ATTENTION: OUR SAVIOR HAS RETURNED. IN BEAUTY.(James Sullivan) The air lay still and calm, with the warmth of summer still sparkling in the convection currents rising off the sea, but yet a certain coolness, a sign that winter had begun to employ its witchcraft and had begun to bewitch the world in cold. It was the ultimate time for change.

In a house in the world, a baby that was to grow to be great was born. And thousands of miles away, in a completely different dimension, an 18-year old man slept, newly of age.

His eyelids fluttered below the light flaps of skin, for the conditions outside had not embedded itself within him. His dream was not scary nor pleasant - it was one with no definite property. But, as he woke up to his first day of manhood, his brain was taking control of his body. Sleep paralysis was setting in. Like the transitional stage from child to man, the stage from dreams to reality was warping itself, for the first time in his life.

He was unable to move. His brain seemed disconnected from his body, but let his heart beat rapidly. A face took form in his head, one like no other, a face veiled but yet lucidly he knew what was under that hood.

And that face spoke:
"A baby has been born tonight,
Just through the misty twilight,
and though you may dismiss this dream,
It is no more folly,
18 beats in a bar, 9 notes of two beats each,
have been played by you so far.
Play it now, and you will be
The saviour of modern Earth (to be).
He jerked up out of bed, as he remembered, and walked into the dimly lit main room where his whole family was sitting for the traditional Islamic ritual for this day.

"Look at the picture, Sana. Feel the youth," his mother was whispering to his now frail, cancer-ridden grandmother. "Feel the strength and the wind in your hair. Now move towards the prayer stool."

His grandmother, with every ounce of strength left in her body, moved over to the place where all things in their family were made, destroyed, promised, kept and forgotten.

The new man's father, wearing a mysterious smile, took out a sitar. He remembered, in the past eighteen years, that on every birthday of his, he played a note on this sitar. An insignificant, minor tradition of his family, he thought nothing of it, he had plucked a string and walked off to school, all those years, now deep down in his memory.

"Remember the lesson that you were taught," said his father "about the thirteenth Islamic sect being formed, and when such an event occurred the saviour of the world would descend to earth to be born? It is said that it has been formed today. But let us play those notes you have played at each birthday over the past eighteen years."

He hesitantly took a string, the one he plucked on his seventeeth birthday, and then the one from his sixteenth birthday, and then his father guided him to the others, right down to the one his father had plucked for him the day that he was born. And then he played them from his 18th birthday to his birthdate. It seemed jumbled and out of place, yet sad and melancholy, with a drooping texture that he had never meant to incorporate into that insignificant strumming he had done since his earliest memory.

"Play it from the day you were born to now."

He strummed the first string, which vibrated back and forth a hundred times before it stopped. He played the first, slow note and then the second, and a mysterious build-up of magic developed within him.

Then the third, and the fourth and fifth, and it went low, like a plunging waterfool to the depths of doom, and then rose and wavered in the air with a beautiful minor, and then rose majestically like a newly-feathered falcon, like the honey-sweet petals of a flower bursting forwards out of the confinement of its bud, then up to the tenth note it burst into colourful notes that reached to the depths of the heart and mind, yet to the depths of human happiness and joy, but also grief and sorrow, then withdrew with little, quiet music, yet tingling and magical in its essence, and then when the music rose up and feel and swooped and lifted them up, and in their minds they saw the new boy, just born, the first member of the thirteenth sect. And then the music stopped.

There was a deadly silence, before his father spoke.

"Son, you have uplifted our people like no other boy or man has ever done before. At age 18, become a teacher. Follow in my footsteps. Because you never know who's important, who's special. Anyone could be. He's out there, you know."

"Yes, father." he replied.

"Let us celebrate." his father said, and the sitar was stored away for the next generation of children to come.

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