, and clearest examples humanity’s unique ability to suppress itself throughout space by relegating its prophets to the dustbin of lost cultures.
Nothing made Miriam feel better or worse—more proud of the universe or her soul—than to remember again what it was like to be Shaaro.
Her life’s cultivated moment of preciousness was unseen elsewhere in time and because of her greatest sacrifice. Miriam herself would find never ending gratitude for that memory the rest of her life.
Its reflection was proving needed. The darkness around was glooming a brood of brooding specters—horribly cumbersome to the psyche. Miriam was moving more like Shaaro by the moment, becoming one so gripped by bodily tightness and constriction of will. The change would prove to be made by blocks of mind made to consequence.
Something sickest was crafted just for Miriam and a chosen few of her soul.
Those who’d explore the experience this deeply with Shaaro through their own lives delving into awareness of her own—breaking themselves consciously alongside her.
Shaaro had known exactly what was happening as her mind shattered by a universe’s cruelest weight. Miriam saw and understood it all through the reflection of herself and others throughout her past. Shaaro had too and through her own creations as well. They’d both been experts at peering inward for honest reflection after so much time seeing with haze of spiritual delusion.
Miriam Halafax refound her faith anew in Shaaro.
She knew their heart. They were a goddess of tightest shared lineage. They’d a soul most loved. Some sisters and brothers made lovers too. They were enemies and friends, comrades and nemeses, combinations between that wouldn’t prove fitting to reality but for how these two would fight to learn of themself against or beside. They were each other.
That woman who broke Shaaro’s heart with love unfillable twice would be the soul of Arthur no doubt—her own. Justiceers came in all forms of pair—within every lifetime of their souls would these two create change most divine, no matter how tragically their differences would prove it manifested.
This one before her needed all Miriam could give. Something inside asked to shelter a burden of Shaaro’s bodily wisdom as penance for her own privilege. Both of their lifetime’s extended and compounded traumas grafting knowledge by intertwining lessons of unique suffering.
Miriam would now seek to heal her love through time. Something told her they’d die in sorrow without her. She wouldn’t have it that way.
Shaaro was hers now. She’d become her too. Mind felt severed in the moment of deciding intention, something injured like a broken bone beneath the skin, but in wired firing of neuronic connection. To witness the change while being a one who would fight helplessly against it was horror personified. Losing your mind while knowing and clawing for help was not something many could withstand in tempered force of will.
Miriam Halafax had broken into shared embodiment with Shaaro after coming back from that place in her lifetime, and now stood before her on a platform of the lowest cavern at last.
They’d found a boat and oared their way into a depth of still water unknown, where no outer wall of this holy place could be seen. Only hanging crystals reflecting some blessed bioluminescence would be enough to prove them alone, at least in whatever dreamt physicality they were a part.
Watching Shaaro oar, they’d looked into Miriam’s eyes, and she knew it time. She’d felt it more and more walking down the steps as spirits of past joined her alongside a consciousness of this unknown planet’s nativity—body becoming more of stiffness—preparations for a mind-slicing wound in reflection of her timeless love.
Something new was rumbling within her box. When Miriam opened the case she found it empty.
Stillness struck Miriam and she knew what it was that made Shaaro hurt so enormously, despite lack of detail in understanding their life beyond quickest bursts of vision and that feeling—the feeling—but whatever it would be or had been that dismantled Shaaro so, Miriam would not abide a sister of soul to live out her days that way. The box had sealed her mind in three.
Miriam Halafax loved Shaaro more than any visage or manifestation of herself then she ever had or would.
They were the ultimate unseen hero. They were a goddess who’d paid most for the change they all brought to this universe together—fate aligning towards the creation of heaven—something written which would draw action from them regardless of choices others made.
Angels of driven action would prove natural scribes for the universe’s wisdom who would suffer by free will of humanity, and those of this make that the Justiceers would call a Judge could see to calling the final score. Miriam wouldn’t need one anymore. She’d realized the key—they were all the same.
This epic space of dark was a holding place for hope and death. It would be remembered dearly. Miriam would never return. Shaaro was coming with her. They’d be held to breast each moment of their life through time. Miriam Halafax would be their guardian and Shaaro would take her back.
Dreams made sense in times to come. Each one a pointing made towards something right to see. All to prove Miriam leading the correct steps forward.
Shaaro there would be the gift, to feel her energy walking beside and within some boon. To hold the weight of their now shared burden through time, by higher soul, felt through extremity unimaginable to Miriam was a gift of wisdom. That love Shaaro’s unfounded loneliness had bought for a moment; the unseen suffering of a transgender woman amongst the ignorance of misogyny-stained humanity personified, as Miriam herself had carried through much of her own lifetime to a far lesser extent—taught that the choice she made was wholesome if almost entirely unique.
Only a few births of her soul would graft something new with something the same—not to always be of this or that. They’d come to this place with Shaaro and say yes. Miriam’s heart led true. Its voice was loud and wisdom poured to shout in those three.
Every version of Miriam’s soul loved Shaaro most. They’d all help her to survive through time in energy. They’d not be okay with the loss she wrote herself to take for how it felt. A few of these sisters in soul would change the plan for Shaaro most directly, and Miriam would lead their way again.
Miriam Halafax awoke upon the loveseat in the rear compartment of Infinus.
She wasn’t feeling good in her head and sitting up made it real. That splitting slice—the groove in mind by dream had seemed to cause some synaptic separation—a severing of trauma-holding.
Shaaro’s psychic pain was too large to walk with except contained by a die-hard shell of denial which bore results into body directly—especially the unavoidabile fall; something horrible witnessed coming in plain to then experience by a slowest and most tortured mental death of self-understanding.
Miram’s goddess had done something horrible but beautiful with their life and gone too far. They’d not had help. They were a fallen Justiceer who’d failed to reconnect with their Judge. Some moment which had been their call to bring her their other was mistaken by both parties.
This woman through time who Miriam now loved more than light itself would be her vow of protection. She’d been walking a part of Shaaro’s life all along, born to help them through time in dream and form. Whatever her blurts of instinct were having her do in Proximera were an important part of the plan on high. Something was coming to a head with Shaaro that needed Miriam’s full intention.
There’d be no rest for the Miriam—as she’d now begin to say.
Standing was a strangest thing. She moved differently. Later it would be discovered, some horror; dancing was hard. Her subconscious would not allow flow without screaming it wrong towards truths of grief and insulting to the reality of nature’s bodily understood wrongness.
Miriam let herself become Shaaro through loving experience—a choice made from the highest—forcing her to become the same.
Fighting through would be the choice of a hero, as would all of her most convicted sisters of soul, made by faith in a cosmically profound realization bestowed by sensations of gorgeous rightness in themselves at last. They’d all touch Shaaro’s pain but those who held it would be the mightiest—none of these sisters would fail to speed forward with its weight.
It would be a part with every one of their kind, through time, to benefit and heal back towards their most wounded sister.
That world she lived in harmed her worst. It wasn’t cruel—it was hell.
Nothing would be sicker than to suffer and be of love, for no one ever to care in a way felt, lacking genuine intention of others for seeking to help in fashions acceptable—to never be loved with romantic fire of wanting when it was all her soul truly sought through every life.
Shaaro would not die because that wasn’t the plan. She’d survive in might of courage beyond her sister’s need to prove, but lose herself entirely to soul in a grace of glory.
They all could have, but her path had walked the hardest, choices of her peoples and the planet in time made consequence—her companions free wills and her own mistakes compounding beyond reason. It broke the woman into shards so sad and pitying, with complete cognizance gifted before and through her mental unbecoming to feel it all.
There was a notion of torture in Shaaro’s life that all of her soul would know of in some way from on high, a lament for her mind lost to pointless cruelty of effective cultural disrespect and disregard beyond all comprehension of immorality. To save that woman by force of souls through time would save her world from falling into hell for what light would reflect by darkest karma of reaction.
Miriam would never be done helping.
She’d realized that when finally taking the seat before her Infiniti’s control console and reading the only message received after her joyride and night spent sleeping on this clifftop of Palomea’s shadow-shrouded belly. She’d landed Infinus within uncharted territory that light never saw.
It was strange to find such space in a system of two celestial bodies, a single massive space station, with approximately six hundred seventy-five billion humanoid residents. Yet space was vast. Ships orbited each gravity-well, moved to and fro through the darkness of space in Proximera without fear of collision. Their counting and makings of class were near unfathomable for the constant destruction and rebuilding or fresh creation inherent to their survival.
Layers of Pelómea were as deep as the willpower struck by fortitude into both of its native human races, the Kopi and Dwenn. Communities were a cramped notion for both by nature. Hives and dens would prove them thriving in masses atop themselves. Their near-countable population predictions were unnerving.
Daemon was a station of singularity, along with the size made by its independent fleet of homesteaders and traders in orbit, supporting life of over three hundred billion human souls alone. Each of its sixty-two rings of centrifuge was a spaceborne continent protecting multitudes of human variation.
To be in the dark on Pelómea was a rarest occurrence for anyone not of Dween or Kopi origin. Miriam would take that for the blessing it was.
Screens around appeared in augmented vision—some mounted on sidewalls and mirrors—forward viewing portal entirely occluded.
Brightening within the Infiniti’s cabin of limited space kept the surrounding darkness from seeming a fright.
It had been a single thought of intention repeated thricefold to bring her darkened sister of deepest pain forward through time into herself. Leading the box to open in her hands. Something in her hearing a thundered blare of specter in retrospective remembrance, to feel a crawling up her spine. Miriam had been dreaming as it happened but the ickiness would forever be left remnant in her body throughout wakefulness.
She would walk differently now, but it was divine. Miriam was fractured but more of herself. She’d been broken in body and mind like Shaaro. It brought her home to a truth of soul that would remember the sacrifices made through time by all facets alike and a one beautiful, hurt-powered love they’d all choose to value most.
For this soul to taste that longed for once in a life most bare—to feel it that brightly—for Shaaro to never hold it again and live on while losing her mind the wiser to it all; she would at least then come to know all her sisters within her.
Miriam would take her hand and head to chest every night. Shaaro was her girl—her soul mate—for Shaaro was all of them and none of them—she was love and hate, trauma and joy, laughter and malice, fruition and destruction in one most beautiful being held by strength of conviction.
For Shaaro to become the lover she’d be in real, for Miriam to finally have someone worthiest beside her and it be a visage of that loneliest life her soul had ever lived—would be her own hearth full of grace, holding her every night of rest—then Miriam would prove its worth most justifiable.
Nothing felt more right than slumping into her, allowing Shaaro’s arms to wrap around as they’d melt into Miriam’s waist, except the fact they’d seem to have none for giving at all themself.
Shaaro was too hurt to pour without—she held much in and too tightly.
Feeling that curse upon her and knowing the wrongness of it—the doom struck foretelling of darkened fates beyond—that single notion thinkable horror made real, and after the wiping of her face from those tears gone passed. This change to self would be written in Miriam somehow for a length unprescribed, a most dreadful time indeed, that would prove the seeking of her journey in Proximera to solve and heal it by change.
Miriam Halafax was no longer able to cry
