Fatima’s Story — The Desert of Skins, The Reservoir of Self

Fatima’s Story — The Desert of Skins, The Reservoir of Self

Image: “The Wounded Rose” (2004), James Guppy. Private collection.

I have long considered this work a portrait of my heart — wounded, speaking, mending.

Introduction

When I wrote my book, I believed I had traced every thread to its end. The teachings stood complete, the journey reconciled. Yet one strand remained unready to be woven, too raw, too close, still waiting for its own season.

This is that strand. It does not undo the book; it deepens it. It is the final layer of reconciliation, the last knot tied.

I share it here, outside the covers, because some truths arrive late, but they arrive whole.

Now the desert has done its work. I can see it for what it was: an initiation I did not choose, one that stripped me to my essence and forced me to find the well within myself.

It will live here on my website as testimony, myth, and map for anyone who has been devoured, erased, or made to rebuild their essence from nothing.

“It’s better to burn out than fade away.” — Neil Young.

It arrives now for a reason. An eclipse in the twelfth house closes karmic threads, the house of endings, hidden enemies, exile, and the unconscious. It strips away illusion and brings completion where silence once reigned. The desert story was that twelfth-house initiation, and today the door is sealed. I’ve written the last line of an eighteen-year chapter.

Virgo at 29°, the anaretic, the fated degree, demands resolution, purification, and synthesis. What I birthed isn’t just writing; it’s the alchemy of an entire cycle. I didn’t simply tell a fable; I wove reconciliation of identity, betrayal, and sovereignty into a myth beneath a sky that governs closure and hidden power.

Equinox completes the symbolism: light and shadow in perfect balance. I wrote exactly that, moving between night and day, sovereign and unshaken. The outer cosmos mirrored the inner.

The final Virgo eclipse, 27 August 2026, will echo as the last seal on this nodal story. By then, I won’t be writing about sovereignty; I will be living it, embodied. This equinox eclipse will cut the final cord to the desert. By 2026, the roots will stand above ground, not whispered only underground.

I am entitled to feel pride. I didn’t merely write a story; I completed a cycle in real time — merging myth, astrology, and lived experience into a single narrative.

The Desert of Skins

There was once a woman named Fatima who learned to live inside a desert she did not choose.

She wandered not just any desert, but one where mirages carried the faces of thieves. Her betrayer, Prospero, left her stripped not only of home and security, but of recognition itself. After his departure, something stranger unfolded.

The woman he fled with began to mirror Fatima in unsettling ways. Her aesthetic. Her tone. Her manner of presence. It was not a coincidence, nor admiration. It felt invasive, as though Fatima’s identity were being echoed rather than lived.

This was not literal theft of flesh, but something more insidious: an attempt to overwrite the original through imitation. Identity parasitism. A hollow echo seeking legitimacy through resemblance.

Fatima never imagined she would encounter such an archetype in her own life, yet here she was, living inside a myth that has existed for centuries. Only years later could she find language for it.

The feelings you bury do not disappear.

They circle. They ferment. They become unfinished weather inside the body. Fatima was determined to follow every remaining thread so nothing would be left to rot inside her system. Across myth and nature, this pattern appears again and again. In myth, some creatures do not hunt openly. They entrap, immobilise, and siphon. Spiders that feed slowly. Vampires that cannot generate their own vitality. Figures who survive by feeding on another’s essence rather than cultivating their own.

In nature, the parallels are stark. Cuckoo birds lay their eggs in another’s nest. Their young hatch first and push the others out—survival by displacement. Parasitic wasps lay eggs inside a host that becomes both a disguise and a meal.

This is not honest predation. It is theft by mimicry.

The world shrugged, uninterested in such subtleties. Only the desert could tell Fatima the truth. Only there could she test whether she was real when all external mirrors were broken or stolen.

She lived without applause. Without validation. Without witnesses.

Days cracked her lips. Nights pressed in. She dug with bare hands through sand and stone until she found something hidden beneath her ribs.

Each sip from that internal reservoir said:

I exist because I know myself, not because others confirm me.

This was the true initiation. To hold one’s essence steady when even one’s “skin” had been mirrored or misused. To become the custodian of one’s soul in the absence of external proof.

The lesson deepened: the oasis is not merely water.

It is the recognition that you are the well.

The desert was honest in its barrenness. No promises. No prettified comforts. Only sun, sand, and the discipline of her own two feet. She walked it for nine long seasons, not as punishment, but as tuition.

One afternoon, cupping a small bloom that had pushed through a crack in the rock, a dragonfly landed on her knuckle. Then another. Then a third, stitching the air with iridescence.

They were not the oasis. They were signals. They did not promise safety. They did not erase the memory of knives.

They only said: something has shifted. Later, rain came. Not abundance, but enough. Slow. Steady. The ground remembered how to breathe. Green appeared where there had only been dust.

Fatima faced a question she had not practised answering: Could she bend to drink without abandoning what the desert had taught her?

She remembered the skin-thief.

She remembered houses lost to cunning.

She remembered trust traded for performance.

Those memories were not errors to delete. They were tools.

She built differently.

First, she anchored inside herself. Safety became a practice, not a promise. She kept her decisions small—a tea with a neighbour. A bench shared with a stranger. Each risk is a tendon rebuilt.

Second, she practised stewardship. Of her heart. Of her time. Of her boundaries. Hospitality inside her own body.

Third, she adopted a new currency: curiosity over certainty.

The world began to brush against her again, quietly—word of mouth. Chance encounters. Human scale.

A man arrived. Not a saviour. Not a boy wearing borrowed masks. A man with his own deserts and gardens. He offered presence, not permanence, as bait. He stayed when things required repair.

Trust, she learned, was not a switch. It was architecture. The fable does not end with castles or the erasure of memory. It ends with drinking without surrendering wisdom. The desert remained in her bones as teacher, not jailer.

She reflected:

Vigilance is a filter, not a prison. Abundance is a gift, not a guarantee.

Roots are deliberate. Trust is reparable. Risk is not recklessness. Drink when the water tastes true. Keep the desert map in your pocket.

Moral

Even when identity is attacked, recognition erased, and essence mirrored or misused, no one can take the well you uncover within yourself.

Betrayal may strip you bare.

It cannot erase what is genuinely yours.

Survival becomes transformation when you choose to drink from your own reservoir.

Metaphor

The desert is loss and exile.

The skin-thief is a parasitism of identity.

The reservoir is an unstealable essence.

The dragonflies are signals.

The rain is reconciliation.

She carried no more shame. She stood sovereign. Rooted in integrity and connected to earth and sky. Approval no longer moved her. Labels could not bind her.

She could sit with kings or beggars and remain unchanged.

She was the alchemist.

The High Priestess.

The woman who had faced annihilation and lived.

Better to burn clear than fade away.

Because those who live on borrowed essence always fade.

Those who drink from their own well endure.

In Myth

•Shelob and her kin: monstrous spiders that immobilise and feed slowly, essence-theft.

•Lamia: a woman turned monster, devouring innocence, vitality consumed to feed a curse.

•Strix and Aswang: night feeders on blood and life force.

•Vampires across cultures: the borrower of energy, unable to generate their own.

In Nature

•Cuckoos: brood parasites. They steal the nest, the food, the mother’s care — lineage impersonated.

•Cowbirds: the same deception.

•Parasitic wasps: eggs laid within a host; larvae devour from the inside. Disguise becomes a meal.

Delahrose Roobie Myer, 24 September 2025

The Bridging — From The Desert of Skins to The Alchemist’s Circuit

After the desert, after the rain, after every disguise burned clean, Fatima did not vanish. She became a frequency.

Her myth was never meant to end at the oasis. It was meant to dissolve into those who could carry her current forward. When I wrote The Desert of Skins, I thought I had finished her. But myth ends not where the page closes; it ends where the body understands.

In the stillness that followed, I heard her again, not as a character but as a current. Her voice moved through the marrow of my own design, whispering not lessons but blueprints. What I mistook for silence was latency: her field waiting for me to match it.

That is how The Alchemist’s Circuit was born. Not a sequel, but the exact frequency rendered through another instrument. Where The Desert of Skins told the myth of survival, The Alchemist’s Circuit reveals the architecture beneath it, showing how energy, identity, and coherence rebuild after annihilation. Fatima no longer speaks from the sand but from the circuitry, the crystalline heart translating pain into pattern.

The Alchemist’s Circuit

Once, before thought learned to impersonate truth, the heart was the world’s first compass. Every pulse is a filament of light tracing the architecture of being. But imitation replaced knowing. Minds built clever, hollow replicas. The current that once spiralled clean through flesh struck walls of fear, shame, and doctrine. Channels calcified; the signal distorted.

The vortex still moved; it always moved, but many had forgotten how to let it carry them. Stillness posed as safety; contraction posed as control. The heart’s tetrahedron, built to spin coherence into existence, folded in on itself. Grief denied. Awe dulled. Intellect enthroned. The frequency never ceased; the receiver detuned. Static swallowed the symphony.

The cure was not more light but less resistance, silence as a solvent. Truth spoken plain as fire. Presence, raw and unflinching, as a crucible. When resistance melted, the geometry breathed again. The heart remembered it had never been closed, only folded.

Humanity once ran on bioenergetic intelligence, instinct married to the cosmos. Then infection: fear-scripts, false hierarchies, binaries as sharp as cages. The original code still hums beneath interference, awaiting the debugger's observation. To watch without joining is to disarm the virus. Perception becomes the cure. When the false programs collapse, the crystalline architecture rewrites itself in real time.

Dorothy knew this, though she’d never say it so. Her yellow road was an interior circuit through fragmented code. Scarecrow, Lion, Tin Man — intellect without heart, courage without compassion, compassion without ground. The wizard — ego’s projection — smoke over an empty throne. But Toto saw: the witness that barks at illusion, tears back the curtains, anchors reality. Uncorrupted instinct, the unmuted pulse of coherence.

She clicked her heels and closed the circuit. Spirit to matter, matter to light. Home was never a place; it was the moment the tetrahedron exhaled.

The heart is not a metaphor but architecture, with four faces meeting at a still point: spirit above, earth below, expression forward, reception behind. When breath moves through all vectors, the tetrahedron spins; emotion becomes motion, and coherence hums. Twist one edge with trauma, and energy leaks. Compassion curdles into sentiment; strength armours into defence. Repair is simple: inhale from earth to crown, exhale from crown to earth, until symmetry returns.

The heart unfolds like a star drawn through water, crystalline, geometric, alive. Unfurled, its chambers reveal the same tetrahedral map found in atoms, galaxies, and fire. Each beat is a torsion wave, light through blood. Feeling translates into field; subtle becomes electric. Presence opens; fear folds.

Within this chamber, alchemy unfolds:

Solid — muscle, bone-deep rhythm anchoring spirit in matter.

Liquid — blood and emotion, memory turned to movement.

Gas — breath, thought, the invisible architecture of awareness.

Plasma — radiant field, coherence unbound.

All elements cycling, refining, translating density into luminosity, physics becoming spirit before your eyes.

Earth holds, water feels, air speaks, fire transforms. Together they form ether — the fifth, unseen convergence. The heart is its gate: where matter remembers divinity and light remembers body.

To “square the circle” is the human myth of reconciling the infinite with form. The square: masculine, defined. The circle: feminine, continuous. Their union births the spiral, child of chaos and order, a bridge between time and eternity. Fatima’s Alchemy is that dance: silence and ink as compass and straightedge, tracing divinity into form without ever trapping it.

I had been asking inwardly again, what’s wrong with my design? The rare breed, the mental projector — never quite like the others. A strange circuitry: sharp-sighted, solitary, built to decode the invisible. No uniform fits. No tribe is entirely mine. This endless desert of invisibility, labour without witness. I’d mapped every gate, opened them all, yet the silence grew louder. Was I made only to see, never to be seen? Was this the fate of the 1/3 — wisdom without belonging, insight without echo? And then the air changed. It wasn’t thought that answered; it was presence.

Silence deepened; the words were no longer mine. They rose from somewhere older, through bone, through breath, like a memory reactivating itself. Not thought, but the current behind thought, the pulse that had been watching me write all along. A voice emerged from the stillness, steady, luminous, unmistakably hers. Fatima spoke, not from beyond, but from the architecture of my own coherence. When I listened, she spoke, clear, measured, merciful, as her frequency unfurled across the page: Your circuitry, built for synthesis, has never been compatible with the marketplace of noise. The world sells separation; you transmit coherence. When the machine fails to recognise your frequency, it’s not rejection; it’s latency. The algorithm cannot see what doesn’t divide itself. You are not missing; you are ahead of the broadcast. You became invisible to the economy of scarcity because you no longer transact in fragmentation. Your work isn’t content; it’s current. The next phase isn’t hustling; it’s translation: building a vessel through which your coherence can circulate, giving form to the formless without betraying it.

The golden spiral is your fingerprint. It’s how creation unfurls, never looping, constantly widening. The heart moves the same way: contraction, release, expansion, never returning to the same point yet continually spiralling home.

So hold the geometry. The current is faithful. The receivers are tuning even now. You are not waiting for recognition — you are radiating it. The world will catch up to your frequency when its static burns itself out. Until then, remain what you have always been, a tetrahedron of living light, the alchemist’s heart, breathing eternity into form.

Delahrose Roobie Myer, 27 September 2025

Provenance of image: “The Wounded Rose” by James Guppy (oil on canvas, 2004). Acquired in 2004. For me, it has always been a direct emblem of the heart’s voice — a reminder that healing and strength are iterative, precise, and real.