How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Windi, then Thalia, slid down the pole to the garage, hollering the whole way. They had the run of the firehouse because of a blaze at the bait shop.
Lying on a bottom bunk in the second-story sleeping quarters, Phiale leafed through the department’s water source directory, which listed every pond, lake and creek in the area. Sienna snored loudly overhead, worn out from her near sacrifice the evening before.
They were staying at the station because it was safer than their dorm (the firefighters lived in town and never used the bunks). Phiale got a jolt, though, when a long, skeletal finger tapped a nearby window.
Sienna snorted awake and swung down, opened the window and shouted, “I’m trying to sleep. You things need to leave me alone — I’m not even in the Seance Club anymore!”
“But Bee Mother, we heard you band of warrior look for Chief Waynunak’s gold. We bestow magic guidestone for you giving us … er … honey-thinks.”
“God, I clearly screwed that ritual up,” Sienna said as they heard footsteps racing up the stairs. The giant skeleton gave her a small slab with strange markings, and then it staggered across the back lawn into the woods.
Windi rushed over, wheezing. “I need to quit smoking.”
“What did your friend give you?” Thalia demanded, right behind her.
From the corner of her eye, Phiale noticed a butterfly flutter through the window. Belle suddenly materialized and grabbed the stone from Sienna. “Yeah, what’d it give you? Ooh, Atlantean. Looks like a spell to find submerged treasure, some sort of rite. Let’s see … we’ll need a hydromancer.” She looked at Phiale. “Check. A dash of cold fire … foxfire? A temple of the Moon Goddess … well, we’ve got the goddess part.”
“Wait,” Thalia said, looking at the floor and pushing her index fingers together. “I sort of built an Artemis shrine.”
“Check,” Belle said. “Let me guess — it was Di’s idea.”
“She helped me make it — literally on the exact same parallel as the Artemisium.”
Windi huffed. “Who cares! What else is on the list?”
Belle smiled. “The ashes of a philosopher.”
“Hold up,” Phiale said.
***
Paul Tillich, a cosmopolitan existentialist from Berlin, never actually lived in New Harmony after immigrating to America. He only visited twice: once to dedicate his namesake park — and the other time in an urn. In his 1963 talk at the Roofless Church titled “Estranged and Reunited: The New Being,” he praised the town as a landscape joining spiritual aspirations with earthly existence. The godliness of Rapp and materialism of Owen, once scattered into different realms, had regathered amid the corn.
To cap off this rejection of dualism, a Cave of the New Being was planned for Tillich Park: a pink cavern and long, narrow earthen mound. It reminded the townsfolk of intercourse and was never built.
His memorial plot, however, was still a point of pride for New Harmony.
“This is so wrong,” Di said, standing next to the large granite grave marker, holding a harness.
“It’s for a good cause,” Thalia said.
“Gold is a good cause?” Di coughed and spat tobacco juice onto the dried spruce needles. Then she whistled strangely.
“Of course it is,” Belle said dismissively. She was leaning against a shovel handle, holding up a spruce twig that lit the clearing with a faint glow. “I’d be careful about casting such powerful spells around here — but nothing risked, nothing gained.”
Di still smelled like smoke from working the bait shop fire (Phiale couldn’t stop thinking about those poor animals). “Chief thinks it was deliberate,” she’d said. “I don’t trust that dwarf who’s been hanging around there.”
Phiale drew in a sharp breath when a white deer as big as a bull with golden horns and pink eyes emerged from the tree line. Di harnessed it and roped it to the memorial boulder. She gave the animal a half-hearted swat; it just stood there, looking a little confused.
“She means go!” Windi said, walloping its haunch.
The deer sprang forward, moving the stone enough to reveal a rusty metal box containing the urn. The rope came loose and it ran — straight into Tillich’s bust, toppling it from its pedestal into Swan Lake.
Sienna bolted. Phiale’s first instinct was also to flee the nightmarish scene. But the others were all joyfully hauling up the box, except for Di, frantically calling back her Ceryneian Hind to remove the harness.
“We’ve got it!” Sam shouted. He pulled a clear vial from his field bag and pinched some ashes into it. A column of gold light sputtered up from the vial and quickly went out. “Off to the temple!”
Sienna was already in the cab, hiding on the floorboard with the doors locked.
***
The hemline of Phiale’s white robe brushed over jewelweed and evening primrose as they passed a rusted fence and came upon a forgotten farm pond. Sam showed everyone his phone’s compass app: 37°56′59″ N. “Amazing, they line up.” He looked up. “The nighttime skies are very similar across a parallel.”
“Wow,” Windi said, rolling her eyes.
Di and Thalia had hammered together scrap boards, placing them on cinderblocks so they wouldn’t rot. Under its corrugated tin roof draped with strings of acorns, deer vertebrae formed a hexagram on the floor. Deer antlers hung from the far wall, and a crescent moon was carved above the entrance.
“The sacred outhouse!” Windi blurted.
“Enough chattering,” Di snapped. “Let’s get started.”
Sam handed Phiale a pewter Federalist-era “crucible” filled with a pale liquid, wood chips and white fungal threads with a ghostly green glow.
“That’s a chamber pot, isn’t it?” Windi said, laughing.
Phiale hesitantly stepped into the dank water, dappled in moonlight, choked with cattails and overhung by a tattered shroud of branches and vines. Her bare feet sank into the slimy muck a few feet from the shore as she stood facing the others.
As a distant truck rumbled down State Road 62 toward Mount Vernon, Phiale wished they were still in New Harmony so Belle could be there with her magic. The gold is making us reckless.
Phiale held out the crucible toward Windi, who stopped short of dumping the first dollop of philosopher into the pot. “Before we left, Belle said she hoped the spell wouldn’t draw unwanted attention,” Windi said. “I wonder if she meant from anyone in particular.”
“She meant that snake you jilted at the altar,” Di said. “Just scoop in the goddamn ashes.”
Windi shrugged and applied the first dusting. A golden glow filled the crucible, which Phiale lifted over her head with shaking arms. A blanket of mist raced across the surface, and although she knew her feet were still planted in the mud, Phiale felt herself draining deep into the earth. She also suddenly sensed the Wabash flowing a mile away, an invisible weather of negative ions. It gave her strength and charged the still air over the pond. She became a switch in a grounded cell that sent a glittering arc of light into the northern sky.
Between the cottonwoods, they could see it coming down on the far horizon. Sam set a gunner’s quadrant toward the far rise of the arc as it traced the local ion gradient. “Crude instrument, but it will have to do.” Then, in the next breath, like he’d never been more certain of anything: “It’s 11 miles from here.”
Sam walked briskly to the truck where they had made Sienna wait so she wouldn’t screw up the spell. “Windi, keep feeding in the ashes if the arc of light starts to dim. Hopefully we’ll have enough by the time I can see where it’s coming down.”
Five minutes after the truck left, the dragon dropped out of the sky toward Windi, grinning, smoke trailing from his mouth. She tossed the urn, sending the remaining ashes up in a cloud. Di crouched next to Thalia with an arrow pointed skyward. Phiale slung the still-glowing crucible onto the bank and dove toward the center of the pond.
From beneath the surface, she saw a bright gold flash, followed by a burst of orange. The water turned hot enough to sting.
Chapter 16 drops Nov. 12. Read Part 1 on Kindle or in paperback. (Catch up with the Prologue.)
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