She coils where the carved letters end, where the topmost branch forgets it was ever wood and remembers only sky. Below her, the trunk spirals with an alphabet that has arrived at the end of remembrance, wisdom cut by hands now soil, promises long bereaved. She does not read them. Her glow illuminates the dead’s unsalvageable truths. Each night her breath moves down the bark like slow amber, and the runes shine briefly, one by one, as if the tree were remembering its own name in the dark. She eats the dark. Travelers see her light from far valleys and call it a star caught in branches. They are not wrong. Stars are only fires on lonesome journeys. And hers is the loneliest, traveling long through the endlessness that dreams us. When the last rune cools, she tucks her head beneath one wing and sleeps, like us, in her burning.

It’s the radioactivity. It inebriates them. Something about what we call the weak nuclear force, that shy, unglamorous cousin of electromagnetism, distorts their hyperdimensional minds. They gather around our nuclear facilities like barflies at a saloon on a wet Friday night – and they get lit. This explains the erratic flight paths that radar operators describe with such baffled precision. The sudden altitude drops. The inexplicable loop-de-loops. And the numerous crashes. Need I say more? Moving at the velocity of awe in our world of rue, they must know how this story ends.

A dream is a true thing. Truer than we are. Every night, we appear as unwitting players in the dream’s drama. The true thing that generates our dreams and subverts our sense of reality is our neurology. How weird is that? Not weird at all. It’s wholly natural and ordinary. But what is it? What are we? I feel obliged to state the obvious: The brain is the only object in the known universe that wonders what it is. That wondering is a true thing. It can take us into a lucid state while dreaming. And then, there are two. The dreamed is real. The dreamer is real. The willful space between them is unnatural and extraordinary. How spooky is that for the neurology when we confront it in a lucid dream? Right? For hundreds of millions of years, neurology has been in full command of the dreaming mind. Are we not the first species to interrupt the dream’s drama? The lucid state is not merely a curiosity. It is a revolution. Literally. The dreamed revolving to face the dreamer. The effect interrogating the cause. So, what have we found? Presence. And another true thing we will never know.

You, me, and whoever wrote these words, here may we rest a while. And talk with the dead. Searching minds commune with the silence in which the dead have vanished. Yarns spun like a spider’s web across silence. The weight of fiction. We catch the drift. 300,000 years of human traits and transit, conversational, generational, the same yearning, cave paintings from animal séances, burial crypts with what the dead need, where they go. Flip the hourglass. Loop time. We are the dead.

Merlin had warned them twice. “Not the gold dust,” he had said, lifting the goblet with the solemnity of a king at sacrament. “And absolutely not into my morning tonic.” Faeries, being faeries, love contraries. They took this as an invitation to improve the wizard’s tonic and sprinkled gold dust liberally. So now the old wizard stood in the green light of Brocéliande, beard aflutter, hair storm-tossed, eyes stretched monstrously from his head as though trying to escape the consequences before the rest of him could. From his mouth burst not prophecy, not fire, or some Latin of power, but a blackbird – sleek, indignant, and very much alive. It shot into the air with a cry like a ripped seam. The faeries scattered in a glittering panic, though not too far. They never fled farther than laughter would carry. One hid behind a foxglove bell. Another clutched her sides and pointed. A third, bolder than the rest, hovered before Merlin’s nose and peered mischievously across the steaming cup. “Oh,” she said. “That was a mouthful, even for you Merlin! The wizard fixed her with the most terrible stare a man could manage while still partially cross-eyed. The forest around him listened. Even sunbeams seemed to pause. “At once,” he growled, “you will reverse this enchantment.” The faery tilted her head. “Which part, great wizard? The blackbird, the eyes, or your temper?” Merlin considered, then sighed smoke and feathers. “The temper,” he said. “The others may prove useful.”

When we go through the hot-process of reading stories we are changed and the world itself seems to be telling a story that intensifies the interest and meaning of our lives. In an age when a.i. generates fiction called slop and may very well (and probably soon) patch together fiction as engaging as anything people can write, who then will speak for the human spirit? Machine intelligence can imitate us and may, eventually, have something original to say. But it will be a machine saying it. The human story is a biological one. What a peculiar fact that the DNA in any living creature has never died. Each of us occupies a physical form that has been morphing for four billion years and will experience death for the first time only when we die. Until that mortal moment, somatic intelligence breathes us, beats our hearts, and electrifies our neurology with qualia no machine will ever know. Story is self-reckoning. That’s true for readers and writers both. We meet ourselves in the stories that captivate us. And what more important endeavor is there for any of us than getting to know this marvel of creation called being?