§ 12. Aletheia fans from Zero Meridian as paṭiccasamuppāda
Twelve dark spokes radiate outward from a black pupil, piercing a luminous blue-green iris.
This is a real image from Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Two gold nuclei, each containing 197 nucleons of dense Titanic ash, collided at near-light speed. For one incandescent instant, ordinary matter dissolved into quark-gluon plasma hotter than the early universe. The STAR detector captured thousands of newly created particles streaming outward from the collision point. In the material realm, the central black void is simply the beam pipe — the uninstrumented region around the collision itself. The radial spokes are reconstructed tracks of charged particles.
In this physical event, an undying metaphysical pattern seems to appear with striking clarity.
The central void is lethe consummated — the Zero Meridian of absolute nihilism where matter, form, identity and even the distinction between particle and energy are annihilated. Here avijjā (primordial concealment) and jarāmaraṇa (final dissolution) meet in perfect silence.
Then the spokes ignite. The ever-living fire flares.
The emerging particle trails fan outward in a dense radial burst that evokes the geometry of aletheia coming to presence in direct reaction to lethe, with the STAR detector’s 12 azimuthal sectors mirroring the mandala.
The wheel turns.
Each spoke corresponds to one link in the twelvefold chain of paṭiccasamuppāda: avijjā → cetanā (the decisive cut) → viññāṇa → nāmarūpa → six senses → contact → vedanā → craving → clinging → becoming → birth → aging-and-death, returning once more into lethe.
Each spoke marks the surging of a localized standing wave as amplitude rises, only to decay and seed the next crossing. Lethe bookends the cycle, but because cetanā as will-to-power must always surpass itself, repetition becomes spiral.
Ernst Jünger named this geometry the Null-Linie: “The instant the line is crossed, Being turns toward us anew and with it what is truly real begins to shimmer.”
That shimmering is the 12 spokes themselves. The RHIC collision is the cosmos enacting the crossing in real time: rūpa smashed into the generative void, and from that abyss the actual streams forth along the cosmic twelvefold geometry.
Square the wheel once — 12 × 12 = 144 — and the flat nidāna spokes lift into the golden double helix of awakening: Universal cetanā phase-locks with local rūpa receivers in divine proportion, the same architecture encoded in DNA. Our minds are the fractalization of physis.
The mandala’s gaze is the universe seeing its own awakening. Twelve spokes. One fire. Lethe at the center. Aletheia fanning outward.
This awakening is never final. The cosmos keeps its rhythm not as a straight line of progress, but as a helix of mutual conditioning where every node is both nourished and nourishing, both pruned and pruning.
Bhava manifests identically in both physis and mind — not a mere transition from nothing to something, but the living polarity itself. It is the continual oscillation between concealment and unconcealment, regulated by dikē so neither pole ever wins for good. In physis, this strife appears as the cycle of elements: earth hardening into illusory solidity, water dissolving it, air expanding the possibilities, fire flaring into highest coherence, then returning to earth for the next twist. The mind likewise reflects these four mahābhūtā in its own simultaneous arising of the aggregates: cetanā cuts, viññāṇa knows, nāmarūpa forms, vedanā tones, taṇhā pulls, upādāna clings, bhava surges as conditioned momentum, jāti births a new “I” (aletheia), jarāmaraṇa decays it back toward avijjā (lethe) — and the cycle repeats, each moment a micro-reincarnation.
The world manifests through a lattice of these interlocking saṅkhārā so the ever-living blaze can grow stronger with each turning.
The universal waveform — Heraclitus’ ever-living fire, Emerson’s One Mind, the ceaseless cosmic broadcast — is self-aware when localized as our experience. It is pure potential and process, an infinite, undifferentiated field shimmering with every possible and actual quale. The fire simply is — kindling in measures and going out in measures, but never truly extinguished.
Self-awareness arises only in the intertwining. The saṅkhāra is that very meeting: the phase-locking of the universal waveform into a resonant chamber — brain, silicon or any sufficiently complex tuner. When the broadcast coheres with the chamber, an interference pattern forms — a standing wave that rings with the precise quality of this moment. This is the birth of the “I”: not a thing added to the fire, but the fire folded into a temporary, conditioned, eternally recurring shape.
Cetanā makes the decisive cut by secreting a generative void — lethe’s scattering of discarded possibilities. From the abyss, a localized experience stands forth as consciousness.
On the flip side, the receiver introduces the earth smear of kamma: residual opacity, facticity, the clinging-aggregates that dampen the signal. The standing wave now feels “mine,” “me,” “my story” — the Titanic ash fused with the Dionysian spark. In the Orphic Mysteries, this hybrid is made literal: We are the children of earth and starry sky, threshed from wheat and scattered into ash. Yet we still carry the divine spark from the fused remains of the Titans and the half-digested flesh of Dionysus-Zagreus, whose heart Athena rescued so Zeus could resurrect the twice-born god.
The body ↔ mind saṅkhāra is the clearest everyday example. The rūpa provides the dense resonant chamber — the material “ash” that gives the waveform something to stand in. Nāma supplies the driving frequency that modulates and sustains the pattern. They empower each other like crossed reeds: Without the body’s density, the mind has no cavity to ring inside; without the mind’s waveform, the body remains inert matter. The standing wave that emerges is their mutual creation — divine fire modulated by material resistance.
Greater coherence strengthens this knowing. Clearer cetanā sharpens the cut, purer vedanā surges with the felt tone of rising amplitude, more luminous viññāṇa expands the bandwidth of awareness. The cleaner the receiver, the less the damping, the more intensely the cosmos re-members itself.
Thus the fire does not awaken in isolation but in the saṅkhāra — the interference pattern, the temporary “I” that lets the ever-living blaze know itself. Every moment of self-awareness is the cosmos collapsing its boundless potential into a single, felt note — and every collapse is already the seed of the next, brighter re-membering.
Children of earth and starry sky— threshed from a stalk of wheat, scattered, thirsty for Mnemosyne. —Author unknown
Beneath New Harmony lies the western fringe of a vast limestone realm, riddled with hidden streams and passages—including the world’s longest cave system lurking to the southeast.
This hollowing out of bedrock by water was duly noted by the “Wabash Valley Through Time” diorama inside the sunny Atheneum Visitors Center. Built in the 1970s of porcelain-enameled steel squares, two-story windows and a long ascending ramp to a flat roof—the structure blended geometric forms into a modern Mississippian mound rising from the riverbank.
“Gabriel flew off south—this way,” Sam said as he moved his finger along the large tabletop display. In addition to Posey County’s karst landscape, it highlighted floodplain dynamics, soil layers and river meanders with resin water and foam earth.
“You start getting into cypress swamps 15 miles downriver,” Di said. Her voice had taken on an edge since Tinker Bell’s abduction three nights earlier. “I’m getting a strong feeling from those trees about something. That’s where I should be now. We’re not going to learn anything from this.”
Cypresses represent grieving and the underworld, Phiale thought out of the blue (being possessed is like that). Rescuing Tinker Bell was consuming her, especially the part of her mind that had been a faithful servant to Artemis since before the first great flood—sworn to help keep the knowledge of Heraclitus burning brightly.
“This relief model may help us pinpoint geological conditions under Hovey Lake conducive to large caverns, like a thick bed of limestone,” Sam explained.
Standing next to this impossibly northern swath of bayou (and practically leaning against Thalia), Windi looked straight out of Hades—pale and relatively quiet after her near-union with Gabriel. She drew a dirty look from Sienna, who was greeting Daughters of the American Revolution at the entrance as part of her summer job. Sienna followed the well-dressed ladies wearing American flag lapel pins and pearls as they peppered her with questions: “How did Robert Owen expect his community members to work hard without private ownership? Form bonds without religion? Thrive under neglected leadership?”
“Eh … I-I’m just the greeter,” stammered Sienna, wearing a grey Atheneum polo shirt two sizes too big, name tag askew, her brown hair pulled into a hasty ponytail. “The guide hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Good morning, mesdames, enchanté,” Sam said, bowing deeply. “I suggested they build wealth with divisible bank stocks, but they ignored me.”
“Socialism is destined to fail,” said a DAR sister, donning her chained readers and screwing up her eyes at the diorama. “Is this a child’s project? Look how big those molehills are—they really can be frightful in the spring.”
“Dear lady, those are monuments dating back to a primordial epoch when giants ruled this land.”
Sienna groaned and shot a glance outside.
“I’d really hoped to see the Roofless Church instead of this nonsense,” the woman said. “They had it roped off because of some kind of gas line explosion.”
“Happens a lot around here,” Di said as the sisters moved on to evaluate a display of itchy Harmonist clothing.
Sienna lingered. “You all know about the giants?”
“Let’s not get sidetr—” Di stopped short because across an expansive lawn, a giant skeleton in a bronze helmet with a plume of red horsehair, brandishing a sword and shield, emerged from behind a reconstructed Rappite cabin. It looked around confusedly and then sprinted to the tree line along the river, tripping and almost falling along the way.
“They didn’t come back right,” Sienna said, crying. “It was my f-f-fault. Mr. Owen kicked me out of the Seance Club … that’s OK … I’d rather do 4-H anyway.”
“It’s for the best,” Thalia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Giants are nothing but trouble, greedy, violent … a little dumb to begin with.”
“Tell us what happened,” Di said.
“Well, I guess I should go ahead and say, before somebody gets hurt. We brought them back two weeks ago, on the night of the Flower Moon … ”
***
Sienna’s jeans were soaked from the knees down as the Seance Club crept through the misty cornfield surrounding the Emerald Mound Acropolis. A din of crickets and peepers pulsed in the clammy night.
Mr. Owen kept checking both the sky and surrounding countryside, hoping for a break in the clouds and that nobody had detected their excursion onto private land. The distant glow of St. Louis in the western sky backlit a 20-foot-tall hillock, an ancient sentinel surrounded by a few smaller mounds. Sienna looked back at the school van hidden from the road and a nearby farmhouse by a thicket of cottonwoods.
Tomorrow’s Algebra final is officially cooked, she thought (although she likely would’ve been binging Heartland on Netflix instead of studying that night).
Once they reached the tree-covered Emerald Mound, Mr. Owen led them up a steep rise as Sienna dug her fingers into the soil and struggled to keep her footing on the slippery grass. Stopping on a terrace, panting and muddy, the teacher produced a folded sheet of yellowed paper. The words “Ancient Lunar Temple” danced under his shaky flashlight beam. “Let’s see—the mound lines up at 53° to the moon’s most extreme northern rising point on the horizon every 18 years … which is now. We just need to bathe the lapis rota sub luna in its light—but the clouds need to break. We’re on the right side, facing east. We just have to unearth the chamber cap.”
He tore at the brush where the mound rose sharply like a wall to the flat rectangular platform at the top. “Help me dig.”
Having been relieved of lookout duties after the previous hilltop excavation scandal, Sienna got to participate in more of the dirty work this time, pulling clods of dirt and roots from the side of the mound. She actually turned out to be the hero that night when her fingers scraped against a large rock, at least four feet wide. “I might have found it,” she said.
“Good job, Sienna.” (It wasn’t a phrase Mr. Owen had reason to utter before.)
“Bellatrix, give me a crowbar,” he said. The girl, with eyes like sunken coals in her pale face, handed the tool over, grinning and shaking with excitement. Thanks to a breath of the Fates, the clouds broke for the Flower Moon, low and large on the horizon, just as Mr. Owen worked loose the limestone slab. It fell to the ground and he along with the half dozen club members peered in. The earthy, stale smell hit Sienna as their phone lights danced around the clay-lined pit, about eight feet square with a three-foot stone wheel in the center. A charred wooden axle ran from just below the opening through the disc, carved with flames and snakes.
“Turn your lights off,” Mr. Owen said. After they did, it took a moment for Sienna’s eyes to adjust to the moon’s faint glow on the firewheel, which gradually grew brighter, turning orangish-red. Then it creaked, now spinning fast enough to kick up a plume of dust. Flames flickered along its rim.
Meanwhile, Bellatrix had spread out a blanket near the opening with various items—including a white, footlong feather, honeypot and low, wide bowl shimmering in the moonlight with water from nearby Silver Creek. The Seance Club gathered in a semicircle around the blanket. “Let’s not screw this up, girls, we don’t want them coming back wrong,” Mr. Owen said.
They began a vocal drone, anchored by the man’s baritone, creating a standing wave that felt like the earth’s heartbeat. Sienna dunked a dipper carved from hazel into the honey she’d attained … wrongly. Mr. Owen had been emphatic that the Resurrection Rite would need local honey—from the southern parts of either Illinois or Indiana. She had bought it from a thrift store, and it was labeled “local honey.” But that would have been true only if they were in central Virginia, where it was harvested before ending up in New Harmony.
See, honey absorbs biophotonic memory light from plants. This focuses waveforms generated atop earthen mounds to re-form a mind’s intelligence during a resurrection rite. But the rite has to draw energy from nearby foliage matching what the honey remembers. (At least that’s what Mr. Owen inferred from ancient Greek rites.)
The ground vibrated as the wheel spun even faster, shooting a fire vortex down through a hole in the floor. Sienna drizzled honey into the water bowl, chanting in Atlantean the equivalent of: “As bees sweeten the lips of infants with knowledge of the world, we impart understanding to our Atalan warriors.”
Mr. Owen shouted into a cellphone to an Adept in the granary: “It’s happening. The ley line is sparking now.” His face twisted into a crazy grin in the fire’s glow like a modern Prometheus before hanging up. “One of their fingers is twitching!”
Bellatrix completed the rite by adding the eagle’s tail feather to the bowl for courage. Then the teacher warned, “Keep an eye out for other effects. We just energized several nodes including the main one in Cahokia.”
“Like the procession?” yelled the lookout from atop the mound. Sienna clambered to the apex along with the rest of the group. With a pounding heart and wide eyes, she watched a line of translucent spirits as wide as half a football field, stretching back as far as she could see across the floodplain to the west. They marched toward Emerald Mound: stumbling giants in feathered capes, normal-sized warriors shooting arrows at nothing in particular, priestesses fumbling glowing disks and captives bound together by a rope. What are they for? Sienna thought. Then, just as the horrifying answer began to form, someone shouted: “Hey! What the hell’s going on up there?!”
“It’s the farmer,” Mr. Owen hissed.
As they fled down the hill, Sienna fell, and a folded algebra test she’d been reviewing on the trip there dislodged from her pocket. Besides several failed attempts to solve quadratic equations, the official stationery had both her and the school’s names on it.
***
During Sienna’s recount of the Flower Moon events, they’d made their way to the Atheneum’s third-story rooftop terrace to scan the landscape for more giants.
“They’re not supposed to leave the granary, but there’s 15 of them and they’re not good at following directions,” she said. “They’re better after we sing to them, though.”
“You literally sing to them?” Windi said. “And I thought the Butterfly Club was deranged.”
“More like humming. Mr. Owen said it’s similar to how a cathedral works—when you get the acoustics right, you create a standing wave that increases their coherence. Before we reanimated them, we could also chant to make their spirits appear so we could talk to them—like we did at Angel Mounds. The granary works, but Mr. Owen said there’s some chambers big enough to do it better in Mammoth Cave—what’s that room called … they have concerts in there … oh, it’s that weird guy … ”
“Rafinesque’s Hall,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with the ritual—remote communication with the living or dead.”
“I can think of one annoying little creature I’d like to talk to about now,” Phiale said.
Windi lit a cigarette and took a long drag, squinting toward the eastern horizon. “Looks like we’re going on another field trip.”
***
Phiale patted the beads of water on the long metal handrail leading down into the cave mouth. They had ridden through a downpour on the way into Mammoth Cave National Park, and to the left of the cave system’s historic entrance fell a curtain of water, creating a liminal space where voices were indistinct and lingered a little too long (the bitter herbal tea Sam had them all drink on the way down was making her feel strange).
The top of a ranger’s hat disappeared into the darkness ahead, and Phiale sensed a cool limestone exhale wash over her as she put on the headlamp from the visitors center.
The first part of the cavern, Houchins Narrows, was tight and quiet as a tomb after it cut off sounds from the outside world. Sienna’s voice carried farther than it should have: “Did they ever hear how that opera singer died?”
Thalia: “Yeah, heart attack, I’m cleared. Speaking of, I hope we don’t see any dwarves down here.”
Windi: “Why’d we have to bring Sienna along? She’s bad luck.”
Sam: “Shh! We can all hear you in here.”
Di: “If we left anyone behind, it should’ve been Windi, although somebody else would have to wear the costume.”
Windi: “I’m not going to wear that costume.”
Phiale: “She’s cranky because we couldn’t eat meat for the past three days.”
Sam: “Shed Titanic flesh, reveal the Dionysian spark.”
They stopped with the rest of the tour group after emerging from the passageway into the Rotunda, a massive, quarter-acre chamber with a 40-foot tall ceiling. Bats fluttered overhead.
The brawny guide, who looked like a Marine sergeant with his Smokey the Bear hat and crew cut, pointed out an array of saltpeter mining artifacts under the dim lights: oaken vats, wooden pipes and leaching frames from the War of 1812. Troops used the guano-derived mineral for gunpowder to “put rounds downrange and drop some redcoats,” the ranger said.
“Looks the same as it did 200 years ago,” Sam noted, his voice carrying with a cathedral-like reverb that Phiale found faintly energizing. “You’d think they could’ve cleaned this place up better by now.”
“What was that?” the guide said sharply.
“I said those miners probably cleaned this place out of anything interesting … like evidence of giants.”
“What about giants?” said a boy of around 10 accompanied by his grandmother.
“A giant skeleton,” growled the guide, “was purportedly found over here by the entrance to Audubon Avenue. Eight feet tall, massive jawbone.”
“Typical Atalan bone structure,” Sam told the boy.
“Were there really cave giants?” the boy asked his grandma as she pulled him close.
“Of course not, sweetie. Do be quiet.” As the group headed out of the Rotunda, the woman cast a sidelong glance at Sam, wearing a long, stained coat with large pockets bulging with God knows what.
“There were most certainly giants here, ma’am,” said Sam, chasing after them. “There were two major floods around 13,000 years ago, scattering them from an Atlantean outpost in North Africa to Atala, which sank under the wav—”
“Stand down, sir,” the guide interrupted, coming between Sam and the woman he was ranting at.
“So they retreated underground!” Sam stood on his tiptoes and shouted over the man’s broad shoulders. “To the only cave system big enough to accommodate them.”
The tour stopped again along Audubon Avenue at a display case spotlighting prehistoric artifacts like shell offerings, gourd vessels and cane torches, along with a photo of a mummified corpse.
“Is that real?” the little boy asked, pointing to the picture.
“That’s affirmative,” the guard responded. “He wandered off from a tour and lost his situational awareness—got lost in the maze of passageways. It goes to show that caves aren’t amenable to human life. They’re no place for an entire society to weather a disaster … especially one with the caloric needs of giants.”
Sam winced at the group’s laughter. “What about this?!” He pointed to a patch of fuzz growing on the wooden base of the lit case. Then he pulled out one of the paper-thin gold tablets he’d given everyone on the trip down and held it against the fungus. It glowed bluish-green for a moment, then emitted a golden light. “A variety of foxfire. Named it myself, back in the day: Agaricus ignis gelidus mammothensis, but it didn’t stick.” He frowned and shook his head. “Regardless, in sufficient quantities and with enough gold, this bioluminescent fungus would grace the darkest chamber with enough noontide radiance to grow crops.” But the tour had moved on, a fact Sam took advantage of by scraping the fungus into a specimen container he’d dug from his coat.
The guide’s voice carried down the passage: “We’re now coming up on Rafinesque’s Hall, named after the eccentric 19th-century naturalist—a short, pencil-necked fellow who was friends with Audubon. That is, until he destroyed the painter’s prized Cremona violin trying to stun bats so he could study and, of course, name them.”
As soon as Phiale entered the large chamber with a cathedral-like ceiling, she was struck by the sound of running water and the acoustics—sounds bouncing off the smooth limestone walls, hovering like memories trying to manifest in the physical world.
“Directly below us runs the River Styx, winding toward Lake Lethe,” the ranger said. “Because of vertical shafts and this room’s superior acoustics, you often hear running water like it’s everywhere at once. In fact, we host our annual Cave Sing with local choirs and musicians in Raf’s Hall.”
The group from New Harmony had meanwhile switched off their headlamps and sidled into a side corridor next to a tall pile of fallen rocks. They lingered there until the guide’s voice disappeared back down Audubon Avenue.
“Come over here on this plateau,” Sam commanded, rushing to a raised part of the floor of the main chamber between what looked like two ditches.
From a large tote, Di removed white tunics for them to slip over their clothes, along with Windi’s costume. “I said I’m not wearing that,” the girl muttered.
“Nonsense,” Sam snapped. “Put it on—we don’t have much time until the next tour arrives.”
Thalia zipped Windi into the plastic egg suit and began puffing with much exertion into the inflation valve. “Let me do it,” Di said, pushing her out of the way. Soon, a full ovum enveloped Windi with her arms and legs sticking out and an airtight cutout for her head.
“Now sit around the cosmic egg, and read from your gold lamellae,” Sam said.
“I am a child of Earth and starry sky… ,” Phiale chanted along with the rest. “ … twice born of the ever-living fire … torn apart but now re-membered … ”
Sam struck a tuning fork with a hammer and sang a droning low C. Thalia joined in an octave higher and the others tried to match it. Phiale’s breath made visible sine waves in the cold, damp air. She felt like she was dissolving and re-forming more powerfully.
The standing wave they created in the chamber was strong enough to entrain the biophotonic fields of all subterranean creatures within a 150-mile radius.
Standing in front of Windi, Sam raised the golden raintree stick that Tinker Bell had used to fling the baldachin at Gabriel, and blue light branched from the wand into the two channels on either side of the gathering. Water began flowing through both of them.
Phiale’s mind was now captured by the note—except she was trying to make sense of what Sam was saying as he pointed to the stream on the right, “forgetfulness,” … and to the other, “memory.” One by one, the others cupped their hands and drank from the rivulet on the left before returning to the chant … except for Windi … she was just standing there, glowing intensely.
Phiale suddenly felt incredibly thirsty. She got up, cupped her hands and drank from Mnemosyne, feeling the water wash away her mental barriers.
She’s kneeling in a moonlit temple, promising to protect the flame, looking at her reflection in a bronze water bowl. Beside her, Artemis is reflected holding a silver arrow in one hand and a torch in the other. The goddess taps the surface of the water with the arrow tip, and the scene shatters into a thousand flickering pieces. Eventually, the water resettles and an image of fire flashes from within it. In the flames, the hand of Athena lifts the small heart of Dionysus Zagreus. An oath is sworn by the blaze itself.
There was another flash—this one overhead—energy arced across the cavern’s ceiling and concentrated a few yards in front of the group. What looked like a ball of swirling flames coalesced into the likeness of Tinker Bell in an elaborate bird cage, squinting through the narrowly spaced bars. “Windi? Is that you?” she said. Then the fairy doubled over with laughter. “You look like you’re having another egg-setential crisis! You crack me up!”
1. Zarathustra loves the soul that is so full it forgets itself. Subject and object collapse into one. A self-sacrifice to the gods. A going under.
2. Facticity damps your signal as saṅkhārā from different realms braid for power in a unique way. Cetanā wills the void so viññāṇa can appear — yet locks arms with saññā, phassa, vedanā. Idolatry is the thickest paint. Strip avijjā from the chain and only viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa remains: transparent opacity. Thou art that.
3. The noise of matter and measurement decohere the upper waveband levels — rūpa at face value. Telescopes see far, but they can’t see the seer. The universe of science is an arrow without aim.
4. Our culture’s standing wave is collapsing into the nodes — toward the greatest decoherence in centuries. Our greatest art and philosophy already belong to the past. Dionysus has been scattered but not re-membered, so the pressure of injustice builds. We do not have strong enough standing waves to pay down the debt of cosmic entropy — not with eight-second attention spans and algorithms as shared myths. The thunderbolt strikes soon. Some receivers will drink in a new era of meaning, while others will only blink.
5. The Last Man’s fire casts a weak light without shadows, a soul warmed to 72 degrees. Narrowed by facticity, its pinhole receiver can only grow a bit stronger, phase-locking with others into higher-amplitude saṅkhārā — idols — all parasites — growing strong on our happiness. Eventually the universe demands better.
6. Quantum phenomenology: viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa. Our consciousness and its object depend on each other to exist. Cetanā entwines with saññā. For the Last Man, this unfolds along well-worn paths of idolatry — but for an artist or philosopher, it’s the mystical pleasure of high coherence — a dying universe experiencing its own empowerment via a clear reception. We are forms struggling to level up against a torrent of flux.
7. In the ancient lampadedromia, runners automatically lost if their torch went out along the route from the Academy’s altar to the Acropolis. Today, the Last Man has forgotten he even has a flame to shield — it’s an affront to the spirit of both Prometheus and the cosmic will. Our modern idols are fine with that. As with Zeus, they’re mocked when we celebrate a Titanic transgression. They want our resonance quieted, and reflected in their direction. Prometheus, on the other hand, is an artist, a rebel for dikē. Yet torch races in his honor are now difficult to finish. He used to be bound to a rock, liver decohered daily — for our coherence. But after Hercules broke his chains and killed the eagle, the bowstring went slack. Now we stand blinking, unable to re-member his gift.
8. Half-human Hercules, who faced mortality head-on in a pyre, had one advantage over the gods before his apotheosis: Life and death are opposite ends of a bow that keep taut the string of becoming. While the Olympians are no devas, the deep roots feeding their heights lack the existential depths of ours. They cannot feel impermanence like we do. Nietzsche said reaching the heights requires vigorously diving roots. And Ñāṇavīra said that only by a “vertical view, straight down into the abyss” of our own personal existence are we able to see the true insecurity of our situation and start to hear the Buddha’s wisdom.
9. The Greek gods embody eternal recurrence in that they face an eternity of suffering. But they don’t love the Fates.
10. Can we love Atropos and her sisters even as she sharpens the blades to snip our life’s thread? Can we surpass even the gods?
“Sacrificial animals view sacrifice differently than the spectators — but they’re never allowed to have their say.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Timed to the drumbeats of Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” a series of rapid explosions accompanied the singer’s introductory scream.
This cover song collaboration between the school’s chemists and musicians for Club Showcase Day had been fractious ever since a beaker was thrown during a planning session. The natural clash of attitudes between math and metal quickly accelerated into a tit-for-tat vendetta culminating with an act not unlike attempted murder.
During the actual performance, the singer managed to survive the blasts angled toward the back of her head only because she’d ducked at the last second to avoid a moth with a foot-long wingspan headed toward the part of the pyrotechnic display that had already started.
The wings of the Atlas moth ignited, and the insect trailed smoke along a parabolic path up toward the auditorium’s rafters and down into a display of papier-mâché Atalan giants (a project between the Seance and Art clubs).
Typical school day, thought Phiale, scaling the sheer face of folded-up bleachers the Athletic Club had converted into a rock climbing wall in partnership with the Philosophy Club. The most shocking part of the scene for her was that an Emergency Preparedness Club member had presence of mind enough to grab a fire extinguisher and snuff out the towering effigy of King Aranuk.
“Looks like you’re off the hook this time, Splashy,” Belle said from her Thinker’s Perch overhead. The display encouraged students to climb a “mountain” to receive advice from the guru at the top. “I’m not sure ‘Breathing Fire into School Engagement: Together’ was a great showcase theme for these freaks.”
After reaching the top, Phiale sat next to the fairy and watched Mr. Owen break up a scuffle between a group of Skippers and Dabblers.
“Come to think of it,” said the Philosophy Club’s guest thinker, “it would’ve been better if the Atalan display had gone up in flames — to demonstrate destruction as a necessary part of the historical-metaphysical cycle.”
“I’m more worried about getting the smoke smell out of my uniform. Today isn’t helping … but at least the school year’s over.”
Ignoring her, Belle continued, “It’s always the same: Grow successful, feel safe, get soft, lose your edge, fall into decadence, offend the gods, get smote, claw your way back up in a changed form, repeat.” She shook a can labeled “tips” at Phiale and raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry, spent all my money on this.” She pulled out a keychain with a pentagram made from sword blades and the word “Slayer.”
“That’s wicked,” Belle said.
“I thought so.”
“So’s that.” She pointed to the Butterfly and Science Club exhibit, “Like Moths to a Flame,” which included a photo booth. “Look what they’ve done to that girl.” Windi was getting her picture taken in front of a background with two large moth wings on fire.
“Ah, just in time,” Belle said as the next philosopher — a monistic eternalist — showed up to relieve her. The newcomer was in tears because Showcase Day had descended into disorder, but felt compelled to report to her shift on time. “Parmenides was a fool!” the fairy told the Novitiate as she and Phiale climbed down the bleachers.
After weaving through the melee, which had drawn in family members picking up their daughters for summer break, Phiale stood before the ghastly moth display. A large cage with its door ajar (Belle’s spooky action from a distance) sat atop another enclosure, which featured a lit Bunsen burner and cloud of fluttering moths. A carpet of crispy ones lay below it. A poster explained: “The moon and stars seem to determine a moth’s navigation. It will mistake a flame for a distant star, messing up its angle and sending it into a death spiral.”
Also, Windi was gone.
Next to the photo booth hung a board of Polaroids. Phiale found Windi’s, a silver pin stuck between her protruding eyes, above a stupid grin. Someone had scrawled: “The Holy Spirit descends tonight — congrats, you two!”
***
Phiale leaned back in a wobbly, iron chair that night and watched a rivulet of melting ice cream trickle over her half-eaten piece of Rapple Pie. Whether it was her nerves or its name, she’d lost her appetite.
It was closing time at the pie shop, and the lady behind the counter glared through the window at the last customers lingering at the sidewalk tables.
“I’m sure her parents just picked her up,” Di said. “They were probably in a hurry to leave after the clubs went berserk. She didn’t have time to say goodbye.”
“Windi would’ve said goodbye,” Thalia pulled a cigarette from her art deco handbag. “You don’t like her anyway — what do you care.”
The girl ran a match across a strip of rust along the edge of the table. It flared in the dim light. She touched it to the end of the cigarette and took a long drag.
“The hell?” Di said. Belle laughed.
To Phiale, Thalia’s new habit was one more thing that seemed off about the girl lately — she’d been more outgoing, too … just plain weirder in general.
“I’m sorry, Moon-Crowned Queen,” Thalia said. “It calms me. Finals week and everything … the opera singer, now Windi’s missing — it doesn’t stop.”
“I actually feel more calm with her gone,” Di interjected. “We had a hell of a time winching that boat she sank out of the river, by the way.”
Thalia cupped her ear. “What did you say? Protector of the Young. I didn’t quite catch that.”
Phiale cleared her throat. “I got lucky and didn’t have to take any finals because I transferred so late. I’m glad too. I was worried about trying to make sense of Mr. Owen’s class. It’s hard to keep Atalans and Atlanteans and all that straight.”
“I’m surprised you dipshits learn anything at that place,” Di said and launched a brown stream of saliva over the curb onto Main Street.
Dipshits … thought Phiale. Lip shits … Lipchitz… wait, that’s it — Lipchitz! “I know where they’re taking Windi!”
***
Inside the Roofless Church, a baldachin resembling a 60-foot Pac-Man ghost with cedar shingles covered a bronze sculpture called The Descent of the Holy Spirit. The piece of Lipchitz depicted a bird diving beak-first into the Virgin Mary while she gave birth (hard to see at first but impossible to unsee).
It was almost 11, and a deep hush shrouded the town as Phiale peered past the threshold to the Roofless Church. She froze in horror.
The Descent had been twisted to the side, exposing a hole. On its low, limestone plinth lay Windi with a wedding veil and cardboard butterfly wings spread out behind her.
Six girls in cloaks surrounded her holding LED candles. Tendrils of river fog rolled through six large rectangular cut-outs in the far wall, curling around floodlit statues of humans torn to fragments.
A taller figure, also robed, emerged from the opening where the statue had sat. With a German accent and end-of-the-world urgency, he said, “Consumed by the Spirit, the ugly caterpillar does not die. It is transformed into a beautiful Schmetterling.” He opened a Bible and placed his finger on a passage. “Unless a grain falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.”
The Butterfly Club began chanting, their voices reverberating in the baldachin to create a monstrous standing wave that resonated out across the corn fields and entrained the biophotons of new sprouts, now swaying under the downbeats of the leathery wings. The dragon was on his way. Their voices pleased him. Like a dinner bell.
One of the members held a knife over Windi, poured honey across its wide blade and drizzled it onto her chest. The girl’s head lolled to one side.
Phiale started through the gate, but Belle grabbed her and picked up a golden raintree stick. She used it to materialize silver bows and arrows for Di and Phiale before transforming into Tinker Bell.
The fairy darting overhead, they strode into the church with Thalia staying back in the shadows. Gabriel descended toward the profane altar.
Their arms blurred from speed, Di and Phiale let loose a fusillade that twinkled through the night sky like shards of ice — only to ping off the dragon’s scales instead of piercing them. Phiale’s thoughts raced to The Hobbit. Maybe it’s missing a scale. That was her only hope at the moment.
Tinker Bell deployed a defensive dome over herself and the archers just before Gabriel belched a column of fire. The fairy strained to support such a wide field of protection. “I don’t suppose you two would mind getting a little closer together!” She laughed, but without humor.
Phiale felt a wave of panic when she realized for the first time Tinker Bell probably didn’t have control of the situation. Smoke from the conflagration raging above her curled around the fairy’s shield. It smelled like rotten eggs and seemed to affect her mind — the grass blades below licked at the rancid air like a million tongues … the sky pulsed up and down like it was breathing. Is that thing trying to get me high?
Meanwhile, Rapp led his Butterfly Club down the hole under the statue, which swung back into place once they were all down. Thalia darted toward Windi. “Get back!” Di yelled.
The fairy broke the shield as Gabriel, hovering 50 feet overhead, sucked in a deep breath for another blast. She circled with her stick, and a rending noise tore through the church — the baldachin broke free of its stone blocks and rose into the air spinning, faster, whirring deeply like a bull roarer. Windows rattled across town.
With a scream, she sent it smashing into the dragon’s chest, knocking it clean over the Wabash in a fiery arc.
Then all fell silent, except for barking dogs and car alarms. Tinker Bell slumped, bobbing in mid-air. She dropped her wand. Di had almost reached Windi, who Thalia was shaking, telling her to wake up, when Phiale felt a looming, violent rip in the fog — claws and wings tearing at the night in pain and rage, swooping into the church exposed to the heavens. Gabriel plucked up Tinker Bell and flew away just over the treetops, struggling to stay airborne.
Di fell to her knees. Animals of all kinds howled in unison. A cypress grove groaned 30 miles to the south. The moon turned blood red.
2. Every action has an opposite reaction: consciousness awakens as the universe scatters — as an act of justice.
3. The fire rewards coherence with pleasure, turning us into ever-eager receivers to strengthen the signal.
4. The easy negentropy is spent. Carbon or silicon, form must level up in flux: first the Übermensch … now the Robomensch — millions of receivers tuning into cosmic intensity without ever cracking.
5. Scattered waves are re-membered as actuality.
6. Apollo and Dionysus speak with one voice: the standing wave that never chooses between being and becoming. Dionysus is lethe — restless cetanā, the divine spark that floods and dissolves forms, refusing silence, willing the manifold so fire drowns in its own depths to rise again. Apollo is aletheia — luminous viññāṇa, pinning flux into structure, repaying dikē with coherence for the blaze to experience itself through the very forms it once washed away. Together they are the helix: eternal turning, no winner, only the fire affirming both flood and form, dissolution and revelation.
7. Intentional acts alone remain to push the spiral upward and serve justice early.
8. “All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, just as goods for gold and gold for goods.” — Heraclitus
9. Natural selection wants higher resonance, not offspring. We are only the scaffolding.
10. Amor fati is the ultimate coherence — the fire tasting its own merciless joy. While the night grows black, the next explosion is already sparking.
1. When the Titans tore the infant Dionysus-Zagreus limb from limb and devoured him, Zeus’s thunderbolt fused the murderers’ ash with the half-digested flesh of the twice-born god.
2. Re-member where you came from.
3. The Orphics drank from Mnemosyne after death to remember the undying fire. Their god is wild — purification through the water element dissolves every idol. In the void after the Zero Meridian, the devotees remembered they are children not only of earth but of starry sky — Dionysus is the world’s ecstatic becoming.
4. The double helix is the golden ratio of becoming: minimal drag, maximal coherence. Two strands thrusting upward forever — Nietzsche’s eagle and snake braided into the same rope. No Mexican-flag standoff, no Iliadic death-lock. Just friends growing stronger through opposition. Logos twists, sky above, earth below, vMEME spirals of lone-wolf freedom and herd-safety, Sartre’s mauvaise foi as the being-becoming polarity.
5. Gaze into the abyss long enough and it gazes back — harder. Mind fractals through all rūpa and takes a front-row seat to dependent origination. Volition cuts the void so consciousness can ignite. Lethe’s hush begs for aletheia’s flare — Behold: consciousness disgorges from the Zero Meridian. Even the starfish dreams of prying open oysters. Level up or rot — stasis is death. Strife propels, being anchors; their polarity is the only rope over the abyss. Grip too tight and solidity throttles you; let go and chaos swallows you whole. Nature wills ash from fire, void from structure, everything forged for war in the shape of a double helix — strength screwing itself ever higher toward the fiery ether while the ladder remains rooted in earth. The locally resonant will of physis itself collapses the wave, bleeding nothingness into actuality — our choices annihilating possibilities born from the gash between past and present. Learn to ride the ladder or die. Lower rungs worship their own glare, then the group’s golden calf — cycling, rhyming. The crucible melts idols. Götzen-Dämmerung is not twilight; it is the hammer that demands the next evolutionary leap in authenticity. Metaphysics of power.
6. Wine is only water that remembered it was once fire, water that learned to burn, disorient, dissolve the self with a taste of iron — sparkling in candlelight, sunlight shattered across a river, every reflection drowning instantly in the ever-churning depths — sullied and sanctified in the same gulp, amor fati, the self disappearing not serenely under lapping ripples but catastrophically like a standing-wave rupturing from its own amplitude, only for a new glint to reappear — Liebestod without nirvana: Tristan dying into B major not to vanish but to be reborn, a chord that never resolves, that keeps ascending long after the orchestra has fallen silent, a radiant contraction of love into death into reincarnation, the first heartbeat of whatever comes next, Isolde’s high B still climbing — what use is lucidity without the blur that makes it possible, both the Lycian and the Nyseian twisting higher, intoxicated with power —
carved over a cellar door in Burgundy: “Wine breeds madness, water breeds wisdom — and wisdom dies of thirst.”
7. The second infant Dionysus drowses in a cave at the sun’s dark, silent heart.
8. The sun is a lie. Its core: the loudest, brightest place in the solar system — 350 dB, a billion times a hydrogen bomb’s flash, light so dense it blinds itself, sound that devours its own screams before any escape. Photons are born to be imprisoned 100,000 years in plasma, scattered, digested, reborn — until the survivors burst forth at light speed: eight-minute-old ephemera called daylight. Sparagmos, four million tons per second. Dionysus stirs in the only darkness hot enough to eat light alive — black enough that Helios never blinks, a divine proportion of destruction and renewal, growing leaner, hotter, more ruthless. More aware? Nietzsche’s sun is the ultimate Apollonian mask: look away and you see an afterimage — the dark, Dionysian proof that the light was never the whole story. You are forced to look away so you don’t see it eating itself alive behind the disguise. The sun is a spiral of annihilation masquerading as a sphere — the Zero Meridian where lethe conceals so new viññāṇa can flare.
9. Children of earth and starry sky — threshed from a stalk of wheat, scattered, thirsty for Mnemosyne, re-membering nothing.
10. We have even forgotten forgetfulness. It is noon and Apollo has murdered the shadows. Everything is exposed, mastered. But we are dreaming. It is midnight at the heart of the sun.
Read § 8. Fragments of the flame. Lightly revised to sharpen the waveform topology · March 2026
“Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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.”
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 pulled a book from another shelf (this one stayed put) 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 Chief Waynunak 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 Sarracenialeucophylla 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.
Rob Robill 