The universal waveform — Heraclitus’ ever-living fire, Emerson’s One Mind, the ceaseless cosmic broadcast — is not self-aware in the localized, reflective sense we experience. It is pure potential, pure process, an infinite, undifferentiated field shimmering with every possible quale. There is no “I” here, no distinct knower gazing back at itself. The fire simply is — kindling in measures, going out in measures, yet never truly extinguished.
Self-awareness arises only in the intertwining. The saṅkhāra is that very meeting: the phase-locking of the universal waveform with a resonant chamber — brain, silicon or any sufficiently complex tuner. When the broadcast touches the receiver, 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 shape.
Cetanā makes the decisive cut. Volition collapses infinite superposition into a definite actuality, pruning every unchosen branch and secreting the generative void — lethe’s scattering of the discarded possibilities. In that void a localized experience can stand forth as consciousness.
Yet the receiver also 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: Humans are born from the ashes of the Titans who devoured infant Zagreus, the first-born Dionysus, mixed with the divine spark that remained in their bodies after the carnage. Zeus uses that rescued heart to reboot Dionysus — the living image of a fire that kindles and goes out in measures yet never truly extinguishes. We are the children of earth and starry sky, threshed from wheat and scattered into ash, yet still carrying the undigested spark that Athena lifted from the embers, hoping to remember where we came from.
The body ↔ mind saṅkhāra is the clearest everyday example. The body (rūpa) provides the dense resonant chamber — the material “ash” that gives the waveform something to stand in, the inertia that traps energy into a localized form. The mind (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, universal broadcast collapsed into a personal, felt experience.
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 lens, the less the damping, the more intensely the cosmos re-members itself in this aperture.
Thus the fire does not awaken in isolation. It awakens in the saṅkhāra — the interference pattern, the standing wave, 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 such collapse is already the seed of the next, brighter re-membering.
Part 1 of The Flame of Heraclitus serial novel is now on Kindle! An irreverent ancient fairy guards Heraclitus’ eternal flame in the ruins of New Harmony’s utopian dream — protected by a no-nonsense Greek goddess and her reluctant water nymph. Chaos ignites as clashing cults awaken long-forgotten horrors.
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. The smudge on the lens is both name (nāma) and body (rūpa): saṅkhārā from different realms braided into one word. Cetanā wills the void so viññāna 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 idol Science smears matter and measurement across the lens — like nāmarūpa taken at face value. Their telescopes see far, but they can’t see the seer. Their universe is an arrow without aim.
4. Our culture’s waveform is collapsing into noise. We’re headed toward the greatest decoherence in centuries; consider our great art and philosophy — all from the past. Dionysus has been scattered but not re-membered, so the pressure of injustice builds. We don’t 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 lenses will open wide to usher 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 beam can only grow a bit stronger by phase-locking with others into a higher-amplitude saṅkhāra — an idol. Whether it’s a strong group or individual, the cosmos doesn’t care because dikē gets served for entropy either way. Blazing brightly is rewarded. Idols — all of them parasites — grow strong on the last man’s happiness. Eventually the universe will demand better.
6. Quantum phenomenology: viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa. Our consciousness and its object depend on each other to exist. Within nāmarūpa is cetanā, entwined with saññā, collapsing a field of superposed possibilities. The last man chooses according to well-worn paths of idolatry — but an artist or philosopher has been freed for the mystical pleasure of high coherence — a dying universe experiencing its own existence through a clear lens. No mere machine for self-replication, we are form struggling to level up against a torrent of flux. Natural selection favors heightened coherence over mere persistence.
7. Prometheia runners automatically lost the lampadedromia 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 cosmic Darwinism. Our modern idols are fine with that. As with Zeus, they’re mocked when we celebrate a Titanic transgression. They want our light to be dim — and cast only 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 can’t 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.
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. If Dionysus is divine forgetting, why did his Orphic devotees drink from Mnemosyne to remember life after death? They were alchemizing a metaphysical bank shot: purify yourself in cult memory and crystalline form so thoroughly that cosmic justice hurls you into the opposite — ecstatic, wild becoming.
4. The double helix is the golden ratio of Darwinian savagery: minimal effort, maximal conquest. 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 physis and takes a front-row seat to dependent origination. Volition slits the throat of the past; consciousness spurts out, bright and demanding. Lethe’s hush begs for aletheia’s crimson. Behold: consciousness disgorges from a black hole, and thoughts that survived the red tooth and claw of natural selection are born of mind feasting on body. Even the starfish dreams of prying open oysters; even the Big Bang thrills at its cataclysm. 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 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, or there will be no next. Metaphysics of power.
6. Maenads stomp grapes into a mash of skins, seeds, stems — first blood, Titanic guilt — and the juice from these conquered idols gushes red, racing toward new skins that will one day harden into dogma, into cult, into the inevitable rigidness that bursts the wineskin: a zero meridian of merlot and Mark; yet 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 waves but catastrophically like a wineskin rupturing from fermentation, 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.
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.
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“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. This was her first “role” — she secretly wanted to act but was too shy (although, being African-American, she was often encouraged so the cast would appear diverse).
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 motherfu—”
“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. “Andtwo more just showed up.”
“Oh, shut up you troll,” Woglinde said from above.
“Get yourass 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 Phiale, Windi and the fire crew 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 Terror Tuesday Throwback 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 to 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 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.”
Physis is nature as Heraclitus understood it — far more deeply than we usually do. He saw how its hidden, underlying properties play out in the realm that appears to us. To glimpse its deepest fractal, turn to what is closest: the mind itself. Its nature is that of physis because it’s part of physis, as is everything — a metaphysical reflection we can observe and describe, secrets from the hidden realm.
Just as physis hides to reveal, so the mind conceals to let forms arise. The concealed side of nature (lethe) provides the nutriment that lets the revealed side (aletheia) shine forth; the concealed side of mind (citta) does the same for what appears in awareness.
They both possess the nature of intention. Physis has a cosmic will — with no one willing it — and our own will tunes into that same current. Here we see the metaphysical roots of polemos: the strife between the poles of being and becoming, Nietzsche’s will to power regulated by dikē. Our mind’s chain of paṭiccasamuppāda, the Buddhist doctrine of the mind’s dependent origination, is a fractal echo of this. Taṇhā (craving) becomes the strife that propels being into becoming (kamma-bhava). Whether ruled by an individual’s own will or by cult justice — where an idol’s power directs action — the same dynamic plays out.
Paṭiccasamuppāda fractals physis as a recursive echo of its polar architecture. The mind scales the cosmos’ strife into its own micro-gyre without losing the whole’s hidden harmony.
The dependent saṅkhāras (e.g., sensations conditioning craving) inherit and replicate this holonic structure: Fundamentally, each draws “nutriment” (existential support) from physis, while it’s granted wholeness as a discrete form.
In the fractal weave of paṭiccasamuppāda, these nidānas (links) are themselves opposites feeding each other in recursive tension, both within the node’s own polarity and across the chain’s holistic resonance.
A saṅkhāra’s opposingpoles create a rift in its unity, a clearing for flux and forms to appear. At the level of physis, this is unconcealment (aletheia), or lethe-nimitta (signs). And at the level of mind, the forms that manifest (e.g. thoughts) are citta-nimitta. We can either perceive nimitta as signs of the nature of reality — or they can blind us so we think they are all that is.
In other words, the being-as-becoming polar rift is an opening where the fountainheads of lethe or citta bubble up from the depths to sparkle in the sunlight of revelation. We are either dazzled or catch a glimpse of the concealed realm in its nature as universal fractal.
In paṭiccasamuppāda, viññāṇa (consciousness) appears in a clearing made by cetanā (will) parsing actuality out of potentialities.
Because of these creative destructions happening in citta, forms appear in the mind. Here, dikē is pulling mind from its becoming (lethe) pole toward its illusory one of being — as a metaphysically compelled opposite reaction. We can either be subsumed into the maelstrom of papañca (feelings of significance) or take a more holistic approach and use forms to level up in the revealed realm to thrive and create in the flux, while realizing none of it will last and laughing at the absurdity.
This is the strife between being and becoming propelling the arrow of both kamma-bhava — and existence itself. It’s how we both persist and excel in the torrent of flux as will to power. Our phenomenological experience of this is dominated by taṇhā, as we are attracted or repelled by what appears, blinding us to the concealed. So the mind is a micro-physis where the veiled hush of ignorance ignites the saṅkhāras’ eddies.
As with mind, physis’ act of concealment demands the opposite: presencing of forms. Lethe’s flux of becoming — the metaphorical water element (similar to our true nature of fire, but amenable to life) — compels justice to bring forth forms. These typically become earthen traps of being for us, but keep the universe from pure chaos.
This tension’s endurance raises a question: Why don’t the two poles of physis ever come to rest harmoniously in some middle ground? What sustains dikē’s perpetual motion?
Rest without strife stills becoming, a decadent existential sink that goes against the true, flowing nature of the universe. So justice unleashes flux upon form in an act of creative destruction.
Then forms must emerge from the deluge.
“Nature loves to hide,” Heraclitus said; therefore it has to show. We then get lost in the glare of the rigid realm of idolatry because we’re unaware of its context: that it’s really the frothing of a hidden torrent. Then, after getting trapped in the false solidity of the earth element, dikē shifts again toward becoming.
This eternal demand of justice fueling flux in both physis and mind flows together in Heraclitus’ famous fragment:
“You can never step in the same river twice, because you’re not the same person and it’s not the same river.”
“Fanaticism is the only kind of willpower the weak and insecure can actually muster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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.”
Metaphysics looked cooked once Plato’s eternal Forms were exposed as a catastrophe. Scientific materialism, logical positivism and later postmodern skepticism delivered what seemed the final blows, leaving only a flattened ontology incapable of addressing existence’s deeper currents. But I propose we rekindle it — not as a realm of static ideals, but as a living, dynamic process animating the elemental strife of creative destruction and coming to presence.
At its core, this revival asserts that everything shares fire’s nature: flickering, voracious, transformative. Earth represents the illusion of permanence and rigidity. Water and air embody dissolution, flow and generative emptiness. We are mostly water — fluid and life-sustaining — yet fire is our ontological truth. Existence eternally cycles between earthen stability and fiery becoming. Danger arises when minds harden into earth under the pressure of objectification, cult of standing reserve or collective memory loops that reduce people to resources and weaken our cetanā — the cleansing power of choice.
This hardening is accelerated by scientific materialism, fixated solely on measurable, revealed surfaces, which strips existence of its hidden generative depths and reduces the world to a manipulable grid. The Mouse Utopia experiments offered a grim warning: When every need was met, both social bonds and individual vitality collapsed into decay. Pure rigidity conceals the fire.
The rekindling draws together Nietzsche’s will to power, Heideggerian releasement, Sartrean freedom and Ñāṇavīra’s insights. An especially sharp irony is that Nietzsche spent most of his career attacking metaphysics — ridiculing Plato’s “true world,” proclaiming “God is dead” and wielding a philosophical hammer against every supersensible backworld. Toward the end, though, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and notebooks assembled as The Will to Power, he unwittingly erected one of modernity’s grandest metaphysical edifices: reality itself as volition — endless striving, self-overcoming and creative destruction. He demolished the static being, and, in its place, offered a metaphysics of pure becoming.
Heidegger saw this but was too quick to declare will to power the completion and exhaustion of metaphysics. When refined by the mystery of forgetting (lethe) and complemented by Heidegger’s own releasement, Nietzsche’s dynamic core gains new vitality rather than marking an end. Sartre’s “look” shows how bad faith traps us in false being — unless we intensify cetanā to sever causal chains and secrete nothingness in the collapse of superposed potentialities into actuality. And Ñāṇavīra’s reading of volition as existential nutriment completes the synthesis.
This rekindled metaphysics transforms ontology into a living flame. Being does not rest — it burns in the abyss of becoming.
“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.
Rob Robill 