Black Sun Rising

Chapter Eleven

The horizon glowed a deep orange as the sun descended toward it. There had been no word about the exact time at which the evening's introductory event was due to begin — not that it would have mattered, because all devices that could be used to tell the time were now in Cody's keeping. Sam had asked a couple of people if they knew. Only one, CEO Ethan McCluskey of a social media start-up named Synergize, had seemed to have a clue. He had taken part in Vision Quests and other ceremonies before.

"You're supposed to just feel when the time is right," he'd said, with a finality that made Sam feel utterly stupid. How is that even possible? he had asked himself. How can an entire group of people just feel when the time is right, when they can't even tell what time it is? I'll just keep an eye on the others and figure it out that way.

It turned out that his concerns were unwarranted. As the light changed and began to tinge the valley with gold, the two young FireStorm acolytes emerged from the connection tent, each carrying drums. Sam wondered whether they were twins, they looked so alike — one was male, the other female, but their angular faces were nearly identical and it required a second glance at their athletic bodies to figure out which was which. They both sported long, loosely braided brown hair and wore matching white tunics. As one, they lifted the drums and began to walk around the outside of the tent, beating a rapid, energetic rhythm, an unmistakable signal that it was time for the ceremony to begin.

Unfortunately, Sam's vantage point was from behind one of the scrubby bushes uphill from the campsite, where he was attempting to answer the call of nature. By the time he had finished and scrambled back down the hill, the rest of the delegates were already inside. He looked around for his friends as he stepped inside, but before he could spot them he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Cody. He pushed Sam down onto his knees like the other delegates and stooped to whisper in his ear "Deep breaths, Sam. Just match them to everyone else's and you'll be fine."

Sara walked among the kneeling figures in full ceremonial regalia. She was a spectacular sight to behold. Her long, white robe was streaked with red down the back and emblazoned with the same spiky, angular black sun Sam had seen on the curtains in Las Vegas on the front. Her feet were bare but her toes were decorated with gold rings. A long, heavy chain, hung around her neck and falling almost to her waist, had feathers and crystals suspended from it.

Her dark hair was loose, with flowers and more feathers woven into it, and a delicate filigree ornament encircled her head. She carried a tied bundle of herbs in one hand, which she held for a moment in the flames from the fire pit. It caught light, releasing a cloud of sweet, fragrant smoke. Slowly she circled the room, trailing the smudge stick through the air above the heads of the delegates, chanting gently as she went.

It was not in Sam's nature to feel at ease in this kind of environment, and he took his deep breaths with a certain self-consciousness. He listened carefully to the people around him and tried to synchronize his breathing with theirs, but they were slightly out of sync with one another. He picked one to follow at random, feeling like a pillock as he half-closed his eyes and squinted at the others to see whether anyone else had their eyes closed. He could not tell, so he closed his completely. At least I'll look like I'm getting into it, he thought, even if this isn't what I'm meant to be doing.

The drumming stopped. The tent was silent, apart from the gentle crackle of the fire, the rhythmic inhalation and exhalation, and the faint sound of Sara's footsteps through the sand. "Welcome," she said softly, her voice as warm and inviting as if it had been an individual address. "We find ourselves now in a place of harsh, unforgiving beauty. It is the perfect place to connect with the divinity within you — a place that can be as unyielding as you are toward yourselves, where we must rely on one another and on ourselves without distraction or assistance from the outside world. You will leave here stronger and also kinder, more self-sufficient and less alone."

"Long before the Native Americans, the Paleo-Indian considered this land to be sacred. Each year, as the seasons turned and the summer heat began to descend, the tribes who inhabited this place would move from the shelter of the Grand Canyon to the higher elevation to find the cooler, fresher air of the mountain forests. This area was part of their sacred route, and they documented it in the form of paintings, petroglyphs, that have been preserved to this day. They show us images of gatherings, of the confluence of energy being focused on a central point.

"They suggest that the type of ritual we carry out on this spot might well have been part of their lives — that we are a part of a tradition dating back more than 13,000 years. They knew then that this place — this earth shaped by volcanic fire, torrents of water, and the ceaseless rush of air — was the perfect meeting point between the human and the divine. They might have believed that they were communing with gods who existed as external forces. We, however, know that there is no separation between the human and the divine — except that which we choose to allow and create for ourselves."

As she sent more scented smoke drifting gently across the still air, Sara told tales of the Paleo-Indian and later the Native American tribes who had occupied Parashant. It seemed a little convenient to Sam that the names of these tribes had been "lost to history" but that their mythology had been passed down perfectly intact. Nevertheless, even his natural tendency toward pedantry had trouble standing up against the spellbinding atmosphere woven by Sara's words.

"Legend has it that Parashant was once the territory of an angry god," she half-whispered, "a fire god. He made his home in one of the volcanoes that once set the valley ablaze. A neighboring volcano was inhabited by a beautiful fire goddess, and she was his lover. For a time they were happy, until a great storm came. The lightning god fell in love with the fire goddess, and when she refused to be his, he lashed out in a jealous rage, sending a bolt of his lightning deep into her volcanic home. It struck her in the heart. She died instantly, and her volcano cooled and became nothing more than a mountain.

"The fire god was devastated. The explosive glory of his volcano brought him no joy without his lover to share it, and the best he could do was send thin streams of lava trickling downhill like fiery tears. So it remained for a thousand years, until the first condor chose this path for its annual migration. They call these noble birds California condors, but the evidence of their presence in Arizona predates that of California by millennia. This condor flew high above the fire god's home, saw the marks of his grief on the scorched earth, and called out to the fire god to ask the cause of his grief.

"The fire god was so accustomed to his lonely solitude that at first he was taken back, but as he told the condor the circumstances of his pain, he began to feel friendship for the kind bird. At last he ceased to cry, and the ground cooled. But the lightning god, who still considered himself a rival to the fire god, was angry and jealous of their bond. He threw another bolt, which caught the tip of the condor's mighty wings and send it spinning to earth, where it crashed into the ground. The lightning god left the bird for dead, certain that the cold night would kill the condor and leave the fire god alone once again.

"The condor felt the chill of the night air on its feathers and knew that without being able to fly to safety, it would certainly die on the cold rock, either freezing while the sun was gone or becoming the prey of a coyote. The bird called out to the fire god that it would be sorry to leave him to his solitude. At the prospect of further loneliness, the fire god began again to weep. Trails of molten rock cascaded down the mountainside, warming the earth beneath the condor, warming its body so that the cold night could do it no harm. When coyotes dared to approach, the fire god spat at them, gobbets of liquid flame that sent them scurrying for the shadows. Day after day, night after night, the fire god protected the condor until its body healed and the bird was able to soar through the skies once more.

"Their friendship continued for many years. The condor's migration path took him back and forth across the fire god's territory, and they spent a great deal of time together. There were no secrets between them. They knew the innermost depths of each other's hearts. But sadly, the condor was mortal and the god was not, so eventually the condor's life came to an end. When the bird realized the end was near, it flew to the fire god's home and lay once more on the warm volcanic earth, taking comfort in the presence of the fire god, and then it died.

"The fire god, in his grief, took a handful of his friend's feathers and consumed them so that a part of the condor would always live in him, and, for a brief time, his fire burned black. He sent forth a mighty blaze of black fire and magma into the sky to mark the condor's passing, and it is from this that we take the name FireStorm. We seek to emulate the example of the fire giant and the condor, who found closeness and connection, who knew true friendship, and who lived interconnected lives."

That explains the logo, then, Sam thought. It must have been easier to use the black fire than the condor. Sara had fallen silent. She bowed her head, one hand clasped over her heart as if the telling of the story had taken everything she had to give. Sam looked at Cody, expecting him to step in and take over the proceedings, but he did not. He knelt close by, watching Sara intently, until she raised her head again. He passed her a small cup of water, which she accepted gratefully and sipped at gently.

"I have shared with you the story on which FireStorm is based. I should now tell you a little about who we are, who I am. We are a comparatively new organization — or at least, we are a new iteration of an old set of ideas. FireStorm has been called a religion. I don't know about that. A belief system, certainly, nut it's a belief system based on connections made by living beings, not on blind faith and the idea that a better world awaits us when we die. We are concerned with bringing connection back to a disconnected world."

She began to tell her own story. It was the typical history of a high achiever — Sara was the child of a lower middle-class family. She had worked hard, won a scholarship to Yale, and then worked her guts out to pay her living expenses. She had graduated at the top of her class, then moved to England to do her MBA at the London School of Economics. By the time she was twenty-five, she had made her first million dollars. She had gone on to lead Fortune 500 companies, frequently being pursued for other leadership positions. She had considered herself an excellent networker and an extremely successful person. By thirty-five, numerous publications had named her as one of the world's greatest businesswomen.

Of course, like so many people experiencing great professional success, her personal life had been a disaster. Her dedication to her work had left her little time for any form of distraction. She had assumed that eventually her meteoric rise would come to an end, and that when her career hit its plateau, she would find the time for a relationship, perhaps even a family. Until then, she would continue to work insane hours, sleeping only a few hours a night.

Eventually she had burned out. On her doctor's advice she had planned a holiday, but taking time off meant putting in some long days before her vacation began. After fourteen hours in her Manhattan office she had set off for the Hamptons, where she had located a beach house to relax in. She never arrived. Physically and mentally exhausted, Sara had dozed off at the wheel of her Lexus.

"I woke up in the back of an ambulance," she said. Her hand strayed unconsciously to the tiny scar on her cheek. "I was covered in blood. I had three broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, and also little cuts all over me. The EMTs kept asking me who they ought to call… and I couldn't give them an answer. There was my mother, back in Indiana, but what could she do from there? Calling her in the middle of the night would only have worried her, and it wouldn't have given me a hand to hold as the doctors stitched up my cuts and reset my bones. There was no one in my everyday life whom I knew well enough to ask. That was a heartbreaking moment.

"I knew then that I had become completely disconnected from myself and from everything that really mattered, and that no amount of money or success was going to comfort me when I found myself in an early grave. Things had to change. When I recovered, I went in search of my spiritual path. Along the way I found FireStorm, back in its earliest stages, and I'm proud to say that I helped the organization to develop into what it is today."

For a moment, the tent was silent as Sara's speech came to an end. Then Cody began to applaud heartily, and the rest of the group quickly followed his lead. "Thanks, Sara!" he cried over the tumult. "Thanks for sharing such an inspiring, cautionary story with us! I've heard it plenty of times before, of course, but every single time I'm amazed and blessed by the honesty and openness you give to us. Now — who's going to be brave enough to do what Sara has just done and tell us about their own disconnection?"