The blue pomegranate hangs ripe for the picking on a nearly barren tree at the desolate borders of awareness in a shattered wastelandscape you can only reach by riding a tired horse for three days and nights through the rain. Do not eat the blue pomegranate. If you must ingest this fruit, cut it cleanly from the tree with a single stroke of your blade, trap its roll upon the ground, sever its leathery hide and consume its sticky seeds in a single sitting. For those who linger over this rare and insidious fruit and dwell upon the fibrous intricacies of its integument, the consequent derangement of the mind and the senses can prove even more profound. Do not feed the blue pomegranate to your mount if you have any hope of returning from where you came. Those who worship the blue fruit, inveterate pomegranate-eaters, gourmet cultists of the bizarre, credit it with the most heavenly of all flavors known to Earth. In truth it has little flavor at all except for a slight aftertaste of lime. It is, of course, highly hallucinogenic. The results vary dramatically according to the individual fruit and the individual consuming it. Generally the bluer and less mottled the rind, the more potent its seeds. Generally the more rigidly defined the personality of the individual, the more devastating the experience. Some eaters undergo a return to an Eden-like state of grace, a paradise where ordinary objects seem to shine with luminous intensity, where even the venations of a leaf or the variegated plane of a rock can render worlds of numinous being. For others, the extended intoxication proves to be a nightmarish travail, brimful of monsters and paranoia. An experience that jumps and kicks from one bald terror to the next without respite for hours unending. There are certain scholars who contend that the blue pomegranate is not really a pomegranate at all, not even a genuine fruit in the sense that we normally mean it. Rather it is their firm belief argued in windy weighty tomes, that some kind of djinni-spirit has incorporated its devilish being into this inert gourd-like form. Others propose that the blue has no actual spirit of its own but merely acts as a catalyst that serves to liberate the true spirits of those who consume it, natures often imprisoned since the early days of childhood. Prolonged effects can vary widely in quantity and quality as the lurid experience itself. Returning to the everyday world you may discover that all of your senses have been altered to such an irrevocable degree that your immediate perceptions of the ground beneath your feet and the sky that caps your head have changed in ways that you could never once have envisioned. You may have unnerving insights regarding the nature of your life and the ones you share it with. Your work may seem meaningless You may spend entire evenings trying to decipher the ancient hieroglyphs that you have only recently discovered are inscribed in the complex lacings of your palms. The parameters of your existence may telescope outward into a realm of infinite choice and possibility. Or collapse and tunnel downward into the darkest regions of madness and stray terror and incarceration. So stay away from that horse. Do not go searching for that tree. Come and sit here by the hearth while the burning logs crackle. The night is mean and blustery and a chill rain threatens to fall, cold as a brand of death we can never quite put our fingers on. Forget the blue pomegranate. Remember the blue pomegranate. Never forget what I have told you. Appeared in Masque of Dreams