3,350 years ago in ancient Egypt, the pharaoh Akhenaten, husband of Nefertiti, discarded the traditional pantheon of his culture and adopted the worship of Aten, the disc of the Sun. This monotheistic reverence for the solar deity lasted only a short while. After the demise of Akhenaten, Egypt’s traditional polytheism reasserted itself. What was that brief adoration of the Sun about? Impossible to know all these millennia later. Most of the records of that ruler were destroyed after his death. But just look at this guy! What do you see in his face? Something truly unique, for sure. We know who is inside, behind those singular features. Not a figurehead or front man for a dynasty but an individual, incomparable as you or I. There are powers that move in our depths. Among them is the self-illuminating reflex of dreams and hypnagogia. And deeper yet, the radiance of the self, the presence of consciousness. This energetic presence, this I Am, is the imprint of the Sun. It is the one star that has sustained us for the four billion years it took to find our way here, to our brief moment of individuality. Odd emotions challenge us. Inhumane energies slip in and out of awareness. The blues. The dark night of the soul. The death wish of depression. What is to be done? Akhenaten had an idea. Sunlight breathes us and sets glowing the soft flame in each cell of our bright-winged bodies. Few believe. And fewer yet know. Our long journey here to this day, to a mind that knows and a heart that blesses, found its way through the deprivations of fire, out of the mystery of light.

After the soul has been severed from the body, it continues its journey, its path unknown, the destination unknown. It is a trembling day. – Zohar 1:201b Trembling Day The moon’s paw padded silently among hurrying clouds. Giant pines wore feather boas of fog. And a bluff of limestone glowed soft as a breast in the wilderness night. A lovely occasion for vampires. How was I to know? A 54-year-old yoga instructor from Rahway, New Jersey, I thought bloodsuckers were swamp worms and lawyers. Sure, the travel agent had said the bluff was haunted. A wraith of a Revolutionary war soldier, the specter of a Mohawk brave, perhaps a flitting apparition of Ralph Waldo himself – these are the spooky experiences of imperishable memories. But vampires in the Adirondacks? Bernie and I had come to this remote resort in Black River Valley to celebrate our 17th anniversary and the opening in Short Hills Mall of a third outlet for our own franchise, a bodymind-fitness-studio slash vegetarian-stir-fry-restaurant: Go Yoga! & Wok Like This! With three places of business that Bernie would have to manage accounts for and new instructors and cooks I had to break in and oversee, who knew when next we’d have a chance to traipse off together and watch moonrise over a haunted bluff? Bernie would rather have stayed in the lodge at his laptop. He was there for golf and relaxation, not canoe trips, foliage hikes, outdoor tai chi, lakeside dawn meditation and other bliss-inducing activities I adore. But he adored me and went along with me that night of the big moon. That’s my sorrow now, a tough karma I’m working at with all my might. You see, we hadn’t snuggled together in the feathered moonlight under those secluded conifers for five minutes before vampires struck. A steel clamp of horror squeezed my heart so tight my last breaths came in gasps. Vampires are not at all elegant like in those movies. Their faces are brilliant as lanterns but blue, cyanotic blue, and leopard-spotted. Maybe it was just the moonlight. Bone shadows fluoresced like X-rays through their flesh, skeletal people with squid eyes, just black keyholes in chalk dead faces. Really. I could have screamed, except I had no breath. Bernie, wide as a lumberjack, my globe-shouldered Bernie, leaped up, his face scrambled with emotion. The first vampire lifted him with one slender neon arm and slammed him against the spruce so hard needles rained. A whiff of Christmas floated briefly before a fecal stink fouled the air. His feet, free of the earth, kicked like a swimmer’s. The vampire that had pinned its trophy to the tree floated horizontally in the moony air like a tattered banner, like an angel of decay, its narrow body concealed in filthy wrappings, face hidden against Bernie’s throat. Tar spackled the back of its head, webs of tar that must once have been hair. It meshed now in filament braids or perhaps that was mold thriving in the sutures of its skull. Bernie’s eyes stared straight ahead, wide open and electrocuted. My throttled lungs howled squeak after mad squeak. When I careened about, I met the second vampire’s night terror eyes. It watched my horror with obvious delight – no joy in those puncture-hole eyes, nothing in those inkwells – yet the spidery creases of its face deepened, twitching sadistic mirth. Leather lips pressed shut, holding back the killing shriek I knew was coming. It came. A gargoyle’s scream rang my bones like chimes. The horrid, famished mouth opened, and I glimpsed those infamous fangs, slender needles of starlight. The thing was on me, nailing me to the tree in a slamming blast of ice gale force. Lit with pain, I blazed for a moment, dazzling atoms bursting all through my body in torrid flares of agony. Is this happening? The incredulity of it endured the searing, silent cries roasting me alive. Me! This is happening to me! Not a nightmare. No dream. Me, dharma darling, devotee of Amitabah Buddha of Infinite Light, lotus-center me, founder and CEO of Go Yoga! & Wok Like This!– qi channeler me, still-point me who is not-me, anatman, radiant me, Bernie’s lover! Me! Like a gust of smoke, I drifted away. The pain ceased abruptly. A blast of power|rightness wafted me into the hush of heaven, under a moon like a blotched mushroom. Was that the moon? That wasn’t the moon but the soft radiance of infinity I had visualized so many times in meditation. Bernie! I spun about in mussel-blue night. There’s my Bernie! He was at the zenith, thunderstruck, a lustrous echo of his naked physical self, balding red hair, freckles, paunch and all, rising swiftly into a confused atmosphere of speeding clouds and moonfire. A moment of clarity dilated my mind, too strangely calm considering what had just happened. And I saw my partner, my lover, ascending toward glistening darkness, a whorl of inward spiraling space, wet-looking and black as a mollusk. I perceived this with a certainty we possess in dreams – and so I had no trouble envisioning his breath|force. It bulged with rainbows at the place of his heart as if from inside an opal. These spectra winced then winked smaller. All those years I had urged him to join me in meditation, to focus his breath, concentrate awareness deep in the body, in the force center, the core chakra of our dream-flesh. All those years amused at my zealous devotion to yoga, he kept himself busy in the back office with spreadsheets and in the studio-restaurants with custodial chores. When we were alone, he gently scoffed at my yoga compulsion – except of course in the tantric serenity of our prolonged lovemaking. (And he never jeered my compulsive cooking, either.) For Bernie, yoga was business. Cooking was business. And business was over now. He floated away, corkscrewing upward – outward? Gone. Breathe! I began my breath-focus routine, trying to keep myself from an implosion of

We are a dream that woke up. Ardipithecus. Paranthropus. Australopithecus. Homo. Thick with sleep, we feel deeper behind our darkness to the secret light brightening all around us 250,000 years ago as the forests retreat and the savanna unrolls. The mother of us all sits there. Will the hyenas find her in the tall grass? Their carnal stink rides the wind. She waits, hands clasped over her swollen belly. The wind will turn and betray her or not. She closes her eyes, and a song opens softly in her mouth. She sings so quietly only the child within can hear her. “The sun is shining upon the world. The sun is shining. And you will see this light. You will know my face. And I will know yours.” Her song did not die in her mouth. We have forgotten her face, but we remember her song. She sings to us still in the secret light of the dream that passed through her heart to wake here.

All things in this world have a mystery of their own. — Zohar 2:16a Psycho Macchina Morning glittered across the dewy turf brilliant as Mozart. The white building on the manicured lawn looked like music, too. Its melodious, horizontal geometry of stucco walls curved to green tinted glass and created a feeling of movement. Landscape screens of Italian cypress hid adjacent houses in the exclusive neighborhood overlooking the Hudson. Manhattan, spangled with sunlight, dominated the eastern prospect and cast bold shadows on the river. Snaking across the broad lawn, a brick path led to an airy entryway. Jade glass sidelights framed a monolithic eight-by-nine-foot sliding door of brushed steel that glided open silently. In the sunstruck foyer, under high skylights, a highly-polished bronze torso of a nude female stood. It gigantically occupied a space of sinuate walls, empty and white, and no furniture. The visitors, two elegantly dressed men, stood baffled before the colossal bronze until a young, strawberry blonde in a white silk shirt and gray slacks approached. Smiling earnestly, she greeted them, “Bevan Powers – Motassem Razori – please, come in. E. Randolph will see you shortly.” E. Randolph Rayne, gallery owner and executive art dealer, knew more about the secret world of vampires than anyone on the planet. For that reason, Bevan Powers had sought him out here at Psycho Macchina, Rayne’s exclusive art salon. Reserved months in advance, the gallery offered corporate clients monumental, contemporary chef-d’oeuvres. Bevan had not expected to wait. An aggressive arbitrageur with a majestic net worth, he moved through circles where people usually waited for him. Today, however, he would wait, because four nights ago he had met his first vampire. “I’m Jenne Prosper.” The strawberry blonde led the men around the mirroring torso to a placid, vacant space. Curly-heart pine floorboards gleamed. A single desk of smoked glass fronted a stainless-steel chair. The desk shared a flat screen monitor with a wireless keyboard and nothing else, no telephone, no pad, not a pencil. “Please, sit.” Jenne motioned to a low bench of laminated birch and took her own seat. “Something to drink perhaps?” Both men declined and sat. With a flagrant murmur of silence in the air and nothing on the white, undulant walls but slants of sunlight, they stared at their bespoke shoes. Motassem Razori reached inside his jacket pocket, removed a small pad and began to scribble. Bevan Powers flexed his hands and, in the singing silence, remembered why he was here. Four nights ago, when the trill alarm in his mattress had gently awakened him, he had groggily noted the time on the nightstand’s digital display: 2:49 AM. Razori’s voice quietly informed him on the intercom, “Sir, I find your daughter at the gate.” A week earlier, sixteen-year-old Ivy Powers had disappeared from the hospital where her doctors had admitted her for treatment of lymphoma. The disease had manifested suddenly and aggressively, resistant to therapy. She would be dead in six months, and he hadn’t blamed her for running away to die somewhere else on her own terms. “Let her in, Razori.” “She will not, sir. She would speak with you at the gate.” “She knows I’m here.” Olivia Fairleigh-Powers sat up in bed beside Bevan. “That’s why she won’t come in.” Olivia, his third wife, a tall, striking woman of honeyed skin, frost hair and razor blue eyes possessed a face of stern beauty. “She despises me.” Bevan did not refute her. He put on a kaftan and hurried out of the bedchamber. As he passed through the dressing room, he glanced at himself in a cheval mirror. Blue-black hair stood out stiffly. His very pale face and dramatic hazel eyes hovered like an apparition in the focal light, and he startled himself. Sleep creases marred his boyish, heartbroken features. Quickly, he swept fingers across his scalp and rushed to the stairwell. Razori met him in the security office on the first floor. The front gate monitors showed a midsize car, empty except for Ivy in the driver’s seat. He asked her to come in and opened the gates, but she refused. In exasperation, he agreed to come out. Razori gave him a disquieted look. Perhaps Ivy had not run away from the hospital. Perhaps she was a lure. In Bevan’s business, underworld figures sometimes made trouble. And that’s why he had hired Razori, a former Iraqi intelligence officer and Sunni thug with a falcon’s furious face. Razori drove Bevan out to the gate in the Peugeot, and when they arrived, sure enough, there was a big man with a shaved head sitting next to Ivy. “Stay, sir.” The trained killer got out of the Peugeot and approached the midsize, hand in his jacket gripping an M11 compact pistol. “Miss Ivy, please, come from the car.” Ivy got out. She didn’t appear as emaciated as she had in the hospital, where she had shrunk to her skeleton. In the metal halide floodlights, she looked implausibly beautiful: spiky midnight hair in perfect disorder, surly teen features pallid as if a cutout of moonlight. She spieled some long speech about how she was all right now and had decided to live on her own and didn’t want her father worrying about or searching for her. While she rattled on, Bevan exited the Peugeot and gradually approached, intending to grab her and haul her inside, away from that big stranger in the passenger seat wearing ski sunglasses in the dark. The stranger stepped out, and Razori drew his M11. What happened next… # Evolving Door What happened next? Bevan dizzied at the memory and stood up. “May I look around?” Jenne Prosper peered over the flat screen with a rabbity pout. “The installations are in the east wing. Some are mechanical, others electrical. For your safety, Mister Powers, be sure not to touch them.” Razori moved to rise, and Bevan motioned for him to stay. “Finish your poem, Razori. I’ll be fine.” Effervescent as champagne, sunlight bounded off the

William Hunt Jr. has created a gallery of character portraits from my novel The Last Legends of Earth using Wonder, an AI image generator. This medium is so condign with science fiction, I’m moved to display some of his portraits here along with quotes from the novel. The images occupy the synapse between text and our wordless selves, which urges me to keep accompanying quotes brief. The Last Legends of Earth takes place seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died. Alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. Upon an artificial planetary system called Chalco-Doror, we are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between humankind’s re-animator and a predator that feeds vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms. Gai, the re-animator, in its natural morphology: “They jumped about and faced a mass of lashing cilia far bigger than a man and jointed like an upright centipede, eyes two black lenses above scissoring mouthparts.” … “They gazed at the mountainous and alien shape of convoluted insect-parts and viper coils.” ◊ Gai in the human form adopted for interfacing with human bait: “They whirled about as one and faced Gai in her human guise smiling benignly, star-gleam eyes bright as laserpoints. ‘Better that we part like this, and you remember me as an alien that learned something of being human.’ “ ◊ Lod Chalco-Doror, a binary system, consists of a radiant star and a gravitationally collapsed object, a black hole. Each is a machine intelligence capable of assuming human form: ◊ Egil Grimson “The Aesirai, who currently dominate all of Doror and parts of Chalco, are humans selectively bred to imitate the tribe of their founder, Egil Grimson, a man who had lived and died on Earth as a Viking, a sea rover in the third millennium before human extinction.” ◊ Wulf Bane “The rebel leader, Wulf Bane, a robust, bearded, and broad-faced man with a mane of white-blond hair.” ◊ The Weed Woman “The Weed Woman only looked human. She had been created by one of the many powers—the spiders, lizard angels, Fire, the Face of Night, or maybe even the World Eater. She was already there when the first people arrived.” ◊ Sword “The besieged hamlet had no one to appeal to for help but a legendary figure called Sword, reputed to wander the wild worlds seeking evil distorts to slay.” ◊ The Tryl “During the sapiens era on Earth, their primary ancestor, a gecko (family Gekkonidae), fairly reliably traces their origin to the island of Vanua Levu. A billion years after the end of the sapiens era, the Tryl evolved from that small creature. They had the stature of humans, though far cleverer and more compassionate. Earth’s preeminent intelligence, the Tryl produced the greatest technological artifacts in world history.” ◊ ◊ ◊

Who speaks for the Kenning Stone? Not Merlin. Merlin speaks for no one since Nimue beguiled him. Though he raised the great stone from Cimmerian caverns to clasp Excalibur, the wizard could not lift himself above lust. The Wiccan women he took as lovers stole his power. In the enchanted forest of Brocéliande, he wanders aimlessly, lamenting his half-fool heart. If not Merlin, then who speaks for the Kenning Stone? Not the Ladies of the Slippery Branch – Sybilla, Isola, Viviane, Nimue – the uncanny lovers who seduced Merlin to learn his secrets. They turned the wizard’s arcana upon the Kenning Stone to shed darkness and peer into the moony land of the dead. Seeking their ancestors’ fabled skill at cropping fate, they gazed all the way back to the very first queens who followed the arrowing geese to this northland. The Ice Age queens immediately sensed these intruders from millennia in their future. With necromancy old as Olduvai, they ensorcelled Merlin’s lovers and locked them inside immense crags of blue ice cleaved from ebbing glaciers. The ice towers eventually melted to meres and tarns brimming with tranquil force, and the Ladies of the Slippery Branch became the Ladies of the Lake. They speak for none now under the rolling stars, save the Ice Age Queens. And the queens? The Ice Age queens, with their necromancy old as Olduvai, drew power out of the frozen land as it woke from its numb eonian sleep. They rode rivers of mist, spoke with the thawing winds, and stored their strength inside those mountains of blue ice and their airless shadows. The Kenning Stone instructed the queens how to double their energy. Soon after, before they slipped out of the phenomenal world, they confided in the chiefs who came after them the dreaming force of the Kenning Stone. If not the Ladies of the Lake or the land’s first queens, then who will speak for the Kenning Stone? Not the great chiefs whose tribes learned from the Stone how to mount megaliths and gear the heavens. Those chiefs lie silent in their barrow graves. So, if not the chiefs, who speaks for the Kenning Stone? Not the roving tribes from the east with their worship of the wheel. They slaughtered the chiefs and took the land and the women and learned nothing of the Kenning Stone. Merlin’s lovers dwell to this day within ancient glacial thaws shimmering with the plangent songs of distant stars. The Ladies float and peer, steady and focused as hummingbirds to each moment, no fathom between us. Their attention will not yield. In the buoyant twilight and through all the slow night, while angels undress and time fits us to the opposite of time, you will sense them. They watch us even now, in dreams that love the yew.