1. Cliormina

When the flint salamander stopped talking, its lava eyes dimmed and it sank back into the sand. Some of the scales on its upper body still poked out, here and there, as though they were part of no living creature, but simply stones scattered across the surface. 

It had said no more than a dozen words. Fragmented murmurings without much sense to them, a fistful of chess pieces thrown down to the ground.

Cliormina, frustrated, sank her fingers into the temple sand until an electric shock forced her to remove them. Almost instantaneously they had turned red and shrivelled.

She shut her eyes, forced herself to be calm, gave herself a mental command to change the colour of her saliva, give it medicinal properties, and licked her fingertips to heal them. She was furious but was not allowed to let this emotion show in her voice.

‘Is that all you’re going to say? No, don’t repeat it. You’re boring.’

 The sand bubbled up, slowly mocking her, one last time.

The witch got to her feet with difficulty, having spent too much time on her knees. She had been waiting for hours for the salamander, her mentor, to decide to come to the surface and grant her a pearl of wisdom, and the result had been the same disappointment as so many times before. And Cliormina did not like waiting. And she did not like being disappointed.

Cliormina had known the salamander for centuries now, ever since she was little more than a child. She had been playing on the beach, and the stones and shells that had formed her game shifted around her until they took on the shape of an enormous slow-moving lizard. It had a penetrating gaze. It disappeared the same way as it had arrived, and Cliormina waited and waited in vain for it to return, staring at the sand until her eyes hurt, uncertain if she had even imagined the movement of the sand, those eyes looking at her.

The second day the salamander did not appear, nor the third, nor the fourth. But the little girl came back again and again, pulling at the reeds until she wrenched them out of the ground in her impatience and frustration.

Two weeks later, the sand once again gave a disconcerting order to its stones, and a flint mouth spoke to her of energy, of possibilities, of magic. She couldn’t even blink. To prove that she wasn’t dreaming, she cut her hands. If all of this was a dream, then the wounds wouldn’t be there the next day.

But she woke up with open wounds, and when she looked at them she realised that nothing else in the world had ever made her so happy. Magic was real. There was something more to life than her mother’s cooking pots, the long walks to the well, gathering the goatshit to spread on the fields. The world was open, and it went on forever.

More than two months went by before she saw it again. And for those two months, the wounds did not close. But she didn’t mind waiting this time: the salamander had promised to teach her a first spell. When it at length appeared, it explained that the spell needed the life of one of the farm animals, her favourite goat. But Cliormina now was ambitious, and decided to listen to what the salamander said, fascinated by its rolling magma eyes. When the stone creature appeared, the air became incomparably tense.

Following the salamander’s instructions to the letter, she took the goat’s life and her wounds were healed. Then she learnt that if she had not cried while she was killing it, then her spell would have been far more powerful. And so, after many years of practice, she learned never to love anything. She placed a spider in her throat; it was trained to build a clinging web there every time she was tempted to speak words of true affection. She avoided every temptation that fate laid in front of her like a honey-trap. She turned her friends’ blood and bones into ingredients for her potions.

She killed all the animals, tortured her two younger sisters, left her useless father with his stupid beard out on the moor, cutting off his feet so he could not follow her, and ate her mother’s flesh. And thanks to the fact that she had kept all her power inside herself, and had not wasted a drop on other people, she focussed herself so deeply onto herself that she multiplied like a glow worm in a hall of mirrors. 

She shook herself awake. Memories did not make her more powerful, and so she had spent years steering clear of them. She licked her fingers for the bear to come and find her. She was furious with that damn stone lizard, but also furious with herself: what was the point in her still coming here to beg words from him? She was certain that she had surpassed her teacher. She was wiser and stronger, in ways that the stone creature could never dream of … if stone, even if it speaks, is capable of dreaming.

The bear arrived, pulling the luxurious carriage in which Cliormina liked to travel. It had a canopy of ribbons supported by spiral-carved cedar columns, and a huge fan of grasshopper wings that waved magically whenever she was hot.

She went back to her castle. A couple of times the bear asked her permission to stop and relieve itself, but she did not grant it. And then she beat it with the thorny whip when the animal soiled itself. 

Cliormina was fed up with her life. Her anger with the salamander was perhaps no more than a deeper disappointment with herself.

She lived alone, with five servants to whom she never spoke. The huge tawny bear which pulled her carriage also hunted and fished for her. An ostrich and a goat were her cooks, and Cliormina made sure that it was always the ostrich that cooked her eggs, and the goat which drowned the little puppies in their own milk. Her messenger was a two-headed snake, and a black pelican travelled the world looking for the rarest ingredients for her potions, keeping them safe in its beak as it flew.

They reached the castle. It was a complicated heap of interconnected cylindrical towers, with so many spiral staircases inside that it was impossible to know which way one was headed without the guide-lizards. It was only they who understood this intricate architecture, created by the petrifying power of the salamander.

Cliormina reached her chambers and let herself fall down onto the feather bed. It was oval in shape and covered by fourteen silk sheets one on top of the other, and innumerable pillows, small as pincushions. There was a beautiful fresco on the wall which showed a pelican piercing its own breast, drinking its own blood.

She closed her eyes and felt a wave of hatred towards her fourteen sheets, her feather bed and its gauze canopies, the walls with their beautiful paintings, the alabaster window-frames, the stained glass, the castle itself filled with lamps and gems, the towers filled with potions, the handwritten books, the objects of power. Her whole body shivered with rage. She had gained control over magic. And it had been no use at all.

She was sure now that she had moved beyond the advice of the stone being. There was no direction left for her power to expand; it had barely any limits. She could fold lightning, divert the course of underground streams, command every living creature, from ants to eagles, without them realising that they were being controlled. She knew the power of every element, in every combination. She had cheated time, her body and her face both as fresh as newly budding grapes. Neither did space hold any secrets for her: she could fly, transforming her fingers into giant batwings, and she could transport herself instantaneously from one spot to another. She could go invisible, change her shape, fold herself down until she was as small as a fieldmouse. She thought that if she wanted to destroy the salamander itself then she would be able to.

And it had all been useless. She didn’t feel any more complete, any happier. Power did not make her feel any more powerful. There was no one for her to compare herself to.

She bit her lip. An idea had been fondling her brain for the last thirteen or fourteen years. Perhaps, now that she was resolved to submit herself no longer to the salamander, it was the moment to put it into action.

Over the next few months she worked out what the best way to put the plan into action might be. Should she use her own body, or should she use spells? After thinking it over for a long time, she decided that she disliked the idea of bloating herself with fluids and producing a little bloody creature, so she preferred to have a child the normal way. ‘Not to care for, of course,’ she said to herself over and over. ‘Just to have someone I can torture a bit.’

And so she hid herself away in the dampest and darkest part of the dungeons, and imagined the child to herself until she knew exactly how he would be down to the smallest detail, both outside and in. She thought him up until she knew him completely. She made his skin by gathering white rose petals with the dew still on them, and a single redcurrant, the last of the winter.

She made his flesh by chewing the sad sea sponges with her own mouth, soft sage roots macerated in tears and scraps of cloud spread out over the evening. She wanted to have a sad child. She created his veins from the skins of tiny new-hatched rattlesnakes, and filled them with sweet poppy juice and the juice of black cherries.       

She made his brain of the white sand from an hourglass, so that the child would always be afraid of the passing of time, and then added to the sand cemetery worms, so the child would always be afraid of death. Then she added the softest guts, still throbbing, from eight beautiful little greyhound puppies, so the child would always demand a mother’s attention.

Instead of a heart she placed a wheel, and within the wheel a little golden mouse that would never grow tired of running until she gave the order.

She gave him a tongue to enjoy himself with, and some ears to suffer with. She granted him a beautiful face but refused him the freedom of a strong and healthy body.

Instead of eyes, she gave him two little bottles. One of them was filled with mercury, which reflects things like a mirror, just so the boy would see people exactly as they see themselves. The other was filled with sloe wine, so the child would never be able to do anything other than allow his emotions to run away with him.

And finally she placed a lock on the infant’s perfect forehead.

He was so beautiful it hurt.

She called him Zephyr.

And then she gave him permission to live.

2. Zephyr

The first thing Zephyr saw when he opened his eyes was a very beautiful woman smiling at him. 

‘It works!’ the woman said, clapping with joy.

Zephyr smiled to see her so happy. But when she saw that the child knew how to smile, her expression hardened in an instant.

‘Are you my mother?’ the child asked.

‘That depends. I’m only your mother when that makes you suffer.’

Zephyr, confused, did not know what she meant.

‘Will you sing songs to me? Will you tell me stories?’ he asked, his voice full of hope.

‘You’d like that a lot, wouldn’t you?’ Cliormina said, observing the child’s every little reaction.

He nodded and smiled.

‘I would love to tell you stories, my darling. I could tell you about the four corners of the world, the marvels to be found there, tell you about palaces, plants and animals in countries you will never visit. I could use my harp and my voice to create a music that would make your heart swell…’ she said, almost dreamily.

Zephyr’s eyes turned green with hope. She shook her head.

‘But you were not born to be happy,’ she said, sweetly.

The child was confused.

After she had said this, Cliormina took hold of the child’s head and gave it a painful twist, before tipping into his right ear drops of three different colours: a golden drop, one which was half blue and half red, and one which was totally black. To the surprise of the witch, her own eyes let drop a single tear, the first she had cried in decades, which also slipped into the ear of the artificial boy.

Zephyr felt like his head was splitting, The first drop had burned like molten lead, the second wriggled in his brain like some wicked tadpole, and the third seemed made of liquid thorns. Only the fourth allowed him a little bit of relief.

 Was this pain? Without knowing what to do, or rather, without being able to do anything else, the child started silently to cry. But as he was not really a child, no salty water fell from his eyes, but rather a little bubble, filled with a thick white smoke, which floated up to the ceiling. When it burst, it formed a tiny butterfly.

Zephyr, feeling a little better, started to play with the white butterfly. It was his first friend. He wanted it to come and sit on his fingers, and the butterfly obeyed. Then it kissed his nose.

The witch looked at the child’s concord with the little animal and felt jealous. She opened the window and used the power of her mind to call up a little tornado which blew the insect away.

Zephyr, caught out by this cruelty, started to cry once again. But this time his tears were not white, the pure colour of innocence, but rather the bitter purple of sadness. And they too turned into butterflies. Only this time none of them came to play with the child, and when he tried to play with them all they would do was bite his fingers.

The disappointment made the pain in the child’s head grow ever greater, slashing at him like a whip of nettles. And Zephyr cried and cried many more of these terrible purple butterflies.

Cliormina congratulated herself for the child’s tears. They were beautiful, which was significant for her. There would be a lot of them. She did not want to make a creature suffer if its sadness wouldn’t be beautiful.

Zephyr’s pain grew until he could not bear it. He felt his head scratched on the inside by a swarm of horseflies, by a swirl of leeches, by a rain of poisoned needles.

‘Does it hurt, sweetheart?’ the witch asked.

The child, in so much pain that he thought he was about to faint, nodded gently. The butterflies fluttered around his head.

‘In that case they’ll all be marvellous,’ Cliormina said.

The pain did not let up all night long. Cliormina could have given him a potion so that he did not have to suffer, but that would have influenced the outcome. Not just that: seeing the child cry was fascinating. He was the only thing that had stirred some kind of emotion inside her in a very long time. She sat by him all night long, watching over his suffering and feeding herself on it, refusing the child even the small comfort of holding her hand.

When dawn was nearly breaking, the child managed to fall asleep for a couple of hours. A sudden suffocation woke him, an immense difficulty in breathing. Just as he was about to choke, he turned to her to ask for help from the only person he knew.

Cliormina, overjoyed, picked up a enormous pair of silver pincers and reached over to Zephyr. Obedient despite his terror he allowed her to act.

One after another, the witch took out from Zephyr’s throat three shining bloody eggs. She put them down on a little marble table.

‘Stop bleeding,’ she ordered the child.

Anxious to comply, he did what he could, concentrating and trying to slow down his heart rate. He managed to lessen the flow of blood and stop the haemorrhage.  

Cliormina knocked two of her fingernails together. The sound they made was like that of a little silver bell. In less time than it took to think it, a group of beautiful hummingbirds came down from the ceiling and started to eat the bright shells of the eggs. Zephyr did not know that hummingbirds weren’t meant to have teeth, so he was not frightened to see them, and saw nothing odd about the little creatures. However, he did notice that with every mouthful they took they grew even more beautiful.

When they had greedily munched up the shells of all three eggs, Cliormina shooed them away with a wave of her hand. There were now three keys on the marble table: a golden key, a black key, and one in which red and blue were mingled as though it were made of veins and arteries.

‘Every one of these keys, my little Zephyr, will allow me to open up a part of you. With the golden key I will know what your dreams are. With the key of blood I will get into your body, its deepest darkest places. And with the black key … Well, you’ll see.’

Cliormina smiled, and Zephyr did the same. He was punished for it.

3. The three keys

Oh, how much fun Cliormina had with Zephyr! She was able to cause him pain in so many ways that every day was a challenge to the witch’s creativity. Sometimes she thought she would hurt him by her indifference, and spent the whole day without even looking at the child, who trailed around after her, waiting for anything, a gesture even. Sometimes she used the red-and-blue key to cause him terrible pains in his stomach or his ears, or to provoke an itch that it was impossible for him to scratch. She curled up with laughter to see the little boy uselessly trying to scratch himself, until there was no other remedy other than to scrape himself against the blackberry bushes and end up covered in little black wounds, small yet deep.

She let weeks go by without giving him anything to drink. The child, without knowing that this unbearable and oppressive feeling was thirst, did not know what to do. When she finally did give him a drop of liquid, it was salted vinegar.

Cliormina forced the child to eat goldfish while they were still alive, little ducks just fresh from the egg, lake oysters which screamed when the fork sunk into them. For Zephyr, the taste of every dish mixed inevitably with the taste of his tears.

Zephyr was unable not to love Cliormina, because he had been made to feel, and she was the only human being that he knew. He was frightened of time and death, and desperately needed a mother.

‘Any moment I’ll grow bored of you and tell the little mouse in your chest to stop running round on its wheel,’ she said.

Zephyr looked at her, smiling. He was punished for it.

She dressed him in fine clothes, made of linen interwoven with wild rose. She knew that the child would be constantly itching, but he never complained, and only rubbed himself in secret against the back of the chair.

Sometimes she dropped stinging caterpillars down between his clothes and his soft skin. Once she allowed the child to know the feeling of relief that a butter of almonds and jasmine caused his irritated skin, but then she threw the balm into a lake, and enjoyed the surprised and pained expression on Zephyr’s face.

Then something unexpected happened.

One night, after she had told him a story (one of her terrible stories about mother deer pursued by hunters and caught up in forest fires, or mother elephants kept prisoner in cages in vile circuses … always lost children, sad, abandoned animals) Zephyr gave Cliormina a kiss.

She was shocked. The little boy had never seen a kiss before. How had he managed to work out that this stupid gesture was what vulgar people did to express affection?

Cliormina spent days sunk in thought. That kiss had awakened memories in her that she had spent decades expunging from her mind. She thought that she had eradicated them completely … memories of a farm, a couple of sheep, and her mother surrounded by cooking pots. And no, that single, almost imperceptible touch of the lips was enough for all the kisses of the past to come back to the surface of her mind, shining like lotus flowers in a pond.

The boy had been made to suffer. She had done nothing apart from cause him pain in every possible way. She had deployed all her creativity, all her talent, and even a part of her power (the sacred power that she should never share with anyone) in the daily tortures to which she subjected Zephyr. And yet, nevertheless, he loved her.

The witch didn’t realise that she had been spending almost all her waking hours with this little creature. But Zephyr realised that she could have ignored him, could have left him alone in a corner without even looking at him. And for this alone, he somehow knew that he was important to her.

Cliormina began to fool herself. She said to herself that she was only keeping the child around to amuse her, but the truth was that something had begun to thaw inside her. Her heart, which had been as dry as a raisin, was starting to soften thanks to the kindness of the artificial boy. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she no longer enjoyed seeing Zephyr suffer. When she opened his dreams with the golden key, and saw her own face in them, worshipped as a goddess, she felt such a strange happiness … a forgotten sensation … She scarcely realised it, but the rigid spider that she guarded in her breast had stopped moving.

The witch put the golden key and the blue-and-red key away in a velvet-lined casket, but with trembling hands she threw the dangerous black key into the well.

Zephyr dreamed of Cliormina walking through huge gardens of white poppies, pretty cemeteries filled with stone giraffes and platypuses, through splendid snow-filled valleys. He dreamed that she gathered translucent berries from spiny bushes, and that the fireflies pulled back the branches so that she would not hurt her hands. He dreamed of Cliormina flying, held calmly above the clouds that the twilight stained with blood.

And the days went by. The bear, the ostrich, the goat and the pelican took pity on the child, and spoke to him when they thought the witch wasn’t looking at them. They did not know that she had eyes in every little mirror, in every window, in every glass.

While Cliormina watched Zephyr, someone else was watching her.

4.The Flint Salamander

The flint salamander had sprouted up from the sand. His slow stone-ish curiosity had been piqued by the prolonged absence of visits from his disciple. Moving imperceptibly slowly, he dragged himself over to the castle which he had built for her.

No one noticed him arrive. He blended in with the very stones themselves.

And he found out that Cliormina had built herself a child. Without his permission. The salamander realised that for the witch the child was enough, and that she no longer needed her mentor. She had fallen into the trap of affection.

A few grains of sand fell out at the corners of the Stone salamander’s mouth when he attempted a rictus that was something like a smile. This was the moment he had been waiting for. It always happened, sooner or later, with all of his disciples: they accumulated a great deal of power but were not able to maintain it. Their weak human minds were set against the idea of permanence. In these moments of crisis, all the salamander had to do was what he had always planned: take payment for his work. Pluck the ripe fruits of his efforts over so long a time. Take a hold of the huge, accumulated energy of those people who no longer valued it. This is how things had been for millennia.

At dawn, the salamander melted into the stones of Cliormina’s castle, and took possession of it. He liked to become a part of buildings, in spite of how exhausting he found it: the sensation repaid him amply for the effort.

As soon as the witch lowered her guard a little more, as soon as she became sufficiently soft, he would take possession of her as well, and win everything. It was just a question of waiting. And patience is the natural element of the flint salamander. They float in extended time like birds of paradise float among clouds. They can stay floating in time indefinitely.

One morning, Cliormina took Zephyr to have breakfast in the garden. She liked to see the child surrounded by bougainvillea: the colour of the flowers made him look even more pale. She herself spread the gooseberry jam on the child’s bread, without realising how much tenderness there was in this gesture.

‘What did you dream last night?’ she asked Zephyr, in spite of the fact that she knew very well already.

The child looked worried.

‘Last night wasn’t like other nights.’

He sat in silence for a few seconds, trying to find the words to describe what he had dreamt.

‘My bed was alive. When I touched it, invisible mouse-teeth bit into my hand. I tried to sleep, but the blankets pressed down on me, trying to suffocate me. And the window was laughing at me.’

The dream confirmed Cliormina’s suspicions. A few days ago she had felt the numb feeling in her mouth that had accompanied her visits to the salamander. His presence was unequivocal. He was spying on them.

Cliormina did not understand why.

The days went by, and the castle grew ever colder, as though the stones were black magnets. Cliormina waited fearfully. Zephyr knew that something bad was happening, because the animals were impatient and scarcely looked at him, Cliormina shivered when she thought no one was watching, and even the fire had changed shape in the fireplaces. The flames no longer sketched out flower petals, but rather crystals of quartz.

But despite the cold the days kept on passing. Cliromina thought she would act as though the salamander did not exist. She no longer feared his power. And there is no energy more intense than that of converting another being to nothingness. As though her life were built of paradoxes, the presence of the salamander brought her even closer to Zephyr.

She no longer punished him for smiling. She gave him glasses of limpid water and made the ostrich prepare him pumpkin soup. And sometimes she stroked his perfectly white skin.

One night the salamander felt a sudden drain of his energy and grew a little impatient. He realised that the weakness which the child caused within Cliormina came paradoxically accompanied by a strange resistance, a new kind of strength. This affection was a powerful vine, and its slippery roots were able, as time went by, to break through rock itself.

For the first time in millennia, time stopped being on the stone creature’s side.

That night, Zephyr dreamed that a set of vast stone teeth were slowly chewing on him, grinding him down carefully, blending his tendons with his splintered bones. He dreamt that the bear, the snake, the pelican, the ostrich and the goat all looked at him without doing anything, their smiles filled with teeth and their eyes made of lava.

Cliormina woke up with a start. She touched the stone wall and realised the danger they were in. The only thing that was valued enough, that was precious enough for the salamander to desire it, was Zephyr. She had to hide him.

She pretended that they were going to make a journey to visit her mentor, the flint salamander. She put the necessary equipment together slowly, just as she would have done had she been telling the truth. Just as she had done so many times before, she ordered the bear to prepare the carriage and the black pelican to come with them to detect possible dangers and problems. She dressed Zephyr in a shirt of pleats and ribbons and set off.

They travelled almost halfway to the temple of sand. Then she bade goodbye to her servants and journeyed with Zephyr into the Plain of Silence.

They walked for hours. The whitethorn branches ripped Zephyr’s beautiful clothes to pieces, and even injured his delicate skin, but he said nothing. He had never before seen Cliormina so scared, and at the same time he had never felt her treat him with such affection. He was extremely confused.

The only animals in the wood were huge white caterpillars, smoke squirrels and pale deer skeletons, which drifted around without any focus or goal.

When they reached the cave of secrets, from which no Word can escape without being eaten by the paledeer, Cliormina pulled out a silk kerchief and herself removed a fat poisonous caterpillar from a rock so that Zephyr could sit down.

The child was pleased for the rest, understanding that something serious was going on, and looked at his mother with eyes full of questions.

The witch felt that the spider in her throat was starting to build a thick web so that she couldn’t speak. And with a huge effort she put her fingers down her throat, for the first time in her life, and dragged the creature out. The spider tried to run away, but she crushed it against a rock.

‘Zephyr,’ she said, ‘it is nearly time for me to die. The forces that have kept me in place for all these centuries are no longer on my side. The only way for you not to die alongside me is for you to inherit my magic. We need to fool the flint salamander. But I don’t know how to do this. You’ll need to travel the world until you find the answer.’

Cliormina cleared her throat. She didn’t tell the boy about how scared she was that the flint salamander would kill him, but she said, in a particularly sharp voice:

‘You may not return to the castle until you have done so.’

5. Flight of the tears

Zephyr realised that this was a good-bye and burst into tears. He had not cried for some time now, but every time he did his tears still turned into indigo butterflies which flew off as soon as they left his eyes.

Cliormina went back to the carriage. She told her servants that she had grown tired of the child and decided to abandon him out in the wastes. She went back to the sand temple, waited several days for the flint salamander to appear, and pretended to be terribly upset when her mentor did not show up. Then she went back to her castle, knowing that once there she would have to face up to the last great challenge of her life.,

The night came across Zephyr when he was not expecting it. It was the first time that he had not had a light to protect himself from the night, and this inhabited darkness made him so scared that he couldn’t sleep. He looked up at the vague flights of the fireflies, thinking that maybe he could trust these glowing creatures and use them as a guide, but when the morning came he realised that he had been walking in circles. Exhausted by having spent the night walking about, he fell to the ground.

While he slept, wild beasts came to investigate the artificial child. They smelt his body and wrinkled their muzzles with fear. No one wanted to eat the flesh of this accursed creature.

Zephyr woke up with a start. He feared all the dangers that could be lurking in the wasteland. He had dreamed of falcons made of ash which destroyed everything they touched against. If it had been up to him, he would have hidden in a cave and languished there until he faded away, simply so as not to have to face up to anything. But he had to help Cliormina.

As he did not know where to go, he just put one foot in front of the other and let fate carry him where it would.

He passed through the city of Coriandre, where the rain falls like gold and damages the sight of old men. He went through the swamps of ghost orchids, and wanted to take some back for Cliormina. He walked through a river of tiny black scorpions, which were about to eat his feet.

He asked people for places where he might find answers, and he was directed to the Caves of Infinite Echo, which could transform the right kind of silence into the most beautiful music.  However, Zephyr’s question caused such a terrible thundering that the resulting landslide nearly buried him.

He questioned wise men, he questioned sphinxes, he questioned chimeras whose riddles contained great wisdom. He visited the white toad of Rastalla, the all-seeing waterlilies of Morsel, and the ancient donkey with two heads that lived beyond the Void Plain. If the answers they gave him told of anything that was not completely absurd, Zephyr did not understand what it was. 

Not everything was useless: the tree-witch of Garyle taught him how to cure wounds with lichen, the hermit of the Trassego thickets shared a simple invisibility charm with him, to hide from every scaled creature, and the talking lamb of Huer whispered into his ear the word that instantly kills a bear. But none of these things could help Cliormina.

He missed his mother. He felt that it was unfair that he had needed to leave her at just that moment when she had started to admit that she loved him, just when she realised that she had to treat him well and that they could eventually be happy. Nostalgia, love and anger mingled their colours, and he started to cry butterflies very regularly: in the rain, in the middle of the night, walking the dusty paths alone.

And one fine day he realised that his tears all flew off in the same direction.

He had by now visited all the magical springs and seen all the magic mirrors. He had spoken to the most powerful kings and the most worrying beggars. He had memorised all their answers, trusting that one day maybe these words would fit together magically with other words until everything made sense. He had looked at the world as though he would one day have to paint an endless canvas of all that he had seen over the course of ten years. But he had still not paused to look at himself.

Where were all his tears going?

He decided to follow them. Of course, this meant that he needed to cry fairly often. But Zephyr was accustomed to this. He held tight to his reasons for sadness as though they were his only family.

6. The stylite

The child walked for weeks following his butterfly-tears. He ate petals and little white roots. He licked the salt from the rocks and kneeled by the side of every river, hoping that the face he saw in it would not be his own but that of his mother. However this never happened.

The butterflies were faster than him. It was exhausting to run after them for a couple of hours and then have to evoke an intense sadness once again so that new ones would appear.

After a few weeks, in which Zephyr exhausted himself so much that he was scared he would no longer be able to carry on with his journey, the butterflies led him to a vast plain filled with blue flowers. In the centre of the plain was a very tall marble column, and at the top of the column sat an old man, meditating. Looking up from below he seemed very small. His hair and his beard were both very long, as though he hadn’t cut them since he was born.

And here was where the butterflies stopped.

Zephyr knew that he would have to speak to the man, but he had no way of climbing to the top of the column. There were no stairs or ropes or anything like that, and the surface of the column was so smooth and unblemished that it was impossible to try to climb up it.

He spent three days and three nights at the foot of the column, watching the stylite and waiting for him to come down. But the saint did not need to come down at any moment. From time to time the bees placed drops of honey on his tongue. This honey, and the morning dew, were enough to keep him alive.

On the fourth day, although he did not need to, he remembered Cliormina and almost without realising began to cry once more. But these tears, for the first time, were tears of hope. Their colour was not the same.

The butterflies, green as new leaves, instead of flying away from him, surrounded him and bit his clothes with their small mouths, then lifted him into the air and took him to the top of the column, next to the stylite.

Zephyr saw that the stylite had no feet.

‘I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,’ the old man said.

Slowly, the stylite opened his breviary to a page where there lay a pressed butterfly, very white against the aged paper.

‘Do you recognise it?’ the stylite asked.

Zephyr remembered it very well. It was the first tear he had ever cried in his life.

‘The butterflies have told me your story.’

There was another long silence.

‘It’s a very sad story.’

They spoke about many things. Zephyr spent a long time at the top of the column and learnt to feed himself on the bees’ honey and the morning dew.

One day the stylite said:

‘The only way to understand a creature made of stone is to think like it.’

The child took these words into his heart. It might have been the closest he had yet come to thinking of a way to save Cliormina.

But then he realised that he also needed to save himself.

They kept on speaking about hope and despair, encounter and loss, love and death.

And finally, the old man took out from the folds of his clothes a bundle of blackberry leaves tied with a fern.

Zephyr opened it in wonder and found there a stone key that would fit the lock in his forehead.

‘I’ve been polishing this key up ever since your first tear reached me. Do you know what it’s for?’

Zephyr nodded, gravely. As soon as he had seen the object his whole life had passed before his eyes in waves of images.

‘There are two kinds of death. One is black death, which comes from confusion and leads to confusion, and white death, which comes from peace and which is peace. If one day you find yourself unable to bear so much sadness, then turn this key in your lock. You will have an hour of absolute peace, and then you will find the white death.’

The child thanked the saintly old man, and felt such a keen emotion that he started to cry. His green tears lifted him once again tentatively into the air and brought him back down to the field of blue flowers.

Then he realised that he did not know which way to turn to head back to Cliormina’s castle.

And he also knew that it was more urgent than ever for him to return. He felt a pain in his chest which it was impossible for him to name.

Then two things happened at the same time. A white mouse ran by and stopped in front of him, and one of the stylite’s long hairs fell down onto Zephyr’s forehead.

7. The golden mouse

Zephyr understood at once what it was he had to do. He opened the box that was his heart and took out the little mechanical mouse and replaced it on the wheel with the white mouse. A vast and painful fear immediately spread through his chest, and for the first time he knew that death was a possibility.

Then he tied the stylite’s hair to the neck of the golden mouse and held the other end in his hand. The mouse started to run away quickly, towards Cliormina’s castle. And Zephyr followed it as best he could.

Every time that the white mouse who kept Zephyr’s heart running died, another one appeared to take its place. Zephyr didn’t understand what magic was helping him, but he accepted the gift of the lives of these little rodents because he knew that Cliormina didn’t have that much time.

A few weeks later he saw the castle in the distance. He released the last of the white mouse, and put his true heart back in his chest: the little mechanical golden mouse which Cliormina’s magic had created for him alone. Fear of his own death was replaced by a panic, a hundred times greater, at maybe losing his mother.

When he came to the gates of the castle he disguised himself as a beggar, covering his face with a burlap hood, and knocked on the door.

The bear opened but it did not recognise him. Its eyes were made of lava.

Zephyr killed it with the bear-killing word that he had learned from the talking ram of Huer, and then turned himself invisible to all creatures with scales, just as the hermit of the Trassego Grove had taught him.

He climbed the stairs, wary and tentative. The higher he climbed, the clearer and ghastlier the sound of the salamander’s voice came to him. The two-headed serpent, possessed by the salamander just like all the rest of Cliormina’s servants, stood guard in front of the witch’s room, but could not see Zephyr.

He peeped through the half-open door.

Cliormina was lying in her bed, dying. Her body was shrunken, wrinkled and dry. She no longer had any hair, eyebrows or eyelashes, and a thick yellow goo drooled from her lips.

The salamander was by her side, rummaging around in her head.

The stone creature had placed a lock in the witch’s forehead. He spied on her dreams with the golden key, and used the vein-and-artery key to torture her body.

But Zephyr knew that Cliormina had not told him anything, because she was still alive. Not even in her dreams had she revealed what she had done with the black key. If the salamander found it, and used it to end the witch’s life, then he would take control of all her power. 

The salamander was so intent on taking the witch’s energy that he did not perceive the child.

Zephyr stood back from the door, appalled by what he had seen. He was only an artificial child. He had no way of beating such a powerful creature.

He felt a tightness in his chest, an intense pain in his forehead, and wished he could cry. But if he did so, then the butterflies would give his presence away to the salamander. So he hugged himself tightly and tried to calm down.

But he couldn’t calm himself, and a single small tear came from his eyes. He tried to catch the bubble of smoke, but it immediately turned into the smallest butterfly which Zephyr had ever seen. It was black.

And the butterfly flew to the child’s pocket where the white key was kept. And it disappeared.

Zephyr looked at the white key.

And he remembered the words of the stylite:

‘The only way to understand a creature of stone is to think like it.’

And Zephyr pressed his fingers to his eyes to help him think. He didn’t move a muscle until he had an idea.

He went back to the entrance, where the corpse of the dead bear floated in a pool of black blood. Then the child took out the white key the stylite had given him and he soaked it in the thick blood, almost like tar, in order to stain it.

With the claws of the motionless bear he tore scratches into his clothes and his skin. He spoke backwards the words that allowed him to remain unseen by all scaled creatures.

He fell into the bear’s arms, gave a huge agonised shout, and asked the mouse in his chest to stop its running for a few minutes.

Zephyr stopped breathing.

The serpent came down the stairs like an overflowing cup of poison, found the two corpses and went back upstairs quickly to tell the flint salamander.

The flint salamander flowed through the stones of the castle to rise up in the shaken stones of the entrance hall. He looked carefully at the scene in front of him. He thought that the bear and Zephyr had killed one another.

And then he saw, held between the child’s pale fingers, the black key. And a hollow groan of triumph burst from his guts.

He took a deep breath and materialised once again in Cliormina’s room. He couldn’t wait to finish off his old disciple once and for all.

8. The white key

Cliormina’s two cooks, the ostrich and the goat, approached the corpse of the bear with eyes of burning lava. They were hungry.

‘We’ll cook him over a slow fire, and baste him with his own lard,’ the ostrich said.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to fry him in rosemary oil? The meat will be more tender,’ the goat replied.

‘You’ve always been a little bit in love with him, haven’t you?’ the ostrich said scornfully.

‘And that’s why he’ll taste so good,’ the goat drooled.

While the two of them pulled and pushed at the corpse of the bear, the body of Zephyr fell to the floor. 

‘And what shall we do with the toy?’ the goat asked.

‘I wouldn’t eat that, how disgusting. Leave him there: the pelican will take him.’

Just at that moment the mechanical mouse started to walk once again, and Zephyr’s heart began to beat. The child opened his eyes, startling the cooks.

Simultaneously, elsewhere in the castle, the flint salamander inserted the white key into Cliormina’s forehead, believing it to be the black one.

And now Cliormina recovered all her energy. An unknown peace entered her mind and body. Her skin started to give off bright electricity.

The salamander, terrified, took a clumsy step backwards.

And Cliormina dissolved him into nothingness with a single thought.

The Salamander broke down into fine sand with a terrible croak of rage which sounded on every wall of the labyrinthine palace.

And finally the stone could rest.

Downstairs, Zephyr saw how the eyes of the ostrich and the goat took on their normal colours once again. They stopped, surprised, and looked at the bear as it lay on the floor, and understood that it was dead. The goat burst into tears.

The ostrich enveloped her friend with her wings and tried to console her.

‘I know a beautiful spot where we can bury him. It’s under a beehive.’

Zephyr walked quickly back to Cliormina’s bed. As he climbed the stairs, he realised that it was not as cold there as it had been, and that there was no dark magnetic force leeching off the castle stones. He knew that his mother had beaten the salamander.

The artificial boy discovered his mother exhausted by her efforts. Her body had grown thirty years older. There was a pool of sand next to her bed, as fine as the sand of an hourglass.

‘Zephyr … I’m so happy to see you.’

He smiled, but the mouse in his chest was running furiously. He knew that his mother only had an hour left to live.

I destroyed the black key when I started to love you,’ she said. ‘Tell me where you got this other key from …’

Zephyr sat down at the side of her bed, took her hand, and told him of all his adventures. Cliormina cried when she realised that the boy had done all this just for her, and cried again when she realised that the stylite was none other than her very own father, whom she had abandoned and mutilated when she was still only a girl.

And she knew that the white key had not been meant for Zephyr, but for her.

‘I’m going to die, my boy,’ the witch said, breathing with effort. ‘I want to pass my powers on to you.’

‘Can’t you take them with you where you’re going?’ the boy asked.

Cliormina shook her head.

‘And can’t you use them to live a little longer?’

She smiled and said no once again.

‘And can you use them to take me with you?’

Cliormina looked straight at him.

‘You have travelled the world. Now you know all its wealth and all of its joy. Are you sure you would travel with me?’

Zephyr nodded urgently, without hesitating for a second. He saw that his mother had very little time left to live.

‘I’ve always loved you more than the whole world,’ he said.

And then Cliormina cried. And her tears dragged so much pain from her that they left an acid trail on everything they touched as they fell.

She opened the plate that she had put so many years ago into her own torso. She had swapped her blackened heart for a golden spider so long ago. She hugged Zephyr, and kissed him for the first time in both their lives, and opened up his chest, releasing the mechanical mouse.

The spider wove a fine white web, wrapping the bodies of the dried-out old woman and the beautiful boy, trapping them and protecting them with so many layers of silk that when the ostrich came up to bring them some vegetable soup she found a white bundle lying on the bed, very much like a silkworm’s cocoon.

On the bedside table, the mechanical spider fitted its needle-like legs into the holes of the cogwheel mouse and they fit together perfectly. The clock that the two bodies made began to tick.