1.

— What a dry summer! sighed the boy looking at the red sky, clear as a glass dome.

- Yes, the old man agreed. It's terribly hot.

They were standing at the edge of the scorched plain. The damned slops stank like hell. Apart from them, no life animates the infinity of radioactive ash. Even their silver hazmat suits glittered inorganically under the bloody sun. Somewhere, in the shadows, the outline of the City loomed as if cut out. The broken parallelepipeds exposed black holes staring blindly at the brightly colored world of the Plain. The gray monoliths were, by the way, the only monochrome thing in the multicolored field of powder.

"Since I was little, I liked to come and stay around Pustia," says the boy. I was running away from home and coming here. All the other children preferred to stay in Hrubă and listen to the chatter of the elders, stories about ancient peoples, with Heroes and Dragonflies.

- Don't mention them here. This is their year.

- Yes. And? You just didn't start believing in the superstition with the invocation...

- I don't believe in anything. But you've never seen Libelungi and that's why it's easy for you to talk like that.

"That's right. I've been hanging around here for over twenty years, and to be honest, I haven't seen a Libelung foot yet." I think that, in so many years, isn't it, if they existed, it was impossible for me not to come face to face with at least one of them. But no. You know not, old man.

- Listen... what did you say your name was?

— Swan.

- Good. Look, Swan, I've only seen them once, but to be honest, I wouldn't want to see them again.

- Why?

- It's hard to understand. After the Great Disaster, when the First Wave came over the world, people were still in solidarity and were able to welcome them, stop them...

"But why do they need to be stopped?" Aside from the fact that a man with a rifle is invincible...

- Shut up, shut up, because I'm simply giddy when I hear you! My boy, you have never seen dragonflies in your life, and that's why you're good at advice.

- Well, come on, what does he look like? Come on, explain it to me one more time.

- They are a bit shorter than us. The metal crust…

"But are you sure it's metal?"

- What do you think? This ash is more than 90% metalliferous. 90%, do you understand? And then, just think what they look like! They are mutants. Are you good at it?

- No, I don't understand. And until I meet one myself, I have no way of understanding. That is if there is. But if it really was, in twenty-five years... And then, what would happen so amazingly if it reached the Ocean? Even supposing they exist and are as the saying goes, and as you say, why so much trouble to prevent them from reaching the Ocean?

- I don't know, admits the old man. That's how it's been left to us since ancient times, so that we don't leave them. And back then there were still Scientists, important Scientists...

- Ouch! said the boy, waving his hand.

2.

The two walk through the ash, scattering it into magical rainbows. At only a quarter of a geometric unit, the Plantations grow, although, because of the slope, nothing can be seen. There, shady trees with lilac and white leaves bear fruit. There, when you step, the wet clay creaks under your feet. There are people there. People like me, like you, living people, who fall in love, who talk, eat and sleep. People, one behind the other, signaling with the smoke of the fires from hill to hill, evening after evening, that they were not buried in ashes, that they populate the planet, strong, free up to the Horizon beyond which the Suns rise, and up to beyond it. And only a quarter of a geometric unit: The wasteland, the multicolored ashes, the leeches, the cracked soil, the Necropolis.

The two traverse the Wilderness, probing the dust here and there with their spears.

- Be careful! says the old man, showing him the cloud of dice.

- Yes, it will rain, finally! agreed the young man.

I go on, discussing the ghosts that, except for the old man, who is probably lying, no one on the Plantation has seen.

3.

The rain was much heavier than the dry season would suggest. It had been another torrid year! Only a few months ago, at the very beginning of the season, a tongue of fire had broken out from the Sun, and for days and nights in a row its slow tearing through the Universe had been seen in the sky.

4.

The rain thundered over the ashes, iridescent on the surface of the water in patches of garish colors: the thousand-hued skin of the Earth, of the Desert. The two had taken shelter under the silver blanket and admired the bubbling of the spray, beating like a drum, incessantly.

- What will that be? asked the young man.

At the foot of a mountain, in the water, something was stirring, like an endless struggle.

"And I've been looking for a while and I don't understand what it could be," says the old man. Let's go see.

Because the night has fallen, the only light rises from below, from the radioactive dust. The grasshopper in the puddle next to the mushroom blinks colorfully at them, as if beckoning them.

They lean forward and watch something unseen. In the puddle, the dust seems to come alive, absorbing the water that was fermenting in vivid colors. And from the fertile mud, a variety of small, metallic worms begin to emerge. By day, under their eyes, from those worms, which had swelled up well, a kind of soft and rosy childlike hands were already emerging.

- God! They are! whispered the old man.

Looking around, under the pale rays of the dawn, the whole colb trembled multicolored. The wasteland had completely transformed into an endless mass of energetically scurrying metallic grubs, pulling their rosy little hands out of the heavy plume of luminescent dust.

"We should do something," said the young man, scrutinizing the bloody sunrise. We still have time.

- Shh! murmured the old man. Shut up! Please shut up! Do what you want, but stop talking, stop beating me over the head with your nonsense! Just look at them! What do you want to do with them? Look! This time they will arrive!

We don't mean anything anymore! Know it! We are no more!

The young man crushed a few grubs with his heel. He was irritated by the old man's indifferent pessimism, by the fainting fatalism that emanated from his words and attitude. He crushed the larvae with his foot, and when the metallic crust cracked, the penetrating dust spread in the air for a moment.

When he got tired and looked around to ascertain his work, because it seemed to him that he would have made a visible slope in the sea of ​​life by trampling, he discovered that he had no idea where he had stepped and where he had not. The place of the crushed ones was immediately taken by others, rushing out of the dust. The dust itself swelled and each particle was a larva. If you pushed aside the ones above, the ones below, which were patiently waiting their turn, began to develop rapidly, reaching the last platoon in a few minutes, taking out their pink and fragile hands of lustful infants from their metal shell.

5.

The two had entered the Plantation coming from the crescent of the Plain beach that stretched behind them, in all directions, gigantic, to the Ocean that the legends mentioned. Dirty, they passed from man to man, from bar to bar, raising the crowd. Then panic seized the hearts of the wretched commoners, and every breath moved, maddened with fear. What else can cause fear in the souls of poor living, dying corpses? What do the poor hungry and covered with wounds have to fear, descendants of those who saw the dust mushrooms opening their umbrellas over the City? And yet... yet, behold, there was something, a terrible specter tearing from all the chests a cry of horror with which they warned each other, horrified, that "the Dragonflies are coming"!
Great God, but even death would have been gladly received by these beings of the deep, as a quenching of their passions! Dragonflies coming? Very good. Their business, let them come!

But there is, it seems, something terrible in the coming of these Dragonflies. Something that makes the barren woman resolutely pull her hood under her chin, gather the cloth of her silver cape to her phthisis-eaten chest, grab her crutch from the threshold and, leaving her barren home, rush across the multicolored plain over there. The stunted children, with hands and feet dry from birth from the unnatural sun once seen by their parents blooming over the bloody buttermilk, also drag their cripples across the field, stirring up the ashes with shuffling steps, rushing with the howls of beasts unleashed on the strange beings, pulling their frail and harmless bodies from the ashes of the valley of Death.

6.

The dragonflies were fiercely attacked, from the first moment, with everything that man could use for the purpose of destruction.

When the first groups of locals arrived, in the evening, the larvae had risen for good and now resembled young people sleeping. They were walking here and there, worming, with closed eyes, with gentle movements, sneaking among each other in a compact people. What were those beauties dreaming, with their smiling faces, with their beautifully colored robes? What dreams their rudimentary heads could entertain, their misty minds of mimesis sprouting from spores directly cast into thread-worked wedding robes, za shirt, and funeral gown! They no longer calmed down by greeting each other with emphasis when they met each other and, in that delirious crowding, they always met someone and that is why they kept her in a servile bow, to the right and to the left.
How would they perceive each other when they performed the ritual of their sleepwalking dance in a blind trance of magical steps? Was there a programmed algorithm that ordered him? A law of the game, with abstract pieces, in which Noima subsists, somewhere else, above or below the carved figures, in the game or of the game? Was the game the secret master of the ghostly caricatures, hypocritically pretending to be a farce of the world? Which world?

And the people, the crippled and miserable people on the sidelines, rushed with clubs, or with old weapons left, by who knows what miracle, intact from the time of the Great Disaster, or with field tools brought especially for this purpose and with furious blows, they destroyed the phenomenal Apparitions. And how strange this collective assassination could look! What a curious thing was the legitimate extirpation in which the victims were reproduced mechanically, row by row, by a punch drawing them faithfully according to a deep and PERFECT archetype, their clean cheeks, smooth flesh, contrasting to the fantastic with the pitiable condition of the executioners in legitimate defense of the species. The principle of Good wore such a bewildering outer garment in this conflict that an outsider, outside the problem, might have been left with the profoundly erroneous and contrary impression that the massacre was of PERFECTION, and it would have been exceedingly difficult to convince anyone that the hideous brutes were, this time, the just cause. But fair from what point of view?

7.

Dragonflies followed their metamorphosis throughout the day. With all the carnage, when the dawn broke its gore over the Endless Wasteland, the curb of corpses was no more than an insignificant marginal border to the grand picture of the Landless Force.

It was as if the City of the Realms, dead since it was no longer known when, had risen from its graves, with death treading on its feet, the populations of inhabitants who would have languished under the cold vaults throughout History, to pour out of the leprous catacombs of the walls, in swarms of myriads crowded, directly from the streets through which the miserable procession of Paraginia passed, directly over the devastated field around, where a reverent and joyful carnival was taking place, lit up in various colors.

Swan also worked side by side with the others, rotating the heavy blade with which he hacked at the bodies, which had metamorphosed terribly before his eyes, from the limping creatures they had been the night before, to the stage of lunatics frantically and servilely saluting from side to side, to the present appearance, imposing, strong, giving off a crushing impression of perfection and ideal. Of course, Swan was not aware, as were those around him, of the impressive contrast that differentiated those who butchered from the butchered in the fantastic clutch of Death, Life. He just twirled his sword called Galantdourh, creating wide slopes in the slender bodies that now rose under the sun, straighter, purer, softer. No, Swan could not have asserted that he felt any repulsion towards his fellows, with whom he hacked without interruption, day and night, in the increasingly terrible pile of corpses that had already entered into decomposition, while other larvae crept between their ribs, hastened to restore the handicap, in order to walk proudly across the Plain as soon as possible. Not! nor did he feel any kind of understanding or admiration before the Perfection of the forms of the sleeping ones he hacked, no pity for their struggling after them when the edge of the weapon, passing through them, awakened them for a moment, for a single moment of flight: into Death. Swan felt nothing but the joy of the action, alongside the people whose hot breath they felt when they brought their red faces, eaten by leprosy chancres, closer to shout one more encouragement in the indescribable chorus.

Substantial reinforcements had already arrived. Thousands and thousands of strong arms were fanning the sharp tools spreading across the endless field of death, but on such a narrow strip, so narrow!

- Well, now what do you think? asked the older man when they stopped side by side to wipe the sweat that was running down their faces that were contorted into fierce masks of unleashed hatred.

Swan was silent, looking at the sight of sleepwalkers who had given up greeting each other, now passing each other without giving any signs that they would perceive each other in one way or another. They didn't let it be seen that they would notice them either, little slaves of some obscure traditions, killing without interruption, but causing such small and insignificant damage.

— They must not be allowed to soar! the old man clenched his fist stubbornly. If they rise, this time there are so many of them that we won't be able to stop them from reaching the Ocean.

- Do you want to leave me, old man?! I can't stand you anymore! Swan snapped.

But, even though he snapped at him, he did not feel any kind of repulsion, neither against the other's crepe face, nor against his hands reeking of the murky juice that flowed from the Dragonflies' bodies when he planted the cold blade in them, nor against the other details that characterized them. She only felt that she loved him, and the other two, with scythes, which cut without interruption from right and left, as in a day's work in the field, scattering heads with glassy eyes all around.

- They must be prevented at all costs from getting up! anonymous voices repeated, caught in flight, warning.

"And, after all, what big deal could they do if they get to Ocean?" wondered Swan, although, when he remembered how they had fermented out of the water and how the multi-colored dust had in such a short time become the almost mature Dragonflies of today, it was as if he let himself be carried away by the wave of suspicion, supposing that the fear was, one can see the point, lest, being able to take advantage of so much water, the dust of ghosts might not cover the whole Planet - or even the Universe.

8.

In the end, even the slaves from the descendants of the prisoners from the Great Disaster were brought.

- On them, boys! shouted the guards who worked alongside those whom they whipped until they bled. He doesn't have to get up! This is the watchword!

And the slaves, shaken by terror, put all their souls into the desperate attempt to save their cruel tyrants. For what else can a person condemned to be dead alive sacrifice himself?

But the Libelungi had also changed essentially. Tall, shining multicolored, they proudly exposed their chests. It's true, their eyes were still closed, but they proceeded with a precision that made you wonder if they could see through their eyelids. Asexual, dull, they rose from the mire as a defiance to Eternity.

"They can't be stopped anymore," the old man breathed into Swan's ear. Let's look for horses and take it from the others first, because after that it will be a disaster.

"Are you sure, old man?" Swan looked for him straight in the glare.

- Yes. On this night. I saw them once before.

"And I'm always like that?" asked the young man.

- No, they have never been like that before. It's terrible!

The compact table had been driven by a central tourbillon whose pace was continually accelerating. The closed-eyed beings, who had seemed to have no definite purpose in their blind wandering, had gathered together in a single, uniform motion, forming them into regular ranks. Even now they did not take into consideration the multitude of arms that were reaping at the edges, because there were many, countless, and the arms were reaping until exhaustion without any perceptible consequences being perceived.

Swan and the old man had loaded some lousy packs onto two horses and were waiting a little further beyond the theater of events. They had climbed a mound to see better and, after so many days of not eating, they were nibbling on the reserves of the proper sacrament that had been waiting for them intact at the bottom until they completely withered. No one had touched what was theirs, because there was no one left in the settlement. Everyone was here.

Dominating the map of the surroundings, at first it was only the two of them, raised up the stairs to scrutinize the buttermilk. Then, gradually, others had gathered around, more and more, on horseback, waiting. The old man's bushy beard fluttered in the fierce evening wind, commanding the knowledge of a secret to which the others had no access. From time to time, all eyes turned to him. But the old man remained unmoved, looking far into the distance. When the night spread, on all the hills, fires were lit as far as the eye could see, demarcating the limits of the Wilderness from the limits of the Plantation of people stratified in concentric waves of impact: first thousands, then millions, then billions, peoples of peoples, one behind the others: fires to the bottomless dawn, shining from gorge to gorge to where the suns rise from the Ocean on which the Planet floats like a frog's shell turtle, wandering through the Cosmos. And every hill was like a beacon in the night, guiding the dusty path of some unseen ships that had set off quietly, in great secret, against Time, on the course of a River with turbid and lazy waters. Through the darkness only strange rustlings and deep roaring, like that of the sea, stirred up by the waves of the other army, innumerable, which was preparing something, there, a few steps from them, could be heard. Something unexpected and of colossal importance, something that made you shudder and clutch the silver anti-radiant cape torn in places to your chest with a trembling hand. The old capes showed the warriors' breasts, their flesh hanging, gnawed by incurable decay. Here and there, a woman's shriek or hoot in the throes of pleasure seemed to defy the solemnity of the moment; and the whimpers of children seemed brutally torn from tender bodies, recently sacrificed at the altar of a life "much nearer to death than to error" or truth. It was the night of a colossal wedding, where nothingness joined with ashes to give birth to the monstrous bastards of incest. The groom was dressed in Powder, the bride in dresses of age-old darkness, with thousands of stars sparkling in the warp. And the guests wore the sign of the night; as if the Banquet to which they had received the invitation had been a funeral baptism.

- And, above all, remember: when they get up, they must not be allowed to sit down anywhere! the old man said sententiously. This is our hope! This is now the watchword!
And the others nodded, silently approving him.

9.

The woman had sent the child away, so that he would not see her suffering like this. She was panting heavily, choking on her grunting breath, when the frail voice made her swallow the bitter liquid that had filled her mouth.

- Mommy, look an angel!

- I told you to stop staying here and play a little further, in the tall grass... the woman whispered, trying to control her unbearable cough. But because he still looked up, his cough turned into a pitiful burp. He was sitting with his mouth open and, because he hadn't eaten anything for several days, and the sterilized and tasteless water was not assimilated by his body, he was spreading the stench of rot from the entrails that were soaking on him. She stared blankly up as the child tugged at her unbuttoned cape, obscenely revealing her suckling belly covered in unnatural, black and curly hair, up to between her swollen breasts.

"Mother, mother, what is it, what happened?"

The woman finally looked down at the little one's bald head and, in an uncontrolled gesture, reached out to caress the open wounds in his skull.

"Oh my God!" she repeated. Yes, God, let it pass on! God forbid it doesn't stop flying right here! Lord, take him to the neighbor over the hill, take him to the desert.

Staring eyes followed the evolution of the suave creatures under the high sky as if dripping with blood.

He was nothing but a chicken, with an open face, with dark and empty eyes, with a round metal skull, sparkling ruby in the sun: a dragonfly that had barely opened its eyes to the world after a long and dreamless sleep, in which it had done nothing but repeat the automatic program of incomprehensible gestures, which the species had implanted in its body before it was born, it was following a trajectory, a meaning that animated it, confused, launching him on this road as a particular path. Fluorescent wings, streaked with geometric holography, beat at hundreds of thousands of pulsations per second, keeping him suspended in the air above the unique image magically reflected in his spectroscopic search. Thus, the pitiful cane fence surrounding the foreign field seemed to him from up there like a miraculous opening of irradiation, like a wonderful rainbow of life, and the woman beckoned to him, to him in particular, showing him the little spectral form next to it. And the Dragonfly comes closer to descend with them, to comfort them. He felt endless pity for the tragic tumult of the little creatures, the worms of those who did not know flight, crawling so close to the tyrannical dust.
But when he reached out to caress them, trying to give them at least a drop of the unspeakably painful and bitter tenderness that filled the void under his metal armor, the dust creatures rushed in, knocking him down with ferocious blows.

He had been a very young Libelung. The cuirass gave way, creaking under the blows of the wood grabbed at random by the dying woman and her son.

- Why didn't he make any gesture to defend himself? asked the astonished child, carefully scratching the scrofulous ulcers between his legs.

"Dragonflies never defend themselves," the woman had explained.

"Okay, but then why are we killing them?" the child asked again.

"So that he doesn't sit down," replied the inattentive woman, listening to the commotion that was approaching. That's the watchword.

Then the thunder poured out. Horsemen clattered wildly past, brandishing their sharp weapons. Seeing them alone, a few dashed with their swift horses over the furrows and overtook them, split the child with a blow, and those who had not gathered to gnaw the little flesh from the crooked bones, rolled the woman or amused herself at the expense of her sufferings.

They were the first wave.

10.

Before the dragonflies, the horde was rolling, raving and ravaging the foreign territories, taking full advantage of the unexpected incursion, butchering everything on the way, not to settle down, not to stop flying. It was tremendously pleasant to be able to strike between the eyes of the beings descending from the sky in your path! To have a sword in your hand, drenched in the milky sperm that seeps through the flake-lighter bodies of the young Dragonflies!

After the first wave, only the lucky ones remained who had managed to hide in the burrows under the ground, because the first wave was made up of the most daring, rushing to prey, tear and kill.

The second wave came with colored mats unfurling in the wind. Carols were sung, cotlotos were beaten, women were abducted with arcana, babies were killed. The men who did not immediately mount their saddles to mingle with the horde were hung upside down from the marigold branches at the foot of the vitrified trees that guarded the side of the Plain of Cultures taken in the hooves of the swift horses of the Wilderness.
We are human! Billions! And after us come the Libelungi, who are not allowed to sit down, who must not sit down!

And, indeed, after the second wave, the Dragonflies followed. When it landed, one of the flight was tied with its wings to the pole and turned into a live pyre. Those of the third wave, riding all the time below the herd, struck them from the flight of the horse, shooting them in flight, knocking them down with stones, breaking their ankles. In the wake of the swarm, the Cultures remained covered by their torn metal armor.

But even the Dragonflies were no longer the same suave beings that had once crawled out of the wasteland near the Necropolis. They had grown tall, bright and shiny, with faces dug deep into metal, bodies of solid titanium and aluminum shells. The wings flashed continuously, and when they came, the horizon was darkened by an age-old twilight. Myriads were left behind to decompose under the red sun of the Planet's greenhouse. Myriads continued their high, triumphant flight. From the moment they came into the world they had not been fed anything. They had grown and developed on their own, germs of unbridled energy, rising to transcend the torment of this world and reach where they were destined to descend. Nothing could stop them. This time nothing was going to prevent them from reaching their secret goal towards which they had rushed each time in ever more sublime enteleches, towards an irrevocable victory.

11.

Swan rode alongside the old man. The food had run out and they had ended up devouring each other. They were sleeping in the saddle of their horses, sword in hand, driving steadily beneath the flock that was heading, in a perfectly straight line, towards the nebulous goal.

- We must not let them sit down! cried the old man.

But he had revealed to him, in a whisper, a long time ago that they would not be able to stop them like before.

And Swan now looked with interest and esteem upon the beings in the compact cloud under which they rode day and night, bringing darkness wherever they passed.

- Why would he be crossing the field? If they had taken the direct shortest route to the Ocean, they would have been there a long time ago and we wouldn't have been able to do anything to them, Swan marveled.

- Maybe the Ocean is not their target, but, who knows, some specific place...

They revolved incessantly, stirring up eddies and currents that fluttered their plumes, letting an eternal flake of torn angels fall from above. Nevertheless, the cloud continued to exist, hovering oppressively under the sky and pointing like an arrow THE MEANING.

12.

Reaching the most advanced limits of the Inhabited Zone, most of the knights dismounted, giving up. But he and the old man continued on their way, riding in silence, hip to hip, lance flag to lance flag, swords beating rhythmically over the purple horses' rumps. And Swan realized for the first time that although he had sat by the old man's side for years and years, a human life, he did not even know his name, he had never had the curiosity to ask him what his name was, but, he thought to himself, what importance could a name have?

How deeply imprinted in his memory was the image of that Dragonfly that had fallen from a height that had quietly watched as it came, rising respectfully to its feet, with broken wings! They had approached at a gallop and, when they had come face to face, they had studied each other for a while, curiously. And Swan had reached out, trembling with emotion, to feel the glossy, rigid tire whose appearance had changed again. To the touch, it had given him a foreign sensation and his skin had wrinkled with an inner cold. Looking from afar, he had expected something completely different.

Then the old man held out his sword to him, and Swan, grasping it with both hands, raised it above his head, looking into the icy eyes of the Libelung. When the blade fell, slicing through the air, not a single moan escaped the destroyed body. A man, a woman even, struck by death, moans, utters something, curses, gives thanks or at least cries. But the Libelung's writhings were mute.

"Maybe they don't have a tongue," he suggested, but the old man shook his head disapprovingly.

The cavalcade continued to Earth at the End of the World. They entered a gigantic city, much less damaged than the Plains Necropolis, signaling an area where clean weapons had been used. The horses' hooves rang long on the cobbles of the streets between the blocks that remained, just as they would have been in the past: no doors, no windows: simple intact parallelepipeds followed indifferently by the trot of the horses, rocking, as they paraded by them, in the eternal twilight that reigned under the cloud of Dragonflies.

- You are walking through the Eternal City, the old man told him.

- Through the Citadel how? he had asked, thinking he hadn't heard correctly.

They walked continuously through the City haunted by well-preserved thieves. Then, suddenly, the City plunged into the Ocean. From the sea, sunken buildings still rose above the water, but where the waves hit the land, a narrow beach had formed. In front of the beach there was a vast square, surrounded by columns up to the sky.

The Libelungi descended there. Although there were only a millionth of those who once left the Wilderness left, probably, there were still many, overwhelmingly many.

"It's over," murmured the old man.

Really, there was nothing left to do. The dragonfly vortex had subsided, awakening a strong wind as the sun reappeared in the clear red sky. The leaden-green waves crashed against the rocks, spreading rainbow iridescence in the air. The corpses on the shore, clean and beautiful like us, carried by the currents, moved their limbs lazily.

The dragonflies had gathered in concentric semicircles. The groups of horsemen dashed their lances in unison. The steel spikes rattled like hail on their za carcasses, but the Exalted Ones paid no heed to the furious attack of the knights in the saddles of the white-boned steeds. The steel struck by the stratospheric hardening of the diamond-plated cuirass was only sparking, causing no damage. Swan and the old man dismounted and slipped through the homogeneous mesh of winged metallic bodies toward the central point that focused the circular assembly. All around rose the long and steadfast faces, fashioned in the hardest metal in the Universe. In front of the first row, with its legs submerged in water up to above the knees, a Dragonfly like a beacon raises the shining edge of its arm to the sky, cleaving the air with a roar, in a grand, sacred, emotional gesture. The sun was bleeding the wings of the transparency through which it refracted in countless unknown shades, revealing games of abstract spatial images, in relief. The one who seemed to be the king of Cârdului raised his hands again over the countless multitudes and, then, from the strong and empty chests burst a guttural, but harmonious roar, vibrating like an organ whose pipes would be History.

"Oh my God!" whispered the old man. So that was it! So that's it!

It seemed that a boundless sadness soothed, now and always, their battered souls. Swan fell to his knees, face down in the sand, pulling his hair from his head with both hands and smashing his forehead against a crystal-polished mosaic tile.

And from the old man's eyes big tears rolled, dripping from his beard tangled in his chest.

And the song of the Dragonflies grew ever more penetrating, taking on a grand and dramatic allure, rising heartbreakingly, without equal, above the dead Ocean, above the desolate World. Grave, without intonations, metallic, direct, crushing, elevating the spirit to the highest heights of the Abyss and Desolation. The song of the Dragonflies on the beach where the Ocean beats against the walls of the Eternal City.

(1980)