They are in the timeless vault of the cavern that to Dema is the womb of Gaia, the Earth Mother. It was in this cavern, very long ago, that she had first become the Lamia. Now, once more with the aid of Gaia, she has been reborn in Lamia form, her bodily substance restored after being sucked away by her ancient nemesis, most recently incarnated as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad is gone, and Dema has returned to her normal physical form. She and Cern, waiting for dawn before attempting the walk back to the fortress above, remain immersed in the realm of Gaia's global awareness. 

Later, on the drive down the Olt valley to the plains below and the airport at Bucharest, Dema recalled the experience of the cavern, reluctant to let it fade. 

"Cern, that is my cavern, the very one where I first became the Lamia. And long before that it was sacred to my people, and to the line of the Lamia. The awareness that is Gaia, the global awareness, has always resonated strongly there, and is part of my deepest heritage."

"Global awareness, that's how I felt it too. But it's not a focused awareness is it? It's not like she was aware of us at all as individuals."

"That's right. She's more of a guiding will or intention that favors biological life. What we tapped there was a resonance with that will, because our intention was aligned with hers, so we were able to draw on that to defeat Vlad."

"Gaia would never pay attention to someone like Vlad. To her he was a minor aberration. That's why he was able to perpetrate his scheme for so long."

"But somehow Vlad was influenced to establish himself in that cave, the worst place he could have chosen to confront me."

"I think it was his own hubris. Subconsciously he knew, and it symbolized for him the defeat of his old enemy. Except he wasn't planning on a rematch!"

"Or maybe he was, and that's what drew me here."

"You think he wanted you to come?"

"Again, subconsciously. Down deep the evildoers do not want to be what they are, but they can't stop themselves. So they arrange for help."

"But he was hardly cooperative!" Cern flexed his shoulder, still sore from when Vlad knocked him off the platform.

"I think that's part of the plan. They have to put up a fight, so when they lose they have a convincing argument to justify the loss; their opponent had a better strategy, one they should now emulate."

"One other thing. At the end you told Vlad he was evil because he lived off the substance of others. But don't we all do that?"

Dema thought for a moment before responding. "I think the difference is that he was a parasite. The more fulfilling mode is to be a symbiote, one who contributes to the fuller cycle of life, not focused solely on self-fulfillment."

Cern nodded, and Dema thought this had been a good answer, but she knew it was incomplete. Cern was right that life feeds on life as a matter of course. Where does one draw the line? If symbiosis is the ideal, how does one distinguish it in practice from parasites and diseases? Is there a simple answer, or is it necessary to take the long view, like Gaia, and not question or criticize short-term aberrations?

Later, when they were settled in their seats on the flight home, Dema closed her eyes and let herself drift into that timeless shaman realm where she was here with Cern but also in the cavern, and in the manor with Dame Agatha, with Sedna in Chicago, with Juan in Mexico, with Ryan in Seattle... 

Her whole life, all her lives, opened up for her in this place. She thought of what her mother might say about the Bose postulate, the idea that quantum entanglement keeps individual energy resonances linked to each other after they have interacted, and about the superposition of states, the summation that defines the evolution of those interactions in the time domain. 

She thought about her own talent for influencing the local agreement among the manifestations of consciousness that define reality, and realized that Gaia could be thought of as a similar influence on a global scale, gently guiding the manifestations of reality on the whole planet. 

It was a scale of geologic proportions in time as well as space. Never intentionally influencing specific events, it provided a background influence on the tendencies, on the quantum level likelihood's, that enhanced the probabilities in favor of evolutionary change. This brought more and more order and sophistication to the biosphere, the emergence of more and more phenomena that were implicit, but not inevitable, from the beginning. Potentialities of the primitive biosphere were only slowly realized in new, more complex life forms. 

Gaia was in a sense a personification of the deep primitive biosphere from which all life on the planet had emerged. Gaia was synonymous with the force of biological evolution, the force that defines life as the natural potential for complex, self-defining structures to arise and perpetuate themselves. These structures would then elaborate further by symbiotic association with other structures to some mutual advantage. All without thought, without plan, merely expressing the inherent physical possibilities as their likelihoods grew.

Cern was tuned in, sharing Dema's ruminations. But he had his own realizations about the broad implications of the nature of Gaia and her interactions with, or perhaps manifestations as, places like Stonehenge and Avebury and Silbury Hill. Even transient things like crop circles, or the less transient and to him more personal but still ephemeral oak groves. As he looked out the window at the vastness of the planet turning below them, he thought about the implications for more mundane things, like the actions of pollinators, and realized why the Green Man was content to take such a long view. From Gaia's perspective, a thousand years was less than an eye blink. 

There were many other symbiotic relationships in the biosphere, and even between the biosphere and the geosphere. He recalled the use of the word noosphere to denote the realm of thought. In his own thought he began to apply it to the sphere of all awareness, including Gaia herself. 

The entire physical universe was to him clearly a manifestation of consciousness or will. Difficult to define in human terms, it was something one became aware of when one allowed ones own awareness to expand beyond the immediate and mundane and embrace the infinite. It was, he had come to realize, the essence of the shaman experience.

To a shaman there was a simple is-ness about the physical realm, a matter-of-factness, a sense that physical reality was governed by rules. He knew there was a deeper sense in which the outcomes of those rules were neither fixed nor unique, but encompassed a broad set of possibilities. 

As Dema would say, using the jargon of modern physics, this was expressed in the quantum realm as the time-evolution of the wave function. Thus Gaia was simply a summation of the consciousness that determined which possibilities of the quantum realm were expressed as Earth reality. 

The fundamental imperative of that will, the one rule that set it all in motion, was simple. Favor order over chaos. Favor survival of form over random change and destruction. Favor patterns of precedent that establish rules of order over patternless change. 

With this simple intention built into the laws of physics, the laws of nature, the eventual outcome was inevitable. It was the particular details, the particular expressions of reality, which remained open to the influence of each particular will. Such as Dema's. Such as his own.

Cern realized that with the heightening of this awareness brought on by the shaman experience came a heightening of responsibility, because, as Vlad had amply illustrated, there could be local kinks in the fabric of reality that ran counter to the fundamental imperative, aberrations in the expression of particular wills that could divert other particles of will away from the grand design. 

Although those particles of will were immortal as such, they were each in their own way committed to the realization of the potential of that will in an expression of physical reality. There was a sense in which all expressions, even aberrant ones, were unique and therefore to be admired, but when they introduced disorder, or interfered with the enhancement of order, they were detrimental, and would be perceived as such.

Cern pondered the way this was reflected in Dema's Lamia nature, her commitment to the defense of the innocent—where innocent meant benign, supporting symbiotic relationships, not malignant or destructive. 

It had a similar reflection in his own nature as a manifestation of the Stag-Horned Man, Cernunnos, with his commitment to the preservation of the natural order of the wilds. There the role of death and decay as part of the cycle of life was accepted and understood. The longer look, the perception of life as a complex interaction of many entities, unfolding over generations of the various physical manifestations of particular wills, led to a more accepting view in general. But where chaos and degradation were gaining ground, and life and order were losing, his role was clear.

He again looked out the window at the planet rolling along below. Here over Europe the land was green and charged with life and hope, and it gave him a sense of pride and satisfaction to think that in some degree this was the legacy of Cernunnos. But in his mind's eye he saw the vast sub-Saharan deserts, with their perpetually undernourished populations, and knew that all was not ideal. 

His new-found link to Gaia awakened, and he saw these deserts as they had been mere tens of thousands of years prior, when they had been green and lush, vast grassland expanses, supporting vast herds of roaming wildlife. His understanding freed to permeate the perception of Gaia, he saw how the lions and other predators corralled the herds, and the herds trampled the grass as they grazed, how the herds moved on when the grasses had been cropped and trampled too low for grazing, and the grasses responded by sending up new shoots.

He saw as well how microbes in the soil and in the gut of the herds supported this cycle, breaking down the dead grass and converting it to nutrients that were incorporated into the roots and stems of the new grasses and the bone and sinew of the herds. He wondered why the land no longer supported such vast wild herds. 

Cern turned from the window and looked at Dema, eyes closed and relaxed beside him, and was reminded of her shaman experience in the southwestern deserts of the United States and Mexico. He had spent time in those deserts himself, but that was before his shaman perception had awakened fully. 

Now he too closed his eyes, and his awareness shifted to those lands, and he knew that in times past they, like the Sahara, had supported vast herds. There the herds had been bison, and the predators the wolf and the cougar, but the pattern was the same.

A small frown creased his brow, and one with the deeper vision might have seen a rack of antlers there as well. He resolved to learn more of what had caused the change. Perhaps there would be clues in what was known of the Anasazi Indians, the ancient ones. Then a wave of the endless patience of Gaia washed over him. He felt with her the microbial presence deep in the soil there, more ancient than the Anasazi, waiting for the chance to again play their part in a cycle of burgeoning life. His frown and his antlers faded, and he slept.