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borrowed accidents that collected
like flowing water droplets.
    He loved her, had that feeling, delicate,
ephemeral, and eternal, full of an emptiness that only the love of
two merged souls could recreate as a colorful bubble.
    They were like twisted plants, entangled in
their destiny and life until he got sick.
    He remembered the night when it happened. It
had been a gloomy December day during which the wind scraped the
fields. Cold penetrated the houses.
    They had said that everything was fine.
    In fact, we all say such childlike things as
we twist headlong into a blanket of gathered darkness. We tell
ourselves that monsters do not really exist.
    And in the morning, we believe everything
will be fine. We believe all the things that we need and want will
be ours in the future.
    Because hope is that gem created by the dust
of despair that has entered the soul.
    But often, in this world that dictates
orders in opposition to our beautiful stories, unexpected things
happen.
    And weakness, accompanied by her eternal
companion, pain, began to change Akuma.
    It happened slowly at first, but gradually
grew—the pain was an unwanted guest that held the power of an
unexpected nightmare. It stayed until it became a constant
companion.
    Akuma could not live.
    Because of this, he could not be with
her.
    The seasons of life always gnaw away at
time, which casts its nets, holding and severing the two currents
of present and future in their flow.
    So after the snatches of time that drove the
agony in Akuma’s life like a fierce, evil dog, he went to the leper
colony, where the decay of his body would reach its natural
end.
    He cared for the sick with that arrangement
in mind. It filled his very being with a panic, an insipid
vermouth, that suffocated his lungs. Soon he himself would be taken
care of. Soon he would become very ill.
    And that, my friends, highlights how life is
the veil that descends over a good or bad play. Whichever it is,
there’s nothing more to say.
    That is the kind of existence that has led
us to this particular morning.
    The cool breeze blew across the cheeks,
nipped at the side of the sea that stood calm in the aftermath of
the oil previously hauled across it. The waters were blue from the
previous storm.
    Akuma, twenty-one years old, rubbed at his
diseased sides and watched the neighborhood from the heights of the
colony. He could see the countryside spread out into concentric
circles for miles around.
    Maybe soon someone’s relatives would bring
food or someone, a healer, perhaps—or a noble madman or a greedy
charlatan or a huckster, would come over, causing animation
above.
    The usual shapes darted around the rocks in
the mainland. Strange, ghostly similar items forced people to go
out to do their usual work. Akuma had grown up around the valleys
and was now getting lost in them.
    But no one had come any closer to it, to
them. For most people, filthy and flooded with light, glowing like
a graveyard, the place where they lived had no place, at least not
while they were alive.
    The light burned white as the tallow candle
flickered. It was hard to explain why she had come to the
colony.
    Originally, Akuma did not give the event any
importance. Many still lived within pretty close reach to the
rock.
    He did not pay attention until it became
clear that time had headed to her.
    He prepared the basket and the device went
down from the colony.
    The man who wanted to come up seemed very
ill. His skin, unusually whitish for the East, shone from the open
seams of his hairy robe like a fresh lime under the scorched rays
of the ever-climbing sun.
    They dropped the basket and the man climbed
into it.
    Nuts and bolts began to tremble and after
several efforts, he was above.
    In front of Akuma had arrived the first
European to visit the East centuries before our history tells it
will happen.
    Chapter
Seven
    The men were hunched into the ink-silver
puddles that illuminated the arched corridors that stood rampant
before