YD6-85 (Dr.) The Clash of Fates: Stalked, Steered by Aetheria, The Noctilucence of Intuition

 

Chapter Preface: In the hush between the ring and the response, Victoria crosses a threshold—from hunted to hunter, from trembling to tethered by purpose. Aetheria hovers in sunbeams and shuttered reflections, her presence instrumental in the veiled glow, steering the morning’s course. Shadows call themselves husbands, but fate stirs elsewhere. Among prowling men and glass-bubbled drives, a For-Sale sign flares like a coded signal. This is the clash—of fates, of rooms, of the right to choose one’s light.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.


YD6-85 (Dr.) The Clash of Fates: Stalked, Steered by Aetheria, The Noctilucence of Intuition

As I shouldered a stance by the open-hearth marble mantelpiece, Monday evening has returned us from work, I gaze at Victoria. She sits centered on the upholstered yellow sofa, upright dressed in black—one heeled shoe resting alongside a flexed knee in stockings—eloquent of a peaceful past week, extended through the weekend, and a day. Until - Ring, riling, riling… - It ceased, Victoria stills. Her eyes sink into darkness, roll behind her skeptically toward the perched telephone in the far corner of the windowsill, beneath the soft beige dip valance over the sashes.

“My Little One. Je n’y répondrai pas—I wouldn’t answer!”

Victoria, tone-deaf to the warning, thaws out. She slides her foot from the sofa’s soft edge, rises, and plods away—behind her, the phone screeching its persistent ringing. She butts the plain white wall, thrown offside. Rounding the Cabriole sofa, she skims past the bright gape of the kitchen doorway. 

She slips across the window, blind to Lucifer—veiled in the cloak of Nyx—his face breaching the window’s bright mirrored audience of her paired yellow-upholstered Bergères, glowing deeper across the living room. The gaping portal reflects in the darkness a yellow wooden corner of the mezzanine. 

Victoria grimaces—an eyebrow squeeze. ‘Stay out of this.’ 

She pauses. Contemplates. Then lifts the handset. 

The ringing breaks. 

At a reluctant, knuckled hand, the gleam of the ear and mouth cups lifts to Victoria's face—she listens as the words crescendo, André wails: “[French: Je suis seul… la maison est vide.] —I’m alone… the house’s empty.” Turning away from the corner of the wall. Her gaze spaces off—blind to the aisle of her own making. Silhouettes breach the bright interior reflection—a gaze waking at the threshold. A distant toddler’s tantrum horns through the line. Shouts. “[Tu es ma femme.] —You’re my wife.” She tries to appease: “André, André…” 

But her voice only contradicts the rising screams. “[Tu me dois.] —You owe me.” Returning them as screeches. Her eyes hover, just short of space—ran out of cord slack. She butts the wall beside the kitchen’s open, unblemished light—stuck. Then turns. She frogmarches the handset grip away from her cheeks—crosses back past the window, where Luciferous gaze breaches the mirrored brightness. “[Tu es à moi.] —You are mine.” His insinuation simmers through me as André's thoughts exudes like steam from a pressure cooker. ‘I have the proof—a marriage certificate.’ Resumes shouting. “[T’es mariée à moi…] —You’re married to me…” And behind it, unsaid—‘Therefore—I own you!’

It dawns on me: During Alexandre’s two-week absences—in André Daniel’s custody or with his paternal grandparents—he lodges in a room that is wholly his. The calls always come at these moments, when a little boy, unknowingly, spills his news to a Scorpio fishing for it. Here, in his mother’s place, his hut beneath the kingsize mezzanine: toys scattered, mostly books—a puppet theater crowding the floor. A three-court, unique child’s playroom—vivid, overfull—besides a daybed tucked in the headboard. Victoria has come to see the bay window room as his, awaiting the prodigious child’s return. She borrows it, her wardrobe filling the wasted niches besides the open-hearth fireplace, my suitcases in its shadows—deserted through his long absences—its only inhibition waiting to be slain by André.  

She paces blindly through the aisle behind the sofa, reeling—the cord trailing, looping.   

Victoria still clings to the belief she can win André over—repeating in vain. “[French: tu sais que je ne peux pas faire ça !] —André… André, you know I can’t do that!” The Scorpio in André Daniel shifts tactics. His voice slanders in harsh gusts. “[Avec qui que tu vives...] —Whoever you’re living with… in that one-room apartment—it’s no place to raise a child. You only have one room. You’re a whore!”

The Scorpio in André stretches across the days—withdrawn, brooding in oblivion—until the week uncoils, and he returns to claim: ‘My possession!’ Victoria sinks—on the verge of flipping—barely restraining herself from hurling the handset into the wall. She bursts into tears. André’s voice falls silent. He hangs up—satisfied, to his heart’s content. Devastated, she whispers into the shadows: “What. . . What can I do?” 

Through the wide open to light bay window, mornings spills in—efflorescent, ricocheting off the ceiling. A soft second-hand light awakens me, to stir, and gaze over at Victoria opening her eyes. We crawl from a muddled bedding of our hovering promontory, edge toward the shelf-brimmed ledge. Turn around over the carpet sprawled wide below, descend in front of the mezzanine backward the ladder. Gapping free, to the space of a child’s hut, left to drop a glance offside, Pipo’s daybed: ‘free or occupied?’ Victoria and I slip into our clothes, pull on our shoes, and step out through the portal, veering in the living room toward the door. 

We step, grope our way through the Luciferous entrance hall—until the street opens up: the path across the yard to the sidewalk. Victoria to a pause beside the silver-gray Audi. I slip into the crotch of the seat, lean over, and unlatch the door to her. She joins me. I tweak the ignition. The engine raises into a pull-off purr, edge into the lane and coasting around a few corners into the awakening streets. 

The routing set in—after a few seasons of blending our Geminis—emerging from the dense hedgerows of fenestration glazed eyes spying on us, dwarfing our passage. But as the facades relent, one margin slips into the shadows—its wall clearing for the woods. Crossing the green river, the hedge of facades flip to the opposite bank. Driving alongside the meandering fluidly until the current’s backdraft pools at the open corner of  Rochefort Square. 

With the notion of a waking mirage, the patter of tires thins—sound slipping out of mind—as we crawl along the curb of the park’s gateway, the cobblestone traffic plaza rotating around us, the past pressure drifts, lying half-awake behind us. The nagging patter vanishes into the leading asphalt lane skirting behind the figures at the plate-glass tram halt. The threads of light run silver rails, stippled through the grass median—sunlight flickering into the hush of our glass bubble, riding through the leafy park lanes.  

Across the seismic shift, the rails run flush and gleaming through the asphalt, spearheading into a future: a wide vista of fenestrated brick facades, Helio’s morning reflection caught in the lenses above the trickling tram tangles with traffic, tapering toward carrying us approaching the bohemian girl. We orbit around the Aquarius spill of silver water, then spin off into the severing gutter’s dark, across a field of sherds lining the valley. The ride squeezes along the gutter’s narrow run, hemmed in by fenestrated terracotta-ashlar facades.

Cresting through the slit, clearing besides the drawbridge stone tower, we slip into the elusive moat-flow of traffic—the Little Betway—surf the trough Gate Louise’s underpass onto riding the asphalt wave, zipping across scissor lanes toward the intersection’s lenses—where traffic ebbs and flows. After dropping Victoria—day to day, as traffic permits—I flip off from the bustling Gate of Namur, on my way. 

I carve my way onward—through breathing arteries or stifling lanes lined with curb-parked cars, past the terracotta-brick facades—until I pull up, park, and walk away toward a symmetry of glass panes punctuating the boxed stretch of a hideous concrete-bones facade. I press open the aluminum-framed door, eyes slipping across the cold marble lobby’s gleaming wash. Reaching the blind door, thoughtful behind my climb the stairs, distracted, gripped by the oozing chill of skeletal concrete steeping through the stairwell. 

I return to a freshly stirred office and hunch over Axa’s Bill of Quantities. Daylight from the landscape pane of the window dabs my right cheek, flaring in the corner of my eye. A gleam washes across the island of four naked tables—each of us hunched over a ream of paper, the rifle of sheets splayed open. 

Vexed by the Toshiba laptop booting, the screen flickers—C:\123—Lotus loading, the spreadsheet spitting back blank cells. I can’t fathom how, or why. I keep working, trying to navigate the machine’s fabricated entrails—yet I don’t dare approach the Forum owner for answers. There’s a Leo in him, quietly withdrawing from me—aloof behind his pack of bloodthirsty hounds. 

With the weary task of regenerating yesterday’s implanted formulas, the Warthog’s pigheaded grip on my Gemini tears at me—unmasking, pushing me to abandon reason as my mind spirals into turmoil, My fingers piano the keyboard: In cell F3, I type +B3*E3, arrow down, replicate the command. F3 to F99. Enter. In cell F100, @Sum(F3. . F99). Enter. Retrieve to B100..F100. The calculations flash back—cold digits, yet strangely alive. ‘You’re good for the day—now the day begins, and reason itself is here to feed it.’

I turn to Axa’s bill of quantities: item number in column A, contract value in B, budget in C, cost to date in D, percentage in E, and the month’s Work in Progress report in F. Each input, each overwritten item—a bead on a wire—slides into place—until a shadow surges in the corner of my left eye.

By mid-morning, Laurence’s appearance stirs the hounds’ den. We were called the engineers—though I felt the term misused, like calling a street sweeper a “street engineer.” Laurence, undeterred, she measures her steps rounds the corridor—past Mr. Canario’s shoulders, graceful as a waiter serving a plate over his shoulder. Mr. Rottweiler reeks of his vulgar teases, sinks to grunts. She steps over to Mr. Pitbull, leaving him with an envelope, too. Then continues to Mr. Doberman, deposits his envelope, she spins back—anti-clockwise—retracing her path. 

From behind me, she comes to stand by the daylight window, close to my arm. Like everyone else, I open mine—hoping to see an amount greater than the last statement—like an entrepreneur putting into the work a greater effort. But, under Forum’s letterhead, the detailed breakdown resumes: the same 115,000 Belgian francs transferred into my bank account. 

I didn’t question the pack in the den—I was the black sheep among them. We’re all called full-time self-employed, engineer-entrepreneurs—‘Isn't that a beautiful title?’ I thought so. And yet, I felt the herd distancing from me. 

After Laurence—rosé, rounded face—emerges from her office's gaping doorway, she brushes past the doored elevator shaft, her calm strides crossing the passageway. Her eyes circumvent the hounds in men’s suits. She passes behind me, leans over my shoulder, caught in the evening light of the window. She lays my previous report on the table, opens the tagged pages, and points out the errors. 

Swift as she appeared, she left my side after, together we corrected my report—the next wave of motion in the corridor. When the staff clears out for home, in a change of thought, I can’t help but feel grateful to her Libra--the patience of living pacing the sleepers marking the present of a railway line through out the past and into the future. Laurence corrected my French. A report going to land on the paraplegic Leo’s desk—self-hating, the owner, buried under a swell of paperwork. And I can rest my mind as he signs it off.

Emerging from the lobby, we split. I head for the silver-gray Audi, parked among a train of dark-tainted cars, Victoria’s call echoing in my mind—‘Porte de Namur,’ etched from our first date. I slip behind the wheel, tweak the ignition, and pull out into the light stifled street—zigzagging through the community conclave of narrow streets—wedges between boulevards fated to clog in their outward spreading. Coming around a street block razed to a construction fence, instead. I spot her: across the side street, Victoria walks out the display window, detaching herself from a brand’s mannequins in fashion. I stop. She ascends in her approach, framed in the window—the door swing, through the gap she slips into the seat, pulling the door after her. 

Pushed by restless traffic, I drive off—I mind the sherds of the old city, jagged rooftops, chimneys, and gables, that cradle the blurry spire of the City Hall peeking through with a flaring Saint Michael slaying a devil. I track across Gate of Namur overpass, through the lenses of traffic lights, surfing south the Little Beltway—riding the asphalt wave, skipping the stippled lane lines, zipping, scissoring across lanes to view the rambling stone tower. With each toggle of the bright lenses, we cross over the elusive moat—through the cleft of a side street between the stone mansion apartment blocks—leaving the Axa Tower to its fate in the changing skyline. 

Our glass bubble glides a slipway before the hedgerow of fenestrated facades bends—into the straight, where the afternoon light stifles along a gutter of craggy-punctured brick facades, iron balconies jutting from their riddled faces. A soft paw stirs above the shadows, claws sliding to probe the gutter’s hollow—intuition unreels its thread, drawn taut across yesterday and tomorrow, looping into 1983—recalling from memory the blue barn doors, a knot in the weave of existence. Aetheria, unfolding as the universe curls in its coil, evolves in the now. That Jewish Secular Cultural Center once nestled in the living room of such a blatant townhouse, where couples gathered for a modest Sabbath eve meal. 

Launched in the thread of memory, I search for the barn door to a porte cochère—but the cleaving artery runs in vain, severe beneath a late-autumn litterfall through terracotta sherds across rooftops lining the valley. We dive into the opposite flank, crest Gate of Saint Giles, around the Bohemian young girl fluttering in a flimsy summer dress, spilling silver water from her pottery urn over her shoulder as she tiptoes across the stones of a stream.

In the hush of Victoria’s thoughts, her gaze drifts along the tram tracks—Helios’ early evening runs through the asphalt unhindered. Until the tectonic shift of grass veers the light-thread shyly into the prolonged course, weaving through the leafy median alley, through the adjacent community of Forest. It resurfaces at the feet of figures scattered from the tram platform—long strides threading toward the gaping striated wall—homing in.

The tires awaken, pattering alongside the efflorescent docked vessel of the Pre-First World War apartments—a massive Pleiades-decked prow moored in Rochefort Square. I steer away from the gaping parkway on our right—mirrored by another on the far flank of the prow—both vessels linked by a facade that yields, mis-span, a Second World War generation. Beneath their windows, the tram rails bypass, running a thread of light through the undercurrent of their shadows. 

At the crossing, the tram rails’ light threads evanesce—faint filaments slipping into the street alongside the docked prow. In its shadow, Lucifer lurks—unyielding. ‘I’m from the 80s,’ proclaims the vessel, its skyline surpassing the trailing terracotta rooftops, jagged in the roundabouts. It juts forward—wedging off Helios, fragmenting his light across the squatting cobblestone square, to a golden tide. By this deflection, Aetheria stirs—hovering across the square’s lush backlash of pooling green lawns.

We breach the spill blindly—our path - patter, patter, patter - through a resilient  sunlight beam spears from the next side street, wedging past these blatant monstrosities. The 1970s facade looms—the royal-blue enamel nameplate gleams, tagged: “Avenue Queen Marie Henriette.”—and we slip into its shade, tracing the length of a ship’s hull. Garage doors punctuate its flank, relenting now and then to half a dozen fluorescent-lit lobbies feeding the apartments block. 

The Titanic, overlooking the green river, ends. Its edge relapses into a hedgerow of fenestrated historic facades. Before me, the avenue sweeps uphill—when out the hush and stillness, Victoria springs in her seat. “Stop, stop, stop!” 

The ball of my foot releases the throttle-pivot to the brake—then a gentle press into the clutch. My glance slides past Victoria’s dark blond pixie cut, framed in the passenger window. Her hawk-eyed swoop from wide scan to myopic focus, zeroing in on the classic brick-and-whitestone ashlar townhouse as we come to a halt. Her door flings open. ‘My Little One, what are you up to?’

Victoria jumps to her feet, dashing to the rear—skirting the curve of the parked car’s taillight. She pep-steps across the promenade sidewalk toward a black jute sack printed “15,” plants herself by the brick wall, rising on tiptoe. Her eyes lift to the faded red luminescent “For Sale” poster. To her right, a pair of miserable sculptured doors—their deep green paint whining under age. ‘Look what they have done to my wood!’ 

On her left side, a wrought-iron faux balcony clings to French doors—the roller shutter’s wooden slats peeling with old white paint, drooping, jammed lopsided. Victoria finishes reading the notice, sinks back to her heels, and turns—lips trembling like an amateur ventriloquist. She returns, fills the gaping door, lowers into her seat - Smack - the door shut. 

I pull off, not stirring her concentration, as Victoria bends forward, fishing her purse from the footwell—fumbling at the bottom until a pen and mini-diary surface. Mumbling she jots down the telephone number, her lips stop jabbering, she tears out the page, drops pen and scribbled sheet of paper, diary back into her purse.

Victoria sits thoughtful and silent, her dream unimaginable, while I drive—with bushwhacking eyes—along the Avenue’s hedge-crowded thickets, where dominant dark trunks prey on last autumn leaves decomposing at their roots. The asphalt spread into branching paths that bridge the meandering lawns—swapping parkland and habitations, until we crest at “Altitude One Hundred.” I follow the arterial traffic deeper inland. Circle the GB supermarket, slip into Dr. Decroly Avenue—and short of the intersection, I stall the car. 

Victoria steps out. By the muzzle of the Audi, I catch up with her frisky gait down the sidewalk. At the paired blue brick pillars to the gate, she scurries across the yellow-terrazzo tiled path, past the patch of grass dotted with a few shrubs. At the door, she slips into the hollow of the hallway, she crosses through—light gaping from one doorway to the next—before I catch up. Fearless, Victoria’s glare shoots ahead—piercing the invisible number she’s awakening—as she crosses by the window where the phone sits quietly in its cradle, bathed in an early evening light.

She whisks the handset off the cradle, clenches it in her palm, fingers pianoing the keys. I close the door behind us, as Victoria lifts the cups to her ear and lips, the cord dangling from her arm to the floor. Her impatience mounts—jittery—then softens as she speaks. “[Dutch: Op weg naar huis zag ik het 'te koop'-bord. Kunnen we het bezichtigen]—On my way home, I saw the house for sale sign. Can we visit?”

Victoria pauses—attentive—in silence, then hangs up. She dials out, her lips talking to the telephone cup, saying. “[French: Je suis Victoria. Madame Van Goethem m’a donné ce numéro pour appeler]—I’m Victoria . Mrs. Van Goethem gave me this number to call—yes.” 

Victoria hangs up, cradling a little girl’s promise to visit fairyland—unwary, through her flair for the lives once lived behind a haunted doorway.

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5. You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expressions—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

6. https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing