I was already an old man by the tenets of my time when I Awoke. In those days 60 was ancient.  I was 63 and felt it most mornings.  Not only was 63 ancient for then, it was ancient for a New One.  Is there a hormonal component to Awakening that means that most of us go through it sometime between puberty and menopause...or its male equivalent? I've often wondered.  Or is it just that at that point in our lives we are starting to love in ways that are self-transcendent, like the love of a parent for a child or a lover for the beloved?

In those days, when it happened to me there weren't any Listeners like there are now.  Stephen was decades away.  Those who heard had learned to shut their ears, because what could they do? How many of us died at emergence in those long years before Stephen I don't know.  Charlie would have died.  I think he would have preferred that in the early days.  It may have been a measure of his despair that he fought back so hard once he realized he wasn't going to.  And of those who survived, how many are still lost to us? We believe, Stephen and I, that there are many who disappeared back into the landscape leading lives that hide the changes we have never found.  It's what we all tried to do then.  We don't know and we're not allowed to look.

In those days the changes made us witches, devils, necromancers and just plain alien.  To have the -pathic gifts, to be able to do the things we can do and that all of a sudden was akin to possession.  To hear in your mind the voices of all those around you seemed like possession.  To let the world know was to invite death and torture in horrific ways.  So we hid those things, even from ourselves if we could.  It's what I did, until Stephen forced a second emergence.  And that happened someplace else.

The border between Wales and England, in the days before I Awoke, delineated more than just sovereignty.  The lands on both sides of that border became a philosophical melting pot of law and mysticism and culture.  A different language and a different heritage separated the Celt and the Saxon and the Norman.  Along the Marches they approached each other and were hand fasted.  There, John the Baptist met St. Benedict and they were intimate.

I am Celt, a child of the borders, and thus I first approached God in silence and solitude within the conventual life of a Benedictine monastery.  The focus of plain song chant balanced the interior quest for God in contemplation and the quietude of dwelling with living things incapable of words.  I brought to the cloister the Celtic paradigm that blended the asceticism of the old religion of the forests and the night sky with the asceticism of the new religion of the cross and the resurrection.  It was a marriage of the intellect and the emotions, the will and the heart, the imagination and the senses, which when perfected liberated the soul.  The Christian God was there both in-dwelling and out-dwelling for us. 

That was the gift of the borderlands to those who dwelt there after the Christianization of Britain.  It was destined to fade away after the Synod of Whitby and its ilk to the ascendancy of Rome.  The Celtic church was doomed. But in those days it still lived and was comfortable with the hermit and the solitary.  It just smacked too much of the pagan, its roots were too deep into magic and polytheism to be tolerated in those fragile days of transition from the dark ages into medieval times.  Civilization needed the dogmatic surety I suppose of Catholicism to emerge out of ignorance.  Clear-cut boundaries between the real and the unreal, between good and evil were the surest weapon in the advance of science.  Progress spread across Europe on the backs of religion because religion controlled learning.  Only religion, the Catholic religion, I suppose, could be trusted to keep the devil out of mathematics.

But when I entered the cloister that had just begun.  So I praised God in Latin and found Him in the eternal flow of the seasons, the perfection of growing things, and of life begetting life in both love and in violence.  Life was allowed to be cyclic and filled with duality. Man lived with death, woke up to it and went to sleep accepting it.  I went to mass, made confession and accepted penance, while also celebrating the fecundity of the earth and the fertility of a woman. Easter was as much the resurrection of Christ as it was the rebirth of the earth after the short death of winter.  Magic was real, whether in the act of transubstantiation or the mating of priestess with priest to bring forth the crops.

None of that meant I believed in the old Celtic religion in the sense of theology.  I was and am wholly Christian.  It was flavored, though, by those things as if there were incorporated into me with the air I breathed and the water I drank.  I don't suppose, looking back now, that any of that impinged on my consciousness.  That was just the way it was. The capacity to accept the mysterious, the dual and the inexplicable was a part of me, a gift of Celtic-ness, I suppose.  I was what I was and content to be so.  But that was what led me, five years into my final vows to become a priest so as to more fully, I think, participate in the mysteries and to bring them to the people around me.  So I left the monastery to seek ordination and after had grown old as a priest in a small Welsh village.  It was a rich life, for all its poverty and uncertainly.  And I was content to tend my flock of souls even as they tended their sheep and cattle and crops of corn. 

One must never forget, however, for all its rural plenitude and bucolic serenity those were dangerous times as well, of the landless, the lawless and the clanless.  One had only to cross the border in either direction to escape the law.  There were those who roved the Marches in outlaw bands raiding the villages.  They raided us.  They burned and stole and slaughtered.  And, in fighting back I Awoke.

Before it happened I was simply a man, old and content to live the few remaining years of my life in that place, among those people.  The only voice in my head was my own and the furthest I'd ever been from this home was a distance that could be measured in miles and hours or days, not lifetimes and universes.  I knew only one God and had no name other than the one my parents give me at birth.  I spoke Welsh and English and Latin, which are the languages of men and lived in accord with the laws of one kind of physics.  Then I plunged into a burning building to save a child of my heart, though not my loins.  I heard, as if from a great distance that devoured my ear drums, the sound of the child screaming out a monotone note of overwhelming panic and helplessness, in accompaniment to my own feeling of having entered the inferno that awaited all sinners.  Yet I was utterly detached and the world was suspended in blinding smoke and the stench of burning things and unbelieving horror while the seconds spread out into eternity and the roof began to fall.  The sound ended, the screaming was stilled as suddenly as life becomes death.  I was stumbling forward, desperate then, to reach him.  Everything compressed into that moment.

The stumbling changed and I was falling.  The sound of my yelling replaced his and a detached part of my mind began to recite the prayers for the dead for both of us and I whispered words of absolution in my heart for that boy even as desperation and demand kept me trying to reach him.  But I was falling, and falling faster than sound in spite of having already hit the ground.  My yelling became a scream of NO! and a denial of the impossible.  Desperation took on a life of its own, pulling me towards the boy but I couldn't move and the impotent rage engendered by helplessness took over.  Then something happened in that wasteland where time had no meaning any more and the falling became a sound I heard and a feeling I couldn't grasp that allowed no motion or movement of any kind. 

Something caught up with me then and held me immobilized, demanding I listen to the sound of stillness contained in all the noise there ever was or would be.  So it made perfect sense when all the sounds I understood stopped and new ones began in some language I'd never heard and always known, giving me directions to some corner in my mind that had never been there before, a corner reached through twisting angles with smooth curves that led outward and inward at the same time.  So I turned the corner, turned into it because I had to, had no choice but to go there, where ever it was that this particular there existed if I wanted to save the boy.  I reached it at the speed of light in defiance of gravity and the mandates of time and space that were still awaiting Newton for elucidation, in a vortex that ripped me apart, wrenching from my soul another and more despairing scream filled with every molecule of myself as I used to be, using up that self as fuel for a primal sound of a scalding transformation signaling a new birth.  It was a scream filled with longing and regret and farewell. 

The sound remade me, then, into something other that I recognized, even in its total strangeness, as the totality and sum of myself that had been envisioned in some unknown creator's dream of my being.  A dream so powerful and impossibly, achingly beautiful it had caused the creation of my soul before time began.  I was called forth by irresistible promise and possibility.  All things reformed in my mind and everything made perfect sense.

 It was an act of brutal creation that took an eternity of time, leaving me bereft and complete at the same time.  I saw myself and knew myself totally...all there was to know of me and my soul and I realized that I knew nothing at all of who I was. But I did know that what I'd become was alien beyond my wildest imaginings.  Everything was contradiction and misdirection, managed by a laughing, delighted god pleased beyond words with his handiwork.  Only it was a creator I'd never met before, who certainly wasn't the god of the Jews and the Christians or any god of the old religion of the Celts.  It wasn't a god who'd ever walked the earth and filled the tales of human beings for millennia; but one as alienly new as I was and as demanding as the need I had to do something for the boy still burning to death

And that awareness brought the stench back into my nostrils and the imperative began again, newer and intense beyond anything I knew, even the fire.  Then, as suddenly as I realized that, the need answered me of its own volition sending me back out of myself.  It sent me reaching for the boy...only it was with my mind somehow, touching a soul not my own, even as I realized it was already too late, I'd lingered too long on that journey into myself.  Then the need grabbed hold again, separating me from despair, and it flung outward and I was someone other.  And then...then, a blankness.  A void even, made of all the horror in the universe compressed in on itself, where I lost the boy forever and couldn't find a path to save myself.

But I did, somehow, using the resources of the new-born self I didn't understand.  And even as I found myself between one thought and the next I was outside the fire, on the dirt in front of the building, while the building collapsed completely and I lost consciousness.

Afterwards what could I do? In those days there were no Listeners like there are now.  There was no one to explain to me what had happened or even how to cope with it all.  I came back to consciousness burned, lungs scorched and in full possession of all my faculties, plus a few more.  As I lay in bed trying to recover, tended by the old women of the parish, I tried to take stock of it all, to take inventory.  Suddenly I had the ability to hear the thoughts of others.  I discovered that I could wish for something and it occurred, it happened or appeared.  Like wanting a cup of water and there it was in my hand. 

This was dangerous business in those days.  Things like that made you a witch.  So I learned to hide those things.  But as the years went by I couldn't hide the fact that I was getting older, but not looking older. And, I suppose, I was restless.  So I became an itinerant preacher, moving from village to village preaching and saying mass.  For a time I settled in as a hermit, a life much better understood in Wales in those days.  Later, I crossed the sea into France and traveled to Rome and the Holy Land. 

I have always been a simple man.  I never dreamed of doing great things or changing the world.  By the time I met Stephen any pretensions to greatness had been burned out of my by the weariness of too many days and too many miles.  I would never had chosen to become what I am now, an Awakened, a Listener, an 1100 year old man who has the -pathic gifts, and can follow souls through time.  But I wasn't asked to vote.  Then, in those first years, it was mostly a burden to be hidden.  I was getting tired of hiding by the time I met Stephen.

Stephen was already forming the Listeners when I stumbled onto them.  It was smaller and much less organized than it is now.  But even in those days Stephen had a dream and was pursuing it.  I think he knew from the beginning that it would take centuries for it to come to fruition, but he didn't care.  Slower was usually better in any case.  And he was right because the end point of Stephen's dream is a united people, living in the open amongst the non-Awakened, without fear and without prejudice.  Stephen likes to dream big.  What happened between then and now is a long and fairly complex tale that would be better told elsewhere.  What resulted is simpler and easier to tell in a short space.

We are now a united people to a degree.  We live in accord with the covenants hammered out by us 900 years ago.  The Listeners exist and do their work under those covenants which are usually referred to as The Covenant.  Those are the successes. 

The failures include the decision to create a world we call Home for the Awakened though that wasn't very apparent at the time, even to those who were dreaming Stephen's dream.  That is where most of us live now.

The failures also include provisions in the covenants that bind the Listeners to only intervene with the New One.  Anyone else involved is left strictly alone.  And the New Ones are allowed to bring no one from their old life into their new one as Awakened.  To ensure this New Ones are treated and healed, these days anyway, at the Listener House of Studies at the Refuge, given some basic orientation about themselves as they are now and then sent Home and not allowed to leave until all they knew are dead.  Well, not allowed is a strong word.  It's better to say that since they don't know the way back they can't leave.  Usually, in practice, that amounts to about 50 years, sometimes longer.  Because of those things by the time we are allowed to leave most of us feel no tie to our human brothers and our former home is just a playground. 

Finally, we guess that there are Awakened who have never been found.  We are not allowed to look for them because, the argument goes, those who are hidden want it that way and those who accept the Covenant must do so willingly.  Well, they may have all been willing back then, but now that's not quite the case. 

As I said before, up until about 10 years ago, all the Awakened were what we now call emergent, and they were all gifted.  Some were also Listeners.  To be emergent means that in addition to having all of the -pathic gifts one also has the ability to create reality out of thought and desire.  To be gifted is to also have one of the great gifts.  Those are things like Healing, or Empathy, or Channeling.  There is also my gift, which is being able to follow souls through time and space.  In other words, I find people, anywhere and anytime time past.  I don't do the future since those souls, properly speaking, can not be said to exist.  There are others, like shape shifting and recording.  And once we as a people were gifted with a prophet but that was long ago and even I can not follow where he has gone. 

All of that, however, is beside the point.  The point is that now most of the Awakened are not emergent and are not gifted.  The only ones who are, are those who are also Listeners.  Most new Awakened now have only the -pathic gifts.  At the same time that began we began getting fewer and fewer New Ones.  And all that is starting to create tensions above and beyond those we already have between the Listeners and the Awakened particularly as represented by the Council of Elders.  All this began happening about the same time that Doni died and Richard and Lily left. That last is a failure Stephen may never stop blaming himself for.

Then came Charlie Palmer and the two girl-babies that Baylee refused to let die and Charlie refused to let go of.  The ruckus that ensued led directly to situation we now have.  But I'll get to that part later. First you need to know the rest of what happened the day Charlie Palmer Awoke.  Some of the rest of what I'm going to tell you I was there for but some I pieced together later as being the most likely way it all went down and some I was told by those who were there.