Solstice - Of The Heart

Solstice

Of The Heart

A Novel

by

John J Blenkush

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Copyright by John J Blenkush

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For information
address:

John J Blenkush

[email protected]

PO Box 531

Forest Ranch, CA
95942

Legend has it the ancient Lemurian
city of Telos lies beneath the great northern Californian volcano
of Mount Shasta. Lemurians live on, so the storytellers say. We’ve
seen them, they say, tall, handsome, beautiful, gentle giants with
blue eyes and flowing manes of blonde hair. Small people too,
miniature, darting from here to there, so fast the eye can’t
follow. Living in hollow earth, where light ends darkness, where
walls are made of gold, the ceilings cast in jewel, the floors
copper laid. Animals abound, the fish and the fowl too, living in
harmony, nary a bone left to the rot. And here you will find the
flower, foliage, and fruit, sweet nectar, all, next to none,
snatched away only to reappear.

And what shall we say of the mountain
dwellers? Those who reap the life-force energy of the mountain, who
practice the ancient art of vampirism, transferring and
manipulating life-force energy, for neither is it created or lost,
only transferred from crucible to crucible. Should we say they are
good? Should we say they are evil?

Surface dwellers bite their tongues,
fearful their whispers of tittle-tattle will be heard, their
destinies forever lay to waste by the masters of vampirism. Only
the story-tellers, old men and women, a foot set in the grave, dare
discharge the secrets they hold, for death is the enemy of misery,
and a fond friend to them.

Learned men will tell you; the
life-force energy knows no evil, knows no good. And so too, the
vessel which holds the life-force, it must be chosen, with care and
due diligence, for what good is it to cast a net only to catch a
tailless fish, a wingless bird, a bull without heart, or one who
casts aside The Law of One.

Herein lays the crux.

The storytellers say, foretelling is
written in the Record of Ancient Matters. The Lemurians will a day
ascend, lift their superlatives to the surface, and pledge them to
wage war, not with blunt force, but with imprint. The chosen few
will learn the ways of surface dwellers, liberate their hearts and
minds, turn them from destruction to salvation.

One, they say, will lead the coming,
going forth to choose a surface equal, to unite with her as one, as
is inscribed by The Laws of One, to procreate a newborn, so all
will come to see the infant as, he IS. For the time will come, when
all things old must end, when the world will replicate the
obliteration of Mu and, for those who survive, only one choice will
remain; he IS.

To this end, a bride, pure in heart,
unblemished in body, soul of perfect love, must be mated. And on
the day of her bequest, the sun will stop, reverse, and start
again. Solstice will pass. A new world will seek birth through
rebirth. New will replace old. Scraping clean what is, so what must
come will be, good triumphing over evil.

And so...the Solstice Saga begins, a
story to be told, and handed down through the ages, so that all
will know; a new world is yet to come, for it has been written in
the Record of Ancient Matters.

To learn more about the Lemurians and
the back story to the SOLSTICE SAGA go to
www.jblenkush.com

I felt my heart stand still, as if in
waiting to reverse direction.

Julissa Grant

CONTENTS

1 – BOY HUNTING

2 – DETENTION

3 – LEMURIANS

4 – CLOSE CALL

5 – FIRST CONTACT

6 – KNOWING

7 – GIRL TALK

8 – LIVE PIG

9 – SECOND GUESSING

10 – DREAMS

11 – SNOW AND CRYSTALS

12 – DEATH

13 – DEAL

14 – MINNESOTA
BECKONING

15 – LAW OF ONE

16 – WINDOW TO THE SOUL

17 – HISTORY LESSON

1 BOY HUNTING

In the overall events of the world,
skipping a class on history to lark around on such a grand autumn
day wasn’t such a big deal. Or at least it shouldn’t have been.
Turns out it would be a life changer for me.

My first week as a sophomore in a new
high school and here I was ditching my last period class. Why do I
need to know what happened four-hundred years ago? What sixteen
year old girl is going to care who fought who in what war and for
what reason? Was there ever a good enough reason to cause
harm?

I didn’t think so.

Mr. Mattingly, my history teacher,
said, “If you don’t like my class, the door swings both ways. Don’t
let it hit you on the way out.”

I took him up on his offer.

I looked across at Cherrie
who had her left leg tucked up under her on the driver’s seat of
her grandfather’s Lincoln Continental. I suppose I could blame her
for my infraction. After all, she’s two years older than me. She
started school a year late—something about Attention Disorder—and
managed to flunk a class in grade school. But I know she’s not
dumb. In my book she’s the smartest student at Shasta High School
(SHS), clever enough to find a shortcut around six hours of classes
a day.

It’s a given, if you are a student at
Jefferson High, SHS’s continuation school, you have issues.
Cherrie’s issue was boredom. She made the choice to attend the
alternative school. Decisions of that sort made her the adult of
our pair in my eyes and a leader. It didn’t hurt she owned a
driver’s license and, just as important, had access to a
car.

As we drove out of Shasta City,
California and entered I-5 heading south, I couldn’t help but feel
like Louise of the notorious film Thelma and Louise. Only I hadn’t
been nearly raped and Cherrie hadn’t killed anyone, or at least she
hadn’t in the two short months I had come to know her.

Thinking back over the last several
months, I expected the worse when Dierdra, my mother, informed me
we were moving from White Bear Lake, Minnesota to a small town in
northern California called Shasta City. I had been to Shasta once
when I was five. I didn’t remember much about the town. I did
remember Uncle Mickey and his overgrown mustache and the way he
liked to grab me, lie down on the floor, and while hoisting me up
in the air, recite the I’ll give you a pickle for a nickel
rhyme.

I also had vivid memories of Uncle
Mickey’s small log cabin, mostly because of the enormous amount of
snow blanketing the house, the Christmas lights, and sledding down
the snow caked driveway. For a while, those cherished memories were
tarnished by the hate I felt for Uncle Mickey’s role in the death
of my father, Simon Grant.

Uncle Mickey and my father perished in
a white out—as the newspaper headlines described it—on Mount Hood.
Their bodies were never found. It took me a few years to accept the
fact father died doing something he loved to do and it wasn’t Uncle
Mickey’s fault, even if he was the one who enticed his brother to
go mountaineering.

I found peace with Dad’s
passing.

Mom didn’t.

Uncle Mickey, in his will,
left his log cabin to Simon. Naturally, Dierdra inherited it upon
Simon’s death.

I suppose it was because of me it took
three years before mother closed on the idea of relocating to
California. I just didn’t expect it to happen after I had already
completed my freshman year at White Bear Lake High School and made
new friends, not to mention being forced to give up my childhood
friends.

I felt for Dierdra, so I didn’t
complain much about the move. She’s a psychotherapist. She’s good
at helping others with their anxieties, depression, and phobias,
but it was becoming increasing apparent she wasn’t good at helping
herself. I could feel her slipping away; the mood shifts, the
staring out the window at nothing, weight loss, that sort of
thing.

Moving to the town of Shasta City,
which rests on the flank of the mountain, Mount Shasta, would bring
her closer to father. Or at least that was what she said. It didn’t
seem to matter to her Mount Shasta wasn’t where father had died and
now laid entombed in ice. He and Uncle Mickey had summited Shasta a
half dozen times, two of those from the north side. This is where
Simon had chosen to set his spirit free. It is where, I imagined,
Dierdra believed his spirit lived on.

And maybe I didn’t
complain, because I knew I could use a change in scenery too. After
having lost a friend and my father to death within a year’s time, I
felt my life had forever lost its purpose. At one point I found
myself asking the question: What’s the point of struggling on if
sorrow scrapes away everything worth living for? As Cherrie’s life
did for her, the cruelty of my life ate away at my soul and carved
inroads into my will to live.

So why should I care?

I lost my passion. I grew apathetic.
Joy eluded me. It was time for a change. Some would say a drastic
change. So I didn’t complain, not too loudly anyway, when Dierdra
approached me and asked if I wouldn’t mind moving to
California.

I met Cherrie, who lives across the
street from Uncle Mickey’s cabin with her grandfather, Garl, the
same day we moved in. She wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt. With
her short cropped hair and the ever present unlit cigarette hanging
from her mouth, I—at first and from a distance—mistook her for a
boy. Within days we were inseparable. She seemed to need a friend.
More so, I understood, she needed someone to follow her on her
adventures. I needed a lifeline and a bridge to my new life, so I
unwittingly became her accomplice. Or at least that’s what I like
to tell myself. Fact was I knew exactly what I was
doing.

Skipping a class from school would
come at a price, but at the moment I didn’t care, as long as my
punishment didn’t mean the loss of life or limb.

As far as I knew, Cherrie and I,
unlike Thelma and Louise, weren’t planning on driving over a cliff.
I gave Cherrie the once over in attempt to gauge her mood. She did
say we were going rock climbing in the Castle Crag State Forest.
She wasn’t planning on jumping off a cliff, I could only hope. With
Cherrie, you never knew.

I heard Cherrie once punched a guy who
outweighed her by two-hundred pounds in the gut for insisting the
pronunciation of her name was Cherry (emphasis on the Ch) and not
Cherrie. She could be unpredictable and, of course,
temperamental.

“What’re you thinking?” Cherrie asked,
as her lips held dearly to the unlit cigarette.

“Why are we going rock climbing? You
know us Minnesotans have flat feet.”

“Julis” (my name is
Julissa Grant but I’m not about to punch Cherrie in the gut for not
pronouncing it correct) “take a look out there.” Cherrie pointed,
her finger stretching in a south west direction. “What do you
see?”

I looked beyond the road and the pine
studded forest.

Castle Crags State Park is well known
throughout Northern California for its towering crags and spires
and convex slabs of granite, one of which makes up Castle
Dome.