Of The Heart (Solstice Saga - Book 1)

Copyright © 2012 JOHN J BLENKUSH
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by
any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the
author. www.jblenkush.com
ISBN: 1469902958
ISBN-13: 978-1469902951


To my wife, NJ, whose “touch” rejuvenates my life-force.





A special thank-you to my wife and family, who are forever the wind beneath
my wings, for their understanding when I disappear into my fictional world,
and for their ongoing continued support.



“I feel my heart stand still, as if in waiting to reverse direction.”
Julissa Grant



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 cannot follow. Living in hollow earth, where light ends
darkness, where walls are tinted 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, to nourish in the morrow.
And what shall we say of the mountain dwellers? Those who
reap the essence of the mountain, who practice the ancient art of
vampirism, transferring and manipulating life-force energy, for neither
is it created or lost, only shifted from crucible to crucible. Should we
say they are worthy? Should we say they are wicked?
Surface dwellers bite their tongues, fearful their whispers of tittletattle 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 those who wish to live no more.
Learned men will tell you life-force knows no evil, knows no
good. And so too, the vessel which holds the soul, 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, for 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,
HeIS. 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; HeIS.
To this end, a bride, pure in heart, virtuous 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 restoration 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 all will know; a new world is yet to come,
for it has been written in the Record of Ancient Matters.



In the overall events of the world, skipping a class on history to lark
around on such a grand autumn day isn’t such a big deal. Or at least it
shouldn’t be. Turns out it’s a life changer for me.
My first week as a sophomore in a new high school and here I am
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 your backside on
the way out.”
I took him up on his offer.

I look across at Cherrie who has her left leg tucked up under her on
the driver’s seat of her grandfather’s Lincoln Continental. I suppose I
can 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. As far as I can tell, 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 no brainer. 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 make her the adult of our pair in my eyes and a promising leader.
Of course it doesn’t hurt she has a driver’s license and, more
important, access to a car.


As we drive out of Shasta City, California, and enter I-5 heading
south, I can’t help but feel like Louise in one of my mom’s favorite
movies, Thelma and Louise. Only I haven’t been raped and Cherrie
hasn’t killed anyone, or at least she hasn’t in the two short months I’ve
known her. I’m exhilarated for having escaped school, frightened at
what may take place when I return, and jacked up for the boy hunt.
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. I still
remembered Uncle Mickey showing me how to make angels in the
snow and I still remembered Big Carrot, the snowman we made. For a
while, those cherished memories lay within me, 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 buddies.
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,
drinking to excess, that sort of thing.
Moving to the town of Shasta City, which rests on the flank of the

mountain, Mount Shasta, would allow her to find closure in Simon’s
passing. Or at least that was what she told me. 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. How, I wondered, would she find closure
by chasing ghosts on a mountain?
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 scarifies 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 is I know exactly what I am
doing.

Skipping a class from school would come at a price, but at the
moment I don’t care, as long as my punishment doesn’t mean the loss
of life or limb.
As far as I know, Cherrie and I, unlike Thelma and Louise, aren’t
planning on driving over a cliff, which seems to be my mom’s favorite
scene in the movie. I give 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 know.
I heard Cherrie once punched a guy who outweighed her by twohundred pounds in the gut for insisting the pronunciation of her name
was Cherry (emphasis on the Ch) and not Cherrie, as in Sherrie. She
could be unpredictable and, of course, temperamental.
“What’re you thinking?” Cherrie asks, as her lips clamp down on 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 points out past the road, her finger stretching long in a
south west direction. “What do you see?”
I stare out 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.
“Rock,” I say.
“And lots of it.”
“And we have to climb it, why?”
Cherrie smiles. I think I know what she is going to say. I rush to

beat her to the answer.
“Because, like the mountain, it’s there? Right?”
“Course not, dweeb. Not taking you to climb rock.”
“Then what?”
“Because that’s where the boys are.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me! Didn’t we just leave a school full of
boys? Over two-hundred by my count.”
“None like these.”
“And these are?”
“Rock climbers. Spidermen.”
“Cough. Sputter. For real? I’m risking detention at school and
grounding at home to see Toby Maguire in tights?”
“You haven’t seen these hunks climb the wall. Pretty impressive
stuff. Muscle against mass. Sweat against stone.”
“Only walls we have in Minnesota are mounds of snow. No one
climbs them but little kids.”
“Reason enough to take you along. To broaden your horizons.”


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