FIRST PART: THE MORNING TWILIGHT CHAPTER I: THE CITY OF FOG

   The star Regulus, alpha leonis, of an intense blue-white glare, bright in the skies of winter and spring in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, the brightest of the five gems of Leo, and one of the four royal stars from Mesopotamia (together with Antares, Aldebaran and Fomalhaut), had just emerged, outpost of its constellation, in the east of the mountain range northeast on a cold night in mid-February of the year 33 of beggars; and he beheld the city as if it were for the first time since the night was a crystal, the moon was new, and capricious regular fog, that rhythmically often used to cover it, threatened not to appear; and everything tended to give the royal star, in that cold hour, the best terrestrial observatories.

 But hand in hand with Regulus there came Algieba, gamma Leonis,  and Elased,  beautiful and fragrant, tender and crystal clear; and the three formed the well-known asterism of the sickle (a question mark inverted in the sky, like a P that doesn't end to close); After a few minutes one could distinguish Zosma and the white Denebola (or Dafira), Beta leonis, and the lion was perfectly drawn, on a lake of the sky where there took pleasure Coma Berenices, Leo Minor, Cancer, and the Hydra, waiting for Virgo. It is a constellation easy to recognize on clear nights, but arbitrary lines that ancient civilizations used for gathering their stars just as well could have recalled, and so it was for the eyes of the beggars, a rodent that veered towards the southeast to feed on the virgin prairie where grows the white Spica, or a huge rocker or wooden horse.

   If time and space are the coordinates, meridians and parallels that delimit the latitude and longitude of the vital trajectories of every woman, every man; and if you need to take care of precision in any story about heroes or villains, patricians or plebeians; more so in a long story like this one, which, as every one of the twelve houses of the sun, is, at the time of appearing at night, only in the east, should be expected to correct magnetic compass, points toward magnetic north of events and the story finally slips toward its west gently, until it is swallowed by the west horizon insatiable gluttony. But saying that the beggars of the city lived the most important facts of this narration in a given year of the 20th century, -tumultuous, miserable, sterile and violent-, in a particular place in the world, makes no sense when they are known because they all were substantially stateless and timeless and its exploits could have happened at any time or geography and  It is well known that beggars are born where they want; and do not remain in any time or any space, as they are expelled of all.  That’s why the narrator, first storyteller of this story, is going to take leave to obscure, without modifying the true facts, the space and the time, changing place names and inventing a chronology. Perhaps also because, paradoxically, and despite their negligible relevance, beggars seem covered with a patina of mythological grandeur, small but resembling legendary characters that deserved statue, beings who were huge in their day and now are blurred in the distance, and who knows if remembered, and who, however, keep still a last flash of their majestic pride. Thus, Regulus looks at the city in the year 33 because it is the time elapsed since year zero, when the singular fact happened in this story that came to the world three beggars, born in an earthen cradle, in a wooden cradle and a golden cradle. 

   And time for beggars, however, was a cornerstone that was always ruled by the chronological order, laurel wreath on their hair that had been gained with the effort of sweat and fatigue, the charity gathered in the endless days on the street, and everlasting cold, sleepless nights by hunger. That’s why they would put special care in the exact mention of the order of events and referred to themselves as the second or seventh beggar, for example, with the same meticulousness with which they tell any episode; and it was common to hear them temporary evocations as "I've been three years and four months in the street", "sixty days you have been absent" or "wait for me when the moon changes".

   Located in this way year zero as meridian of Greenwich or temporary axis of this story, we need the equator of the spatial references. But as well as the movement of precession of the Earth has been changing with the centuries the star which points north or the constellation where the sun enters the spring equinox, the beggars have been moving their successive settlements, and for some the city where they were born or that saw them going to the streets is not the one where they moved; and for almost all of them the story would have been the same in any barracks or camp; and for this reason, since geography certainly influences circumstances but does not create them, also it makes no sense being more exact in location. However, although it was true that each was born where they wanted, admittedly, at least at the end, they all ended up sharing the same country; but nor does it seem relevant to position it accurately and it will be enough to say that it might be a vast northern territory which was perhaps founded with drops of Celtic blood, perhaps mixed with the Saxons, Picts, Angles or Breton and some patches of blood of the Roman soldiers - no state has been able to build its identity without smearing of bloods,  and has not created a culture until they mix them-; of whose people, of having known, venerable Beda could have written. Perhaps a European, in sum, Saxon and powerful country, or maybe not... It may not have any importance.

   The city, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful, sometimes hopeless; as matriarch of the splendid nature as mother who devours her favorite children; so often dressed by a milky snowy mantle that seems naked without it, had and it has a name, but beggars rarely referred to it with a name different to City. Anyway, and for reasons of clarity, here it will be called Hazington, the city of haze, as it has been said that this was its natural robe, white veil that covered it from the mountains of the north to the southern highlands, as if everybody would like to see it veiled, hiding its charms or its impudence, rarely looked and almost always half seen. Many were the sources from where this haze emanated, and it came from the beds of two rivers: the rich river and the poor river, or from their sleepy valleys or abundant mountains, hills or clearings; but it was also the pollution from a medium sized industrial town, whose dirty fumes produced a steamy broth, or smog, that mingled with that natural whiteness and which prevented three or four days out of seven, glimpse the outlines of this nebulous city. 

   In its stellar tour, from the east where it had just arisen, to the west which already approached Castor and Pollux (in Gemini) and where it still would take hours to set, Regulus was touring the city with calm eyes, recalling the awe with which it had discovered it years ago, with which it continued to glimpse it from time to time: a city always strange and prodigious, restless beings hasty anteater, whose borders were lavish in beautiful natural features, with two beautiful rivers and two mountainous mountain chains, northwestern and northeastern, which it has never been known if they are part of the same mountain range or are two different chains forming by chance - if random there is-, the strong shoulders which, as a shield guard, defend it from the north. There were, to the northeast, the ashen hills and the flamboyant, rather than high, peaks of Crownridge: abundant ridges often crowned with snow, not very high and straight or flattened on the top, splendid to wander calmly on their banks or for the observation of the stars. It is a modest ridge that serves as a cradle of the river Kilmourne, the poor river, well known among the inhabitants of Hazington because much of its course runs along the east of the city, the most depressed area (apparently not every paradise comes from the east); the left bank by little-inhabited areas: just the poor neighborhood of Arcade - ranging from Knights Bridge to Arcade Bridge - industrial extension of the city, only neighborhood on the opposite bank; its right bank licking poor areas and outlying suburbs where beggars swarm and multiply every day,  real human swarms that strip the miseries of this, on the other hand, thriving metropolis. In that time, and in the weak light of the new moon, the Kilmourne resembled a long ribbon of silver, fresh, peaceful and polished, which widens shortly after leaving the mountainous slopes and reaches a considerable width about four hundred meters before the first of its bridges. Regulus paused a moment, concerned, by the grim silhouette of Rage Bridge , superb and solid in its monster, modernist architecture of steel skeleton of twisted irons, a spectrum at night, whose huge height had seduced the suicide on numerous occasions, encouraged rather than driven away by the insignificance of its parapet. From the bridge or from the viewpoint placed at its west end, desperate men or women jump to space and are swallowed up by the freezing of the Kilmourne waters, before the river decides to commit suicide at the same time, tumbling in Wrathfall waterfalls. These were a cataract that, despite not having a spectacular fall, just fourteen metres, attracts visitors by the ancestral beauty of all that formed the river, the trees of the riverbanks, foam and the brightness of the fallen water and rhythmic sounds of its irascible roar. It was southwest of the falls that the city was born, but Regulus preferred to continue watching the river, following its waters to the south, as if sailing, blue passenger, in a silent boat on them. It was thus learning the outskirts, the trees, and nature. It didn’t took him much to be looking the classic beauty of Wrathfall Bridge, with its fifteen spans and its stony anatomy; and then, having left behind a double escort of elm groves, Knights Bridge and the other eastern bridges: Arcade Bridge, Millbridge, the ruined Menhir Bridge and Meander Bridge where the river met with the catholic St. Alban cemetery and curved westward to follow this direction until the end of the city and finish in the natural death, or natural continuation of the distant sea. This is the east of Hazington, west bank of the river, a country where beggars camp, nomadic loners, survivors, pariahs, philosophers, tricksters... Regulus could not see them, but he could almost imagine them nestled in the fetal position inside of the infected, and sometimes spacious, eyes of the bridges, so many bridges!... or among the trees of the parks, the banks, the boulevards and he guessed that those points of lackluster canvas were tents where  rotted, rather than lived, many of them. Others were grouped in tribes or clans in sordid and gloomy suburbs, of names, yet evocative, medieval, whose origins are lost in time, perhaps even on days prior to its remote Templar past. They are here from north to south: the Seductress Outskirt, Knights Hill, the Umbra Terrae Boulevard, Blood Cattle Route, the Outcasts Outskirt, and the Outskirt of the Torn Hand...

   Never stationary, the stars do not remain long at the same point; and now the rectangular silhouette of the twins could hardly be distinguished, Cancer approached the west and Leo stood in the visible center of the ecliptic. In a different perspective, Regulus returned to cast his eyes towards the north, starting now in the northwest, where he met the brown mountains of Burnt Hills. It is not clear whether its name is due to the quality of the soil and its coppery tone; or, more likely, the bloody, almost burning color of the superb sunset, because in those places it is increased the usual sight of the refraction of the rays of the sun in the atmosphere, and it is delight to come and contemplate the death of every day. They were a succession of not very high mountains, for the most part little more than hills or elevations, lush vegetation, especially heath land, with numerous sources, three or four of which disputed, without possible agreement, the title of birthplace of the other river of the city: the rich river, the Heatherling. Despite the uncertain paternity, shortly after birth, the bastard already had pretensions of lord of noble lineage, meandering through the luxurious properties that dotted the low hills of the more southern branches of the mountain range, villas belonging to wealthy businessmen and buoyant new rich, forming a large and prosperous area known as Downhills. Further south the river was crossed by the bridges of the northeastern highway, connecting the city with the north of the country: an intricate skein that crossed it, taking advantage of the eastern cliffs of Burnt Hills, from the northeast – where the north road was, formerly going through the Halbrook-Rage bridge (now disused) – to the southwest, with branches to another highway:  south, linking Hazington with the Capital. After going under several bridges without fame or beauty, the river reached the populous neighborhood of Northchapel, inhabited by people of middle class, where they lived mixed, in the harmony of mutual indifference, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and to a lesser extent the faithful of the church official in the country, and as they were most abundant, scattered by all sectors of the city. Many were the confessions, called Protestants after the diet of Speyer, that Christianity had been divided into, and the city was a melting pot and amalgam of all of them, but did not know well in what it believed. So much the ecclesiastical history of the country had changed that the Venerable Bede could not recognize it!

   The first course of the river to the south ended abruptly at the great curve of Newchapel, carrying it, through Castle Road, eastward. Newchapel was a new neighborhood of sumptuous mansions which did not mostly have more than half a century, which inspired architects minds had wrought for the new feudal lords (large industrialists, bankers, flourishing raiders or melancholy heirs), in the noble style of the previous century, with high richly adorned façades, extensive front gardens and profusion of windowsills, lofts and towers that are scattered along the two banks of the river, boasting luxury and elegance instead of boasting of moisture, which rats (and other visitors also not invited) used to make frequent but short visits that their owners did not know how to dispose. A neighborhood with the cold spell of money, where not streets, but the houses - each differentiated from the others in details of form and structure or the colour of the façades, according to the whim of their owners, when the will of the constructors was not inflexible-, had the names. Regulus was struck singularly by a grand mansion of ochre walls on the extreme southwest of the Hammerstone Bridge. Deanforest was called. -Strange house, it seemed, inhabited by their former servants!- He wondered whether it would hide a story of interest in those thick walls that his eyes could not drill. He continued, however, his browsing along Castle Road, a long avenue full of bridges in his hasty desire to see the expected towers of St Paul. Meanwhile, on the left, in a corner, located on the edge of the ugly area of Heathwood with Churchway Park (one of the lungs of the city with at least a hundred different plant species), he saw the famous façade of an ancient palace in ruins, which he knew abandoned in the last quarter of the century, and was surprised to find it restored and filled with warm lighting that invited inside. Now it had been given a new use and it was the more recent of the two shelters for beggars that the city had, opened hardly a year before. The name could be read without difficulty on the threshold of a huge wooden door: Earthkings. Or Earthkins, since the g had disappeared. And that was all, in simple words, without a legend. Generous city -thought Regulus with irony-, where the dispossessed that wouldn't cross the thresholds of their homes are made Kings of the Earth!

   The high towers of St Paul, the main temple of Hazington, known irreverently as the Basilica, were already defeated by the height of many of the adjacent buildings, but retained their luxury and solemnity. The builder had refused, God knows why, the characteristic Latin cross plant, and had preferred the Basilica (rectangular and without a transept, with long aisles that ended in the apse), and this could explain that it was called by that name. There it was, four centuries after its completion-... in the northeast corner of the square of St Paul's, which the Heatherling cut in two halves -like two orange sections, like two half moons-, a shrine in the city of the country Church, sober but not without some elegance, with a wide Renaissance doorway which had a huge staircase, full of beggars in the hours of worship, which descended and went down as if to purify of sins by washing its feet in the water; faced with the 18th towers of City Hall, its most fervent parishioner and accomplice, which occupied, always vigilant, the waning moon at the other end of the square and superb High Bridge. Castle Road was a street with two rivers, since it continued beyond the Basilica, to Knights Bridge, and the Kilmourne again. Before the bridge, to the South, the steep Knights Hill was a desolate, barren and dusty prominence; on the left, to the North, the remains of the homage tower, demolished and undefended, of the ancient castle of the Templar, and moldy stones that were left of what once was its great eastern walls, broken in so many points that if the castle had had so many doors, it would seem to have been reared up with the unhealthy intention to entertain the enemies rather than to combat them. The street that ran between the walls and the river - very poor, pestilent and dangerous - was therefore called Wall Street and it was only one of the many inconsistencies in this contradictory city. It went down between old elms and ravines to the very shores of the Kilmourne, by the so-called Seductress Outskirt; and if the unsuspecting visitor, attracted by the spell of its name, came to reach the threshold, it would be more worth his while having got lost before than losing afterwards body and soul. By some strange magic spell through the generations, those warriors and monks and men of honor who had beaten in defense of the Holy Land, had been transmuted into the devout bourgeoisie that sent them to the flames while they prayed to the Almighty; and centuries later, the great-grandchildren of those bourgeois were thugs and crooks that peeled the skins of unbelievers without relying on divinity, certain not to possess a soul to risk or they would have negotiated it with the infernal powers. Knights Bridge was the rescued name, after centuries of darkness in which the Templar were banned, of the first bridge that  the Kilmourne had, but for centuries it was called  the bridge of the castle; and thus, Castlebridge, was the name that was given to the wider district comprised between Churchway Park, Castle Road, and Wall Street. Access via Churchway Boulevard, in the west, was more secure if it was really necessary. Certainly the security had been improved, and the district embellished, after the construction of the Great Hospital Philip Rage, oblong block of needlessly grey colour and house reputed for its efficiency in  avoiding patients the harmful effects of health, an irreproachable  way of serenity and spiritual benefits that had gained its fame and its capital in the same proportion that the enclosure was gaining weight – a vampire inflated with the blood of its victims- with brand new pavilions where they put into practice new therapies, cures, and means of torture, piously thanked with money and prayers.

   The latest grim visions had failed to frighten the unwavering spirit of Regulus, also known as rex or cor leonis, which was supposed to have courage, as the high nicknames said. The sand was slipping down the neck of the clock and falling inexorably, and the time to see the city was running out. He preferred to look at it complete that night and not to leave a corner to glance for tomorrow, since it was in his mind that he would devote the next night to the contemplation of a southern population that is not left easily victimized by fog or cold; some more vibrant city, more naked and hot, more tempting; a city, for example, washed by the sea. Yes, the King of Leo wished to return to the waters. It was time to return to the course of Heatherling the mighty, up to its strange death. After St Paul's square, the river recovered its fondness and turned towards the south, or southeast south, by another long avenue full of bridges called Temple Road. On its shores, in the wide angle in the shape of a V between the Heatherling and the Kilmourne, was the primitive nucleus of the city, whose official name remained St Mary's despite the fact that everyone knew it as Templar Village, the Templar neighborhood, or even the Village, no more. It was a maze of streets of irregular drawing, where it was easy to disorient, with exuberant alleys and streets, with shady angles or cobbled or earthen grounds, aromatic corners and graceful and dense squares that came suddenly because they never seemed to be where you expected them. There lived the new artisans and old goldsmiths; the shepherds and millers, away from their ancestral work after the loss of pasture and mills, now recycled in painters and carpenters, shopkeepers, butchers or bricklayers, servers or go-getters. And they maintained the tradition of the master glassmakers, who even conveyed from parents to children a trade, former emblem and pride of the city, which had filled with color and glory churches and cathedrals around the country - while Hazington, with all its churches, small temples, parishes and chapels, did not have a single stained glass window worthy of mention, and that managed to survive, fluctuating with the vagaries of fashion, on the whims of the powerful or strangers with money, whose mansions were copious in stained glass places that glinted in a lot of windows and rosettes, where light quivered as gold, as spilled blood and wine, like an ocean of glass or a meadow of waves without foam. The Catholic Church of St Mary, in a corner of Jerusalem Street (the only one that could be called street, right in the centre of Templar Village, which west of Temple Road changed name and was called Chamberlain Street with property), solid as the certainty of the word that guarded, was older than St Paul and had survived the difficult times of the religious persecutions; and would not dare to deny, for not contradicting historians - or mythology hunters , which are legion-, constant legends which spoke of intricate passageways and damp underground full of ossuaries, caverns where many poor devils were hiding who lost the light of reason at the time of losing that of the sun, buried before the end of their days. The same fiction wanted to also see - but the historicity is doubtful-, chests or trunks, hidden in a tunnel or niche of St Mary, where the Lords of the Temple would have saved treasures, or encrypted codices which kept terrible secrets that could help unleash the raging forces of nature. Imagination and dreams are worthy of respect because they are methods of decipherment with which the human mind goes beyond appearances as a spirit through walls and perceives, with difficulty, reality. But visions and nonsense about treasures and secrets of the Knights invite distrust; and it is often their followers who carry them to dishonor, since at the end lie has the face of Templar.  But let each with their creed. Perhaps it is part of my misfortune - if misfortune it is- that I will never have faith, and I cannot go further than the idea that I was educated with that gods, even the heathen gods, just end where their name begins. But truth is, at least, than the poor Knights of Christ, crosses of blood on white robe, settled in the city, and enlarged it, in the year of our Lord of 1194, shortly after the third crusade, during the reign of their benefactor Richard I, known as Richard the Lion Heart, the cor leonis and rex of a moment in the time of Earth.

Calvary Road, in Templar village, was a winding and twisting street that sometimes seemed to be approaching undecided Temple Road, then wriggle back away from it, and eventually rose with stubbornness until it created a small mound, where the two streets met finally in the north, almost in the Basilica. Regulus knew what he was going to discover in the summit and could not help but shudder: there stood the vexed and immaculate whiteness of the RASH, the most ancient of the two hostels for beggars, which looked certainly what the name said - and please forgive me, because I will never be able to love it-: a skin stain that had appeared in the hill, a sudden rash. After the fall of the Templar, the city was at the mercy of clans or powerful families; but mixed with them, the bourgeois, the soldiers and the plain people began also their own lineage and descendants; and had last names that rarely were seen in the rest of the country and some that could be only found in Hazington, as it was the case of the Wrathfall, the Philisey or the Prancitt. The power had gone from the Halbrook - of whom there were no more traces than their names carved in marble funerary – to the Chamberlain, old peasant men who descended from soldiers ennobled by any Queen or King who thus thanked then for the defense of the Crown and of the Christian faith. But in the last hundred and fifty years, a family, the Rage family, had made the power and influence that gives control of the money and therefore creditors of adulation, which begets honor and prestige. Particularly famous was one of the last scions of this prolific family: the illustrious and famous Philip Rage, man of unquestionable good judgment and wisdom, acclaimed benefactor and patron of the city, who enriched in surprising speculation - it would be almost heresy to qualify them as fraudulent - as well as other virtuous business and successful transaction. He married, as it was mandatory, a ruddy invalidity whose enormous dowry heralded a union based on the best assumptions, who gave him nine male children and seven daughters, and that only on one occasion opposed the wishes of her husband, when in spite of 16 pregnancies, however managed to survive him. The great patriarch was a man suffering ailments of great men, as severe attacks of migraine and high blood pressure, who guided by his wise and prudent business sense and the uncontested endorsement of the family name, started a brilliant career and became gold and active touching all industry and all trade that flourished in Hazington, particularly steel. It was then when, already an influential nobleman, he managed to convince authorities to tear down the historic Halbrook Bridge and start the construction of a bridge that would bear his name; and if there were shy protests from a group of ungrateful citizens, interested in saving the heritage, they were quickly silenced. Philip Rage dared later with the world of banking, since financial affairs were no secret for him, and he wore on the forehead the sign of destiny, and his name should appear in golden letters in the annals of finance. He could not delay to be chosen for glory, and he was soon called to direct the second bank in the country, although to do this he had to reside sometime in the Capital. But the darkness that his absence left did not last long, because he decided to retire still young - tongues, harpies completely unworthy of credit, say that not to find himself in prison-, and returned to the town where he was born, with the ambition to enlighten the city that badly needed him and the vehement desire to live in peace among the people of his beloved town all the days of his life. His beloved people loved him so much that they decided to elect him mayor, an honor that he welcomed as a man that does not wrinkle with challenges or difficulties, in spite of worries and strong headaches that he often had to feel, which were going to hinder his repeated desire of aging in a quiet and peaceful place, until his death... which was premature, when he was 63. He had time, however, to live long enough to work for the city and fill it with small and promising Rage, which, if the will of God so desired it, would continue His power and His glory. And he lived far enough for his works to become known, because it was in his tenure when the name Rage began to multiply everywhere, and the planting started with Rage Bridge germinated with the Great Hospital Philip Rage, Rage Avenue (at Riverside, where he was born) and the RASH, a joke that disrespectful inhabitants of Hazington created from the acronym that could be made with its official name letters: RAge Shelter for the Homeless. The complete legend said: Rage Shelter for the Homeless. Beati pauperes spiritu, quoniam ipsorum est regnum coelorum. Mondays we don't open, legend that wouldn't entirely clear if Monday closed the shelter or the kingdom of the heavens. -"have mercy, Lord, and if it is your will, take this cup away from me! Don’t let me die of cold! Get me the warmth of a blanket that I can put on these hard bones that are breaking and are no longer what they were; and I do not know whether I will have strength to find an open doorway where I can spend the rest of the night. I can eat tomorrow, if that is your wish; but if you open the door, I could even sleep on the floor, here within these four walls, sheltered from these winds that pass through the skin as knives and are tormenting my poor bones. "Pity me, Lord, and do not let me die on Monday!"–. The RASH! Warm soup of fish or vegetable stew, meat in few occasions, just a dish every day; tables without tablecloth, damaged, fireplaces where cold sneaks; dark rooms where beggars sleep two in a room, dirty linen; The RASH!... cockroaches of Calvary Road tend to find it comfortable and decent for their usual mundane meetings. The Rage Shelter for the Homeless, shelter and soup kitchen for those excluded from society, hostel cockroaches... and beggars.

   The powerful knight Heatherling had walked its freshness down the oasis of beauty and fortune, sacred gardens of faith and the transcendent paths where history arises. But all glory is fleeting. The rich river, Lord who in its youth had had such high school, which at maturity had tasted the honey and the laurels that due to upbringing he deserved, eventually died as a beggar, its unbelieving waters meeeting the river of indigence. In the end, the Heatherling was only the first of the tributaries of the Kilmourne, and had to start a second life, old and miserable, accompanying it to the sea with the dishonor of having finally lost its name. Perhaps that is the reason why its terrified tears were a frothy anger that, protestant, was poured into the river in the mouth, in Rivers' Meet. There, between choppy water and bridges that barely managed to skip them; close to St Alban's Road, old road fleeing the Outskirt of the Torn Hand and the cemetery, but still main and fully-lined avenue which reached the motorway; there were the roundabout and  Rivers' Meet Park,  a broad garden extended and careless, helpless as a savage pulled out of their habitat and transplanted to the city, to develop without God, without order and without law, and however strong and alive; and there began the extensive district of Riverside. Hazington grew only on the west and on the south, and Riverside was now almost a second city, with grey workers who were earning a life among industrial smoke or working, as they had always done, in the multiple tasks of the harbour, where the Kilmourne, doubled its waters with the blood of the Heatherling, began to be navigable.

   Night languished. It was the time of Scorpio. Libra and Virgo advanced to the west and Regulus was in a hurry. He went almost on tiptoe through the new city, west of the Templar, whose large rectilinear and geometric avenues, the true urban center, had little to offer. He went up the waters of the Heatherling, which this way receded from dead to dying and was a respectable elder, along the right bank of the river once again. In Temple Road you could see from east to west (as the tour of the celestial objects) plenty of main avenues whose names he knew by heart, but not too many bridges. Of those that did have one, the most important were Castle Road, Chamberlain Street, Dingate Street and Riverside Avenue; and cutting north to south (as the snowy path of the Milky Way), and parallel to Temple Road: Longborough Street, Havengrove Avenue and Avalon Road. The latter had been for centuries the west gate, the end of the city.  Far from being the mythical Avalon or another island of the fairies or a new garden of the Hesperides, it was actually the heart of Hazington (the financial heart, of course, perhaps the only true heart). In the early hours of the morning a batch of energetic workers were responsible for the cleanliness of this vital organ, and a host of carriers provided vitamins and nutrients so before seven in the morning its first heartbeat can be heard. In that part of the city, since powerful avenue streetlights or fog made it impossible to see how Polaris changed into the most necessary star, dawn was recognized by the arrival of first hasty executives, who were more reliable than the rooster. They moved methodically through the arteries until they found the assigned member, section, limb or organ where to perform the work for which they are required in the social body perfectly organized gear. The two sidewalks of Avalon Road were crowded with banks and companies of all types, large or medium-sized, which bustled with the exchange of goods in innumerable purchases and sales of properties, shares and bonds; in business, opportunities and bids, a sap of money changing hands at frenetic pace that is renewed each day, infinite as this broad free-market transactions. Regulus is set in a building that had been neglected in other occasions, north of the street. He is not attracted by height, not even by the splendid stained-glass façade that was receiving visitors: a representation of Jason yoking two bulls on his journey with the Argonauts; what struck him was his name: Thuban Star. -Why precisely Thuban? He could not help but wonder. Uneasy, he directed his gaze to the circumpolar region. He was reassured to contemplate the serpentine silhouette of the Dragon, with each star holding their secular position. It was too much! He didn't want to lose even one more minute in that place. He wanted to get away from Avalon Road.

   The horizon was swallowing him. But he still had time to contemplate past the railroad lines, for which reason they had been forced to build new passages, making Hazington the city of the thousand bridges. They separated Avalon Road of the two neighborhoods in the west. He noted the peaceful and bourgeois prosperity of Evendale; he didn’t stop to see the omnipresent motorway of the northeast and the airport; and arrived to the last jewel acquired by the city, a range of fertile land populated here and there, in a scattered way, by farmhouses and manor houses that were a separate nucleus. The ancient village of Fairfields, whose noble figure was barely defended of the ugliness of new constructions and asphalt, had been engulfed by cannibal Hazington greed and was not more than its umpteenth neighborhood, its umpteenth change of west.

   Stars are the beggars of space. Surrounded by cold universe but inexhaustible heat sources, they haven’t been granted any refuge of walls and ceiling where to find shelter from prying. They are nomads condemned to wandering without finding a land belonging to them; every day in a different place, a never-ending tour on the four horizons and paths where passage is forbidden: If they could at least know the thirty-two paths of the rose! That's why envious stars look with anger at the circumpolar, which have a piece of sky of which they can claim the property; and, however, they envy in those their right to move wherever they please. Sometimes they are one, two, three seasons, but never settle. A cry of crazy rebellion, as an inexplicable craving for freedom, takes them to new latitudes. But you cannot be always free, beggars; at the end you must return, humbling yourselves to places that have seen you and know you. And they do not sleep. When it seems that they will sleep, they are not going towards death: they inexorably return without having earned the mercy of peace and rest that comes with the name, when the sickle is ready to harvest. They only have the desired chance of dying exploding in supernovas, giving birth to new celestial beggars, in fertile nebulae.

   Regulus goes westward, to tell other stars what he has seen of the city which for some years he has appreciated differently, since one night that he was wandering miserably, meditating on the suicide of supernovae and longing for the same fate, he realized that some of the last of its inhabitants, small beings without inheritance or land, full of need, invoked him only for his beauty, without begging him, with the only desire that his distant, but hot, light remained with them. Regulus is going, but the city still has Zosma and Denebola; Indeed for a short time, a last heartbeat. Looking back to see them, he sees the birth of Sagittarius, which is hardly distinguishable, because the fog is beginning to cover its region when it should be navigating the restless waters of the Kilmourne. We can see that dawn will be dense and steamy and Hazington will wake up to a new day in which once again it will be necessary to grope. Regulus sets, a pilgrim to other longitudes of the Earth. You can no longer see the city, but there's still some of its blood, because he has decided to continue the course of its poor River, which carries the weight of the rich, to the ocean waters. At the time of disappearing on the horizon, the sudden movement of an animal in the river, a visitor not invited, brings him the memory of the only enigma that he has not been able to decipher; and he resolves that when he decides to settle again on Hazington, he will focus his eyes carefully doubled above moisture and the ivy, above the ochre walls, of Deanforest.