Robert S. Wright

Before They Awaken

an anthology

What if you discovered that everything you know is an illusion, and that beneath that illusion is a world without discord, where sorrow is nonexistent and evil is a term without definition? Could it be that the prophetic writings of the ancients, in their predictions of the End of the World, were referring not to fire and calamities of nature, but to the destruction of the basic human mechanism? The ethereal fiend built of thought and memory? The beast itself? Perhaps then, in the course of human evolution, there will come a new creation risen from ashes, one pure in the experiential realization of the true nature of things. Maybe the word apocalypse means just what it means, the lifting of the veil, the opening of the eyes, as is the definition of the Greek word.

And maybe along the way a fortunate few will glimpse this reality of existence. Mahlir of Mathias, an influential Jewish Temple priest, is one such individual. He rescues his infant son from the purging sword of Archelaus, king of the Judean Jews, and flees into the unforgiving Dead Sea desert where he and his son are taken by Parthian slave traders, to become kingpins in a bizarre kidnapping plot to abduct a twelve year old Jesus. The plot is the brainchild of the Parthian Magi. They believe that Jesus is their king, their savior, and that he belongs in Parthia, not in some faraway land three thousand miles away. They enlist Mahlir’s help, assuring him his baby will be protected and well cared for, as long as he helps them in relocating their boy-king so he can be properly trained and prepared for his kingship.

But when Mahlir realizes that the queen of Parthia has adopted his child, he flees his captors and spends the next 20 years as a monk in the compound of the Essenes at Qumran, where news of his son, the “Wolf Prince of Parthia,” travels to his ears from time to time, from the faraway Kingdom of the Magi. He is known worldwide as the “Wolf Prince,” because of a wolf puppy he saved one day while hunting in the forest that has become his constant companion.

The novel is filled with twists and turns and surprises, one of which is a reunion of father and son, when Mahlir discovers that the Wolf Prince is right under his nose, right there in Palestine, as one of twelve followers of an itinerate sorcerer put to death for treasonous ways. But Mahlir cannot approach. To do so would endanger his son’s life. The followers of this executed criminal are being hunted down and forced underground to live lives of seclusion.  They are perpetrators of evil.  Word has it that when their leader died his face turned into the head of a bull.  It is said that when they meet for their secret rituals their chief rite is the sacrificing of a newborn.

Mahlir, however, has reason to doubt the rumors.  He has crossed paths with this sorcerer, the last time being an encounter after the man’s death, if such a thing be possible. If the Magi are to be believed, those of the priestly caste that make up half the Parthian Senate, kingmakers they are called, because it is to them that the duty falls to nominate and install kings, this strange man is more than a sorcerer.  He is the one ordained to conquer kingdoms.  Since his birth the Magi have watched over him, waited, since the time they presented him with gifts of gold and expensive spices, after having journeyed from the heart of Parthia thousands of miles under the light of the Star of All Mighty Ahura Mazda.  His coming had been foretold in their prophesies, in the writings of the Zend Avesta, in the one hundred twenty-ninth fragment of the twenty eighth hymn of the Yasht where it is said that the victorious Saoshyant, born of virgin woman from the Holy seed of Ahura Mazda, “shall restore the world, which will thenceforth never grow old and never die, never decaying and never rotting, ever living and ever increasing, and master of its wish, when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come, and the world will be restored at its wish; when the creation will grow deathless…”