Private: “Age of Delerium”

New York City – June 21, 2002

In their wanderings through the Akashic Library, Peter and Calliope come upon a vast chamber where broken stained glass windows arch toward a vaulted ceiling. Through one of the windows, impossibly large and partially shattered, a woman’s face peers in from beyond – her skin tinged with an otherworldly green, her eye wide and wild with madness, her expression caught between laughter and pain. Scattered papers and shards of glass litter the floor beneath their feet, catching the strange light that filters through the fractured panes. “Is this too a part of the World Tree?” Calliope asks, her blue cloak rippling in an unfelt wind as she gazes up at the haunting visage. Peter nods, his gold cloak catching the eerie glow from the window. “What you’re seeing,” he says quietly, “is the primary challenge of our current time – what I call the Age of Delirium. It’s the face of our collective madness, peering in through the broken windows of perception.”

“How … how did you know?” she asked quietly.

“Because I met her. I met Delirium herself.”

“Tell me more. It feels significant.”

“It was,” Peter nods, “As I wandered through the streets of New York, my perspective on the world would constantly shift, as though I was looking through different lens of a camera. I had no control over which lens I was seeing through at any given moment. The shifts would come without warning. One minute I’d be having a normal conversation, the next I’d be seeing someone’s divine essence so clearly it was blinding. But I couldn’t… I couldn’t hold onto either reality long enough to function in it.”

Calliope leans forward, her blue cloak rippling with starlight. “That must have been terrifying.”

“It was…” he begins, his voice carrying the weight of remembered confusion, “like trying to exist in multiple worlds at once, but never fully in any of them. One moment I could see the grand cosmic dance, the divine play of archetypal forces moving through everyone I met. I could see the Gods walking among us, wearing mortal flesh. But then…” He pauses, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. “Then I couldn’t figure out how to do laundry, or maintain a conversation, or remember what day it was. The very qualities that made me capable of seeing the Mythica also made it nearly impossible to function in the mortal world.”

“And when you met Delirium you were seeing the Godly aspect of the world?”

“Yes.”

“Visits from Gods are always significant on Quests” said Calliope, “tell me more.”

“I’d been walking through the streets of New York in my usual fugue, just following the energies as they’d occurred to me within the space, and i’d come upon Delirium sitting on the steps of a brownstone. I could feel the thickness of the vibrations around her, the gravity of her madness and it’s slippery anchor upon the worlds. It was both terrifying and seductive.”

“And she looked like she did in the comics?”

“Very much so.” he replied.

“What did you talk about?”

“We got into it, and while I don’t remember the actual words, the sense that I was dealing with an actual embodiment of the character from the comics was profound.”

“How so?”

“In encountering her, manifest through a British girl with a shaved head who was absolutely mad, I had a vision of a mad world, that she was emblematic of a world distorted by it’s own madness, lost in the cruelties and sharp corners of a fractured mind.”

“Like how you saw yourself” she said softly.

He nodded. “Yes. I knew there was madness in me, my life was defined by it. Yet at the same time there was majesty, a sense of the deeper qualities which existed within mortal consciousness. Of the majesty that can exist past the madness.”

She nods. “And was Delirium the only embodiment of the Endless you met along your path?”

“Yes and no.” he said. “They exist in all of us, to one degree or another. All the pantheons do. It’s the essence of the thing. While I saw myself as moving in her realm, I also saw myself as an embodiment of Divinity, one essence meeting another on the path.”

“Fascinating” she said, taking some notes. “Did you envision yourself in the context of Gaiman’s mythology as well?”

“In that moment? Yes. I felt myself as an avatar of Destruction.”

“Destruction? The embodiment of it’s quality in the world?”

Peter nods slowly, his expression thoughtful. “Yes. Like Delirium, Destruction wasn’t just a character in Gaiman’s stories – it was a divine quality moving through many of us in the collective. In my case, I came to understand that my inability to maintain the illusion of stability, my constant shifting between states, was part of my function as a destructive force. I was meant to help break down the old paradigm, the very illusions that created the madness in the first place.”

“What you would later recognize as Shivic consciousness,” Calliope adds softly.

“Exactly,” Peter agrees, watching as images of Shiva’s dance of destruction and creation play across the timeline. “The force that destroys illusion to make way for truth. I couldn’t maintain the comfortable delusions that kept most people functioning in the Age of Delirium because that wasn’t my purpose. I was meant to help break them down. Though at the time,” he adds with a hint of irony, “I wouldn’t have believed them. I was too lost in it, too overwhelmed by the simple challenge of existing in a world that seemed to operate on rules I couldn’t grasp.”

“Interesting.” she said. “And was this your only encounter with her?”

“No.” he said. “There was another moment.”

The library shimmered around them then, showing an unfinished loft with a younger Peter opening his door to see Delirium in his doorway, eyes bright with madness.

“She arrived at my loft” he said, “Claiming to have been walking on the moon.”

She arrives at my doorstep some days later, claiming that she was walking the moon.  She sleeps in my loft, and I smell her, sweat and leather and madness.  I consider having sex with her, or at least attempting the thing when a subtle voice speaks to me from the ethers saying ‘that way lay madness’.

“What happened then?” Calliope asked, her voice thick with curiosity.

“She left in the morning” he said, “And I never saw her again, at least in a body. But, in her way, she’s always with me. Even now.”

She mused for a moment. “Something occurs to me.” she said. “In Gaiman’s mythology, Delirium was once Delight.”

The library shifted then, showing a series of splintered stained glass windows, their broken shards fallen on the floor. Peter looked at it for a moment, then turned to face her, watching as the stained glass fragments around them catch the light. “That’s the core of it all, really. What everyone’s attempting to do with all these practices – the mindfulness, the yoga, the shadow work, the constant vigilance required just to maintain clarity – it’s all about the journey from Delirium back to Delight. From the madness of the Kali Yuga to the harmony of the Satya Yuga, as witnessed through Gaiman’s mythological lens.”

He picks up a broken piece of glass, turning it in his hands. “That’s been the great challenge for me, you know. The thorn in my side. Having to accept that in this Age, in this time of collective delirium, we’re required to do these endless practices just to maintain some semblance of coherence. That we can’t simply BE in Delight – we have to work our way back to it, step by painful step, through all these techniques and methods that feel like…” he pauses, searching for the words, “like attempting to reassemble a shattered mirror with bleeding hands.”

She bent down, picking up a piece of broken glass. “This is how you see the world?”

“Sometimes.” he replied. “Not all times. Sometimes the glass is broken. Other times it’s whole. Sometimes there’s no window at all. It depends.”

“Like Delirium’s eyes,” Calliope notes gently. “One eye seeing what was, one eye seeing what could be. And yet … you had access to both states, didn’t you? Even in your deepest confusion, there were moments when you touched that original essence of Delight.””

“Yes, though I couldn’t hold onto it,” Peter continues, watching the golden threads of his timeline shimmer between shadow and radiance. “I’d drift across what I came to call the underlands, moving through these different territories of consciousness. Sometimes I’d find myself in realms of such majesty it would take my breath away – realms where the world’s magic was clear and bright, where the divine play was obvious and beautiful. But then…” he gestures to where the timeline grows darker, more fractured, “I’d slip back into the splintered lands, or into some other territory of confusion and shadow. I had no anchor, no way to stabilize myself in any single realm. It was this very thing that made my life so challenging – this inability to maintain a consistent state of consciousness, this constant shifting between seeing the divine and struggling with the mundane – it was actually showing me something crucial about the collective condition. We were all living in a kind of madness, but most people had found ways to normalize it, to function within it.”

“You were experiencing it raw,” Calliope observes softly, “without the buffers most people had built up.”

“Yes. I didn’t have that luxury,” he continues, his voice carrying a mix of pain and understanding. “I couldn’t pretend the delirium wasn’t there. I couldn’t ignore the fractured nature of our collective consciousness. And while that made basic survival incredibly challenging…” He glances at Calliope, a glimmer of hard-won wisdom in his eyes, “…it also forced me to map it. To really see what was happening, not just to me, but to all of us.”

“And yet,” Calliope observes softly, “this very splintering became the foundation of your understanding. The map you couldn’t find became the map you had to create.”

“Because I had to,” Peter nods, watching as the timeline shows his first attempts at documenting these shifting states. “I was living in the broken kingdoms – not just visiting them, but actually living there. Every day was a journey through different facets of a shattered mirror, each one reflecting a different aspect of reality. Sometimes I lived in the realms of Delight, other times I was lost in Delirium. I had to find some way to make sense of it, some way to bring coherence to the chaos.”

“That’s why the documentation became so crucial,” Calliope reflects, watching as images of Peter’s early photography appear in the timeline. “It was your anchor point.”

“It was the only way I could prove to myself that any of it was real,” Peter agrees. “That both the divine visions and the mundane struggles were equally valid parts of the journey. But at the time…” He pauses, looking at his younger self in the timeline. “At the time, I was just drowning in the delirium of it all, desperately trying to find solid ground while simultaneously being shown these incredible visions of how reality actually worked.”

“And in mapping your own journey through the underlands of the Mythica …” Calliope begins.

“I was mapping a way through for others,” Peter finishes. “Though I couldn’t see it then. When you’re drowning in delirium, when you can barely hold onto a single coherent thought from one moment to the next, you don’t realize that your desperate attempts to find solid ground might actually be creating a path that others will need. You’re just trying to survive, to make sense of a world that seems to have lost all sense.”

The firelight catches the tears in his eyes, turning them to gold. “If someone had told me then that this confusion, this constant shifting between states of consciousness, was actually revealing something profound about the nature of our time, about the collective journey from delirium to clarity… I wouldn’t have believed them. I was too lost in it, too overwhelmed by the simple challenge of existing in a world that seemed to operate on rules I couldn’t grasp.”

Calliope’s expression softens with understanding. “But don’t you see?” she says gently, the book in her hands pulsing with a subtle light. “If you hadn’t felt that resistance so deeply, if that thorn hadn’t pushed you to question everything about this transition between states, you might never have created the Mythica. You might never have mapped the underlands that show others how to navigate their own journey from Delirium to Delight.”

“The very territories beneath the surface world,” Peter acknowledges, watching as the broken glass in his hand reflects both shadow and light. “The landscapes we all must traverse as we make our way back to what was lost. Though I resented having to make the map…”

“You made it all the same,” Calliope finishes, “And in doing so, showed others they weren’t alone in their journey through the madness.”