Road to Recovery

When you think of the cliche "road to recovery" for the addict you think of rehabilitation centers, therapy sessions, relapses, parole officers, and sometimes court orders. There are so many conceptions of recovery which are medical, physical, and mental in health. The ninety days away from all friends and all family was meant to give the recovery its fullest potential. Loved ones give in willingly, despite their intense feelings of protection and the nagging sense that although they are willing to do anything they are losing the one they love. They may even feel they are contributing to the fallen soul's downward spiral. So when it is demanded for "recovery" that all contact cease, families think the change is final and the decision made. What will be will be. Their guilt, in some ways, will ease with the fallen family member out of sight and out of mind. These family members are actually ones weaker in resisting rogues dredging their life force from them as a sickly sweet icing on the already steady drain that was the addict. Once the rogue is absence so too was the drain on their will to survive. Some may feel even more afflicted, though their feelings are real, they were the strongest to resist the leeching presence of the rogue.

No, the recovery is again different because of extenuating circumstances. Those circumstances concern the muse world. The fight between good and evil. The protection of the human charges caught in between. The power hunger rogue looking to leech all the life and love from any human they were created to protect and nourish. The good guys were still not united under one ideal in the fight against the overwhelming rogue numbers of the recent years. There were precisely nine factions which hadn't been aligned as one for nearly two millennium. In fact, finding a healthy identity for all muses hadn't been high on the to do list. The schism which created the nine separate sisters transfigure into their beautiful forms also left each one vying for their own territory. They agreed to separate, spreading across the globe and calling all loose muses form in their misty ethereal states to come forth and realize a solid form and a state of mind. They coalesced and came forth when called, though not all came easily or at all. Most fell in line in the marching bands of organized chaos that resulted from the schism. That schism was one that shock the muse world. Previously just energies that lacked all law and order, the muse pre-schism was a violent creature like a lone wolf that could conform to pack hierarchy and fight for territorial power, or the muse could leave for the world of humans. They could watch and take pleasure. They could help or affect their lives. They tended to be happy alone and without community. Their were very little in numbers that ventured into the human world, but those who did progressed in mind and spirit taking on the form of their charges. They imitated, for lacking the power to create, they could manipulate their form and they could gain power in a new form of community that set an elite race of muses apart from their nomadic, anarchic, and wild counterparts.

There was little to see at first, but those with heightened senses in the human world could fill the holes in their imagination concerning the forms, purposes, and actions of the muses misty visages. Some were benign and loving. Some came to see monsters and devils.