Aurora Borealis

by Nathan Hays and Karyn Huntting Peters
graphics by Karyn Huntting Peters



A magnetic shudder precedes your long-awaited arrival. You are all around me, ethereal aurora borealis, hues shimmering violet, green, blue, white. Entrance your nascent victim, aurora. Sway enticingly, cascading down like waterfalls from the right hand of Zeus. Lance Arthurian swords of ancient waters through the heart of the blood-red earth. Fall from the skies like fire into the yearning hands of Prometheus. Burn through the writhing bodies of the eternal stigmata-marked. Siphon from earth's molten core its darkest pain to quiet the wandering of your ghostly lights above. Hear the unspoken whispers of dervish souls escaping into the night air, and quill their rapturous embraces and anguished tears on eternal palimpsests with night sky's blackest ink.

- Karyn


Far from burning sands and steaming jungle is an arctic silence screaming in brilliant hues. While the wide world wipes dusty grime from its salty brow, Merlin's fire lances through the icy forms frozen in the endless twilight. Deep into the earth the unearthly power streams. The dynamo throbs in rhythm with the pulsing rain. Sol's secret wind replenishes the occult flame.

- Nate


Infused anew with the mystical fire, overflowing now with white hot embers, the earth dances slowly across its starlit ballroom, slain through by the unearthly dynamo, hypnotized by Merlin's sword of light. Prometheus slowly closes his now-sated hands and draws them close to his breast. It is done.

The dervishes whirl and whisper in the ether, somewhere between the molten core of earth and the violet flame of the aurora. There is electricity in the air and the occasional sound of scratching quills. The aurora borealis has never burned this brightly, this deeply.

- Karyn


How mundane seem the mechanics of graphite and fiber, ink and vellum, oil and canvas. Carbon infiltrates the matrix with inextricable randomness. Turbid solvents flow into tiny cracks only to evaporate to the winds leaving their flotsam residues. Ordered colors are smeared together with entropic fineness. As might a meteor smash perfect quartz into a billion fragments or a star radiate its fusions across the spectrum.

And yet, coursing through these dying movements is fire! Ripping through the dust is a searing wind that leaves mere whorls and traces, but will entrance the djinns to come. In vapid grit lay forms meaningless to the universe, yet fuel the divine flames that dance upon it.

Grasp the clays, for they are the veil and the portal that lay between us.

- Nate


Promethean promise unbroken, gift delivered, the fires of the kiln are stoked. Arctic ices begin to melt, mirroring aurora's ancient dance. The scalding breath of Olympian spectators rouses the sleeping spirits. Magmous caverns, awakened by the scent of warm gases, await their metamorphosis.

The hushed voices of the ether grow louder. The djinn are stirring in adagio, crossing over from their eternal dream of auroras and waterfalls and verdant glades.

The sky pulses with life. The earth seethes in the heat of the growing pyre. The mythical bird marks another half millennium gone as he circles the dancing flames. The clays will soon be cast.

Hands of the Moirae descend in a pas de deux, but the veil will not yet be lifted. Whispers from the zephyr: porta eterna.

- Karyn


While vast preponderate clouds of frenetic atoms coalesce in galactic proportions, the silent mirror begins to stir. Eerie colors like oil films on an unseen ether swirl and knot. Soon globules of Promethean fire condense and separate. Into the lifeless clay the light presses like singularities in dimensions beyond ken. Olympian hands seal each in geodes of hardening slime. Globs of oozing mud are molded around them.

As the heat of the great furnace penetrates into the argillaceous mass, threads of the divine flame grow from within in fractal venation. Capillary fineness continues to bifurcate until the dimensions entwine on Planck's scale and the melding is complete. Soul mirrors matter in a Yin Yang of intimacy.

Infinite mind veiled in portals of clay. The breach is open though few see it or pass.

- Nate