YD6-101 (Cradle)—Aetheria Weaves Her Nest, Adam Chisels the Path of Her Destiny
She gathers light as twigs — he strikes stone to open a path.
In YD6-101 (Cradle), Aetheria begins to weave her nest within the shell of an old townhouse, each beam of light a strand of awakening. Beneath her unseen rhythm, Adam chisels through walls and foundations, unaware that every hammer-blow sculpts the passage of her becoming.
Between the dust of renovation and the hush of revelation, consciousness builds its home.
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.
YD6-101 (Cradle)—Aetheria Weaves Her Nest, Adam Chisels the Path of Her Destiny
The weekend looms, and frisky as a morning bird fluttering in the poor, dilapidated dormer room, I dress before Victoria, head for the doorway, and find the barn-flight cascading stairs sinking into the tenebrific entrails—shuffling a hollow wood-box echo. I swivel beneath the dangling fatigue bulb at the Truck Driver and his wife’s door, hush with their concern over the renovations.
I swing down another swingback toward the bulb before the Spanish woman, daughter and boyfriend—those intermediate landings shared with the Mezzanine. I peek a curiosity through the wall’s faux-spread of panel doors, step into the room where Rudi—a squatter’s whitish, muddled blanket piled on the floor. Scratching at my temple, nagged by the sight, I exit beneath the bulb shadowing the next flight of stairs down to the apron, before meeting the crystal-cottage portal.
The sun foreshadows the gloom. I slip through, under the guise of the Bull’s-eye rose and the peacock fan tail window—an eager translucence swelling in the hush of morning into an enigmatic kaleidoscopic light. Pausing a moment in the early 1900s before the split-level’s marble whisper, I descend from the Belle Epoque, Nyx sits guard in the shadow of the doors’ apron. A crack of glow opens—ousting Nyx from her shy permanency—into a silhouette in the doorway.
Her sylph-mirage—at the crack of the opening door—Aetheria eagerly crosses the threshold, and blends into a brighter interior, leaves me to face a gentle confrontation with a twentyish man as his hand reaches for the door calling bell. Soft-spoken, lisping a pronounced cleft of the upper lip, he distracts me—until I scold myself, ‘Don’t judge by appearance!’ With a distinctive Polish accent, and without a qualm, he says. “Adam! [Je cherche du travail]—I’m looking for work.”
It’s not as if the avenue had construction sites or number 15 is plastered: ‘Seeking labor?’ Yets, startled by Rudy, I exclaim inwardly, ‘How do these men sense I’m about to renovate the house—when I don't even know by what means?’ I face the young man on the sidewalk—he takes the words from my mouth, saying. “[Je peux faire n'importe quel travail]—I can do any job.” I wince at his cleft lip, curse my mind—my Aries-Horse girl still under my skin, her words echoing in my head, the expression learned from her art professor, “[La beauté de l’errreur]—the beauty of the error.” I swallowed.
I draw a deep breath—hard to apply. My thoughts wrangle: gather willpower to arbitrate. Ill-at-ease words spatter over my lips, my mind snagged on the question: ‘Can he handle a clump-hammer and a chisel to break through a massive foundation wall?’—’What’s your qualm?’ I ask myself.
“Adam. [Bon ! Vient la semaine prochaine]—OK! Come next week,” I say.
“[Oui]—Yes,” Adam replies. He turns away, and after him I pull the door latch closed. I cross the avenue toward the Audi, along the thicket hedge bordering the park, while he walks the curbside train of cars uphill. I follow him with my gaze until I leave him to the ghost of my mind—at the top of the park, his figure dissolving along the bus route up the sweeping avenue among the fenestrated brick facades. Illogic enters my senses—as he drifts into the tight residential communities.
I step in the Audi, slide into my seat, tweak the ignition, and drive down toward the square, still, waiting for the crowds to tickle onto the tram platform by the park’s pooling lawns. I drift away for the lopsided highway pointer, threading a course through the Valley of Forest. I joined the tramway rails through the cobblestone street, veer at the toggle of the traffic light—the grass median skipping past the Stonehenge to boxy mega-storefront parking empty before to overpassing highway—a reminder of the GB supermarket group, echoing my errand for the weekend: to fetch, amid the Brico hardware shelves, a club hammer and chisel to start Adam off on Monday.
I curl away beneath the highway, rise onto the on-ramp, and slip my glass bubble amid a drip-drop of commercial panel vans—Adam stirring my mind through the kinetics of their workday drift. The overhead signs flip: Parijs underscore, Rijssel besides it—the interchange drawing Rijssel (Lille) into the midst of the woods along vanishing lanes. Then Paris flips back, suspending the lead multilane in a trickling traffic, disillusioning me by the flagrant French-Flander city. After a hypnotic stretch of asphalt, I shunt from traversing the wrought-iron bow-truss bridge, curling beneath along the glazed riverbank. The deserted thoroughfare, at every interchange, gathers a trickle of traffic in growing intensity nearing Charleroi—yet I veer off before entering the coal city, pulling up at the office.
By the swing of the car door, I step onto the gritty apron, slam it shut, and approach the entrance. With a swing thr door leaf clear the corridor’s glazed partition run—its somber depth reflective of a maze of empty offices. Passing the CEO, who steals back his glimpses—the vulture’s claws perched on my shoulders—I brush him off, onto stepping a U-turn across the corridor through doorways and the anteroom toward the back-to-back blueprint tables bathed in the courtyard’s morning glowThere lies a lone ream of a Bill of Quantities I can’t see my way through, my head pleading once more—disect subcontractors’ quotes.
Trails of fax paper snake across the tables; the control-freaking Libra has verified my analysis, assuring me he’s checked the incoming quotations. I pull from Rico’s executive briefcase my Toshiba, to set it on the table, raise the screen, and boot up. Grounding myself in the web of electrical runs—power and lighting traced from the main distribution boards to sub-boards, feeding the jam’s industrial cooking kettles—I drop into the lighting layout: harsh, purposeful glare of the high-bays, and the security lights outside.
Over my shoulders, Helios’ noon cloak yields its warmth to Nyx’s evening chill - ring, ring - the phone slices through. Knowing it’s Victoria’s time, I pick up the handset, though my mind still hovers over air ducts, roof vents and extractors—clean air turnover waiting to breathe life into the space. Then, attuning to a twelve-year-old-lost voice, I hear. “[French] What must I do? Rudy is waiting for you?”
Across the corridor’s shadowy glazed partition, the CEO—vulture-perched—steals back his glimpses, muttering to himself—’Woman, let the man do his work?’ I return to the riffled pages of the Bill of Quantities in a wave of distraction.
Unattainable, I’m stunned mute, unable to pose Rudy the simplest question—’What do you want…’ Victoria insists; her words grow larger than my head, sentient of Rudy seeking appraisal for his excavation progress. As she persists, my mind curses, ‘shut up, shut up, shut up. . .’ until, without warning, words leapfrog from the back of my mind: “[Pourquoi tu ne l’emmene pas un repas au restaurant ?] Why don’t you treat him to a meal at a restaurant?”
Victoria hangs up, sentient of a faint glow at heart of her disillusion. My mind rattled—‘how can a simple excavation be so demanding.’ The nearby streets have quietened; the highway’s murmur sinks into the ground, dissolving and raising the hush of the Nyx. I succumb to a dread of the cosmic vacuum catching up with me.
At a glance across the blueprints tables, I try to recall—Eli Godard chair, vacant; and in the same optic, the secretary’s living bust amiss within a maze of reflective shadows through the glazed partitions—vacated. Oblivious to Eli Godard's ritual pause, yet his routine lingers in mind: laying down his folder on the corner of the table with his keys, then sitting to open the folder and complete a construction-site report.
Restless, I leap to my feet, breaking away from the analysis of plumbing subcontractors: cold and hot lines snaking through floors and walls, drainage drops, sanitaryware installation—bolt down, finesse.
Across the partition’s glazed sills, the CEO’s perch had melted into the office’s shadows. I step past in vain, absent from his elusive regard. The entrance door swings; I reach out for the Audi. With a few tweaks of the key, I step in, shift through gears, and drive away toward the glowing-cloud—homeward.
Headlights burrow the darkness, flashing across interchange’s cloud-glows, tracking back to the resigned fieldfire. I swerve through the trumpet interchange’s slip road, into the yellow-plasmic worm of the night, picking up the Brussels signs flitting overhead. I’m slow to pull out of my trance—the brakes shaking the car with fear, landing into the belated reverse thrust of tire grip on the asphalt, pausing before the median—the GB supermarket ahead, staring at me, its Brico and Auto5 bright fascias, glowing as reminders. I veer, weasel through the Forest valley, and pull up before number 15.
Victoria greets me. Place mats are laid for a meal on hold behind her; half a glass bowl of red Porto stems high on the table. She’s pushed back the sheet of tracing paper I had spread the night before across the original house floor blueprint—reviving the apprentices in me—Thursdays, a break from laying bricks meant attending Technical College classes, clutching a pencil over an architectural table, drafting mechanical drawings—only a few half-dozen of us in the class.
Between meals, over the weekend, Victoria and I clear the table pushed against the gable-wall chimney through the dormer room. I spread the 1912 plan and tape down my tracing paper, the cellar omitted—but De Bon’ma’s stories ruminate in my mind. The old house, its stingy basement flues and mean fireplaces, evoke a lineage of warmth and smoke—a family of coal-merchant’s house in Lier, horse-drawn carts hauling sacks from a soot-black yard.
I face the dilemma: each room projects its hearth and its chimneys—a passage as vital as a stairwell for the voyage between floors. In memory, De P'pa’s cradle, on the ±0 Ground Floor in firelight. Those dancing flames, blind to their flues, licks across candlelite rooms—no mere fancy, but a child’s earliest image alive in my mind, form the nascent town of Goma, born of lava, where the Kilimanjaro’s plume of smoke pictured itself in my windowless window.
The stack that rises through the +1 upper floor, accumulates volume by the +2 floor rooms, the chimney gathers so many flues that it swallows its own width to a double-bed headboard. This mass of brick is where the withe works hardest—devising a half-dozen smoke pathways looping around the mantelpieces of the other floors. Here the masonry is at its thickest, yet the flues breath—drawing air and memory through the house—before emerging onto the rooftop, each demanding its own stack pot, lining the gables its respiratory organs. I’m left to confront modernization: draw these arteries to a single vertical core, like the nervous system of the body.
While the CEO waits for me to be plunged into the Bill of Quantities at the office, I stand before the sunrise through the woods of the park across the avenue. The faux-balcony holding me back as I lean over the sidewalk. When the bus shelter releases Adam’s approach, I retreat, spread my arms, pull the French doors close, and turn away—backtracking a U-turn through the doorways to unlatch the entrance door and greet him, closing it behind us.
The engulfed glow shut out, I lead him up to the split-level Erebus behind the crystal-cottage portal of waffled panes, through the hollow of the doorway along the landing’s handrail, into the profound depths of the stairwell where the bulb no longer catches the shadows. My feet grope the nosing, stepping in a rhythmic sink along light-fluffed walls landing onto the -1 apron.
Gripping the front newel post, I spin beneath the brick barrel-vaulted ceiling—the bulb’s light shying away from the handrail trailing back into the depth. I swivel again by the rear post, dithering a foot onto the treads, sinking into an earthy mass. My nostrils flare, short of sneezing away the poignant musk of stale air, as I descend into the hush; the stairs squeak like mice underfoot, the railing wobbling beneath my fingertips, faint light fluffing the bricks of walls as they dissolve into a luciferous underground.
My foot fails to find treads that ought to be there. I step into the dark void—helped only by a faint forewarning—then plunge, stumbling over two floating steps before landing on the apron, springing forward to plant both palms on the front wall. My feet glue to the spot; shaking my senses. I draw back my hands and, with an over-the-shoulder warning glance, catch Adam holding his step—hesitant before my sudden disappearance, cautious of the mischievous hole. He lands by my side.
“Adam! [Voici un travail pour toi]—Here is a job for you. Break through a doorway opening.”
I’ve seen Rudy on the other side of the front wall, descending through the vestibule’s crawl space beneath a dangling bulb. Each day, around the interleading portal nib in the far corner—half under the egress-window sill to the sidewalk—the front basement room at level -1 swelled with soil-filled bags. By the window, the heap of white construction refuse bags rose higher, marking Rudy’s progress as he dug himslef—from hip-deep, then to shoulder height at the toes of my shoes beyond the -1 threshold. Peering into the light of the dangling bulb, I’d watch the unearthen room sink deeper, the hole exposing the old foundations—residues of some Roman architecture beyond my imagination.
I hand him the club hammer and chisel, paused to purchase over the past weekend, aware that on the other side of the wall, he’s bound to meet Rudy. Until then, I turn my fingertips to the wiggling newel—the post’s tenon planted at the foot of the stringer—a rotted hollow. I heaved myself over the missing steps, the staircase now my priority, a re-design nurturing in my mind. Tracking back beneath the dangling bulbs, I step out the entrance, stepping into a glow of daylight - kwock! - and reach out for the Audi, debuting my course to work.
