Category: An Existential Fairy Tale

Metaphysics gets lit with “The Flame of Heraclitus” fantasy novel. New chapters are dropping every two weeks.

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 9

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” — Gustav Mahler

“Plants are called ‘emergent’ when they break the water’s surface,” Mrs. Owen explained to her Elementary Biology class. “Local examples include yellow water buttercups, named Ranunculus flabellaris by professor Rafinesque. They bloom this time of year in Maple Run, bearing yellow flowers that display radial symmetry — Clara! Quit staring out the window and explain to the class what radial symmetry is.”

“Eh … it’s when they broadcast jazz from the graveyard?”

“You either need to clean your ears or —” Mrs. Owen slapped the girl’s desk with a blackboard pointer three times: “Pay! Better! Attention!”

“Lord, I need a coffin nail,” Clara said under her breath as the teacher walked away.

Viv leaned over from the next row and whispered, “Don’t let that Trotsky get to you.” She held up a pack of Marlboros. “For after class. Mild as May.”

Clara’s eyes, already large behind the thick lenses of her round, tortoiseshell glasses, bugged further at the sight.

Viv turned to Doris behind her. “I’ve got enough if you want one too. I’m dying to show y’all something.”

“And how!” I’m actually going to inhale this time, thought Doris, who’d transferred to the school a few months earlier and was eager to make friends.

So they puffed the last class of the day away on a lawn along the east bank of the Wabash while Viv filled them in on the craziest thing Doris had ever heard. Supposedly, the ghost of Rafinesque, via a Ouija board owned by Occult Club Dabbler Velma, informed Viv of a treasure map concealed behind his portrait in the school’s main hallway.

“Why are you hanging around Velma — that vamp’s got freaky raccoon eyes,” Clara said, giving Viv a death stare.

“What difference does it make,” Viv said, pulling an old sheet of rag paper from her beaded purse. “What matters is the map was there. We’re going to get rich — and it’s going to keep that racist bank from taking pa’s repair shop.”

“I heard the town wants to turn it back into an opera house,” Clara said.

“Opera is dead.”

As if to prove her wrong, a voice from beyond a bend in the river floated toward the girls: a tenor singing the “Recondita armonia” (hidden harmony) aria from Puccini’s Tosca. A tall man in his 40s with thick eyebrows, a thin mustache and slicked-back hair came into view propelling a jon boat with a long pole. Dripping freshwater mussel cages were scattered across the deck. “Ciao, my name is Giovanni,” he said to the girls, tipping his boater hat as he drifted past. “It is nice to meet you, belle ragazze.”

“Don’t care … at all,” Viv muttered.

Doris smiled and waved, picturing herself reclining in the punt, gliding downstream as an Italian man serenaded her.

“Do you have a singing part in the play, Viv?” Clara asked.

“No, all the roles are speaking except a chorus that ‘provides narrative context’ — is how Rosabel put it. My Lord, she’s aggravating.” Viv, who sang in a church choir, preferred musicals but had been talked into her current role as Ethiopian princess Worknesh Zewditi because of her own African ancestry. “You know she’s convinced the senior class to install the eternal flame from the play in the middle of the labyrinth as their class project — just honor that Greek guy nobody’s heard of before.”

“We’re arranging plants around it in the Flower Club,” Doris said. “Reds and yellows like marigolds and poppies — and hummingbird vines to grow up the columns … Rosabel said they taste good, anyway.”

“Taste good? … wait, you’re in the Flower Club?” Clara asked. “I thought you were in the play.”

“Yeah, both. Cynthia said I’d make a perfect temple nymph, so I’m moonlighting.”

“That lady’s off her cob,” Clara said. “Anyway, they shouldn’t let somebody from outside the school run the Theater Club. She’s a bit rough — and couldn’t pull any of it off anyway without Rosabel’s help.”

“Shut your Skipper mouth,” Viv snapped and took a long drag off her Marlboro, sending a plume of smoke toward the heavens. “Cynthia’s divine.”

* * *

Doris tipped a jug of water over the hands of an Ephesian lawmaker standing at a basin. The worshiper then dried her hands on her tunic and scowled at another girl representing an old man with a long gray beard rolling bones across the stage floor, surrounded by urchins.

“Look at that fool! I’m busy making laws all day while Heraclitus wastes his time playing games in the hallowed temple of Artemis.”

“Snake eyes!” shouted the philosopher.

“’Tis an affront to the almighty goddess,” princess Zewditi said snootily as she waited in line for cleansing, reeking of cigarettes and holding a goat’s leash.

“Maa,” exclaimed the animal, seemingly in agreement.

“Sweet Zeus!” Rosabel shouted from offstage. “You’ve got a she-goat in the cleansing line and you’re the one shaming someone for sacrilege? The sacrifice line is over there!”

Rosabel buried her pixie-like face in her palm and shook her head. “We’re only two days from the premiere — we can’t still be making mistakes like that.” (She wasn’t even officially in the Theater Club, and no one had ever seen her in class for that matter.)

“Also, princess, you’re supposed to deliver that line with ambiguity — a little breathless … like he’s being a naughty boy,” the fairy continued. “You’re his metaphorical ‘flame,’ after all.”

The philosopher winked at Viv, and her face contorted in disgust.

“How about we come back to this scene later?” Rosabel suggested. “Let’s go straight to the end.” Sitting in the shadows by the chorus, Cynthia shrugged.

“Great! Slaves, roll in the flame!” Using ropes tied to a wheeled pallet, a group of girls dressed in rags pulled The Flame of Heraclitus onstage with an acetylene tank in tow. “No … over there, underneath the fairy. Perfect. Just make sure you don’t turn the … ”

A match flared. A slave grinned. A gas valve had been left too wide open. The actress playing the fairy, dangling over the stage by a rope, was mostly out of the ensuing blast zone, though, except for the long swallowtails of her gauzy dress.

“ … fire up too high.”

Doris grabbed her jug and tossed a plume of water toward the flames as they climbed the fabric … not quite hard enough, or in the right direction — but the stream changed course and found enough extra momentum to drench its target. Did I do that? she thought.

A slave managed to cut the flame down to only two feet. “I’m OK — you don’t have to let me down,” the girl on the rope said. “Let’s get through this.”

Rosabel told the dangling fairy that she admired her spirit, addressing her with the character’s actual Atlanten name, with all of its related drama. “You make me proud of myself.”

“Rose! Quit spitting everywhere, and let’s get going,” said Cynthia, her eyes narrowed and glinting silver.

“Yes, a rose! But this one makes no loogie!” exclaimed the Italian boatman from earlier, holding up a single red blossom. “Ciao, Signorina!”

“Oh, no,” Cynthia muttered. “That freak gives me the heebie-jeebies.” Then addressing the sudden visitor, she said sternly: “Like I told you before — buzz off!”

He looked crushed. “One day, you are chasing after me — after my river gold, sinceramente.” He held up a hand, bringing his fingers together pointed upward, and shook it — then he tossed the flower to the floor and stormed out.

“What’s that about ‘river gold,’ Cynthia,” Viv asked nervously. “Cynthia?”

“No idea.” The woman rose from her stool, standing just over six feet tall, and clapped her hands. “To your places — Herostratus! Flame Keeper!”

With the lingering odor of melted tulle and clams in the air, the crew lowered a painted backdrop depicting a large temple chamber. The Flame Keeper took her place in a parlor chair with red cushions next to the fire and a stack of scrolls on a pedestal. Then she touched her head and looked up. “She’s dripping on me … and my seat’s wet.”

“Stick to your lines,” Rosabel commanded.

“Sorry!” said the Flame Keeper — then to Herostratus: “Why are you carrying a torch. Is The Flame of Heraclitus not bright enough to illuminate the temple?”

Sporting a large, fake cheek scar, Herostratus limped back and forth holding a small bundle of sticks with orange tissue paper glued to the top. “I will need no one else’s light soon enough — my own will burn brightly for generations.”

“I know not of what you speak. You’re a nobody. Heraclitus’ flame still burns brightly because he described the true nature of things, which is fire.”

“But how quickly could the light from the Book of Heraclitus be extinguished — by fire, of all things?” Herostratus waved the torch toward the scrolls. The Flame Keeper gasped.

“What’s to stop me from destroying them along with everything else mighty Artemis holds dear in this temple while she’s off playing midwife in Macedon. Behold, as I turn the twilight of the gods into the noontide sun!” Herostratus waved the torch near the flame bowl. “If I drop this into the pit of Greek fire feeding The Flame of Heraclitus, how long do you think I’d remain a nobody?”

The Flame Keeper screamed and ran.

“Remember the name Herostratus!” He tossed in the torch and raised his arms in triumph as two rows of flame bearers ran across the front of the stage, shaking sheets of red chiffon from wooden rods.

The fairy was lowered over the scrolls but she couldn’t grab them in the conflagration. She wailed and shook her fists at the Fates.

The chorus sang: “’Tis lost to flames for good — the book with all the truth.” They too wept loudly.

Cynthia also teared up.

“Here, cheer up, have a Moon Pie,” Rosabel said, handing her one. “Destruction is a necessary part of the cycle of history.”

The fairy was about to take the thread into the metaphysical realm when a girl threw open the auditorium doors from the outside and yelled, “Somebody help! A goat’s jumped a greaser!”

***

Each year as school came to an end, the Occult Club performed a ritualistic summoning of Pan — it was fun and, depending on what pictures they’d seen of the god, seemed a bit naughty. But it had never actually worked … until that evening.

The faun was already lurking in the shadows, in full stalking mode because Artemis and one of her nymphs were nearby. His long ears were pinned back in anger as he peered through a row of bushes near prostrate Owls in dark purple cloaks. He’d seen the boatman greet the nymph and two other girls earlier on the riverbank — then, from the wooded fringes of campus, he witnessed the foreigner sneak into the school conservatory, steal a rose and enter a wooden building where the goddess and nymph were performing some kind of fire ritual from the homeland. (He learned the last part from a goat in a pen next to the structure; from what he could gather, it had been forced to take part in a series of mock sacrifices.)

***

Doris followed the group of actors and stagehands to the lawn beside the auditorium, where the faun had Giovanni pressed to the ground with his goat legs while raining down blows with human fists.

From nowhere, a creature resembling a butterfly appeared in front of his face, its arms crossed and eyes shooting 3,000-year-old daggers. Pan leapt from his victim and his hooves dug into the turf as he sprung back into the woods.

Giovanni managed to stand on his own, rubbing his battered face with trembling hands. He looked around at the girls, some dressed in hooded robes and others in Greek tunics. “Stay back, witches,” he said, making horns with his forefinger and pinky. Then he turned and ran toward the river.

* * *

From the “Sour Grapes” column of the New Harmony Grapevine, May 15, 1925:

The ‘Shame’ of Heraclitus: NHGA play torches good taste

“The Flame of Heraclitus” is set in the Greek colony of Ionia along the coast of what is now called Turkey, which is apt. But to call this production of the New Harmony Girls Academy a “turkey” would be unfair to both the new nation and bird. Never in this town’s increasingly disreputable history has there been such a demonstration of godless despair, moral depravity and reckless use of fire.

“Baloney … we turned the flame down,” said Viv, starting to fold back up the Grapevine she’d laid out on the lunch table.

“Wait,” said Doris, grabbing the paper and tapping the Sour Grape below the review. 

It read:

Local goose lays golden ‘egg’

Aesop, who is said to have lived on an island near Heraclitus in time and space, described a goose that laid golden eggs. Last Wednesday, local farm girl Bridget Meir found a bead of pure gold in a dropping left by one of her geese along the riverbank near the confluence of Maple Run. When asked if she plans to keep an eye to the ground for more golden guano or go ahead and cut open her feathered friend to see if there’s treasure inside, it seems she’s learned something from the Greeks: “No way I’d kill such a talented bird,” Meir proclaimed.

“Looks like we need to pay a visit to the Meir farm,” Viv said.

The following Friday, the Grapevine ran this story across its banner:

GOOSE GIRL GONE; FOWL PLAY SUSPECTED

NEW HARMONY, Ind.–May 22, 1925—Is 15-year-old farm girl BridgetMeir sending police on a wild goose chase, or did something more sinister happen Tuesday along the banks of the Wabash?

The afternoon started innocently enough. Picture the bucolic scene: Meir whistling sweetly to gather her flock of geese for a short walk to the river where they swim and graze. Her calls also seem to have drawn four girls she’d never met, looking smart in clean academy uniforms — unexpected barnyard visitors who later admitted they weren’t there to make friends; instead, they’d read last week’s Sour Grape on Meir finding an ‘egg’ made of gold.

“None of us saw her get snatched, so this is just speculation,” said Rosabel Neverland, the apparent leader of this gang of Goldbug Girls, “but I’d bet a hundred drachmas the Goat Man snatched her. Why, just the other day we saw it assault an immigrant on school grounds.”

Police Chief William Owen confirmed rumors that a cult ritual involving goats may have gotten out of hand at the academy earlier this month. But no report was taken, and school administrators declined to comment. (See last week’s Sour Grape on their recent Greek tragedy — in the sense of a tragic lack of value or meaning.)

“A girl is missing,” added Chief Owen. “This is a serious incident, and it’s not helpful to get distracted about some fairytale creature. One of the girls at the scene mentioned seeing a large black snake with a strange marking, but there’s nothing like that around here big enough to drag off what’s basically a grown woman.”

While the Goldbug Girls supposedly didn’t see Meir’s supposed abduction, they were close enough to hear a scream. When they went to see what was wrong, they found two dead geese stomped flat in a depression resembling the print of an enormous beast and ten live ones flapping around hissing and honking. White feathers littered the mud like dogwood petals after a storm.

“We’d left her by the riverbank because the geese were starting to bite us … I guess they were nervous about something,” Neverland said. “She had a long stick she used to keep them together, but she wouldn’t beat them with it like I begged her to.”

Chief Owen hasn’t ruled out any suspects, and he ordered the Goldbug Girls to remain in New Harmony after the school year ends because of the investigation.

The events of Tuesday leave us with a series of questions lacking easy answers. Is New Harmony now New Klondike? Did the Goat Man make off with the Goose Girl? And is there any hope for the Flapper Generation?

Chapter 10 of The Flame of Heraclitus gets lit Dec. 30. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus: An Existential Fairy Tale

Rob Robill

Chapter 8

“Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner

The sound of flatulence and tittering from the balcony blended with a low B and E flat rising from the orchestra pit. Thus began the New Harmony Opera Society’s special daytime presentation of Das Rheingold for local schools: with an ill wind — a bad omen.

In contrast to the riffraff overhead, Thalia held a golden masquerade mask to her face (hiding in fear of the cast). It reminded Phiale of a butterfly glowing faintly in the darkened hall.

Phiale never especially cared for opera, but she was paying close attention to the supertitles because it featured water nymphs — two “swimming” through the air on ropes and one sitting on a rock. They were supposed to be protecting a trove of gold under the Rhine, but they screw up and lose it: After the hunchback Alberich starts flirting, they taunt him, saying he could have the hoard only if he swears off love entirely — which the nymphs think he’ll never do. But he does, so he can forge the gold into a ring of power.

While the dwarf, bathed in golden light, acted like he was scooping up the riches, Windi said quite loudly as the music swelled, “That’s it! Now I remember. The treasure map — it’s in the grease pit.”

Alberich made off with the gold as nymphs sang “Hülfe! Hülfe!” (“help! help!”). But then Flosshilde suddenly fell silent and slumped, aglitter in aquamarine, dangling like a piano four feet over the floor. Bubbles rose from a nearby machine.

“Flosshilde!” shouted Woglinde. “What’s wrong?”

A balding man in a suit and woman in blue coveralls (a custodian who’d been cranking the bubbler) rushed from the wings and shook the singer. The man checked her pulse and gasped. He turned toward the audience and said, “Eh … it’s over.” The curtain fell.

For a few moments, the opera house was silent except for onstage sobbing and frantic exertions of stagehands unharnessing Flosshilde — along with a smattering of applause from students who thought that might somehow be appropriate. Someone called 911 and begged them to hurry.

In the ensuing commotion after the lights came on, Windi grabbed her friends and led them through a door beside the stage.

“I k-killed her,” Thalia said as they rushed through a narrow passageway into a room with props like battle axes, female breastplates and helmets with horns. (The company planned to eventually present the entire Ring Cycle, a project the local Grapevine newspaper had deemed “overly ambitious for such a backwater operation.”)

“Killed who?” Windi asked.

“The singer,” she whispered. “That was the one I slammed into the beam. Maybe she had a delayed reaction from hitting her head.”

“Nonsense.” Windi seized a spear and, with the handle end, rapped on a large oriental rug in the center of the room until it made a hollow sound. Then she pulled the carpet back, exposing a trap door. “Ha! I knew it. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it.”

“Daddy’s always down there under a tin lizzie … ,” murmured Thalia with a faraway voice.

“Freedom for the woman who owns a Ford,” Windi responded.

Struggling to make sense of either of them, Phiale stayed above as a lookout while their phone lights danced around below, illuminating things long forgotten. “Creepy … it looks like War of the Worlds down here,” Windi said.

“Those things on tripods are old theater lights — from back when they used incandescents,” Thalia informed her.

Phiale heard an ambulance pull up outside and people run down the hall.

“Look!” Windi shouted, and the other girls shushed her. “That wall, it’s stone … older than the others.” She grunted from exertion. “Help me shove in this smooth part. Not there, find my hand and push right below it.”

Giggling … silence …

“Oh, yeah, push,” Thalia said. “It moved! Look, a secret compartment!”

They came back up grimy and flushed, Windi gripping a folded, yellowed sheet of paper. She carefully spread it out on the rug.

“That’s just a Peter Pan map … a prop,” Phiale scoffed after noticing locations like “Skull Rock.”

Thalia ran her finger along a squiggly line. “No, look, the Wabash. That ain’t Neverland.” The map also featured a crude drawing of a goose where a smaller stream came out. Beneath it, written in neat script, someone had copied two fragments attributed to Heraclitus: “Asses prefer chaff over gold” and “Water is born from earth and your soul from water.” At the bottom of the map, someone had scrawled “C+V.” (The paper itself was in good condition for being 200 years old, thanks to a century-old fairy spell.)

“It says ‘Treasure Map’ but there’s no X,” Windi noted.

“Hope it’s not supposed to be there.” Phiale tapped the words “Cannibal Cove.”

“You know it has to be,” Windi said.

* * *

Sam took one look at the map later that afternoon, dipped a quill into an inkwell, and drew an “X” through the heart of Cannibal Cove. “There’s your spot.”

“I told you he’d know,” Belle said. (She’d met the shopkeeper back when she was hunting for an antique Ouija board — made from wood and not cardboard, so it actually worked.)

“Follow me.” Sam led them into a back room with a large bookcase and removed a leather-bound volume in a series on medical botany; the case slid sideways along rails exposing an entrance to the shop’s real back room.

In the dim light, Phiale discerned oddities like a stuffed, two-headed calf and an enormous footprint impressed into a chunk of limestone (Tinker Bell wasn’t just making that one up, she thought).

Sam removed a leather-bound book from a shelf and leafed through it. “Yes, here it is … from the journal of professor Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: ‘There exists a little bay in the Wabash, a short distance below Harmonie, in the new state of Indiana, that was the scene of a brutal ritual. Lore has it, when the greatest Emerald Mound chief died, his tribe interred his head along the bank and devoured the body in a grim feast. Then they cast an offering of pure gold from New Spain into the middle of the cove as payment for some sort of aquatic panther to carry the leader’s soul into the spirit realm. But something else took it first.”

“Let me guess,” Phiale said. “A black snake with a red mark on its head.”

Thalia was instantly on her phone. “Oh, mighty Artemis, we beseech you to join us in our quest for sunken treasure.” Then, turning away from the others, she whispered, “for your votive offerings.”

Thalia hung up and said, “We’ve got a diver and gear, but the search and rescue boat is up in the yard for repairs.”

“Hmm … no … that would just be silly … ” Sam said mysteriously. “Oh yes, I almost forgot … follow me, I’ve got hungry mouths to feed.”

They walked down a narrow hallway into the brightness of an herbary, passing under a tangled arbor of hallucinogenic devil’s trumpet into a secluded space against an exterior glass wall. A card table was covered with dozens of tubular plants up to three feet tall, sporting frilly white hoods with red veins that fanned out like flames in the sunlight.

Sam picked up a small “Wabash Wigglers” cylinder with a cartoon worm struggling on a hook but smiling nonetheless. With a slight grin himself, he removed a live cricket and dropped it into one of the plant’s maws.

“Some call them crimson pitchers,” he said. “I named them Sarracenia leucophylla after the white, translucent tops. They produce a volatile organic compound that attracts insects into the brilliant atrium at the top, only for them to slip down the tube into a dark pit of digestive fluids.”

“Cool!” Windi said. “You’re the one who named these things? I thought somebody would have done that a long time ago.”

“Well, yes.”

“What’s your experiment about?” Phiale asked, touching the side of one of the recently fed plants. She felt the tube vibrate as the cricket struggled in the water at the bottom, dank with bacteria, flecks of exoskeleton, fermented nectar, crumpled antennae — she jerked her hand back in revulsion.

“I’m breeding them to mimic the pheromones of blue ghost fireflies — to trap them and prove we have a local population. That halfwit Thomas Say named the insects Lampyris reticulata shortly before he slithered off the Philanthropist … maybe we could take her out for a quick spin … no, of course not … what was I saying … oh, that Say fellow, the father of American entomology, indeed — I’m the one who described the entire family as Lampyridae.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Belle said. “Those bugs don’t live around here — what do you want with them, anyway.” She glared at him with a raised eyebrow.

“You’ll see … you’ll all see … ” He dug into the cylinder again, shook it and sighed. “That settles it, they need more Wigglers and I’ve got a tiller that needs testing. Call your diver back. We set sail soon.”

***

Their feet crunched on the gravel drive as they approached the bait shack. Phiale felt the onrush of the Wabash before she saw it flowing past the city dock, which secured an unfinished replica of the Philanthropist (the name on the stern lacked the second “h”). At 40 feet, the keel boat was half the length of the original and still lacked a cabin, but Sam had recently installed a real tiller from the era.

Looming ahead of them was the shop’s mascot, now faint pink instead of the original vermillion, writhing above a line in the warped boards marking the great flood of 1913. Phiale almost felt sorry for the shop hunkering along the bank, resigned to decades of abuse.

Inside, past a creaking screen door, she was enveloped by the smell of mildew, fish and cigarette smoke, and from somewhere in the depths, a disembodied voice sang in German, “Mild und leise wie er lächelt” — hacking coughs — “wie das Auge er öffnet.”

“Tristan’s ‘Liebestod,’ Western civilization’s swan song,” Belle said as they weaved their way around racks of lures and bobbers, watched over by mounted catfish and the milky eyes of a deer head with patchy fur, one ear rotted off by decades of river mist.

“I’ve had enough opera for a lifetime — it’s all just screaming gibberish,” Windi said, and the woman sitting behind stacks of styrofoam worm cups stopped singing. Phiale immediately recognized her as the janitor who’d rushed onto the opera stage earlier that day — moonlighting at the bait shop.

Wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I’m Not Lazy, I Just Really Enjoy Doing Nothing,” her face as weathered as the shack’s pine boards, she stood, ashed into a Busch Light can and glared at the new arrivals. “Philistines,” she hissed.

“Finally, somebody I can agree with,” Belle said. “How could they ever appreciate how the metaphorical water element in Tristan und Isolde washes away old orders — as opposed to the earth element blasting them over Jünger’s zero meridian?”

“Exactly,” the clerk croaked. “They could never feel the full weight of the metaphysical contraction that births renewal in the radiant B major triad.”

The bait shop employee had more than just opera on her mind, though — she had her eye on Thalia. Both the fairy and Phiale scooted in front of the girl to hide her.

Sam shook the cricket cylinder. “We just need a refill.”

***

Di met them at the dock wearing a wetsuit, and Thalia helped her unload a fire department scuba tank and other gear from the back of her pickup onto the boat.

“What could go wrong?” Sam said. “Simply oar downstream and then hoist the sail for the return trip.” He held his finger out. “We’ll take advantage of the southerly breeze.”

“I doubt that’s how you spell it,” Windi said as she boarded, pointing at the name on the stern.

The original Philanthropist launched from Pittsburgh back in December 1825 with 40 boatloaders including scientists, educators and artists on an arduous journey down the Ohio to New Harmony. They arrived a month later — in the dead of winter (an imperfect anniversary date for a reenactment, so it was moved up to the summer).

As Belle was walking over a plank onto the craft, Di grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled her to solid ground. “Where on this river does your magic end?”

The fairy looked downstream. “Well … just past the Maple Run confluence, I’d say.”

Di looked at the map. “Cannibal Cove is past that. You’re staying here.”

“Raf! I mean Sam! You’re the captain — let me board.”

“Not if the lady says you can’t,” he replied. Then in a brisk voice, he told Di and Phiale to each grab an oar on either side of the boat while he untethered it from the dock. Thus, the Philanthropist once again glided along the Wabash on an improbable mission.

Belle glared from the shore with clenched fists as they drifted away. Both oar blades flared with fairy fire on the upstroke and hissed out in the water. “Quit being a baby!” Di shouted.

Although a steady wind blew against the bow, Phiale’s oar pushed easily, almost magically, against the water as the boat sliced its way downstream. A bald eagle soared above them, seemingly keeping up with the boat.

Cannibal Cove was easy to find once they spotted Skull Rock, a jutting piece of limestone that lived up to its name (if you squinted). Sam swung the Philanthropist into the backwater and had Windi release the anchor rope attached to an old-timey winch. The firefighter, who was holding an underwater metal detector and wearing a headlamp strapped above her goggles, tipped backward over the rim of the boat and disappeared into the murk.

“Sam, do you think the gold’s still there?” Windi asked.

He scrutinized the Wabash. Then he scanned the shoreline until his gaze fixed on the branches of a beech, where a large black snake hung over the water. “Can’t be sure, but this land does hide unspeakable riches … for those strong enough to claim them.”

Sitting on one of the benches, Thalia was hunched over in a prayer that seemed to match the rhythm of the crickets. Phiale noticed a hole in her skirt and thought of the moths from the other night.

But Thalia’s supplications went unfulfilled. When the firefighter resurfaced, she shook her head; apparently, the only gold down there was a Goldschläger bottle, and the only gleaming was from a lure still hooked in the jaw of a bluegill skeleton.

So they hoisted the sail and started back. Windi was mopey and Thalia, sobbing, proclaimed, “I’ve lost a fortune and my freedom in the same day.”

Di put an arm around the girl. “Your freedom?”

“T-that fat lady … the one who profaned you … ”

“Oh, the singer,” Di said and laughed. “They took her to Evansville for an autopsy. She looked unhealthy to begin with — and angry … could’ve been anything.”

“Really?” She rested her head on Di’s shoulder, and the woman spat tobacco juice overboard.

Spinning the heavy, detached winch handle in her hand, Windi glowered at Di with dull green eyes. “Spitting is disgusting. Even when men do it.”

The firefighter made as if to spit on Windi but stopped herself in an act of divine intervention.

“Beefy, goddamn Amazon!” Windi screamed and threw down the winch crank — it smashed clear through the craft’s wooden planks, weakened by fungal infections.

Water gushed through the hole — shouts — crickets chirping madly — silence.

The Philantropist descended.

Check out Chapter 9 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 7

“Year after year the corn-spirit is slain at harvest and born again when the new seed is sown.” — Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough

The hem of Ms. Owen’s black dress brushed against ripples of dirt as she crossed the freshly tilled field below the Roofless Church. A funerary veil screened her face as if she were a widow — she was in a way, since before the Civil War. (The covering was supposedly to keep the sun out of her eyes.) In the distance, a tractor pulled a row of yellow plastic hoppers dropping corn seed.

Ms. Owen was out “herping” for snakes — a common activity for her on the rare days the Flower Club didn’t meet. Phiale was trudging behind the teacher across the fertile lowlands after being asked along for a “discussion about her future.” Although the day was dry, the scent of rain filled her nose as their boots disturbed the soft, alluvial soil.

“I understand you’re having a tough time acclimating to our academy,” Ms. Owen said, using a hooked snake pole as a walking stick. “And I realize it’s difficult to develop a sense of loyalty to a group that’s already bonded and sees you as an outsider. But it’s not impossible — you just have to try harder … talk to the other girls more, quit missing meetings, make sacrifices for Beauty and Botany … and ask yourself: Are you a blossom or a deadhead that needs snipping?”

“Snipping, I guess,” Phiale said.

Ms. Owen stopped and lifted her veil so the girl could see her scowl. “I suggest you find a new club at the beginning of next school year. Good day.” She sniffed and resumed walking toward a line of trees along a bend in the Wabash.

“Wait!” Phiale shouted, following after her. “The snake from the other day … the one with the red mark on its head.”

“What about it? Did you see it again?”

Quite a bit of it, in fact, the girl thought, but said, “Eh … not sure … maybe where the creek comes out. Is that what you’re looking for? What kind is it? Can I come with you?”

“Well, I guess … it’s good you’re at least interested in something. As for the snake, I’d never seen its kind before — although there are legends … ”

They reached the riverbank to the sound of tiny frogs splashing into the water for safety. “We’re looking for a hole at least a couple of inches in diameter, and dead skin — I also have an eye out for feces of a certain size.”

“Does the legend say anything about the snake getting bigger when you pray to it?” Phiale asked, standing on a sycamore root clawing at the soil like a giant, skeletal hand.

Ms. Owen looked up from jotting in her field journal. “As a scientist, I don’t take such tales literally — but where did you hear about that?”

“Didn’t exactly hear about it.”

“You are difficult to talk to. There have been historical accounts — mostly the pseudoscientific pronouncements of a certain professor Rafinesque — of a black fire snake protecting a sunken chest of gold in the Wabash … and the serpent was also involved with some kind of ritual — going all the way back to the end of the last glacial period. It supposedly guarded an underground city. Atlanteans, or some such nonsense.”

“Atalans?”

“It’s a shame my father is still allowed to teach. He talks about spiritualism now with the same enthusiasm he once had for creating a perfect society. What I really worry about is you impressionable Owls — that you might start believing him.”

“Do you think Mr. Owen will be arrested?”

“For being a bad teacher?”

“No, for NAGPRA violations. That’s what agent Booker kept saying she was going to slap me with.”

“My lord, you say such nonsense … anyway, I know who you’re talking about. And I plan to lodge a complaint with the Smithsonian for the language she used when I asked if my classes could tour the van.

“From what I’ve gathered, though, they showed up because of that photo. Sienna and my father have both vigorously denied any involvement — he’s just an old spiritualist … who’s sadly forsaken rationalism,” she sighed. “Regardless, it all has to be an absurd mistake — to think anyone would implicate an Owen in such an outrage.”

* * *

“No Sienna, that’s a fibula — it goes here,” Mr. Owen said, tapping a larger bone with his cane, “next to this tibia. I imagine they’ll be upset if we don’t put them back together correctly before we reanimate them.”

A row of more than a dozen skeletons ranging 7-12 feet long lined the granary floor. From high above in the exposed rafters, Tinker Bell watched the Seance Club buzz around the expansive room, some brushing off swords, axes, shields and helmets — while others strained and grunted as they placed the artifacts on the skeletons.

One of the giants’ hands had just arrived. That was actually why the fairy was at the old grain storage building in the first place. She’d been zipping toward downtown when she noticed a six inch skeletal finger poking out of a canvas sack — wagging back and forth like it was trying to tell Tinker Bell she shouldn’t be flying alongside the golf cart driven by Bellatrix. But that just encouraged her.

When Bellatrix reached the drive leading to the vine-covered structure — mostly concealed by trees on a corner lot across from a cluster of reconstructed Rappite cabins — she got out and pulled back a chain with a “No Trespassing” sign. Then she continued up a ramp into the five-story granary through double wooden doors set into a thick sandstone wall. Above the entrance, the stone turned to brick up to the tile roof. Father Rapp’s people had built it in 1818 to store enough grain to survive a year of drought prophesied for some time before Armageddon. Eventually, after the world failed to end, Robert Owen bought it along with the rest of the town’s buildings; it eventually passed down to the history teacher.

Through a window from where she sat, Tinker Bell could keep an eye on Galata Antiquities at the corner of Granary and Main. She smiled when the Smithsonian agents marched into the shop. 

Earlier that afternoon, the agents received an anonymous tip written in sparkly ink informing them that Galata recently made an interesting sale. An out-of-town dealer had purchased an oversized, narrative-destroying footprint in a limestone slab (an angel’s? Sasquatch’s? Atalan’s?) along with burial mound treasures such as an emerald and giant sword.

Before the door shut behind the agents, Tinker Bell managed to flutter out a sparrow hole in the granary, down the street and into the store.

Out came their badges. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way — easy for us, I mean — either way is going to be hard for you,” agent Booker told Sam, the shopkeeper. His small, pale hands were polishing the bone handle of an antique pruning knife — licks of lank black hair clung to his forehead.

Sam squinted at their IDs. “The Smithsonian … how boring.”

“Put down the knife, sir,” Fafner commanded.

Sam looked incredulously at the curved blade, not even three inches long. “What’s the meaning of all this?”

“Tase the freak,” Booker said.

“You bet.” He lit Sam up with 1,200 volts.

Tinker Bell, who’d been hiding in a Victorian hat festooned with dead hummingbirds, felt simultaneously impressed by the audacity of the act and bad that her plan had led Sam to his sorry state on the floor moaning and twitching. But she used the commotion to her advantage, flying to the counter and dipping the tip of a ruby, iridescent feather into an open inkwell. She jotted in the business ledger under that day’s date: “Mr. Jones, St. Louis, misc. items, $445,000,” and then darted behind a bolt of French toile.

The agents moved almost as quickly: Booker dumping drawers full of paper records into a duffel bag, and Fafner scanning the ledger. He tapped it with his finger. “Here it is. There’s a Jones in the Midwest Ring, right? Based in Indiana, works out of Missouri too.”

“I know that scumbag,” his partner said. “These fake motherfuckers here aren’t worth our time. We’re taking down Jones. Let’s gas up the van.”

Sometimes when the Fates want something to happen, like for it to storm hard enough to knock out an electric grid (perhaps to set a scene), they’ll choose a circuitous route … seemingly taking pride in it like a billiards player whose ball ricochets everywhere before finding its mark — in this case Indiana’s bottom-left corner pocket.

Booker slung the duffel over her meaty shoulder and plowed out the door — and into Phiale, who, now unburdened by her Flower Club membership, had been walking past with a spring in her step as she returned from herping with Ms. Owen. Because of the way they twisted when they fell, the first to hit the pavement was the long bag, followed by the federal agent with the former Violet on top. Booker shoved Phiale off, heaved herself to her knees and lifted a hand as if to smack the girl.

“Slap that bitch!” Fafner screamed.

A feeling of such injustice swept over Phiale that a sudden plume of humidity blossomed westward out over the Illinois prairie, setting off a chain of events that led to a line of thunderstorms later boomeranging back to the source.

“I was just going to help her up,” Booker said, and did, grinning. “Everybody here’s fake, anyway. Let’s roll — the trail’s hot.”

About an hour later, the Smithsonian van was barreling along I-64 toward St. Louis when it sustained major karmic damage from golf-ball-sized hail.

* * *

Darkness had fallen by the time thunder rumbled into New Harmony. The third floor common room in Phiale’s residence hall was typically empty, being at the top of the stairs with tattered furniture and a smallish TV screen. However, that Friday night, Belle wanted to share a film about sinister fairies with Phiale and Windi, lighting the room only with candles in brass holders, darkened with age.

Thalia already happened to be sitting there with the TV turned off when they arrived. “Watch whatever you want,” she said from back of the room, sunk into a duct-taped leather recliner. “What difference does it make.”

They sat down with their popcorn, and Belle cued the 2015 Irish movie The Hallow. “My parents would never let me watch something like this,” Windi said. Then, not too far into the film, she must have guessed the plot: “Belle, have you ever abducted an infant?”

“Too many to count.”

Thalia started weeping.

“She was just kidding … I think.”

“It’s not that.”

“What’s wrong then?” Windi asked with uncharacteristic concern.

“I got booted from Theater Club. ‘Midair assault on a mezzo-soprano,’ is what they called it in the report.”

“What a coincidence, I’m done with my club too … I guess. So’s Phiale.”

“That’s good — cults are pathetic,” Belle proclaimed.

“Some aren’t,” Thalia said.

“I mean except for Artemis ones.”

Later on, when a movie fairy was getting ready to poke out a lady’s eye with its long fingernail, the TV winked off. “Hell of a time to lose power!” Belle shouted. “This never happened when we got juice from the pyramids back in the day.”

“Great, and I have to use the bathroom,” Windi said. She grabbed a candle and swept through the door in a long white gown.

“Can’t you just wiggle your nose and bring the grid back up, or at least the TV?” Phiale suggested.

“Maybe, but that’s a lot of work … and so close to bedtime. Hopefully it won’t be out long.” But time crept by, and the TV remained a black pit. Shadows danced in the candlelight. The wind howled.

“Where’s Windi?” Thalia asked after a while.

“Yeah, we should check on her,” Phiale said. They scanned the bathroom in the dim light of their candles: no Windi — she wasn’t in her room, either.

“Maybe we should look in her … eh, club room,” Phiale suggested. Why did I just say that? The dork’s on her own at that point. But down the dark stairwell they went, bottoming out in a hallway with mostly unused rooms except for a few clubs that never needed to see the light of day (also including Chess and Esports, who hated each other with the single-minded passion of nerds).

“Do you know where it is?” Phiale asked.

“No clue,” Belle said. “Last time I was down here was right after this place was built … 1975, I think. Heard a Pet Rock Club had started up, and I couldn’t believe it. Had to check it out for myself. Not exactly the brightest girls in that one.”

“Do you always just make things up?” asked Thalia, who, like Windi had also taken to wearing a long, gauzy nightgown for some reason.

“No, they really were that dumb.”

They wandered the labyrinthine passageways, past cinderblock walls, overhead wires and rattling pipes. Small animals skittered outside the glow of their candlelight.

Belle cocked her head: “I hear voices.” She led them around a few more turns to a hallway that ended with a closed door with a dim light coming from behind it. Something brushed against Phiale’s cheek, and she gasped — a cloud of moths were zigzagging around their flames.

They blew out the candles and crept to the door to listen.

“We told you to quit associating with outsiders,” a girl hissed. “They’ll always try to pull you away … from jealousy. But you let them. You’re ungrateful.”

“No, they mean nothing to me,” Windi pleaded, making Thalia gasp.

“She’s not thinking straight,” Belle whispered.

Another voice from behind the door said, “You’re lying. That Violet you hang out with told me you’re finished with us — and that we’re a … a cult. How absurd!”

“Forgive me!”

“Don’t forget, the witch told us to touch the emerald — just to traumatize us,” added the other Monarch from the night before. “It was awful … poor Father! Did you touch it too, you horrid little Skipper? What did you see?”

Belle kicked in the door and said: “She saw you scum standing over her with a knife.”

Following closely behind the fairy into the room, Phiale first noticed hundreds of tea lights glowing on lab benches next to microscopes, test tubes, specimen trays and what looked like an altar, over which hovered a black, papier-mâché butterfly casting a gigantic shadow on the ceiling.

“You guys shouldn’t be here,” said Windi, her voice quivering. She was tied to a chair in front of thousands of butterflies pinned to the entire back wall, flanked by two cloaked captors. “We have our own ways.”

The dozen or so other club members gaped at the intruders in frozen horror. “These lunatics can’t be here!” one of them finally screamed. “Grab the nets!” So they did, but Belle plucked a bamboo skewer from a jar of preservatives and turned the poles into black snakes. Their ensuing screeches in the bowels of the basement sounded like a boiler ready to blow.

The fairy then struck Phiale’s candle with the skewer — and it turned into an archer’s bow. Then the fairy tapped her back, and a quiver appeared with three-foot steel pins, notched at the end.

“Like this,” Belle explained. She grabbed one of the shafts and turned her stick into a bow, which she used to fire the missile at one of the two members on either side of Windi. It hit her cloak but missed her body, pinning her to the wall. Belle repeated with the one on the other side, leaving the victim wriggling and wailing against the white wood paneling. “Try not to actually hit them … or whatever,” the sprite said and shrugged.

Phiale smiled and fired off a couple of her own pins, attaching the other club member’s cloak to the display with her in it (their fellow Butterfly Club devotees had abandoned them to the Fates by that point). Then she helped Thalia untie Windi as a snake slithered by.

“Honestly, you don’t have to save me,” she said. “This is kind of embarrassing, really.”

“Yeah, you really look like you want to be here,” Thalia responded, struggling with a knot.

“She’s obviously brainwashed,” Phiale chimed in. And generally clueless, she added to herself.

“No, it’s just kind of sweet how much they don’t want me to leave.”

“That’s all applesauce!” Thalia said, putting her hand on Windi’s knee. “You’re with us dolls now.”

Belle beamed. “The ’20s are roaring again.”

Check out Chapter 8 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 6

“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

illustration of singers on an underwater set

“Nasty, privileged bitches like you make it hard for me to control my temper,” agent LaTonya Booker said. Almost as large as a linebacker, she leaned toward Phiale, the threads of her pantsuit straining. “We know the exact time the photo of the girls with the sword was taken — right after you were recorded leaving your dorm headed toward the mound … a sacred site I’m under oath to protect. And you’re saying you don’t know anything about any desecration?”

“T-that’s right.”

A laptop beeped shrilly. “She’s lying again,” said agent Doug Fafner, tall and skinny with acne and round glasses reflecting the glow of multiple computer screens.

Parked in the school lot, the Smithsonian’s mobile interrogation unit looked like a vanload of amazing discoveries from the outside, featuring images of a boy enthralled with an arrowhead and a space shuttle flying over a triceratops skeleton — certainly not a rolling star chamber to enforce the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“You should talk to Sienna instead of me. She’s in the photo — and in the Seance Club. I don’t have anything to do with raising the dead … almost never.” Phiale’s gaze focused on a small devil’s ivy next to a digital EKG reader; its leaves were mostly brown and shriveled, although droplets reflecting faint sparks around the base of its pot pointed to recent watering.

Booker snapped her fingers. “Girl, over here!” The agent sighed and laughed. “What’s all this about raising the dead? We’re just trying to solve a simple grave robbery you dipshits obviously committed. Why’s your pal Skipper Windi googling about Middle Mississippian emerald jewelry? And whether it can give people second sight? Andhow much it’s worth?”

* * *

Phiale struggled to open a tartar sauce packet because her hands were still shaking from that morning’s third degree. She always ate lunch with Windi but hadn’t seen her all morning. On the lam, no doubt. Now I’ve got to sit here eating by myself like a loser.

She was taking a bite of a fish sandwich when she noticed Rapp staring at her over a bin of stewed apples from the other side of the buffet line. By the time she’d finished chewing, he was sitting across from her.

“I asked for food of my Fatherland, but the lunch frau prepared this.” He picked through strands of sauerkraut served with breakfast sausages, then glared at the girl. “Your only friend hasn’t bothered to show up for classes today. Where is she?”

“I have no idea, sir.” It was the truth, although she wouldn’t have told him anyway. Belle had made them promise not to run their mouth to anyone in authority — not even about what Mr. Owen was up to, because of all the attention it would draw.

“Was she acting strange on the field trip yesterday? Did she say she needed to get something?”

“An emerald?”

“Yes! You saw her take it!”

“No, the Smithsonian lady said Windi was googling how much she could get for it.” Idiot! Why’d I bring up the emerald? Keep it together.“She thinks we’re the grave robbers.”

“Oh, nein, nein. They need to be looking into Mr. Owen and his coven.”

An out-of-breath woman in a hairnet rushed up to the table. “Just caught a student in the cooler … shoving a whole chicken up her … toga … slipped past me … ran out the back door with it … shouted ‘charge the Theater Club!’”

Rapp frowned. “From what I’ve gathered, they’re conspiring with the Fire Safety Goddess on some sort of presentation … or ceremony, as she called it. Heathens, the lot of them.”

* * *

Belle saw a great opportunity to regale the children of a degraded culture with the treasures of ancient Greece when the goddess of Heraclitus (in part) said she was planning a burn trailer demonstration at the school. So the fairy retrieved a box of costumes she’d stowed away in a forgotten tunnel under the auditorium following a spring 1925 production of “The Flame of Heraclitus” (the play where the labyrinth planter came from). Belle beamed at their pristine condition thanks to her protection spell against mold and moths. While she could’ve just wagged her wand to materialize passable replicas, she felt the actual link to that era was the bee’s knees.

One of the chiton tunics was worn by Thalia, along with a bay laurel crown and leather sandals, as she walked at a stately pace toward the burn trailer with a sliver tray holding the chicken carcass.

The fire department had pulled the trailer and a pumper truck into the back lot near the Butterfly Garden, and the academy’s students formed a wide circle around it. Inside the trailer was a typical dorm room: bed, desk, chair, strewn clothing, overstuffed trash can and Hunger Games: Catching Fire poster of a young archer surrounded by flames. Not so typical was an altar with stag antlers attached to the front and a large offering bowl along with a saucer of red amaranth leaves on top. Fire hoses snaked through the grass.

Two other Theater Club members, also clad in ancient Greek attire, flanked the trailer, facing it with their palms to the sky. “Oh, mighty Artemis, accept this burnt offering to the delight of your everlasting soul,” they chanted in unison from a script Belle had written.

Thalia placed the chicken in the altar bowl, and all three girls stepped back. As Di emerged from the truck wearing a tunic and crown of flowers, they prostrated themselves before the trailer. The firefighter seemed even taller than usual, almost floating across the ground, her metallic eyes glinting in the sunshine. (Phiale, a face in the crowd, fought an urge to fall to the pavement herself in supplication.)

Di climbed into the trailer and turned to the girls with a serious expression. “Hanging out in your room on a festival day? Feeling too lazy to take that burnt offering outside? Think twice before you char it in your dorm room.” After a moment of awkward silence, she cleared her throat.

“Sorry,” Thalia said. She stood and ascended into the trailer, pulling out a long-stemmed lighter from her belt. Di handed her a can of accelerant, which the girl lightly sprinkled on the chicken.

“A generous application of holy fluid is necessary,” said the firefighter, squeezing her hand over Thalia’s, squirting it all over the altar and the mess around it.

“I am now prepared to receive my nourishment,” Di said. Thalia pointed the lighter at the chicken and clicked the trigger. Nothing. She tried again and again, stabbing at it with each attempt. Prepared for such a mishap from living in cursed places so long, Belle wiggled her foot back and forth on a stick to create a spark at a distance.

The fire roared, and Di and Thalia quickly stepped out of the trailer. “Behold the speed at which the pyre consumes everything you hold dear — and likely you as well,” said the goddess, glowing in the conflagration. A column of black smoke rose into the empyrean.

Phiale watched forms wink in and out of the roiling flames: a volley of arrows, a snarling bear, a man’s face twisted in agony. Then her gaze wandered across the lawn to the garden and its shed, which made her wonder whether she’d wound the hose back up the other day like she was supposed to. As she stared at reflections in the outbuilding’s dirty window, her mind again conjured recognizable shapes, like a girl’s face … specifically Windi’s face.

After the demonstration, Larry doused the blaze and Di changed back into her fire gear to help clean up. The girls had trickled away to after-school clubs (or for a nip of nectar in Belle’s case); but Phiale headed to the shed, where she peeked in the window to ensure the hose was coiled around its reel (it was) and the image of Windi had been illusory (it hadn’t).

The Skipper was looking up at her like a cornered animal wedged between a lawnmower and stack of terra cotta pots — until she recognized her friend and grinned with relief. The door was padlocked from the outside, but Phiale could open it because she had the combination saved to her phone.

“You must have climbed through the window — or somebody locked you in,” she said as Windi hugged her in the dim, dusty light.

“No.”

“Eh … how’d you get in here?”

“My life’s in danger,” she said. “I had to go underground … literally.”

“You stole an emerald, didn’t you? Off that mannequin.” Phiale held up her phone with the picture she’d taken and zoomed in on the pendant.

“Not too sly was I?” she admitted, pointing to her purse on a potting bench. Phiale started for it but Windi grabbed her. “No, don’t touch it. It shows you things you don’t want to see … like me lying on a stone slab … a Monarch hovering over, ready to plunge a knife in my heart.”

“Why don’t you just give it to Rapp like he wants?”

“I’m not going near that creep anymore … I’m sorry, that’s bad, I shouldn’t call him that … no — I’m done with butterfly cults … I’m the one who took the risk — it’s more mine than his.”

“He’s our principal. You can’t keep hiding from him. Anyway, do you remember the dragon saying he’s after a gem? Do you want that nasty thing coming for you?”

“It’s more mine than his, too.”

A sudden whiff of smoke filled the shed as Di appeared in the doorway, hulking and dirty. “I don’t know who they are, but you’re being watched,” she said.

Phiale looked out the window and saw agents Booker and Fafner peeking from opposite sides of a large oak 50 yards away. “It’s the Feds.”

Windi leapt up and grabbed her purse. “I’ve got to go.” She twisted a rusty bucket sitting next to the door until it clicked and then lifted it, along with several floorboards stuck to the bottom. Phiale peered into the hole and saw a ladder, which Windi descended into the darkness until just her head was visible. She looked at the other two and pointed to a small flashlight clipped to the side of Di’s helmet. “My phone’s battery ran out this morning. Can I borrow that?”

“No need,” Di said. She radioed the chief that she had a few other things to take care of and to go ahead back without her. “We’re coming too. You two go down first — I’ll bear the light.”

Phiale glanced once more out the window and saw the agents now walking toward the shed. So down she went, past dirt, roots and rock. At the bottom, she looked up in time to see Di struggling to shut the trap door. Then the light from her helmet danced as her boots loudly scraped the rungs in the otherwise hushed space. Was there still supposed to be a crack of light at the top?

A system of underground pathways had existed in New Harmony since the Rappite days, when Father Rapp had them dug as a way for him to keep an eye on his flock. (He could also appear seemingly out of nowhere — for a touch of the supernatural.) The most recent beam restoration and passage clearing happened in the 1980s as part of an “Under Utopia” tourism scheme using federal fallout shelter funds. But having drawn more attention from Department of Justice auditors than paying visitors, the project was abandoned.

The network as a whole was largely forgotten over the next four decades, but the Butterfly Club knew about it. (A map of the tunnels drawn by Father Rapp himself more than 200 years earlier was a cherished Butterfly Club secret.) Windi and other members occasionally used the passages as shortcuts and to avoid bad weather on outings.

As Phiale filled Di in on the gem heist and interrogation by the museum heavies, they passed several offshoot tunnels — along with several doors.

“Where are we supposed to come out, Windi?” Di asked.

“The labyrinth.”

“I don’t think we’re headed the right way,” Phiale said.

“How would you know?”

“I can sense the river getting closer.”

They reversed course with little protest from Windi, who wasn’t confident navigating the tunnels to begin with. (Di tried to check their location on her phone but couldn’t get a signal.)

After nearly 10 minutes of Windi supposedly getting her bearings and then losing them again, Di stopped in a patch of light from a slanted air vent.

“This is getting ridiculous,” she said, stuffing tobacco under her bottom lip. “We just need to try a door and apologize later if we wind up in somebody’s cellar. Then we should figure out what to do about that emerald — and get those agents off your tail.”

“I heard Sienna told the Feds she just happened to come across the girls with the giant’s sword — and ran off before she could see who it was,” Phiale said. “Surely the government already has some kind of file on the Seance Club.”

“I bet so. After y’all came back from the field trip, I heard on the scanner that one of your classmates got transported back to Evansville — to a psych ward.”

“The ones who weren’t in the Seance Club chalked it up to some kind of laser light show — a hologram. Guess not all of them could believe that.”

“Also …,” Di said glaring at Phiale, “Belle is not supposed to leave New Harmony.”

“I doubt I could stop her from doing anything.”

“Just call me next time. She’s in too much danger when she’s away.”

“Hey,” Windi interrupted. “Is somebody singing?” They stopped to listen.

“I can hear something now, like an orchestra,” Phiale said.

Then, from somewhere close in the tunnels, agent Booker shouted: “This way! I think I heard one of those mother fu—”

“Shhh!” the other hissed. “We’ll scare them off again.”

The three of them set off around a corner — and nearly knocked over a dwarf in a leather trench coat.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, smoothing his receding hairline. “Alberich’s my name … getting ready for my cue to go up.” He pointed to a nearby ladder and hatch to where the opera music was coming from. “Have to flirt with some Rhinemaidens, get paid.”

“Whatever, creep,” Di said as she climbed the ladder and pushed open the hatch with the girls in tow.

“Wait! You can’t — we’re rehearsing!”

When Phiale surfaced onto the stage, Flosshilde was on a downward swing — headed straight toward the girl in a shimmery, sequined aqua blue dress, her face twisted in a scream: “Woglinde!”

Just in time, Thalia (with the help of a much stronger stagehand) pulled a rope to raise the high-momentum singer and prevent a collision of water nymphs. “Humans are emerging from Nibelheim!”

“They are trespassers,” proclaimed her sister, also out for a swim while suspended from the rafters. “Thieves after our gold!”

“Are they willing to renounce love for it?”

“Sorry people, just a routine fire inspection,” Di said. “Everything looks fine. Congratulations.”

“I tried to stop them,” Alberich said, poking up his head. “And two more just showed up.”

“Oh, shut up you troll,” Woglinde said from above.

“Get your freak ass out our way!” agent Booker shouted from below.

Tracking mud across the stage toward the exit, Phiale and Windi smiled and waved as they followed Di past a backdrop decorated with bubbles, fish and seaweed. Clamshell footlights glowed along the edge of the stage.

“Who are they, then?” asked the third sister, Wellgunde, perched on a river rock, pointing to the students.

“Eh … my interns,” Di responded.

“I’d like to see one of them carry me out of a burning building,” Flosshilde said with a deep, hearty laugh. “You need to schedule these things in advance next time, loser!”

“How dare you insult mighty Artemis,” Thalia said and jerked as hard as she could on the rope during an upswing, causing the singer to strike her head on a wooden beam.

* * *

Di grilled venison for the fire crew and two girls that evening, having dispatched the agents with a deadly glare at the front door of the station when they dropped by to see why she’d gone with the students into the tunnel. Phiale stuck to corn on the cob and baked beans, though, having read about Artemis changing some perv hunter into a stag after she caught him watching her and her nymphs bathe — his own dogs devoured him. The girl also showed off her newfound archery skills in front of Windi and the firefighters.

As the two students walked back to the academy after nightfall, their plan to get Windi out of her Butterfly Club mess started shaping up sooner than expected — when they noticed four pale green lights dancing toward them along the sidewalk. Windi grabbed her friend’s arm and pulled her into a stand of trees at the edge of Tillich Park.

“Monarchs,” she said. “They’re collecting luna moth eggs for a ceremony. The glowy paint under their eyes is supposed to help them find the clutches. They shimmer in the dark somehow.” She pulled a canvas sack with a cartoon Dalmatian in a fire helmet from her purse and handed it to Phiale. “Give the stone to them; I’ll stay here in the bushes. Good luck.”

As Phiale approached the Monarchs in gray cloaks with their hoods up, one of them shouted: “Look! A Violet at night — her blooms are closed for sure.”

“Is she scared?” asked the other, swaying as if drunk.

“Where’d your friend skip off to, Fail-a-lee? She has something that doesn’t belong to her.”

“Tell Rapp she’s done with your cult,” Phiale said, handing over the sack. “Here’s the gem. Make sure to touch it — you won’t believe how smooth it feels.”

Looking inside, one of them proclaimed, “Father will be pleased!” Then they turned with a flutter of capes and headed toward the school. They hadn’t gotten far when Phiale heard a shriek. She smiled, wondering what the cursed emerald had revealed.

***

The night was breezy and warm as moviegoers filed into a small downtown theater for that week’s Throwback Thursday Terror feature: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the 1920s poster featured a gypsy dancing with a goat standing on its hind legs). Passing the brightly lit ticket booth, Phiale pointed out a long narrow bruise on the back of Windi’s leg.

“That’s probably from sleeping with a hoe last night.”

“What? Oh, yeah, the garden shed.” Phiale laughed. “You’re probably looking forward to your own bed. Prop your chair against the doorknob so nobody with a key can get in.”

From the glow of the main strip, they turned onto a residential street where only one of the overhead lamps worked, and the trees rustled like leathery wings in the wind. “What do you think the dragon would do with Belle if he got ahold of her?” Phiale asked.

“No idea. Rapp doesn’t talk about Gabriel … at least to Skippers. Those weirdos you gave the emerald to probably know.”

Phiale shuddered when she remembered how it felt to be within striking range of those footlong fangs. “Ms. Owen might know something about the snake at least. She saw it too.”

“Don’t tell her about it turning into a dragon, or she’ll have you committed — speaking of, wonder who it was that slipped her lid after the Indian seance.”

“Don’t have a clue. Mr. Owen shouldn’t make club outsiders do things like that. They were more concerned about student well-being at my last school.”

Regardless, Phiale was glad she finally had somebody discuss things with … even if those things were monstrous — along the lines of how she felt like she might finally be settling in somewhere … even if it that somewhere was deeply unsettling.

Back at the residence hall, she said goodnight to Windi in the stairwell as they went to their separate floors. Phiale opened the door to her room and gasped.

Her mattress had been stripped and tossed onto the floor, along with the contents of her dresser and closet. The top of her desk had been swiped clean except for two things. One was a framed photo — its glass smashed — of her and her parents in front of a Mayan temple sculpture depicting a priest holding a severed head (her mom was researching the site). The other was something she’d never seen before — and it felt like a backhand to the face. Phiale stood frozen, staring at a plastic mastodon skeleton with a plaque attached to the base. It read, “Smithsonian Institution: Our past, our shared future.”

Check out Chapter 7 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 5

“The eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara, as ours do now.” — Abraham Lincoln, on a visit to the famous falls

“Guten Morgen, Angels!” began the morning announcements — so loudly Phiale jumped in her seat. Ms. Owen set down the chalk she was using to explain meiosis, sighed and waited for his ranting to cease.

Rapp’s pronouncements included a reminder for his Butterfly Club members to get permission slips signed to remain at school through the Festival of Knowledge. “Remember to tell your parents that your room and board will be paid for through the generosity of the Hoosier Friends of Lepidopterology.” (No such group existed.) “Additionally, students going on this morning’s field trip with Mr. Owen’s so-called History class are to board the bus in front of school at the end of first period. I pray for your souls. And finally, Skipper Windi and Violet Phiale are to report to my office — und mach schnell.”

Windi was already sitting in one of two uncomfortable, wooden chairs facing Rapp’s mission-style desk by the time Phiale got there. Other than a large wooden cross hanging behind the principal, the walls were bare and white. A stack of herpetology and angelology books sat on his desk next to a framed embroidery quote: “I am a prophet, and I am called to be one.”

He noticed Phiale reading it as she sat down (there wasn’t anything else to look at). “Back in Deutschland, I — no, mein ancestor — was jailed for uttering that obvious truth in 1791. We had to flee the Fatherland, you see.”

“Eh …” said Phiale. Windi trembled beside her, the Skipper’s face paler than usual.

A grandfather clock ticked.

“Yes, well … while you girls were tending that butterfly trap last night, did either of you see anything unusual … maybe wander off into the woods?”

Chimes marked another quarter hour closer to the end.

“The only weird thing was the sky lighting up — huge flames down by the river,” Phiale said as she’d rehearsed.

“That seems to be a theme with you. Anyhow, Windi, did you happen to go off by yourself and see something you weren’t supposed to see yet? I can’t imagine you’d want to jeopardize your place in the initiation rite … or worse: participate in a way you wouldn’t enjoy.”

“N-no. We were both at the garden the whole time. Just hanging out and talking after it got dark.” Belle had (somewhat) filled her in on what was happening (while for some reason calling her Clara). The explanation did nothing to ease Windi’s feeling that reality was spinning away from her — beginning with the moment she fell into the abyss of the goat man’s gaze. She’d told Phiale how it left her feeling detached, like everything was happening on a movie screen.

Rapp stared coldly at Windi, twisting his beard hairs. “You will remain a Skipper until you’ve proven yourself worthy. I trust you’re clear on Operation Tiger Lily.” He side-eyed Phiale. “Of course that’s no business of outsiders.”

Windi nodded obediently. Then, as the girls were getting up to leave, the school secretary rushed in. “Sorry to interrupt, but a Smithsonian Institution agent is on the phone demanding to speak with the principal. I told her you’re in a meeting, but she doesn’t care … she used the F-word.”

* * *

The Angel Mounds State Historic Site has two main buildings connected by a glass walkway, both resembling earthen platform pyramids — one a gift shop (the only way in and out) and the other an interpretive center.

“What’s the deal with all the Abe Lincoln stuff?” Phiale asked, squeezing a stress ball of his bust she’d picked up from a display as they made their way through the shop.

“He used to live 30 miles from here when he was a teenager,” Windi said.

“And they call me a know-it-all,” Belle chimed in. The fact she was there at all was a testament to her FOMO over seeing what the Seance Club had planned. The barrier supposedly keeping her in New Harmony was that she lost her magic when she was away. This leads to a range of troubles — from spell casting withdrawals (always grabbing at twigs) to an increased threat of mortality. Mr. Owen had seen Belle previously but didn’t know who she was, so he’d pulled her aside as she was getting on the bus. She begged to come along because she was so excited to explore possible influences of Atlantean giants on Middle Mississippian culture. The teacher’s face brightened, and he waved her aboard, also happy that an additional soul could stand in for Sienna, quarantined over the viral photo.

By the time they got to Angel Mounds, Mr. Owen had grown jittery. “Keep walking,” he said after the girls stopped to browse. “We’ll have time to shop on the way out.”

Windi asked Phiale if she thought she could get away with slipping the squishy Abe into her purse instead of putting it back on the shelf like she was doing — if she’d noticed what the security cameras looked like and where they were.

“Why would I want that stupid thing?”

“Eh … no reason. Just like to play these things out in my head.”

A middle-aged woman bedecked in turquoise jewelry and a feather in her hair stood at the entrance to the interpretive center. “Hi, Mr. Owen … glad to see you back,” she said like she wasn’t at all. “Nice top hat. You got a rabbit in there?”

“Magic is for later, Tallulah. We were promised a tour.”

* * *

Dragons are avid gemstone collectors. In fact, they can sense when one with strong magic is within a hundred miles or so — and they feel unsettled until it’s added to their treasure hoard. Stones that trigger clairvoyance, like the emerald pendant dangling over a Mississippian girl’s bare chest in an Angel Mounds mannequin display of village life, also tend to provide the beasts with detailed visions of their location.

Originally dug up by a Cherokee in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then engraved with a thunderbird, the gem should have been in a museum or at least behind glass. But back in the ’70s, an archaeology student (guided by the Fates) had “accidentally” tossed it into a box of glass costume jewelry for the reenactment displays instead of the one for real artifacts.

The mannequin that ended up wearing it was watching an older woman sitting in the dirt pounding corn into flour with a mortar and pestle. “Girls your age learned vital skills like food preparation along with child-rearing, and were soon married,” the guide informed the class.

“That’s if they weren’t sacrificed in a ritual first,” noted Bellatrix, a Dabbler-level Seance Club member with jet-black lipstick and matching eyeshadow, fingernail polish and hair. “They probably kept quiet about being virgins, is all I’m getting at.”

Tallulah gasped. “Why would you even say that? These were a gentle people living in harmony with nature … just look.” She waved her arm over the smiling figures, also frozen in acts of fish net mending, drumming, hut thatching, etc. — bird calls and tribal chanting emanated from unseen speakers.

“Utopian, I’m sure,” Belle said, followed by “ancestor-cult” while coughing.

The guide cleared her own throat: “Moving along, the next diorama depicts the entire site, which was occupied from 1000-1450 CE and had a peak population of more than 1,400. They built at least 11 earthen structures for burials, escaping floods, elevating the chieftain’s home and ceremonies — when astronomical events closed the distance between the natural and spirit worlds. Central Mound is the tallest at 44 feet … ”

Windi stopped Phiale and Belle from following the group and stepped over the display rope. “I want to get a photo: Windi, Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily together again at last. Stay there, Phiale — take it with your phone.”

Belle joined Windi, and they each put an arm around the diorama girl for the picture. Afterward, as the fairy was climbing back over the rope, Phiale saw Windi pull out of her purse what looked like a pair of scissors glinting under the spotlights. Then she hugged the mannequin and said, “Thank you, Tiger L—” Windi shrieked and stumbled backward, shoving things into her purse and tripping over the rope. Phiale caught her, shocked at her pallor and trembling. Did Operation Tiger Lily — whatever that was — just go FUBAR?

“What’s going on over there?!” shouted an elderly man wearing a name tag, wagging a finger at them from across the hallway. Looking back at the mannequin as they raced to catch up with the group, Phiale felt something was missing but couldn’t quite say what.

The rest of the tour was a blur of broken pottery, barely covered natives and archaeological photos (several Seance Club members laughed at how meticulous their digs were).

When it was wrapping up, Bellatrix expressed disappointment in not getting to see at least pictures of the skeletal remains found at the site. And Mr. Owen heartily seconded her concern.

“Back when I visited Angel Mounds as a girl,” Tallulah said, wiping away a tear, “I was exposed to those horrific images of desecration. We are more respectful these days.”

“Is it that?” Mr. Owen shot back. “Or are you hiding something?”

“Like Atlantean skeletons? Sir, I’ll remind you for the umpteenth time that the tallest ancestor disturbed from rest at this particular site measured 6 feet, 4 inches.

“My mission,” she continued, “is to tell the true tale of my people, not a tall tale. It’s not a narrative for the White Man to control anymore.”

“Your people were Middle Mississippian?” Bellatrix asked.

“Fort Ancient, actually.”

“Mr. Owen, didn’t you tell us those two cultures fought with each other?”

“Like savages, I’m sure,” he said.

“You and your necromancy club have offended my ancestors, sir. I must immediately restore dignity to this sacred space.” She squatted, spread her arms and chanted in a strange language, occasionally emitting the piercing cries of a bald eagle.

“I’m not sure it’s working,” Belle said.

* * *

“More than 2,000 known mounds dot the Indiana landscape, but a lot more have gone undetected because they can look like normal hills,” Mr. Owen said as he led the girls over a bridge toward the main field on that warm spring day. They’d broken off the tour with Tallulah after she pointed at the threatening sky, saying it meant her predecessors were still angry. He promised he’d tell them she said hi.

Distant thunder rumbled as they reached a reconstructed wattle-and-daub palisade wall section. “This outer barrier once stood as tall as 15 feet, but that’s surely a conservative estimate,” Mr. Owen continued.

“Maybe it’s because the Indians didn’t pay them,” said Thalia, a mousy Theater Club stagehand who secretly wanted to act but was too shy (although being African American, she was often begged to try … so the cast would appear diverse).

“Didn’t pay whom?” Mr. Owen asked.

“Th-the giants … maybe the Indians didn’t pay them for building the mounds, and then the giants got mad … eh … like in the opera, so they had to make the fence so tall.”

“Oh, now I remember. In her essay, Thalia references the upcoming New Harmony Opera Society production of Wagner’s Das Rheingoldthat her club is helping stage.” (Rehearsals were held up when Climate Club members stole the ropes and pulleys meant to suspend ample water nymphs swimming through the air.) “The god Wotan commissions two giants to build Valhalla in exchange for his sister-in-law. His wife nixes that deal, so there’s the problem with their compensation.”

Belle nudged Phiale and said, “You’ll never believe this, but those giants were actually my idea … Wagner and I used to hang out by the lake, you know. I had to step in — he actually had dwarfs building Valhalla when he first told me about Rheingold. Dwarfs!”

“That’s right, Belle. Dwarfs were certainly involved, and it didn’t end well … Valhalla went up in flames. Anyway, because giants also constructed these earthen mounds — and the tall fences are an obvious defense against Atalan attacks — Thalia’s theory does have some grounding.”

“I’m confused,” Windi said, trying to seize hold of anything in her fog. “Did normal-size Native Americans build a wall to protect themselves from giants? I thought the giants were their rulers … and buried here.”

“May I explain?” Belle offered.

“Please do,” Mr. Owen said with a tip of his hat.

“Based on writings of professor Rafinesque, the Atalans were post-Atlantis diaspora who ruled as gods over the much shorter natives. But they eventually lost power and were cast out of the villages.”

“Very good,” Mr. Owen said. He looked up at the leaden clouds and waved for the group to follow him.

Belle continued as they walked briskly toward Central Mound. “Remnant Atalan populations retreated to Mesoamerica and into the American wilderness, mainly the caves. They’re now known by such names as Bigfoot and the Hovey Lake Swamp Ape, who I’ve actually met (she held her nose and waved her hand in front of her face).

As they made their way up the structure’s ramp, marked by a trail of freshly mowed grass, Mr. Owen’s voice boomed: “When the Atalans still held sway in this region, their mighty king Aranuk sat on the Cahokia throne while his giant chiefs ruled satellite villages like Angel Mounds. We’ll be speaking with one of them shortly.”

The teacher gathered his class into a circle on the mound, although Phiale lingered at the highest point, transfixed by the murky brown Ohio River rolling past. She felt small near its silent power and wondered what unknown horrors its depths concealed. Catfish as big as school buses? Sunken barges? Death itself?

“Girls, over here … now,” Mr. Owen said, snapping Phiale out of her trance. With the wind picking up, and rain looking imminent (although not of her doing this time), the last of the site’s other visitors were headed back across the field to the interpretive center. So the teacher and his charges were left alone to connect with history as he saw fit.

This involved having them form a ring and hold hands. “Clear your minds and think of corn … what’s that? No, Windi, not creamed corn — more like you’d see in a field.” Then he recited an incantation in an American Atlantean dialect (no spitting or screeching).

Rain began to patter. “You should have left your purse in the bus — it’s going to get soaked,” Phiale said to Windi.

“My purse is no business for outsiders.”

Holding Phiale’s other hand, Belle tried to interpret for her what the teacher was reading from a sheet of paper: “Chief Waynunak, we already hear your voice rumbling through the clouds … now manifest in all the grotesqueness of your Atalan form … no, that’s not what he said (I hope!) — ‘greatness’? … let’s just watch and see what happens. Oh, corn is happening.”

Stalks of iridescent ghost maize sprouted up around them, and a ring of translucent mastodon tusks appeared in the middle of the seance circle. From within this ring arose the spectral image of red-haired, nine-foot-tall Chief Waynunak. He looks upset, Phiale thought, hoping against all evidence that Belle at least might have things under control.

Mr. Owen fumbled his paper, dropped it and tried to dry it on his topcoat. “I can’t read it; the ink has run too badly.” He shoved it into his pocket and grabbed the hands of the two nearest girls. “Don’t break the circle — hold tight!”

Glaring at them, Chief Waynunak opened his mouth and pearls tumbled out, down his bare chest and past a loincloth featuring a beaded eagle’s head with an open beak and extended tongue.

The ghost giant roared forth epithets Phiale couldn’t understand. Belle knew what he was saying, though.

“May I interpret?” she asked Mr. Owen, who just smiled meekly. “He thinks you disturbed his celestial slumber to ask him to become one of your … er, harem girls.”

“No-no, tell him I am his humble servant and I just want to ask a question — one that may help restore his chiefdom to its former glory.”

Belle told him (trying not to spit). Chief Waynunak laughed and responded via the fairy: “There are some answers humans can’t handle knowing, so be careful what you ask. As for reviving the Dominion of the Eagle, a wounded chicken would be more likely to achieve that than you and your band of girl warriors.”

“Ask him what the proper time is for the Rite of Resurrection,” Mr. Owen shouted as the rain started coming down in sheets and lightning flashed around the mound. The seance circle was scattering in a panic at this point, and the otherworldly maize was disappearing.

“When the firewheel flickers in the Flower Moon,” Belle translated. “The big guy also said that the recompense isn’t due until the Buck Moon rises.”

“What kind of recompense?”

But Chief Waynunak was gone.

Belle didn’t have to ask, though. “From what I know about the lore, he’s after two things. One, a cache of river gold originally meant as an offering to the Underwater Panther but wrongly claimed by the Fire Snake. And … ” She just shook her head.

“What’s two?”

“A river of blood.”

Check out Chapter 6 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Or catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 4

“The Giants dwelt in Talo-tolo, the world Tolo of the Hindus, where we find the Tol-tecas (Tol-people): therefore America: called also Atala and once sunk in the waves.” — Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, The American Nations, Vol. I

illustration of a man with a shovel and a skeleton in the background

Phiale was excused from that Saturday morning’s bouquet-making. Having transferred so late, she was never assigned a Rose mentor like the other first-year Flower Club members were. So there was no reason for her to assemble an arrangement in appreciation of a senior’s “wise guidance,” as was tradition.

While the other Violets were snipping Guardian Angels and matching greenery with Golden Beauties, Phiale picked her way upstream through thorny undergrowth along the banks of Maple Run. She felt compelled to find its source.

If anybody had asked, she’d have said she simply wanted to … but how simple was it? What kind of a dweeb would let a fairy convince her she was possessed by a water nymph, anyway? Phiale wasn’t getting any Linda Blair vibes — her head hadn’t exactly whirled around like a vomit sprinkler. In fact, she pretty much just felt a pleasant buzz of power. But was that the nymph’s leash?

She also wondered why she actually felt protective of that winged weirdo — as opposed to immediately informing the authorities about her. As Phiale steadily climbed in elevation up the side of a long ridge, her hiking boots and jeans soaked and muddy, she came to where a subterranean spring became Maple Run as it emerged from the base of a 20-foot cliff. She rested on a boulder and gazed into the stream’s implausible depths. Beneath her, she sensed a vast network of invisible waterways feeding the ones we can actually see — like the Wabash snaking across the light-green landscape in the distance. At first, Phiale thought she heard the water making flute music; then the brook emitted noises like a human voice … it almost sounded like: “I found another shield!” And: “Look at the size of that skull — big as a beach ball!”

Once Phiale realized it wasn’t the creek talking, she went to investigate, skirting the sheer limestone face via the eastern slope on an old logging road. She found the Seance Club at the dome-shaped apex and hid behind a shaggy red cedar. Mr. Owen was straining to lift what appeared to be an enormous copper shield into a trailer attached to a Jeep, which had ripped a large stone slab from the ground with a front-mounted chain winch. Phiale started to go see what they were up to, but something held her back. Something felt off … creepy, really. The girls had gathered around the teacher holding shovels — except for one — just standing there gawping. “Sienna, what are you doing?” he asked nervously. “You’re supposed to be on lookout.”

Phiale didn’t stick around.

* * *

“Only 120 miles northwest of here, a race of giants ruled over what we now call Cahokia,” Mr. Owen proclaimed to the class.

Phiale, along with his other students not in the Seance Club, had learned not to take him too literally. But good lord, she thought — what the hell kind of school did my parents send me to? Normally, she’d be dozing away the class after lunch on a Monday, but the teacher had a way of keeping her attention.

Mr. Owen continued: “The city’s population peaked at around 30,000 in the year 1100 … yes, Windi, I said giants, and I see your hand, but you’ll have to wait until I’m done … making it larger than any other settlement that would come along in what’s now the United States for the next 600 years.”

He turned off the lights, pulled a screen over the chalkboard and flipped on a projector to show an ancient city dotted by large, pyramidal mounds and residential dwellings — with the Mississippi River, smaller streams and maize fields in the background. One pyramid towered over the others inside an expansive plaza surrounded by a palisade.

“Just across from modern-day St. Louis, Caho—”

“I don’t see the Gateway Arch,” Windi blurted. “Maybe the giants could have used it as a croquet wicket.”

“No croquet, but plenty of ‘Off with their heads!’” Mr. Owen said, moving his finger across his throat. “The blood of many young girls soaked the earth of these terraced mounds as offerings to their overlords. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque described the horrifying details. It’s all in here.” Wild-eyed, he grabbed a leather-bound manuscript from his desk and waved it around (it was one of several writings the hapless professor accidentally left behind in New Harmony after his 1818 visit).

“Enough!” Rapp blared over a loudspeaker mounted above the screen.

“Are you eavesdropping on my class?”

“I won’t tolerate the devil’s teaching in my school, you heathen.”

“You’ll pay for this,” Mr. Owen growled as he ripped wires from the bottom of the speaker. The phone started ringing, so he tore the cord out of that too. Then he locked the door.

“Moving forward in time …,” he said, adjusting his pantaloons and changing the image on the screen to a rendering that also featured a walled town with a plaza zigzagged by walking paths, next to a river. In the new picture, though, a much larger inner wall also served as the communal living quarters — a three-story building that formed a square enclosing several other buildings along with towers billowing smoke. Sitting near the screen, Phiale made out a well-dressed 19th century family and their dog taking in the scene from a ridge. It looked pleasant, albeit a little boring.

“This is how New Harmony should have looked,” Mr. Owen said, sighing. “It took me a long time to realize we were going about things all wrong back then — that people aren’t naturally inclined to embrace their duties simply for the well-being of the community … that they wouldn’t feel ashamed to lollygag under an apple tree while a work crew marched off to the hop field.”

He flipped back and forth between the renderings of the two towns, one that actually thrived, the other, a pipe dream. “Since then, I’ve realized that if you want a perfect world, a harmonious order, grandeur — above all efficiency — there must be sacrifices … in honor of more advanced leaders … of a certain stature.”

Mr. Owen clicked the projector to yet another rendering, similar to the first with various pyramids, but smaller than those in Cahokia. “This is where we’re going on a field trip Friday — Angel Mounds in Evansville. We’ll be joined by the rest of the Seance Club because we need extra hands for a project we’re working on.”

“Should we bring our own shovel, or will the club provide one?” Windi asked.

Mr. Owen gasped, as did Sienna, sitting in the next desk row over from Windi. “Young lady, if you’re implying that our club might be planning to desecrate one of those mounds … well, let’s just say the Indiana State Museum will stop at nothing to protect the official narrative … but enough!”

“I was just wondering if it was going to be like what the club was doing in that photo going around.”

Mr. Owen sucked in a breath and blew out slowly. “I’ve seen it — an obvious fake; anyway, their faces are concealed so it doesn’t matter.”

Windi held up her phone to show Sienna an image posted to the subreddit r/usefulredcircle by u/iiskipper — two girls with tongue-out emojis covering their faces posed next to an eight-foot sword leaning against a tree, its gold hilt encrusted with turquoise and obsidian. They were standing on a wooded hilltop scarred by recent digging, and in the background, blending into the foliage (if not for a useful red circle), was Sienna, whose job had been to make sure nobody saw them. “That’s you, right?”

“I was just the lookout,” she blurted. “Those giants are going to defend our town!”

Mr. Owen laughed nervously. “Keep quiet, you idiot!”

***

That evening just before dusk, Phiale scribbled off a History essay on why the walls surrounding Angel Mounds had to be so tall, and then she headed to that day’s Flower Club duty.

Belle appeared (as in she was suddenly there) next to Phiale as the latter dragged a hose toward an overgrown patch of weeds called the Butterfly Garden. Phiale was joining Windi at the plot, where one representative from each of the Flower and Butterfly clubs was supposed to meet regularly to tend it (a good way to bait specimens for the Pinning Wall).

The project was founded back in the 1920s as a peace partnership between warring factions at a time when interclub relations in general ranged from incendiary to explosive. Its state of neglect was a testament to the lack of collaborative spirit it had managed to foster over the ensuing century.

Phiale turned on the spray nozzle, sprinkling crabgrass, thistle and milkweed … possibly some purple coneflowers that weren’t blooming yet, if ever. “I doubt it needs watering,” Windi said. “You always water too much anyway. Huh … that’s funny — my dad’s a contractor and said your name is a fancy word for a fountain, like in a garden.”

Windi jabbed pruning shears in the direction of Belle. “What’s she doing here? Does she even go to this school? Nobody ever knows who she is.”

“You must be getting excited about your initiation rite — about making the cut,” Belle said and made stabbing motions over her heart.

“That’s a myth. Those Seance cows made it up a long time ago to smear us.”

“But it makes sense. Sacrifices become increasingly horrifying as a cult matures — it’s a matter of metaphysics.”

“Shut up, nerd.”

“You see, all idols want to grow stronger by constantly leveling up in power — measured by how much their devotees are willing to give up. There’s even a local myth about a snake that grows more than 10 times in size if it’s worshiped hard enough.” She looked at her watch. “What I’m getting at is that the knives always come out eventually.”

“OK, freak.”

Belle skipped around swiping at the air, “Oh, look at me. I’m just a silly schoolgirl trying to catch a butterfly … certainly not a bloodthirsty zealot whose cult would literally rule the world without any pushback.”

“Is that necessary, Belle?” Phiale said. “Tink?”

Windi looked up from acting like she was weeding. “Where’d she go? She was right there!” The garden stake she’d been holding for balance while squatting suddenly turned into a butterfly net. “What the hell?”

“Now, now,” Tinker Bell said, shaking a twig at her, hovering just out of the pole’s reach.

Windi’s eyes grew wider (than usual), and she grinned. “The talking elfin!” Springing from her crouch, Windi stumbled, recovered, fell, got back up and chased Tinker Bell into the darkening woods, shouting and slamming her net into branches.

Phiale went looking for them after she finished watering. Although the Skipper was clearly no threat to Tinker Bell, she still wanted to make sure the fairy was OK (a common feeling among Artemis’ attendants for the past 2,500 years). Plus, winding her way along a narrow trail, she somehow felt a screw-up in that area would incur the wrath of Di — which she’d like to take a hard pass on. Then, faintly, through the thicket, she heard the cries of a girl generally unloved and fed up with life: “Somebody help meeee … gross, you stink … quit stepping on me.”

* * *

The word “panic” comes from the Greek “panikos,” after the effect caused by looking into Pan’s face — an unfiltered glimpse into nature as it really is. While humans can’t handle such a shock and keep their composure, Phiale was partly immune as she stood there staring at the God in a half-dark valley. Being host to a nymph, she was more likely to frolic in nature than be freaked out by it … unlike Windi, pinned to the ground under the faun’s hoof.

“Get that thing off me!” she screamed. “It tried to kiss me!”

“Oh, a nymph … how much more exciting,” bleated the creature. He reminded Phiale of a video she’d watched of a black goat walking on its hind legs through a chicken coop — a little creepy but nothing to lose it over. That is, until it advanced on her.

Then, from the gloaming, an orange hat bobbed into view — under it appeared a figure in camo reaching for an arrow. Di!

“Behold! Artemis, the enemy of exuberance,” Pan proclaimed.

“How dare you appear before these girls in your true form,” said Di in a voice that was quiet but had the effect of somebody suddenly screaming at you from behind.

“Are you going to tell your daddy on me? This is who I am. I refuse to skulk about in a human baa-dy. I’m proud of my faunhood … your precious fairy says God is dead — well, the great god Pan is notdead.” He pounded his chest, and Di nocked the arrow.

“Go find yourself a filthy she-goat.” She took aim, and he disappeared into the woods with a burst of discordant pipe notes.

Phiale shuddered. Hopefully not in the direction of a farm.

“Great, I smell like that thing now,” Windi said. “If this gets out, nobody will ever want to marry me.”

“You mean as opposed to before?” Di said.

“Hey! Wait … aren’t you the Fire Safety Goddess?”

Ignoring her, Di stared at the ground and said: “I remember seeing y’all down here, dropping my kill to reach for an arrow … and that goat thing … wait, I saw the fairy out here too just now. Where is she?”

“You know about her, then,” Phiale said. “Windi met her too just now.”

“So the elfin’s a fairy,” the Skipper said, picking the net off the ground. “You have no idea how much Principal Rapp wants one of us to catch that thing. Sometimes I think it’s the only way I’ll ever make it to the initiation.”

Di shattered the net’s wooden pole with an arrow just above Windi’s hand. “You’re leaving that and coming with us back to your dorm.” The huntress started up the ridge, and the girls followed.

“Wow, what a nutjob,” Windi said. At the crest, Di grabbed something off the ground and then stood silhouetted by the full moon cresting the horizon. “And is she holding a dead turkey?”

They’d just started back when Phiale heard what sounded like a cross between a party favor and a crying baby in the direction of the river.

“A fawn in distress,” Di said.

Windi sneered. “That goat thing? Who cares?”

“No — a baby deer, and we’re helping it.”

Had Belle been with them, she’d have pointed out how they should pause to consider whether they might be headed into a trap. But she was instead crouched on a bluff overlooking the Wabash, mimicking the sound of a troubled fawn.

“That shrew tricked us,” Windi said when they found her bleating at the moon.

“Keep your voice down,” Belle whispered, motioning them toward her.

Peering through the underbrush, they saw Rapp standing a little ways upriver in shallow water just past the Maple Run confluence. “It sounds like Gabriel will have a tasty treat tonight: a helpless creature stuck in the brambles,” he said.

Belle stifled a giggle and made the distress call again. “Shut up, you fool, or we’ll be the treat,” Di hissed.

Rapp started praying in a strange language, and spitting a lot.

“What’s he saying?” Di asked Belle.

“My Atlantean is rusty — plus it’s hard to tell without him being able to screech hypersonically — but I think he’s pledging total loyalty to an archangel whose excretions … no, no, whose arrival is signaling the beginning of the end … and whose flaming sword will tickle … eh, scratch that — you get the point.”

As Rapp circled with his hand above the water, a spiral of ripples glimmered in the moonlight. The coiling became wider and faster, forming a whirlpool, and Rapp stepped back onto the shore. He bowed his head and extended his arms, palms up.

Then the frogs went quiet. Phiale had gotten so used to their mating chorus it was startling when the spring peepers — aka Pseudacris crucifer (false locusts bearing a cross on their backs) — stopped peeping. (Rapp would’ve been nauseated to find out pseudo-religious creatures had been screeching for sin in the muck all around him.)

From the vortex emerged the snake Phiale saw the other day on the flower walk, like it was rising from a charmer’s basket. It kept growing larger, sprouting legs and bat-like wings … if nothing else, our school mascot makes sense now.

Standing as tall as a sycamore, the dragon immediately stretched its scaly black neck toward the bluff at the same time Belle cast a protection spell that cloaked everyone hiding there. The cat-eyed beast got so close that Phiale could smell the sulfuric smoke curling from its nostrils. And she could make out a red streak running across its snout and fanning out past its horns across the back of its head. It flicked its tongue.

“I see you’ve found your wurst, Great Avenger.”

“There’s nothing here,” the beast said in a deep, leathery voice. “I sensed something strong and ancient, but it’s gone. This land conceals powers that can trick you.” Gabriel looked down at Rapp and asked sternly: “Are you any closer to capturing the frosted elfin?”

“We’re closing in.”

“And the gem?”

“Within days.”

“Do not fail me.”

“I grow stronger only through your approval, mein Lord.”

“And richer with river treasure too, if you succeed.”

Windi whispered in a strange voice, her eyes far away: “Golden glints … shimmery depths …” Belle looked at her curiously and smiled (although it was more like a grimace under the strain of her spell hiding three other people).

“I will bring her to you alive as promised,” Rapp said.

The dragon scowled at him, smoke now pouring out of his nostrils. “You had better,” he said and raised his snout to the sky, shooting forth a column of flames that lit the night sky.

“Eh …,” Rapp said nervously. “That was quite the attention getter, your Lordship.”

“No matter. I must return to my lesser form. Once you complete my offerings, though, I can remain at full strength.” The dragon shrank back into a snake and swam off downriver. Phiale sensed a lingering disturbance in the water — like a churning chill.

Belle ended the spell and caught her breath. Di motioned them away from the bluff, but with all that’d happened, she forgot to grab her turkey when she started off. Windi stepped in it, feeling a deep squish accompanied by a gaseous burbling, and let out a string of words that, while somewhat stifled, are those that naturally prick a principal’s attention.

“Who is that?” Rapp said. “Windi? Is that you?”

Check out Chapter 5 of The Flame of Heraclitus. And catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 3

“Fanaticism is the only kind of willpower the weak and insecure can actually muster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Rapp’s voice crackled from the hallway speakers late in the school day as the girls filed out of their classrooms: “Remember, you have no sixth period. Report directly to the gymnasium for the assembly. Those who miss it or show up late will face severe punishment. Additionally, if you have any information about the Theater Club’s missing pulleys und ropes … ”

“I hope he catches those thieves,” said Windi, the lowly Skipper who’d been bringing up the end of yesterday’s Butterfly Club procession. Gangly, a bit bug-eyed and limping, the girl had fallen in beside Phiale as the students made their way toward the academic building’s back doors. “Maybe Principal Rapp can use the rope they stole to han—”

Windi sprawled face down on the floor, tripped from behind by the girl with sparkly glasses — whose knee was now pressing hard against her back. “That was for yesterday, scum!” the fairy shrieked, and then just as suddenly helped her up. “Hi, my name is—,” she said and spat on Windi’s shoes.

“Eh … meet Belle,” Phiale said.

“Keep that freak away from me — I’ve never done anything to her!” she yelled, now limping even harder as she tried to keep up with the other two, who’d moved on. Windi had no other friends (even her fellow club members shunned her) and was tolerated in this instance only because Phiale herself didn’t have close companions, having transferred just a few months earlier.

“I’ve got my eye on you and your nasty cult,” Belle informed Windi. “And if you think you stand a chance against me with those nets … they’re the kind you give to little children,” she said, laughing.

“Oh, look, another nasty cult,” the fairy added as they emerged into the glare of the sun. Just outside the doors, members of the Climate Club were confronting their fellow students along the short path to the high school’s wooden gym. The girls held signs with messages like “Natural gas is silent but deadly” and, accompanied by a crude drawing of the Earth engulfed in flames: “THE END IS NEAR!!” Racing past them toward the gym, Rapp glanced at the latter image and gave it a thumbs up.

As Phiale passed them, she overheard a senior with a nose ring say into her phone: “I don’t care if you’re afraid of heights — this is more important than your own miserable existence, you weakling.”

Inside the gym, bathed in the heat and red glow of 10-foot flames blasting up from a pair of cardboard-facade sword hilts, the girls took their places in the bleachers. Black curtains hung from the rafters to the hardwood floor behind the methane-fed props. At a podium stood Rapp wearing a scarlet skullcap — grinning like a maniac and flanked by fiery ferns.

“Behold, our Avenging Angel!” the principal said with a wave of his arm. The curtains jerked back to reveal a large metal tank filled with water. From its two-foot depths, someone in a black Godzilla costume with a wire halo emerged brandishing a plastic flaming sword (its LED lights not flickering from the moisture). Prostrate before their new mascot, pompoms extended, the NHGA cheer squad encircled the pool. The gym fell silent, except for the torches whooshing fire … and a faint squeaking. Despite everything else going on, Phiale’s attention focused on the squeak … squeak. Where was it coming from? Was it getting louder? Her heart now racing, she felt disoriented by the whole hellish scene … and the squeaking … it now sounded like it was coming from two different places … somewhere overhead?

Then slowly, led by Rapp, a chant grew: “vengeance … vengeance … vengeance … ”

“Is that wet lizard the mascot?” Belle asked. “And it’s supposed to be an angel?” Windi glared at her, chanting louder. “My favorite part about cultists like Rapp is how distorted their perceptions get — like falling under an enchantment spell without magic. Hilarious.”

“… vengeance … vengeance … ”

“And what’s this?” the fairy said. Using a stick she’d just pulled from her pocket, Belle pointed out a girl descending on a rope from the darkness above. She was sobbing, gripping a bucket while bracing herself — an arm around the line and a foot through a loop — like a frightened acrobat.

“Stop swinging me! I’m going to miss!” she yelled.

Miss what? Phiale wondered. Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like it was part of the program.

Then, from above: “How can I be swinging you — it’s on a pulley, you idiot! You better not miss!”

Phiale now saw there were actually two girls on ropes swaying in front of the flames. “I’m too low! And quit swinging us!” screamed the other. The pulley squeaking intensified as an unseen accomplice struggled to bring her more in line.

“This is too much fun,” said Belle, moving the stick in sync with their oscillations.

One of the protesters decided to go ahead and complete her act of resistance anyway: “As guardians of Gaia, we extinguish—” She slammed into the other girl.

Not only did they manage to splash only each other as opposed to the carbon-spewing torches, but one of them kicked out at a sword hilt to avoid being incinerated, and the prop fell over, setting the curtains ablaze.

Despite everybody’s shrieking and jostling, Phiale concentrated on the water tank as the mascot hopped over the rim and slithered around on the floor trying to stand but slipping on abandoned pompoms. The heat in the gym was now fierce as sweat beaded on Phiale’s forehead. She grasped the situation in a flash: The flames were spreading quickly, and they might not make it out alive. Watching the fire reflections dance chaotically and ephemerally in the rippling water, Phiale felt a bizarre mental tug that somehow pulled her underneath the cool weight of the tank’s 700 gallons. With explosive force, she sprayed it up onto the curtains, dousing the flames.

* * *

After everyone was accounted for, Phiale set off toward Main Street feeling a strange mix of elation and unease — The water in the tank just obeyed my will, like when I made it rain by the creek. It felt like I was doing it, but …

Phiale glanced over her shoulder while crossing the school lot and saw the fairy was following her. “Go find someone else to get in trouble,” she said. “I’ve got to go talk to people about one of the fires you started … our school has counselors, you know. Seek help.”

“That was impressive back there, you putting out the fire,” Belle replied. “You,” she repeated, making scare quotes around the word and grinning darkly.

“Hey, I did it as much as any nymph did,” Phiale snapped back, and she even tried to tell herself that all that talk of possession was total bunk anyway. Was it, though? How much control do I really have anymore? And was that awful fairy reading my mind just now? “Anyway, leave me alone. I’m going to have to start carrying a fire extinguisher if you keep following me around. You need to take things more seriously. You’re going to kill people.”

“Whatever, I’d just watch out when that firefighter lady starts taking things seriously.” Then, under her breath she added, “Talk about killing people.” Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, she turned back into Tinker Bell and fluttered into a flowerbed in front of the academy’s sign.

Phiale already knew a shortcut to the fire station, having seen the back of it while picnicking with classmates by a pond. She’d never been to New Harmony before her parents deposited her at the boarding school 130 miles from their Bloomington home. They were going on sabbaticals that spring to opposite ends of the globe — her mom, an art historian, to Nicaragua and her father to Naxos.

She walked up Main Street, past golf carts parked in front of quaint shops and eateries like Pie in the Sky, which smelled like something was burning. Right before the road ended, a large, brick-walled enclosure came up on her left. This was the Roofless Church that Mr. Owen had talked about in history class, how its “gilded gate was designed by … no one is to laugh or you’ll get detention … by the brilliant sculptor Jacques Lipchitz … silence!”

Then Phiale crossed the road into Paul Tillich Park, named after a German-American existentialist greatly influenced by the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger, a colleague of his at the University of Marburg in the 1920s. Tinker Bell had also been deeply affected by Heidegger; she’d sneak into the Working Men’s Institute library in the wee hours to ponder Being and Time by the light of pixie dust — which was why when a visiting scholar from Indiana University later said the section “Reality as an Ontological Problem” had “sparkled on the page,” he meant it literally.

After the commotion of the assembly, Phiale felt the park’s silence viscerally; all the dead needles on the ground seemed to muffle the sounds around her. The quiet amplified her sense of being alone, which she often valued over hanging around girls she didn’t know very well. But how long will I be able to feel any solitude with that … thing in my mind?

Phiale’s uncanny feelings intensified when she came upon a bronze of Tillich’s oversized head stuck PEZ-like on a pedestal, framed by the park’s glittering pond behind it. A little farther along the trail, she passed a granite marker for his ashes, which were buried in New Harmony because he’d been so taken with the town’s Christian and socialist roots. “Why stop at being a slave to just one victimization cult when you can have two?” Belle actually said to his face when he visited town in 1963.

Now on a short path to the station’s back lawn, Phiale saw the firefighter from the other day in a T-shirt and camo pants shooting arrows at a hay target shaped like a deer, her movements graceful and flowing. When the girl got closer, she noticed all the arrows were clustered in the center of the bullseye (a rare sign of perfection in New Harmony).

“Come over here,” the woman said, holding out a three-fingered glove. After Phiale put it on, she positioned the girl’s left hand on the bow’s grip, nocked the arrow on the string and stepped away. Phiale drew it back without thinking and sent the shaft flying into the bullseye 30 yards away.

“You’ve done this before,” the firefighter said.

“Never.”

“That right? You know, I used to shoot at a scarecrow out here, but Chief made me change it after some crybaby complained about seeing arrows sticking out of its heart.” She drew the string back … “A crybaby who might just turn into a deer himself and learn the sweet release of my bow.” Thump.

Another firefighter, in uniform, emerged from the back of the station and shouted, “Die!”

Di grinned and turned to Larry. “Hi, chief. This is … what’s your name?”

Phiale told them, side-eyeing him.

“Seems like I knew a Phiale a long time ago,” she said and spit out tobacco. “I’m Di.”

“Oh, that’s what he meant,” the girl said, relieved.

The chief, middle-aged, short of breath and coughing, looked at Phiale and slowly shook his head. “It didn’t sound like much on the scanner … I only expected to set up some fans to air out the gym and be done with it. All of you girls were saying how the water leapt up by itself and put out the fire. What kind of hogwash is that?”

Phiale looked away and twisted the sole of a white tennis shoe back and forth in the grass. “It was chaos … I can’t remember anything really … had something to do with global warming, I think.”

“Hey, ain’t you the one who was at the labyrinth the other day? Why are you here? What do you know about all this?” An arrow whizzed by his ear and stuck into the station behind him.

“You’re the one who called Rapp yesterday about the labyrinth incident and made Phiale come here,” Di said. “And sorry … I missed,” she added, pointing to the target in the opposite direction.

“Ah! Now I remember. Weird fellow, that Rapp.”

“I’d say!” said a man who’d just wandered through the back door wearing a frock coat and ascot. “Hi, Phiale.”

“Hi, Mr. Owen.”

He glowered at the chief. “I demand a full investigation into that madman. When my family ran the academy, our girls lived and learned under optimal conditions … well, somewhat — but not the ninth circle of Hell it is now.”

“The fire was an accident, the way I understand,” the chief said. “He feels bad about it … promised to keep indoor flames to under eight feet and get the sprinkler system fixed. I scheduled a Fire Safety Goddess demonstration for the students.”

Mr. Owen sniffed. “We need more than gimmicks at this point, but what would one expect from a town in such utter decline — you just wait, though, things will change around here one way or another,” he said and stormed off.

“Come to think of it,” the chief said, walking closer to the other two. “I didn’t tell anybody because it’s not my business how people choose to worship the Lord, but I was fishing on the Wabash the other night just before dark and saw Rapp standing in the river with both his hands in the air, palms up. He had his head bent down … I couldn’t make out what he was chanting, but he was pretty intense.”

“Where’d you see him?” Di asked.

“Downstream from the academy, near where the creek comes out.”

“That’s funny. I was tracking wild turkeys around there and saw a swath of trees knocked down. I couldn’t think of what could’ve done it. There were these indentations, too … I figured I was just being stupid, but when I stood back, it looked like a big lizard print.”

“How big?” asked the chief.

“Well … if you parked your pickup over it, you’d still see toes sticking out.”

Phiale’s face turned ghostly pale. There’s no way she said “lizard print.”

Check out Chapter 4 of The Flame of Heraclitus. And catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 2

“Lethe dissolves ego, not into escapism but forgetful immersion, losing the self in flux without illusion.” — Rob Robill, Existential Firestorm

Phiale’s hand shook as she poured hibiscus tea into the principal’s porcelain cup. Pulling the spout away, she spilled a few red blossoms on the white tablecloth … and swayed under everyone’s gaze.

Ms. Owen, the biology teacher and Flower Club adviser, sucked in a breath and clicked her tongue from the other end of the long table where a half dozen girls sat, dappled in sunlight under the conservatory’s glass ceiling.

“Fail-a-lee,” whispered one of the nearby Roses.

As Principal Rapp smiled slightly and dabbed the spill with a cloth napkin, Phiale caught a whiff of musty vanilla, like the crumbling Bible in her dad’s office. “So, fie-a-lee, the fire department wants you to stop by the station after school tomorrow,” he said and looked at Ms. Owen. “Apparently, before they could interview her yesterday, she practically fled from the scene of that incident or whatever it was — an exploding hydrangea or something. From the way some people were talking, it sounded like the flames of Armageddon had spewed forth to claim the unrighteous.” He sighed and stared wistfully toward a line of sycamores along the Wabash, stroking his long, graying Amish beard. “If only … ”

“Eh … the important thing is that Phiale’s okay,” Ms. Owen said.

The girl finished pouring the tea from flowers she’d harvested there in the greenhouse and dropped stiffly into her metal chair, wishing everyone would pay attention to something else. WTF, universe — a flying pyro on watering day and Rapp on tea shift? Exactly what I was looking for.

“Yes, of course … das ist gut,” he said.

Rapp was really getting into the spirit of his German American fifth-great-grandfather George (quite literally) in the months ahead of the Boatload of Knowledge bicentennial reenactment. (The town was knocking out the celebration six months early because the real anniversary falls in the cold heart of January.)

“I hope you’ll join us for our flower walk after tea,” Ms. Owen said with the confidence he would say no (or perhaps nein).

The principal and teacher were direct descendants of New Harmony’s two utopian experiments: the Rappite apocalypse cult immediately followed by the Owenite rationality cult.

Wearing a black antique dress, Ms. Owen was herself already getting into character before the reenactment as her ancestor Jane Dale Owen Fauntleroy, daughter of leader Robert Owen (to be represented by the history teacher, her father).

“I wish I could, honestly,” Rapp said. “But I just stopped by to pick up the ferns for tomorrow’s mascot unveiling — the ones with the fiery-red leaves.”

“I see nothing wrong with our current mascot,” Ms. Owen interjected. “Minerva has guided generations of Owls with her wisdom and strength. And this isn’t a religiously affiliated school — so I certainly don’t think an angel is appropriate.”

“I heard it has a tail and scales,” said a Daffodil named Lily under her breath. An athletic Rose named Camellia chortled.

“Silence!” commanded the principal. “Ms. Owen, there are some dominions where the god of science is not the highest power … but how many times have I been through this with you?”

Playing from speakers on a potting bench, the “Allegro” from Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major quickened as the two adults exchanged glares, their shadows stretched out in the afternoon light like echoes of old portraits melting across the conservatory floor. Cups clinked on saucers, the air thick with the smell of earth.

Rapp suddenly smiled. “Ah, look, there they go,” he said, nodding toward a nearby line of girls marching across an unmowed field between the school and river, nets resting on their shoulders like rifles. “The Butterfly Club’s off to the labyrinth today … it’s already reopened. We’ve been hearing rumors that the legendary talking frosted elfin has reappeared there — she would be quite the showpiece pinned to our display wall.”

Phiale choked on her tart tea as the principal waved at the passing girls, who raised their nets in salute under his paternal gaze. His face darkened, however, when the one at the end stumbled and fell beneath the weeds, much to the Flower Club’s amusement.

Rapp mumbled something about a “plague of gophers,” stood, took a sip of tea and puckered his mouth. “I must go now,” he said. “No time to waste — the end draweth nigh.”

* * *

Indiana’s western edge falls in a straight line from the industrial ruins of Gary until it hits an area of high ground (Terre Haute in French) along the Wabash, whose meandering chaos serves as the state’s border until it disappears into the Ohio.

Twenty-two miles north of this confluence, Maple Run burbles near the hedge labyrinth (reconstructed from the Rappites’ original) before meandering through the New Harmony Girls Academy property and joining the Wabash, which Phiale could see flowing between the trees. The Flower Club was huddled around Ms. Owen on the bank of the small creek; she was pointing to a patch of wild blue phlox from a crouch.

The cry of a Violet pierced the air: “Snake!” Much more shrieking followed as Phiale caught sight of a large black serpent with a red mark on its head. It flashed through the scattering girls and splashed into the creek.

“Everything’s okay — just a run-of-the-mill snake,” Ms. Owen said.

She doesn’t sound convinced, though, thought Phiale, who was unfazed by the snake.

“We really must stay on track if we want to wrap up before it rains,” the teacher continued. The sunshine had given up to low clouds. “Notice the five, notched petals … as for its scientific name, the genus Phlox is Greek for ‘flame’ and species divaricata is Latin for ‘spreading.’ In fact — girls … listen, do be quiet … the snake didn’t hurt anyone, and it has swum away — in fact, spreading through replication is the purpose of all organisms.”

Ms. Owen collected herself, smoothing her dress. “This is clear if you take the gene’s-eye view that Richard Dawkins discussed in his keynote at the 2005 Owen Science Society annual meeting.” While Phiale didn’t quite grasp the meaning of the woman’s words, she did notice Ms. Owen blush as she clasped her hands to her chest, smiled and sighed. “That was back when we could still get speakers of his stature … though last year’s chemist from Mount Vernon was an expert on asphalt’s liquidity—”

“Lame!” shouted a girl who had sidled up next to Phiale.

Ms. Owen frowned as she took in the new arrival with long blonde hair and a small, upturned nose. The girl’s sparkly-framed glasses made a mockery of the school uniform. “It seems we have a visitor. You must be new to the academy, because we teach our Owls better manners than that. What is your name?”

The girl spat and tried to screech hypersonically, but it just came out as a weak “eeeee.” She shook her head in frustration and said, “Just call me Belle for now.”

Ms. Owen shut her eyes for a moment and continued in the voice of a 19th-century schoolmarm — but with the confusing precision of a 20th-century slide rule: “As I was saying, imagine strands of DNA lying there in the dirt; their one job is to endure and replicate, but they can’t last long unprotected. So in the case of animals like us, we develop a body around ourselves and a mind to move about for food and to reproduce with the opposite sex.”

“Principal Rapp told us there’s no reason to bother with the last part — back when he canceled our mixers,” said Camellia, whose hand rested on Lily’s far shoulder. “The end is near, and all that.”

Ms. Owen pressed on: “Fifty years ago, Dr. Dawkins described another kind of replicator called a meme.”

“Like the lady yelling at the cat?” asked a Violet standing next to the teacher.

“I wouldn’t know about such nonsense … I mean a bit of culture — like when a song repeats over and over in your head to make you sing it aloud to spread to somebody else’s head — or like when Principal Rapp believes that a Bible verse is so relevant he can’t help but to recite it. It’s the same reason a cold virus makes you sneeze — they have to disperse to other people to survive and thrive.”

“That’s funny how it’s called a meme” — Belle said and winked, giving off faint sparks that caused Ms. Owen to rub her eyes. “I had a friend named Mneme.” The fairy facepalmed and grimaced. “No, I mean I learned about Mneme in school like a normal human.”

Phiale couldn’t explain it at the time, but she felt nervous for Belle and the Flower Club members in general.

“She’s the Boeotian muse of memory, you know,” she rambled on. “The gods hated actors screwing up their lines — especially about their exploits. So they’d have Mneme whisper the right words into a performer’s ear to cut down on mutations. She never forgot anything ever … not nearly as irritating as Echo, though.”

“I’m scared,” said the Violet, shrinking against Ms. Owen, who stared dumbfounded at Belle.

Phiale felt the closeness of the late April sky, the air heavy with moisture. She wished it would pour — so it did. Overcome with shock and power of what she’d done, Phiale fell to the ground.

Belle helped her stand as the rest of the group sprinted up a hill toward the school and led her back to the stream bank. Then she plucked a magnolia leaf, held it over her head, winked and fluttered back into her sprightly form. Phiale blinked at the tiny, iridescent blur of her gossamer wings, shielded from the pelting rain.

“Ah, that’s better — human bodies are so unwieldy!” Tinker Bell shouted over the hammering drops. “Thanks for the cloudburst, by the way. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up — at least that’s what those Fairy Council tyrants say … I guess even the dimmest of wits can occasionally be right about something … like a stopped clock … where’d you go?”

Bent over the stream, Phiale was soaking wet and enjoying it, watching the water ripple past rocks and branches, swirling, drawing her in. Her mood had loosened. Maybe the universe isn’t so bad after all.

“What’s going on?” she asked the sprite, who was now darting over the creek and around her face like a dragonfly with boundary issues.

A plastic ring appeared around Tinker Bell’s waist — which started gyrating. “You know how sometimes groups of humans suddenly feel compelled to all start doing the same thing? Like grab a hoop and twirl it around their midsection?” She pulled off the ring and flicked it at Phiale’s forehead. “Well, this whole town’s like that — with everything — because it got cursed from the sheer stupidity of the people who used to live here.

“It also means residents are more open to possession by cults, ghosts and divine presences — from gods to well … minor deities in your case.”

“I made it rain, Tink.”

Read Chapter 3 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 1

“Heraclitus’ words blaze with truth — but only if seized intuitively, not logically.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

As 60 thin streams fell from Phiale’s watering can into a bronze planter called The Flame of Heraclitus, the topmost soil lost its form and flowed into rivulets between pansies and peonies.

A glint of light flashed near a patch of swamp buttercups she’d just watered — and a large bug zig-zagged in front of her face, dripping wet and asking what the hell her problem was. Phiale dropped the can with a splash and stumbled back into eight-foot-tall hedges encircling the center of the labyrinth.

“Don’t worry, Phiale. I’m not evil,” said the insect. No … more like a fairy … laughing evilly.

“How do you know my n-n-name?”

“You’re an attendant nymph of Artemis. Anybody who’s anybody knows your name.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else,” blurted Phiale, a first-year student at the New Harmony Girls Academy. Dressed in a gray skirt and green V-neck sweater emblazoned with the school logo, she took a deep breath, picked up the can and started for a gap in the hedges. “Anyway, er … Tinker Bell, my name just happens to be Phiale. My dad is a professor of classics.”

“No, it was the Fates who named you — they get cute before big events … to amuse the gods … especially when they’ve been hanging around Bacchus. Wait! Don’t leave yet — I’ve got something to show you.” Then, more to herself than to the girl: “Maybe this time I’ll get exiled someplace less cornpone.”

Wondering what corn had to do with anything, Phiale suddenly stopped and turned around. (Something turned her around.)

“That’s better,” Tinker Bell said. She wrung out her blonde hair and spiraled up above the planter to take a look around. The wide bowl, which sat atop a pedestal, was originally an academy play prop before the Class of 1925 installed it as a senior project — all under the fairy’s influence (although Phiale didn’t know its story that far back yet). The fairy noticed her looking at it. “That thing used to have an ‘eternal’ flame instead of flowers … until the 1975 natural gas shortage. They tried a fountain with a water line after that but gave up because of a drought … settled for dirt. That’s usually the narrative arc around here: big ideas to … well … she grimaced at the muck-streaked pavers below.

“Now let’s begin our lesson. Listen up, and redeem yourself for dousing my nap.” The fairy flew to the hedge tops over Phiale’s head, snapped off a twig and took aim at the planter, ringed by stone benches and Ionic columns, already crumbling, no longer able to support a small roof.

Tinker Bell cleared her throat and … a car door shut.

Crouched in the hedges, Phiale heard voices approaching the labyrinth entrance. “I hope you brought some red thread,” a man said.

“No, but I can leave crumbs — I’ve got half a scone left over from the ‘Finding Utopia in Victimhood’ session,” a woman replied.

“I hear cult scum,” the fairy hissed as her dress changed from mossy green to fiery red.

The man’s voice grew louder and fainter as the pair progressed through the hedge convolutions: “We’re now on a journey to the center, a peaceful, inner space to contemplate our identities before we follow the path back into the world as stronger, more focused allies.”

“That’s so beautiful, the way you put that,” the woman cooed.

Tinker Bell vomited a sparkly stream of half-digested nemesis bloom nectar, wiped her mouth and said, “Class is in session …

“ALL IS FIRE!”

She jabbed with the twig and a 30-foot flame shot up from the planter, blasting Phiale with heat, potting soil and petals. The fire expanded into a dome over the labyrinth — ribbons appearing, spreading, racing into oblivion.

“Oh, my God!” the woman screamed. “The sky’s on fire!”

“Get down!” yelled her companion. “Crawl! Crawl! No, that’s the wrong way!”

“Up and down are one and the same!” Tinker Bell proclaimed. She raised the wand over her head, and as she slowly brought it down, the fire itself dropped a little and was replaced by a mist that shimmered in different colors, shifting with Phiale’s gaze like some kind of psychic Instagram filter. Then the cloud coalesced into water as it continued falling, retracing back to the center in a column above the planter. The girl shivered and felt a wave of relief with the transition in elements. And she had a wild thought: Did I somehow make the mist twinkle?

“Water is descending fire,” Tinker Bell said, “an illusion of form that makes it seem denser, less rarefied than it really is.” She dropped her arm and the water fell as earth back into the planter (mostly).

Phiale let out a long breath. Maybe I’m not going to die … I need to get out of here, though. But she felt like she couldn’t move, trapped in the center of a maze.

“Dirt is fire, but even less its true nature,” the fairy continued. “It has fallen, you see, into stability, rigidity, dogma — into cult … and then …

“EVERYTHING BURNS!”

She cackled and poked with the stick — another column of flame exploded upward and, dropping, turned to mist, water and then dirt.

Peeking between her fingers, Phiale heard distant sirens.

* * *

When the girl emerged from the labyrinth accompanied by an EMT who’d found her still in the shrubbery, she tried to hurry past a firefighter with a boot on the front bumper of a ladder truck and a clipboard on her thigh. She was questioning the man and woman, both openly weeping.

“Hey, Larry!” the firefighter called out to the chief eating a sandwich in the front seat. “This fellow says somebody screamed ‘fire’ before each of the explos—”

“Fellow?” interrupted the eyewitness.

The firefighter’s silver eyes met Phiale’s glance as the girl tried to sneak past. The tall, young woman pulled down her helmet’s chinstrap and spit a string of tobacco juice onto the pavement. “Howdy, miss,” she said.

Phiale gasped and looked away. As she picked up her pace, goosebumps spread over her body. Did I just see a goddess?

Check out Chapter 2 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Prologue

“You can never step in the same river twice, because you’re not the same person and it’s not the same river.” — Heraclitus

The fairy darted between alpine lilies like a bumblebee who’d gotten into a bottle of coca wine from the local pharmacy.

She was feeling especially angry and reckless back in summer 1869, muttering a steady hum of antediluvian swear words, high above Switzerland’s sparkling Lake Lucerne. The sprite had been kicked out of more cursed spots than she’d care to mention — malign meadows, godforsaken gullies — because she kept blabbing about things humans couldn’t handle hearing anymore.

So when she spied a resting hiker with a mustache like a drooping bratwurst, she couldn’t help but land on his knee with a chipper — “Hi there!” Out spilled her original Atlantean name, which included spitting and a hypersonic screech. The man blinked, unperturbed, but the shriek sent a nearby goat leaping to higher ground … dodging a boulder hiding the grave of Pontius Pilate. As with the fairy (another agent of chaos), the body of the Roman who crucified Christ had been exiled to Mount Pilatus.

She filled the hiker in on the legend, waving her little hands around in a whirl. “The body’s been cursing this place since ancient times. First they dumped Pilate in a river but had to fish out the corpse after a bunch of boats started sinking there. Guess they thought this would be out of the way enough to handle a curse like that. Some people are trouble wherever you send them.”

The fairy buzzed on a bit about the universe — dragging out chestnuts like the river of flux and unity of opposites, along with a few even more dangerous descents (the kind that cut the tether keeping you from the void).

“How interesting,” said the man — Friedrich Nietzsche, a visitor to the nearby home of his friend Richard Wagner. He sat on a log, squinting philosophically at her with bloodshot eyes. Then he smiled and adjusted his lederhosen while balancing a satchel that reeked of cannabis tincture.

Nietzsche’s pleasant curiosity made her even more ill-tempered. “Fine, you asked for it, freak. I was there with Artemis in her temple when Heraclitus was dropping off his scrolls for safekeeping. A lot of good that did, by the way — all his writings burned up a while later along with everything else in the Artemisium.

“You’ll never guess what they were talking about, though. It’ll shatter your senses more than that weed of yours grown in a ditch. To Hades with those Fairy Council hags.”

“Tell me more,” Nietzsche said with a crazy grin.

Thus, years later, after he went on to deteriorate mentally while ranting metaphysically, the Fairy Council connected the dots and felt a certain Swiss miss deserved banishment to an even more remote, accursed place.

They sent her to Indiana.

Check out Chapter 1 of The Flame of Heraclitus. (Originally shared on X)