The Wheel of Existence turns at the Common Era's most extraordinary time imaginable. After billions of years of evolution, a Rounder has been born at Zero who returns from Beyond to dwell amongst the mortals. He is Kalen O'Tolan. His young appearance belies the secret of his immortality, an Aeon-spanning Kalendar to which his life and times are aligned. As the world of the Iron Age advances to heighted culture and civilization, he ages slowly in his boyhood. Kalen is aided by parents of mysterious ancestry, his loyal brother and tenacious sisters, the Wizard Aupaiaaqua, and other extraordinary beings. The old world of Magic is dying, and every magical Power is set for turmoil. Corrupted and evil, Aries-Pisces leads the fight to destroy the Rounder and seize the Artifacts of Orr which the boy Kalen is charged to find and protect. Kalen must obtain the Black Stone and win the trust of the Great Bear who will lead the forces of Animwaa in the War of the Zodiacs. Miraculously, the future of humankind depends on the outcome of the hero's quest. A terrifying calamity called the Nadir approaches the world in 2,111 C.E. Kalen must find a way to communicate with someone alive in the present day who can alert humankind to the approaching threat in order to take corrective action before it's too late. The fate of Existence itself depends on Kalen's ability to influence the development of Lingua-U, a new Universal Meta-Language, in our time. The Black Stone comprises two distinct works: "The Omphalos of Delphi," a fantasy novel, and "The Surrender of Symbiosis," an epic-length philosophical poem. Both books are joined under one cover and offer interwoven explorations of human meaning-making at the foundations of consciousness. The Black Stone is the first in a series of nine genre-disrupting works offering a mix of fiction, poetry, art, and philosophy. Together they will make up The Kalendar Series, an epic volume which tells a single story spanning the entire globe of the Earth beginning more than 2,000 years in our past and ending nearly 1,000 years in our future. This is a work that testifies to the emerging human capacity to create languages, tell stories, paint pictures, sing songs, and predict the future from an integrated sense of a unique identity as participants and co-creators in the evolution of Kosmos. "A sort of Lord of the Rings meets Integral Spirituality meets The Canon of Supreme Mystery (among others). If you enjoy-and are ready for-sprawling epics built with spiritually integrated circuitry, The Black Stone is for you-brilliant, compelling, original, beautiful."- Ken Wilber, The Integral Vision. "Wow! The Black Stone is a masterful and mind-bending act of world-creation-even universe and reality-creation. Perez's tale of adventure moves the everyday world into a time-transcending parallel universe in which the archetypes of myth and the categories of mind and metaphor become the living actors in the action plot."-Toby Johnson, author of The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell "The Black Stone is a book that will still be relevant two thousand years from now. For the philosophical seekers and most importantly the book lover, Perez gives us something magical."-John Craig