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 essence and forced me to find the well inside myself.

It will live on my website as testimony, myth, and map for anyone 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 illusion and brings completion where silence once lived. 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, 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 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, 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 cut the final cord to the desert. By 2026, the roots will stand above ground, not whispered only underground.

I am allowed pride. I didn’t just write a story. I closed a cycle in real time — myth, astrology, and lived experience collapsing into one.

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 any desert, but one where mirages wore the faces of thieves. Her betrayer, Prospero, left her stripped not only of home and security but of recognition itself. The woman he fled with carved herself into a likeness, hair matched, features altered to mimic Fatima’s very contours. Cannibalism of identity: an attempt to erase her by duplication.

There are many examples of this behaviour. Fatima never thought she would be hunted by it in her own life. Yet she was, and nothing could change the encounter. Only now, years on, can she give it language.

The feelings you bury don’t vanish; they rot until they turn to torment. To stop carrying storms that never end, let the weather finish moving through. Emptiness is not silence; it is unfinished weather. Fatima resolved to alchemise every thread so none could fester into rot.

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 meal.

The Archetype of Naming

Not honest predation, but parasitism of identity, mimic, invade, occupy.

In myth: spider, vampire, lamia.

In nature: cuckoo, cowbird, parasitic wasp.

The world shrugged at the cruelty. Each day, she watched a soul shadow trying to devour her essence. This is why the desert was needed: only there could she test whether she was real when all proof had been stolen.

She lived without applause, without encouragement. Nights pressed in. Days cracked her lips. She dug with bare hands through sand and stone until she found a hidden well in her chest, her own reservoir. Each sip from that source said: I exist because I know myself, not because others confirm me.

That was the initiation: to hold essence steady when every mirror shattered or was stolen; to be herself when even her “skin” was worn by another. She became custodian of her soul in the absence of witnesses.

The lesson deepens: the oasis is not merely water found. It is the recognition that you are the well. The desert was her crucible; the skin-thief her shadow adversary. Flesh can be mimicked. Persona can be aped. The reservoir within, dug in solitude, belongs only to you.

The desert told the truth in its barrenness: no promises, no prettified comforts, only sun, sand, and two feet. She walked it nine long seasons, not as punishment but as tuition. Betrayal razed her life and left an archive of hard lessons behind her eyes.

Apprenticeship followed. Nights taught listening when nothing else spoke. Days taught the discipline of not handing away the keys to her own house. She learned to read the light that betrays, to smell the sweetness that hides rot. Vigilance grafted to her; solitude became a room she could navigate in the dark.

One afternoon, cupping a tiny bloom prised from a crack in stone, a dragonfly landed on her knuckle, iridescent, reckless, then darted. Two more traced the air like punctuation, a slight electric stirring: a promise of movement, not safety.

The dragonflies were not the oasis. They were signals: something has shifted. They offered no guarantees. They only said the wind had changed its mind.

Then rain, not monsoon, but a steady soaking that made the first rivulets of possibility. Where it touched, green appeared; the cracked earth unfurled new tissue like an old lung recalling breath.

A question she had never practised: would she walk toward the green? Could she bend to drink and risk vulnerability?

Memory steadied her hand: the meddler who wore another’s face; homes lost to cunning; trust traded for performance. These were not errors to erase but tools to build differently.

First, she planted a small pot by her seat, a ritual that cost only attention. Each morning, she named one thing she would accept: sunlight without shame, a laugh without calculation, touch without interrogation. She watered and spoke the name aloud. Not a charm to force fortune, but a training to taste tenderness without panic.

Second, she anchored inside herself. Instead of searching for the one who would not steal, she stewarded what she had: a steady heart, cultivated dignity, the right to hospitality within her own body. Safety became a habit, not a guarantee. She kept books. She kept a spare key. She kept decisions small, a tea with a neighbour, a walk where she allowed a stranger to sit on the bench beside her. Each small risk is a rebuilt tendon.

Third, she traded certainty for curiosity. Interruption no longer meant doom; it created conditions for human surprise. Word-of-mouth returned. Not marketing. Not manufacture. A woman in a grocery line remembered a conversation; a caller passing through asked for coffee. The world brushed against her again.

A vision of a man arrived, not a salvaging prince nor a boy in borrowed masks. A guest with a steady footprint, carved by his own deserts and gardens. He didn’t sell permanence; he offered presence. He revealed consistencies: a hand that returned, a voice that didn’t deflect from her truth, a willingness to be accountable in rough water and to stay when repair demanded work. He carried no hunger for her skin, only recognition for the woman who’d lived a winter of wolves.

She understood the vision, do not rush. Let the air be tested like adults and witness light and shadow. See if they argue, but see if it comes without erasing. Left and returned to mend seams. When betrayal’s shadows rose, as they do for the betrayed, she would speak, and he was one who could listen and clarify. Trust would prove to be a small architecture, built by repeated acts.

The fable doesn’t end with an unassailable castle or the erasure of desert memory. It ends with this stubborn fact: she drank without surrendering the lessons of drought. She kept the desert in her bones as teacher, not jailer. She let the oasis teach her how to water chosen roots and tend them as one tends a creature that can be hurt and healed.

Reflections from the Well

•The desert trained you to recognise deception and survive. Keep vigilance as a filter, not a prison.

•The oasis offers sustenance, not guarantees. Accept abundance as a present, not a promise.

•Roots are deliberate. Build them in increments, one ritual, one person, one home habit at a time. Steward what you value; ceremony and small consistencies create a habitat harder to bulldoze.

•Trust is reparable. Testing and failing means you still risk. Repair is proof life can bind again.

•Risk is not recklessness. Caution becomes wisdom when paired with curiosity. Let dragonflies be signals, not verdicts.

•Love does not make you naive; guarding borders does not make you hard. Drink when the water tastes true; keep the desert’s map in your pocket.

“The desert made me keeper of my own skin. The reservoir made me keeper of my own soul. Together, they made me ready to drink again when the rain finally came.”

Moral

Even when identity is stolen, home destroyed, essence mimicked, no one can take the well you uncover within. Betrayal and exile may strip you bare, but they cannot erase what is genuinely yours. Survival becomes transformation when you drink from your own reservoir and let life teach you again.

Metaphor

The desert is the crucible of loss. The skin-thief is a parasitic identity, those who devour or duplicate what isn’t theirs. The reservoir is the unstealable source. Dragonflies are signals. Rain is reconciliation, proof that desolation can sprout green.

She carried no more shame; it had only ever been a hidden cloak. She feared nothing now, not gossip, not perspective, not the eyes of others. She had faced the desert, walked the valley of darkness, stood before the ultimate fear, and lived.

She stood sovereign, anchored in integrity, rooted in knowing, connected to earth and cosmos, no approval required. No promotion. No embellishment. Labels could not shackle her again.

She could sit with kings or beggars, queens or those on skid row, and remain unchanged. The environment could not swallow her. She moved between shadow and light as easily as breath.

She was the alchemist, the high priestess, the woman who faced her death a thousand times and lived to tell it.

“It’s better to burn out than fade away” is a refusal to be eroded by slow decay—an insistence that life carry heat and presence rather than become a ghost in one’s own story.

In this fable, it is the opposite of the skin-thief: they fade on borrowed essence. Fatima burned because her flame rose from within. The desert made her durable and preserved her fire.

Burn out, because rust never sleeps.

Do not dilute. Do not diminish. Do not ghost yourself. Burn clear, even if brief, because that is the truth.

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 frequency.

Her myth was never meant to end at the oasis. It was designed 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, 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 mapping the architecture of being. But imitation replaced knowing. Minds built replicas, clever, hollow. 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 moves, but many forgot 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 symphony.

The cure was not more light, but less resistance, silence as solvent. Truth spoken plain as fire. Presence, raw, unflinching, as 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 cosmos. Then infection: fear-scripts, false hierarchies, binaries sharp as cages. The original code still hums beneath interference, waiting for the debugger observation. To watch without joining is to disarm the virus. Perception becomes 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 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 metaphor but architecture, 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, 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 a torsion wave, light through blood. Feeling translates to 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, reconciling infinite with form. The square: masculine, defined. The circle: feminine, continuous. Their union births the spiral, child of chaos and order, 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 inward 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 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 through 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, always widening. The heart moves the same way: contraction, release, expansion, never returning to the same point, yet always 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.