This is Amorella. October’s full moon passed on Sunday, two days ago. Sorry if you missed it as orndorff did. In the third Merlyn story, Merlyn’s Mind, the full moon had a great significance.

The passage is in the Epilogue, Amorella. Merlyn who is now in the fictional present wrote a letter in 2008. Here it is in part:

**

“. . . The reader should realize old Merlyn is limited to work within the framework of this writer’s intuitive and anomalous mind. What I send to his fingertips has to run through his open mind first. Parts of my dreams may become lost in translation from the page to the reader. However, if the reader has the mind and energy sheorhe will come to an understanding about human beings that above all, retains a sense of humor. Without understanding the usually understated humor the reader will have to wait patiently, sometimes for decades, to pick up a wry chuckle here and there among the marginal hallways. As for the writer, he would rather write than breathe, and as such, he already has a more than a whiff of the scent of understanding in much of the flavored humor.

Merlyn, the Bard,

Written Under A Full Moon

The Night of a Full Eclipse

20 February 2008,

Local Time: 1920 Hours

Earth

Addendum—

The moon is at a waning crescent this day, 3 March 2008. The moon will be at its waning half on 14 March 2008. This book will be sent to the publisher between now and then. This third work is thus set in the immediacy of my present earth conscious experience. My dreamed thoughts and present action are one in the same with the marriage of the three volume work, Braided Dreams Running Through Merlyn’s Mind. I, Merlyn, am committed to three more volumes about the Dead. I am the Whole by which the Living may peep through and visualize the inner-Otherness, the composition of the Living Dead. Thus, I, can express witness to what would otherwise be Pure Non-existence. . . .”

**

This passage seems somewhat more melodramatic today, as it is a year and a half later. Such as it is with fiction. The passion of the lines has gone from me. It is as the clouds surrounding the moon in the photograph a distortion of the illumination. I am only a hint of the passion I once was. Consciousness does not make cowards of us all. Consciousness is what keeps us alive when we are among the Dead. That’s how I see it presently. How it really is though, no one living knows.