a moment facing the fallen city, picturing its erstwhile splendor, while once again, Alejandro felt his life spin upside down. The discipline he’d imposed upon himself in order to speak for his dead on the battlefield, his enduring solitude in spite of friendship, his castillo crippled with murder and poetry, the war and its abject processions—in the end, everything was being borne along on the flow of an unknown river that released an uninterrupted outpouring of debris inside him. If the sobriety of ink and whiteness in Nanzen seemed familiar, and if the humility of the earthenware bowl had transported him, it was because they’d made the bare structure of his life visible to him; and so, through the magic of feeling the impalpable presence of the tribe of elves all around him, the inhabited mists had offered him the pathway to the other—when he went deep inside himself and accepted his own destitution, he received in return the sweet delight of the encounter. Was it the presence of the elves that served as a balm and healed his grieving heart, or was it that his love for Clara had opened him to the possibility of receiving? I ask the question, but it hardly matters, for great power is a chimera inside us that either elevates us or kills us, since living is nothing more than being able to forge ahead in life by telling oneself the right story. The presence of the community of elves was, to Alejandro, a stronger remedy than the sufferings of the past, and Clara’s smile completed the transfiguration. The stake was plucked from his heart and borne away on the waters of the river.
Jesús, too, gazed at the enemy city. With the strength of the mist, his faith had taken on a new dimension. The fact that the mist brought the breath that turned the stones to water made it the messenger of his redemption. The liquid rocks could change dishonor into honor, betrayal into a gift, and damnation into salvation, while this alchemy required the barrenness of the void. Moreover, we know that Major Rocamora, although he was not a man of words, was nevertheless a soul whose behavior could be affected by three lines of verse, and we weren’t surprised that he was open to the grace of moving stones. Might I add, as I have an undeniable affection for these men, that the young General de Yepes and the young Major Rocamora, driven by their renewed hope that suffering might be transformed into fervor, had just ventured onto a path rarely used by humans. It has been marked out by the breathing of the void, which removes the mess that burdens us—however, we must not simply feel it in ourselves, but also discover it all around us, in the erasures in which true beauty is born, through the unique branch of a world engulfed in fog or through an earthenware bowl more spare than the trees in winter.
“What does the new poem say?” Alejandro asked Clara.
“I cannot read their language,” she said, looking at the light cloth.
“The last alliance,” said Petrus, who had turned toward the wall where the ink inscriptions were glowing faintly.
After a pause, he added:
“Separation is an illness, union is our way of life and our only chance. That is why we are founding our wager regarding this war upon new alliances.”
He gave Solon a questioning look.
“We will speak of the prophecy later,” said the Head of the Council.
Petrus remained silent and Alejandro said:
“So you are doomed to drink tea until your last breath.”
The elf gave out a long sigh.
“That is the entire question of this war,” he replied. “You have seen the color of the tea plantations around Ryoan. That ash gray comes from a noble rot which is eating at the leaves through an entirely natural process. All it will take is one degree more of humidity and a fungus will develop on the tea plants. You have something similar with wine, do you not, and it yields magnificent vintages? Simply, here, the consequences are fatal, and it is unfortunate that we did not realize this earlier. But this blindness, like all the rest, is due to the powers of gray tea.”
“Fatal?” said Alejandro. “Everything we have seen of the tea up to now is that it makes drunkards sober and opens the door to humans to enter this world.”
“Those are simply a few pleasant side effects,” said Solon. “It is because of the power of