they die, he murmured, before waving goodbye to the boy and turning on his heels. Then he remembered another line and, finally, he begged Nanzen to repatriate him.
“We are all about to be born,” he said to himself again, upon landing on the red bridge.
He delivered his report on his visit to the guardian and the Head of the Council, who were also puzzled, and it was decided he would go there again the very next day.
But it was at this very moment in the story that news from Rome caused the sky of quests to explode, upending the calendar of actions, diverting Petrus from Yepes, and precipitating a historical decision on the part of the Head of the Council himself.
Roberto Volpe was dead, and he had left all his belongings to his son Pietro, from whom the Head of the Council—still going by the identity, in the human world, of Gustavo Acciavatti, orchestra conductor by trade—had tried to purchase the painting. Pietro had refused to sell it, but they had become friends. Prior to this, Leonora Volpe, Pietro’s young sister, had fallen in love with the Maestro, who often came to visit her father on the pretext of acquiring Renaissance drawings. The Head of the Council, who had also fallen in love with Leonora, did not see how he could go against these workings of fate, because this woman’s presence had become more vital to him than anything else on earth. Tall, dark-haired, languorous and elegant, she gave a texture to his life that it had always lacked. Her rather austere beauty, without adornment or artifice, gave him a feeling of land and rootedness that contrasted with the evanescence of his misty world; but she also had something of a dancer about her, a languid way of moving that evoked the trees in his homeland. And so, he was going to reside permanently on the other side of the red bridge, although he hadn’t uncovered the secret of permanent passage into the world of humans, and had to conceal his elfin nature. The painter in Amsterdam, through the transformation he had transmitted to the bridge, had taken on the genetic characteristics of the species but, as the gray notebook was still unrecovered, for the moment the new Gustavo had to remain content with merely pretending to be a human.
For the first time in the history of the mists, a Head of the Council was resigning from office and calling for new elections. He gave no reason. The world of elves was in turmoil, and resented this man they loved and admired for abandoning ship just as the mists were declining even further.
Naturally, the head of the garden ran in the new elections with a profession of faith that was even more pathetic than the previous time, and his campaign was bitter and ugly. His opponent, a councilor from Inari, in the province of Snows, took after his dear friend who had resigned and strove to win the highest office with the same elegance and ability to distance himself. He was narrowly elected, and now I can refer to him by the name you are familiar with, that of Solon, Gustavo’s old friend, but also the guardian’s, which he reaffirmed in Nanzen immediately after his accession to the leadership of the Council. I’ll wager you will not be surprised to learn that this guardian you have known for a long time was called Tagore by humans; and so now we have caught up with all the elfin protagonists from the beginning of our tale—those who, in slightly less than forty years from now, will welcome Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora to Nanzen, fresh from their castillo.
For the time being, however, Solon, Tagore, and Gustavo are working to thwart the enemy’s maneuvers. In the person of the head of the garden, baptized Aelius by the opposite camp, the devil is sharpening his knives and rallying his loyal supporters. Does he really believe that humankind is responsible for the extinction of the mists? Who can really know these things? Between the lies our hearts tell us, and the truths we will not admit to, everything has ended up looking like a puzzle where the pieces are mixed and muddled. The fact remains that Aelius’s crusade, unable to obtain weapons legally, is now borrowing the weapons it had always coveted, and is conspiring to provoke total war. It is not yet the war that will break out in the human world and