Year 921,

  After their fight against the vocational school bullies, things between Viryl and Radios suddenly changed. They couldn’t put aside their rivalry, but they started seeing each other in a different light. They had earned mutual respect, and it didn’t take long before that respect turned into a form of competitive friendship.

  As Radios started hanging around with Viryl and Tolomer, the “Daredevil's Congregation” became a serious thing: the trio held new meetings whenever Viryl and Radios were free from their studies, and they had the biggest fun the three of them had ever experienced in their life.

  The Daredevil’s Congregation claimed the abandoned villa as its base, and Tolomer was eventually able to carry out his gross ritual. Still, he failed miserably: despite everything being done according to the book, he wasn’t able to revive the mouse. The failure wasn’t enough to make him give up his obsession with occultism.

  The month of Arsicus was at its beginning, the cicadas were chirping on the pine branches, and Tolomer had a new obsession. Saint John's Night. He was convinced that all the witches and warlocks of Sanchiria would gather and party and invoke devils on the shores of Lake Ophania. The little occultist wanted to organize an outdoor trip with his friends on that magical night.

  He unexpectedly found support from Radios who, of course, considered the witches' thing a load of rubbish, but wanted to take the opportunity to have an adventure with his friends outside the walls of the citadel of Zelfiria.

  Viryl didn’t enjoy the idea at all, but since Radios and Tolomer were set on doing it, he had to reluctantly put up with his cousin’s bizarre adventure.

  The plan was this: Tolomer and Radios would tell their parents they were going fishing that afternoon and then having dinner and staying overnight at Viryl's house. Viryl would tell Lady Lurtinia that they were going to spend a night in a tent fishing at the lake in the park in the southern quadrant of Zelfiria.

  The idea was that in the unfortunate event that Tolomer and Radios' parents had tried to confirm their dinner invitation with Viryl's parents, they would have asked Yustass. And Yustass, who was certainly not an example of a virtuous fatherly presence, would have answered "yes" without having the slightest idea of what his son and his friends' plans were. Could a man ever lie to his brother or a knight of the Order of Ferlonia? Yustass could. If by chance that evening Yustass had remembered to ask why Viryl, Tolomer, and Radios hadn't shown up for dinner, Lurtinia would have shut him up in a bad way because, as usual, Yustass had his mind focused only on his business and was unaware of what his son was doing. Would Yustass have been worried that something was wrong? Absolutely not.

  It wasn't even such a big lie. They really were going to fish at a lake, but six miles further away than they had said.

  In order not to arouse suspicion, they left the citadel gate at four o'clock sharp on the appointed afternoon. There were still many hours of daylight left, and the guards, seeing them go by with modest backpacks and a fishing rod each on their shoulders, asked no questions.

  After walking for a little over a mile along the paved road south of Zelfiria, to reach Lake Ophania it was necessary to take a dirt trail that slipped into a forest at the foot of bare hills on which golden sheaves were piled up.

  Perhaps it was the suggestion of that particular day, but the dense undergrowth in which the path wound its way gave unpleasant vibes to the three children, who, however, to avoid looking like cowards to the others, didn’t bring up the subject. The trunks of the plums and olive trees were gnarled and twisted and closed in an arch over their heads, every plant had thorns, the air was thick with gnats and insects. Often they had to slalom through puddles of black mud even though it hadn't rained for at least thirty days.

  Lake Ophania was located in a valley beyond the hills, and Radios, who had inquired about the route, believed they would arrive in less than three hours. However, it was already past seven o'clock, and the path never ended. It was starting to be a big problem not being able to find a place to camp, because now even if they wanted to go back to Zelfiria on arrival they would find the gates of the citadel shut.

  Moving on was the only option left.

  “What if we lost our way, Radios?” Tolomer asked when his weak legs started to get tired.

  “Did we cross any forks or detours, Tolomer?” Radios replied, a little annoyed because he felt his authority was being questioned. His affirmation was proven by the fact that, despite the hairpin bends and ups and downs, the road had always been unequivocally one.

  “I think he meant that maybe we had to take another path, further up or down the road to Cerisia, Radios,” Viryl explained.

  “It can’t be. The one we took, if I remember correctly, was the first path we stumbled in, as it should be. And even if this wasn't the way to Lake Ophania, we should have already emerged into some field around Zelfiria. What's the use of a path that goes on for hours and hours in a forest without leading anywhere?” Radios countered.

  The squabble ended there, but it was just after a minute's walk that the forest opened into a large clearing where some dilapidated shacks could be seen, as if a god in charge of their destiny had forgotten about them and had been brought back to attention by that chatter.

  The shacks of mossy wooden planks seemed to be built in a semicircle around a clearing hidden from their view, and despite their poor condition they must have been inhabited because voices and sounds of cymbals and flutes echoed in the air, and black smoke carrying the smell of burning grease reached their nostrils.

  That small community residing in that cabins must have begun the festivities for Saint John's Night.

  “It's strange, there shouldn’t be any village on the path before we get to the lake,” Radios observed perplexedly.

  “We must have taken a wrong turn then,” Viryl repeated with a shrug. Radios looked at him sullenly.

  The three children made their way through the row of abandoned huts, and as expected, they found themselves crashing a wild party. Men, women, and children were all dressed in traditional Sanchirian clothing but had long, twisted wooden masks on their faces, of a workmanship never seen before.

  In the center of the square an infernal bonfire burned, and three black wolves had been impaled on three poles planted all around, and their skins stripped bare by the tremendous heat were scorched in scabs and blisters. In an outer circle, a dozen possessed people danced madly to the syncopated rhythm of the tambourines.

  Those who were not dancing or playing music were prepping food. A woman plucked chickens whose necks had been wrung, and an old man eviscerated them. A little boy poured into cups yellow-ocher wine, the color of catarrh. Three plump men grilled offal skewers, which were devoured eagerly by those who received them, raising their masks slightly to pass the succulent chunks of meat under them. Children played with muscular short-haired hounds, throwing them bones and lambskins.

  In the midst of that orgiastic rite, a tall, slender man with a skewer in his hand noticed the three kids and began to walk slowly in their direction. Not at all intimidated, the they waited for the man to be near them, and then Radios stepped forward and with a serious face asked, “Could you tell us which way is Lake Ophania?”

  The man did not answer Radios, but passed him and with his slow pace headed towards the line of huts. The three boys followed him. Back at the point in the clearing where they had arrived, the skeletal man pointed with a long white finger at a point on the opposite side of the plateau where the path resumed. The boys thanked him and went on.

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  The trail wound through the forest for another half hour, and then opened up onto the shores of the placid lake. The sun was now beginning to set, and the boys' stomachs were growling.

  “Maybe we should have asked one of the skewer they were having at that party,” Tolomer said disconsolately.

  “Gross!” Viryl exclaimed. He took off his backpack, picked out a sausage sandwich from inside and handed it to Tolomer, adding, “Here, eat. I and Radios will look for a place to light a fire and camp.”

  They had reached the dirt path that ran around the lake, and Tolomer went to sit on one of the milestones that dotted it. With a mouthful in his throat, he said to Viryl and Radios spitting all around, “I'll wait for you here then!”

  Knowing how frail Tolomer was, the two friends left Tolomer enjoying his sandwich and got down to business. They found a strip of land that jutted out into the lake and set up their fishing rods there. Then they built a circle of stones and, later, while Viryl was looking for dry grass, straw and twigs, Radios went to collect logs and branches that had been deposited on the shores of the lake during the winter, when it was swollen by the rains. After about twenty minutes, their work completed, they lit the fire with a flint and went to fetch Tolomer.

  Unexpectedly, in the twilight, as they climbed the slope they had come down from, they saw him still sitting on the same boulder talking to a man who was pulling a cart. It was a bald man with dark skin, a soul patch under his lip and a black cloak over his shoulders. They hurried to reach him and Viryl shouted, “Hey, who is that?”

  “He's a friend of mine,” Tolomer replied enigmatically. The man did not confirm Tolomer's words, but pursed his unnaturally long and thin lips in a smile.

  “You can sell him your soul, and in return he will grant your every wish,” Tolomer continued.

  “Oh, really?” Radios asked skeptically, “I think my wish is impossible for him to fulfill. Only I, myself, can make it come true.”

  The man took a card out of his cart and put it in Radios' hand. It was none other than a letter of recommendation for the knightly academy of the Spheres of Lazul, handwritten by the honorable Orlando Monteverna of the Sixteen of the Crown, postdated to the month of Laurentinus of the year 922. The stamp, the seal, the calligraphy, every detail was unmistakably authentic. Scared, Radios threw the letter on the cart and squeezed his hand into a claw, as if he had touched a red-hot iron.

  Viryl, seeing Radios' reaction, tried to say something that could get them out of that bizarre situation and make the man go away, “We're sorry, sir, the fact is that we only have one soul, and regardless of the offer, Radios and I are not interested in selling it. We don't want to waste your time, you'd better find another customer.”

  The man pointed at the horizon, to the dark silhouette of the three-peaked top of a mountain. Blessed visions of a modest and serene life on a farm, with a prosperous olive-skinned wife and two mischievous almond-eyed children, flooded Viryl's mind. Incomprehensibly, those visions made Viryl feel an immense melancholy.

  Even though he didn't understand the origin of the emotions he was feeling, Viryl forced himself to repeat, “I really mean it, sir, we will not sell our soul. You should look for other customers.”

  The man grasped the concept and, after respectfully bowing his head in greeting, lit a greenish lantern on his cart and grabbed its handles, to continue his endless wandering.

  After that inexplicable encounter, Viryl, Tolomer, and Radios descended back to their camp. Their minds seemed numbed and an artificial sense of peace pervaded them. Viryl asked Tolomer, with the same enthusiasm with which one talks about the weather outside in the morning, “So, did you sell him your soul?”

  “Yes,” Tolomer replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “And what did you ask him in return?”

  “To make me understand the voices of animals, and to make me always find what I'm looking for. Mom always gets mad because I lose all my pencils at school.”

  Radios laughed out loud and Viryl, with an incredulous expression, said, “Yeah, whatever.”

  The rest of the evening passed pleasantly and nothing out of the ordinary happened. The boys caught a couple of trout and grilled them on the lively fire they had lit. There was no sign that the much-vaunted witches' Sabbath was going to take place anywhere around, but to make up for that lack, the friends told each other ghost stories, while lying in their sleeping bags looking at the stars.

  Shortly after midnight, Viryl's eyelids grew heavy and he slipped into a sleep embellished by a rich dream production.

  *****

  Viryl was a knight armed with a massive jousting lance, and he had to fly into the crater of a volcano to pierce an incandescent Fekoro like an iguana with thirteen legs on each side. But the iguana, which had the face of his old algebra teacher, asked him what year Aldebrando II had been crowned king of Avuèl: Viryl understood perfectly well that if he couldn't answer such a trivial question he would never be able to defeat the Fekoro, yet the answer, which was on the tip of his tongue, he couldn't quite say. The tightly interlocking scales of the iguana's tail were all shaped like masks, masks that replicated the effigy of Radios, which kept repeating to him, “Viryl it is simple, stupid... Viryl it is simple, stupid... Viryl…”

  “Viryl…” Tolomer whispered, an inch from his face, his glassy eyes shining in the darkness.

  “What is it, Tolomer? I want to sleep.”

  “The song of a bat woke me up... it says the witches are on the other side of the lake and that Feneroth is coming…”

  “Tolomer, what time is it? What the heck…”

  “Viryl, look!”

  Viryl pushed Tolomer away and sat up, rubbing his eyes. Indeed something was happening on the shore across the lake. Viryl shook Radios and called him to wake up. Radios, with some protest, complied.

  Together, the three friends walked onto the shore, which reflected the silvery glimmers of the white Moon, at the peak of its cycle. Separated from them by half a mile of water, there were contorted figures dancing in a greenish halo to the rhythm of a discordant female chant, under the redundant branches of an immense dry oak tree.

  The twisted branches incessantly changed their shape, as if shaken by the wind, but there was not a breath of air. Minute after minute the branches of the oak seemed to divide into two distinct arborescences, as if they were the mighty antlers of a colossal deer.

  The shape of the animal seemed to materialize with increasing clarity, to the point that two knots at the top of the trunk began to glow with the reflected light of the satellite Ascurpice rising in the east, as if they were fluorescent eyes.

  The boys, mesmerized by that mournful chant in an unknown language, were brought back to reality by a deep, gloomy, long bellow. The titanic anthropomorphic deer, now clearly distinguishable against the starry sky, was exhaling steam in its labored breaths.

  An ancestral panic, comparable to what ancient men must have felt under the relentless paws of the mastodontic herbivores they dared to hunt, took hold of Radios and Viryl, who remained paralyzed. While all eyes were inexorably absorbed in contemplating the majestic creature, the three boys felt dozens and dozens of slimy and wet hands touching their legs and thighs. Instinctively, they lowered their eyes to investigate what was groping on them. All the fish in the lake were emerging from the depths, crowding and pushing with four limbs that seemed to have sprouted from nowhere. Their suffering eyes turned to the sky, gasping as if they were suffocating.

  That vision was so unbearable that it gave the boys the strength in their legs to flee. They turned and ran with the clear terror of prey that has crossed paths with a predator. They climbed up the bank of the lake and dashed down the path they had taken on the way there. They ran for their lives, hoping to see the huts of the celebrants they had discovered just hours before as soon as possible so they could ask for help, but the mysterious village seemed unwilling to appear. Finally, after less than two hours, they found themselves, almost without knowing how, on the paved road to Zelfiria.

  When they reached the gates of Zelfiria it was almost six o'clock and the gate to the citadel had been opened to allow the merchants’ carts to pass.

  The friends had lost their backpacks, sleeping bags, and fishing rods, but it hardly mattered. They said goodbye and immediately scurried home to slip under their reassuring blankets.

  At subsequent meetings of the Daredevil’s Congregation, the option of returning to the Lake of Ophania to recover the lost material and to further investigate the inexplicable events that had occurred on the night of Saint John was considered. ù

  However, nothing ever came of it.

  Fifty-two years later, third day of Sylyphicus, 11.53, sea of Kaelus, off the Ferlonian coast,

  Anker barfed in the grey foamy waves, bending on the rail of the tartan’s deck. He looked pale, almost greenish.

  “I didn’t expect your seasickness to be so bad”, Viryl observed, as he stood beside him.

  “It’s not, when the sea isn’t stirring like a washing machine,” Anker replied with a feeble voice.

  “Hang on a little more, we’re halfway there,” Viryl tried to comfort him.

  But his words didn’t help Anker at all. Halfway there meant two more days of unbearable suffering.

  “I hope it is going to be worth it, at least,” Anker moaned as he closed his eyes, trying to erase from existence the chaotic spectacle of the mixing waves. The rocking of the ship did not cease.

  “Oh, you can bet on it,” Viryl replied with a smile, “In the field of Occultism no one is as good as Tolomer. One can say he’s befriended the biggest shot in hell!”