Little Lily. Prologue

I repeat your name
At night in the silent dark,
and it sounds so far away,
as it has never sounded before.
This name is further than the stars,
and sadder than the weary rain.
— Federico García Lorca

Prologue

She sat on a warm stone. The stone remembered the morning—remembered how the first ray of light had touched its rough surface, how the dew had lazily trickled down its sides, vanishing into the dry earth, how it had begun slowly, drop by drop, to absorb the blinding zenith light. And now, by noon, it harbored so much dense, heavy heat that one could boil an egg on it, if anyone in this world had an egg, and if anyone wanted to boil it, and if there existed anyone at all besides herself.

But there was no one. There was only the stone. There was the sun, resting on her shoulders like a heavy gold coin. There was a scent—dry, slightly bitter, like the exhalation of an earth that had long ceased praying for rain and had forgotten the names of its gods. The grass didn’t smell like grass; it smelled like the memory of grass: whatever remained of the stems after months of drought and sweltering heat—dust, in which the barely perceptible, ghostly spirit of wild mint and wormwood still lingered. Somewhere far away, perhaps beyond the hill, perhaps beyond the sea—she did not yet know what a sea was, but she felt its subtle, corrosive seed of salt in the air—somewhere far away, something massive was burning. The smoke was not visible, the sky remained ringing and transparent, but her nose caught it: a faint, ancient bitterness, as if someone had placed a glowing coal, oozing an anthracite gleam, on the very edge of the horizon.

She did not remember how she had ended up here. It felt as though she had always sat here, her arms wrapped around her sharp, dry knees.

The boulder she had settled upon was not alone. All around, as if halted halfway between becoming a mountain or crumbling into dust, lay others—gray, rusty, threaded with white quartz that looked like lightning frozen in time. They were all warm, each in its own way: one like a mother’s palm smelling of rice flour and soap, another like the hot breath of a dog, a third like cheeks after a long, frenzied fit of weeping, when the tears are gone but the fever remains. Dry little bushes grew between the stones—hyssop, perhaps, or some thorny scrub—whose stems were thin and springy as rusted wire, their tiny leaves carrying a scent so pungent it made one want to sneeze and cry at the same time.

Then she saw the lizard. It lay on a flat stone—slightly to the left and just above her hand—drinking the sun. It looked like a miniature dragon, cast from old malachite dust and liquid, darkened bronze. Its emerald scales caught the rays, turning them into blinding, microscopic sparks. It lay so motionlessly that for a split second, the girl mistook it for an ancient carving etched into the rock: the same grayish-brown underside, the same dark speckles, the same tiny, almost inhuman pattern. But then the lizard blinked—a single, instantaneous, translucent contraction of a leathery membrane—and the girl understood: it was alive. Time pulsated inside this tiny body.

The girl did not move. She knew—not from anyone else, not from words in a book, but from the very fact of her own presence here, in this merciless light—she knew she had to be quiet. Quieter than silence itself. Quieter than a shadow creeping over grains of sand.

The lizard was basking. Its body lay sprawled across the stone with that absolute, eerie trust accessible only to creatures with cold blood. It let the noon enter it—through its scales, through the bony plates of its skull, through every delicate little joint in its tail—and transformed this heat into movement, into pure life, into an underlying capacity to vanish into a crevice in the blink of an eye if the world suddenly became unsafe. But for now, the world was not unsafe. The world consisted of warmth, stone, and the scent of wormwood. The world was beautiful.

The girl looked at the lizard and saw everything with a frightening, almost agonizing clarity: The five toes of each tiny paw, pressed against the rough quartz—with barely visible suction cups at the tips, like poppy seeds; The flanks, which moved—ever so slightly, yet continuously—sending fine ripples across the scales like a mirror of water into which an invisible strand of hair has been dropped, only in reverse: not from the top down, but from the inside out; The tail. Long, elegant, trailing away from the body like a sentence someone hadn’t had the time or the energy to finish—it lay on the stone in a perfect arc, each scale casting its own separate, miniature shadow; And the eyes. Two round, bulging, yellow eyes with vertical slits for pupils, holding neither thought nor fear—nothing but a readiness to leave. To flash and vanish.

The girl thought about the proper way to be a lizard. How wonderful it must be—to bask on a scorching boulder and know that you are an extension of this boulder, and a part of the sun, and a part of the dry wormwood wind, and that there is no difference between your body and this world, because you are simply one of the places where the world has decided to become dense and tangible for a fleeting moment.

She reached out her hand—slowly, the way a figure moves on a mountain trail far in the distance—not to touch, but to feel, simply to get closer—and her fingers, smeared with gray limestone dust, hovered in the air.

And then came the Sound. It came neither from the right nor the left; it came from everywhere—from above, from the faded blue, and from below, from the granite depths. It was not thunder—she would have recognized thunder; she remembered thunder with her entire body, remembered how the air suddenly turns into an iron wall and strikes your chest, your ears, knocking out teeth and thoughts. This was something else. A collapse. A strained, visceral cracking of the tearing fabric of the world, splitting along some invisible, ancient seam—as if a massive, unseen hand had gripped the mountain itself and snapped its spine in two.

The stones around her began to hum with a dull, terrifying rumble. The earth sent a dry, fine vibration into her tailbone, her thighs, the very base of her skull—not loud, but so deep that the sound was perceived not by the eardrums, but by the spine itself. Somewhere—close, behind her or deep within the cliff—a massive stratum shifted, tore loose, and crumbled into dust, and from this invisible destruction, the air was instantly filled with stone powder. It had no taste, but it possessed a heavy density: it settled on her dry lips, on her eyelashes, on her open, frozen palms.

The birds. They rose all at once—not a flock, not two—but every single feathered creature that had been hiding until that moment in crevices, in thorny bushes, on ledges. Their cry was neither song nor chirp—it was pure, dry, inarticulate terror, transformed into an ultrasonic wave. They shrieked the way creatures shriek in the face of utter annihilation, creatures that have no words and therefore no ability to lie or comfort themselves. Their cry was true—hopelessly, absolutely true—and from this dense truth the air thickened, grew matte, and for a moment, the sun overhead dimmed.

The shadow. It fell upon the stone swiftly and ravenously—not like a ordinary cloud, but like the plummeting of something heavy and unseen. It was not simply a darkening; it was a collision of cold and heat. The shadow was thick, almost anthracite, devoid of gradients or halftones—an absolute, impenetrable impossibility of light. A sudden, sclerotic chill of a crypt swept over the rock.

The lizard vanished. No, it wasn’t a disappearance. An ancient, immutable law triggered in its primal brain: to stay alive, you must be able to sever a part of yourself. You must leave the world the very thing it is trying to use to hold you. There was a barely audible, wet, brief snap—the sound of living fibers tearing. An emerald-bronze lightning bolt darted into a dark, saving crevice between the stones. But the tail remained on the boulder.

It was not dead. It writhed, bounded, violently and rhythmically thrashing against the gray stone, dancing its own mad, death-throe dance. In this tiny stump of flesh, in this scaled ribbon, there was so much desperate, thrashing, blind energy, as if it were trying to deceive the fallen shadow, to take the entire blow upon itself while the lizard quieted deep in the fissure. This was pure physiology elevated to the absolute of beauty: the rhythm of nerves that had not yet realized they no longer belonged to anyone. The tail arched like a plucked string that still trembles, remembering its final, highest note.

The girl gasped. Shock pinned her in place, but then she slowly reached out her hand, as if obeying another’s will. Her fingers carefully closed around the thrashing piece.

It rested in her palm. Warm. Weightless. Convulsively restless—its tip still quivering like a thread in the wind. She felt it with every cell of her skin, every receptor on her fingertips, how smooth and hard-cold the scales were on the curves, and how the living, tender, pinkish skin showed between them—wet, like the tip of a tongue.

And then the smell caught up with her. It wasn’t blood—lizards do not smell of iron and human slaughter. It was a different scent—delicate, dry, like a snapped green branch, like the sap that oozes at the site of a violent rupture. The scent of parting. The scent of how the living leaves a part of itself behind to keep breathing.

She looked at the tail. It had no eyes, but it lay in her palm so trustingly and heavily, as if it were the most precious offering. Finally, the tip stopped twitching. The last spasm subsided, leaving only warmth.

The girl looked up. The crevice where the little emerald dragon had taken refuge was bottomless and silent. Not a sound came from it.

The stone dust slowly settled, swirling in invisible air currents. The birds fell silent, retreating into their rocky burrows. The sun returned—exactly the same as it had been before the sound, before the terrible shadow and the birds’ cry. The boulder beneath her once again swelled with golden heat, the wormwood smelled just as bitter, and on the very edge of the earth, the invisible coal smoldered just as smokelessly.

She closed her palm—slowly, carefully, the way one closes an old, sacred book—and pressed her fist to her chest, right against her beating heart. She did not cry. She did not smile. She simply sat on the scorching stone in the middle of an endless ‘now,’ holding what was lost, knowing that this loss was the most real and honest thing she had left.

Then sleep fell upon her. Thick and warm, like a woolen blanket.

And when she woke up, her palm was empty. The tail had vanished—carried off by the wind, by ants, or by the earth itself. But on her skin remained two thin, semicircular imprints of scales, pressed so deeply into the flesh it was as if they were a seal. Or a brand.

She stared at these marks for a long time, until the sun dipped below the peak of the cliff and a long, cool shadow fell across her lap. Then she stood up, brushed the dust from her hem, and started walking.

Where to? She did not yet know.

Chapter 1. Awakening →