Prologue
German-Occupied Crimea
1944 CE
Irony is a poem handed to us by a dark god. So his mother has told him every day since her husband, his father, left for the Eastern Front, where millions of German soldiers have died already.
Irony was why his mother told him that. As he was her only child, she had to tell him what her grandmother had said to tell only her granddaughter.
Irony was why Nikolas was born male—a gender not endowed with the verbal abstraction to make sense of what his mother has told him to memorize. “Someday, her daughter would return. Two women will fight for the light. One must die. For only in the death of life can one be in the chamber of the blue light.” Nevertheless, she said that these legendary phrases might one day save his life.
Two months after turning sixteen, Nikolas Gollinger mulled over his mother’s last words to him before he took the train from Austria to Odessa, then a boat to Sevastopol, to join his father, Professor Gollinger, and the German paranormal research unit he’d voluntarily joined.
Now, as the Russian troops close in on the last Germans defending this odd peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, the lanky blond Nikolas waits in an oak grove near the hidden mouth of a cave for the return of the stout, black-haired Kemel Ghurdzi, a native from the local Jewish community, the Crimean Krymchaks. The distinct smells of gunpowder and blood waft through the air around them.
Like Nikolas, Ghurdzi suffers dreams of an ancient torment. Like Nikolas, Ghurdzi’s male lineage has passed along an oral tradition of an ancient mystery. And like Nikolas, Ghurdzi has been taught by his father that life is, first and foremost, a chance to solve the mystery.
The oral tradition passed down from dream-afflicted father to dream-afflicted son talks of an ancient star falling to Earth, enslaving giants of the north, the bright star in the Cygnus constellation, and a black object that will save the world—but only if the destined man and woman find the object together.
Every Gollinger man dedicates his life to solving the mystery of the all-powerful black object. And thus, Ghurdzi pleaded, part of the mystery could be solved if he could enter this cavern before the Russians retook Crimea: the reason why Nikolas now waits for this Crimean Krymchak outside these secret caverns hidden in an ancient forest where he once took Ghurdzi’s wife.
A half hour passes as Nikolas paces back and forth, wearing a new trail into the ground before he lets out a juicy curse in German, one his mother would not approve of. He had brought Gurdzhi’s wife here, helping her flee the Russians, when she warned no man should enter. At risk he dies here by Russian bullets or dies inside, he enters the cavern to find Ghurdzi, to find the truth of the mystery. Minutes into the cavern, Nikolas’s torchlight illuminates ancient skeletons. All male, from the tilt of the pelvic bones. All signs that men were not to survive the trip into this cave, just as Ghurdzi’s wife said. His breathing slows as he notes these bones belong to men over three meters tall; Nikolas’s first hard proof of the ancient oral traditions.
The narrowing sandstone-lined cavern shakes with thunderous booms, dropping bits of sand onto his head. Nikolas waffles between going back outside and descending further to get Ghurdzi. Why did he say he had special permission to enter when all other men died? More booms rock the cavern. But the skeletons, evidence of the giants of the legend, compel him to brave death to find out the truth.
One would think the air would be only stale. Perhaps with a tinge of the dank, dark smell of death, given these skeletons. But from further down the passageway comes a different smell. Like the air after it rains. Like the first morning of spring after a long, cold winter. It is the smell of life, and it calls him to descend further.
His nose plays tricks on him, then his eyes do the same. A blue glint? Or is he going blind in these endless passageways? He turns off his lamp, and a tiny glint of blue shimmers from another symbol on the wall. A bull’s head. Didn’t Dr. Murometz, the Russian physician working with his father, wear a pendant with a similar bull’s head?
Blue. The color of the light in that chamber his mother described. He must keep going. For his mother. For every Gollinger who has tried to solve the legend.
He descends further, and his torch illuminates another engraving on the wall. The tail of the bird star, the brightest star in the Cygnus constellation, same as the legend says. He takes out paper and pencil and traces the inscription, written in a language no longer known. A dozen more twists and turns, or was that three dozen? Nikolas is lost as he comes back full circle to the tail of the bird star on the wall. Ghurdzi better still be alive, or Nikolas’s mother’s last words to him were truly the last.
In the distance, he hears a woman’s faint voice. She says Ghurdzi’s wife must spread the word to her daughters. Must tell the woman’s side of the story. That he must sacrifice all so that these teachings can be passed to their children. Ghurdzi’s voice says, “I believe in the light. I believe in you. I will not fail you. She will return to you. She will. But you must trust what I ask.”
A bright blue flash blinds Nikolas. Before his eyes fully recover, Ghurdzi emerges, skin crispy and burnt, shirt off, wrapped around something glowing blue. The Jewish Krymchak says they must protect this blue stone at all costs. Hanging from his neck is a pendant built around a small black stone, one of a pair Ghurdzi’s wife brought out of these caverns when Nikolas stopped here with her, helping her escape the impending Russian onslaught.
Nikolas asks who he was talking with. Ghurdzi says the same who gave his wife the essence of the sacred-gene-activating vaccine Dr. Murometz injected them all with three months ago.
Emerging from the darkness comes an elder woman in a long beige robe that covers her body, neck to ankles, head covered by a pure white headscarf. She ignores Ghurdzi, addressing only Nikolas, who is holding the injured Krymchak. “Men are forbidden in here. Why should I spare you the fate of your friend who dared intrude upon our sanctuary?”
As Ghurdzi’s oozing burns begin to seep onto Nikolas’s clothing, the young Austrian’s mind races. Knowing he has only moments to save his life or become one of those male skeletons, he blurts out, “Because my mother sent me to say that one day, the daughter would return here. That only in the death of life as one knows it can one be in the chamber of the blue light.”
Glancing at him, she puts her hand on his forehead. A blue aura emanates from the juncture, a color Nikolas prays is not the beginning of scorching pain.
She says, “Your mother is wise. You must leave and raise children with a woman of purity like us. Teach your descendants as well as your mother did you. For one of them will help the right woman return to the chamber of the blue light. You will know which one. Tell no one but your child, their child, and only after they have known the truest love of their other half.”
Thankful for his mother’s wisdom, thankful for his life, Nikolas now faces too many twists and turns to remember as Ghurdzi describes how to leave the cave. When finally they emerge back onto the main trail, they find the SS outside with machine guns pointed at Ghurdzi.
Dr. Murometz has his hands up as the SS commander says he is a traitorous spy playing doctor among the German ranks. Nikolas’s father, Professor Gollinger, stands behind the SS soldiers in a German Ahnenerbe uniform, his machine gun aimed at Dr. Murometz as well.
The SS commander says to Ghurdzi, “Hand over what is in your hands. It belongs only to the Aryan race. We have been searching for the past year for this holy stone from Orion. As described in the logbooks of a Russian researcher which we confiscated from Dr. Murometz, it transmits the cosmic energy Herr Himmler has long searched for.”
With a look of resignation, the destined-to-be-executed Jewish Crimean freedom fighter tosses the blue aura stone to the ground. The SS commander picks it up, inspects it, and then drops it, his hands crisped. Howling curses in German, the red-faced SS commander shoots Ghurdzi. Once, twice, thrice in the chest as Nikolas cries out, “No, no! He is innocent.”
An artillery shell explodes nearby, and dirt pellets and rocks shower them. While the SS soldiers are distracted, using their hands to protect their heads, Professor Gollinger guns them down, an act of betrayal if the SS command finds out he killed them to save a Russian.
Nikolas kneels to Ghurdzi, hearing his dying words. “My given first name is Ya’akov. Only my wife knows that. Take this stone pendant and return it to my Ariella. Only the destined man and woman can reenter the grotto in the cavern. Only with these can they both navigate the pathway through the caverns.”
No time for Nikolas to mourn the dead, as Russian soldiers are heard. Dr. Murometz says, “They will not like Austrians any better than Germans. You must flee or be captured.”
Nikolas cries out, “But how are we going to hide the blue stone from the Russians?”
With a smile, Dr. Murometz says to the professor, “You can run away and live, or die with this rock of no significance.”
The Russian doctor takes Professor Gollinger’s gun, shakes his hand, and says, “May God bless our children and our grandchildren with the genetics to finish this.”
Paralyzed, Nikolas wants to tell this doctor what he heard in the caverns, but his father grabs his hand to flee into the forest.
The Russian soldiers enter the grove from the woods, astonished to find this physician scientist with a smoking submachine gun surrounded by a dozen dead SS soldiers. The senior officer says, “You will be a hero of the Motherland. Stalin will reward you handsomely.”
Around the doctor’s neck, an in-field medal for the Defense of the Caucasus is hung. It dangles next to another pendant. A bull’s head.
Chapter 1
Skyline Boulevard above Silicon Valley, California
7:15 a.m. GMT-8, January 2, 2023
She never realized it would be this long. She never, never thought she would be holding his, his…his thing. Yes, she has seen one before. But it enchanted her. It called to her, as it seemed to purr in her two hands.
This moment is exactly what he has been waiting for since they first touched. And finally, here she is with him. Outdoors in his redwood forests, amidst his mountains. He referred to a game children play. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Zara squeezes his dearest thing gently so and says, “Like a ripe banana with a brownish tinge and little reddish spots.”
As the two gaze down at the seven-inch-long banana slug wiggling in Zara’s hands, wisps of drifting white fluffy fog float by, swarming the majestic redwood giants in the grove they have found by this mountain crest drive overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
Peter had been such a dear. Zara had mentioned how much she missed the mountains of her childhood in Duhok Province in Iraq. And so, he suggested they spend time in the mountains of his childhood. It was time for her to know what drove his fondness for these yellow creatures.
As Peter draws his fingers lightly across his beloved banana slug, they land upon Zara’s fingers. And her finger purrs as much as the slug does.
Six months ago, she was about to leave Peter at his grandfather Nikolas’s grave. She had completed the mission her “Sasha” Murometz had coerced her into—the search for the black object of the ancient matriarch. As she was leaving the cemetery, Peter surprised her as he went back to pray at his grandfather Pappy’s grave.
The man-boy, who’d believed in aliens over God when she had met him, found solace in praying. Not because his mother told him to do so. Not because she would have wanted him to do so. But because he had an inner calling. At that moment, she had thought maybe, just maybe, he would be different from any other man who had sought her love.
As Peter touches her banana slug earrings, Zara responds by rubbing her scarred cheek against his hand, wondering if he truly is the one her late great-grandmother said he was. A drop of dew from the giant redwood above them lands on her nose. She puts her nose upon his to wipe the drop, followed by a light, affectionate peck on his lips.
“This means so much to me,” whispers Peter in her ear. “You being here with me so early in the morning—the most likely time to catch banana slugs slithering out to bathe in the mists. Most women wouldn’t dream of doing this.”
Another dewdrop forms on the brow of Zara’s dark plum headscarf from the dampness of the passing fog drifts. She passes the wiggling object of Peter’s second fascination back to him so she can brush the dew off her headscarf before it lands in the eye of Peter’s first fascination. Her.
“So, am I to assume an outing into the cold damp woods before sunrise is not your typical first date?” muses Zara.
“First date, huh? We are so far beyond first date, aren’t we? Only the women who count in my life come here,” asserts Peter as he puts his treasured yellow friend back onto the forest floor matted with fern leaves and redwood twigs and needles.
“My father took my mother, my sister, and me up here on family outings,” says Peter. “I fell in love with these denizens of the Pacific coastal forests. They are so peaceful. They hurt no one.”
Glancing toward the road, Peter looked at the broad trunks of the surrounding redwoods. “Except if someone hits them as they cross the road. No one would be driving so fast out here at this time of morning.”
But her eyes do not gaze upon that road. They do not disrupt the deepest mutual intimacy he has shared—his beloved banana slugs in his most sacred place on Earth. In this regard, she realizes he is like her, as she has a sacred place on her mountain back at her childhood home. A flattop rock next to the twisting trail where her beloved father would take her hiking. The place where she found her greatest peace. That is, until she met Peter.
Her grandmother Roza said peace comes from tolerance. The root of tolerance is mutual understanding. His communing in these woods with his yellow mollusk friends is his source of deep mysticism. No different from her Roza’s father’s Sufi twirling dance. Both ways to understand Xwedê’s world and be closer to Her.
Hence why she made the long journey from the Anatolian Kurdish State to California many times since his pappy’s funeral—the culmination of their two-month mission together searching for the mythical black object of his family’s legends. There is more to this man than his odd demeanor would portray. His composure, his placid eyes gazing in unity with nature remind her so much of her father on her mountain back home. Perhaps he really is a man seeking the Divine. Like her. Like what her mother had with her father. We shall see, she thinks.
Her serene moment is interrupted as Peter challenges, “So, I showed you mine.” He brushes a dewdrop from her nose as they make eye contact again. “Time for you to show me yours.”
Having grown up on the other side of the world, both geographically as well as culturally, from this man who now asks her to show him something most intimate of her inner being, Zara purses her lips, unsure what he is truly seeking in her. Their several-month relationship has already transcended the physical, the emotional, the limits of what she has had with previous boyfriends. What could he have not already seen in her given their ancient ability to spiritually bond?
She tugs on her headscarf more tightly to her head. Shelter from the cold fog? Shielding her most intimate thoughts from this man? Or simply an instinctive subconscious action?
She turns her back to him, facing the redwoods. The negative-ion-charged Pacific air passes so quietly as it flows through these monolithic beings. Ones who have seen a millennium pass. Ones whose family has seen the passage of time since the ancients. Seen the mysteries of the ancients. Like the mystery she and Peter saw because of their genetic descendancy from the ancient matriarch Nanshe’s family. Through their solving the mystery of Nanshe’s words passed from generation to generation.
The words that Peter’s pappy, Nikolas, had made him memorize. The words that her Sasha knew would lead to an ancient monolith, the black object. Known to the rest of the world as Alexander Murometz, her malevolent Sasha had built the world’s most powerful and politically invasive private enterprise so he would have access to the resources needed to find this object. The black object that spawned Zara’s prophecies; this stone could destroy the world. And this silly man in front of her outfoxed, outargued, outwitted the most politically manipulative man in the world, her Sasha, to prevent Turkey, the US, China, and Russia from starting a world war.
