Title | Bonds – GOLD EDITION

Author | Roberta Mezzabarba

Copyright © 2026 by Roberta Mezzabarba

First Edition: 2019

Revised Edition: 2021

Illustrated Gold Edition: April 2026

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the author. Illustrations: Vincent Vincenzoni

Translator: Tem Jin (TJ)

Cover Design: Claudio 42gno

Cover Image: © Sasund Bughdaryan - Dreamstime.com

Roberta Mezzabarba

BONDS

Gold-Edition

Novel

Illustrated by Vincent Vincenzoni

Translated from Italian by Tem Jin (TJ)

To the motions that give life its sense

Preface

New Year’s Eve, 1979

T he day was dying, its cold winter light dissolving into a clear, tranquil twilight. Ghostly plumes of mist escaped the pale lips of the woman in labor with every ragged breath. She lay across the crumpled sheets—disheveled, spent, her strength all but surrendered to the ordeal.

Another woman, her own womb heavy and swollen, waited in the shadows like a restless apparition. Around her, the cries of pain ricocheted against the raw stone of the high-ceilinged room, fluttering frantically like panicked moths trapped in the dark.

Beyond the great window—the room’s solitary source of light, though choked by a heavy iron grate—the horizon lay motionless at the edge of the blackened fields, cleaving the cerulean sky like a cold blade.

For a heartbeat, the two women moved as one. Four eyes turned toward the glass, widening in awe at a celestial vision momentarily distorted by the ripples of the ancient windowpanes.

In the glow of the sunset, two luminous orbs hung in opposition: one at its journey’s end, the other just beginning its ascent. At that sight, a tangle of ancient thoughts surfaced in the young woman’s mind—questions as old as the stars, the ache of nostalgia, and a dark, feverish longing that this cosmic meeting might somehow, impossibly, happen again.

Deep in the shadows, a man with thin lips allowed a smile to graze his face. His first flower was finally ready to bloom. In an instant, the sun vanished. In that moment of darkness, they tasted the first drops of a poison that could drive the world to madness—a path from which there would be no return.

Then, without warning—like a levee collapsing under the sheer weight of a river that once only caressed it—the contractions surged through the woman’s body. The pain was a thief, stealing her very breath as the long seconds bled into beads of sweat.

Finally, Silene’s throat tore open in a roar—a cry of agony and infinite liberation. As the sound faded, the air was filled with the thin, sharp wail of a child who had survived the great trial of birth. He squirmed, still gripped by the primal panic of being cast out from the warm sanctuary that had sheltered him.

Silene let her muscles go slack, sinking into the exhaustion. She looked at her son. The cord was still uncut, tying them together; he looked so terribly small. She had known he was a boy from the first moment she felt him stir within her. With a voice like a whisper of silk, she gave him the name she had carried in her heart for months. “Guglielmo. That shall be your name, my little one.”

She had chosen it with meticulous care, wanting a name that could serve as armor. She had settled on this archaic choice for the truth it held: the man who, through his tenacious will to live, stands as a shield against the world. She was well-acquainted with the weight of words like solitude, marginalization, and pain; it was for this very reason—because he was born of violence—that she had craved a different life for her son.

Lost in these thoughts, Silene barely noticed the faint ache in her chest. She pushed the sensation aside, imagining only that this sudden overflow of happiness was pressing against her sternum, too vast for her body to contain. She and her little one had survived the ordeal of birth, defying the nightmares that had hunted her. Lately, her dreams had been haunted by death—the dawn of an age choked by shadows and grief.

But now, filled with a joy so fleeting it was cruel, her heart surrendered its rhythm only moments later. Silene slipped away with the image of her son, Guglielmo, etched behind her eyes. It happened almost without her realizing, devoid of the terror one might expect for the end awaiting both her and her helpless babe. The story of that strange night—which might seem fabled or far-fetched to an ordinary ear—would echo through the years like the grim prophecies old seers whisper on stormy nights: Once, there was a young woman abducted on the very day she was to bring a child into the world…

The man who had reveled in the shadows, drinking in Silene’s moans of agony, was already fleeing, certain that his design would unfold perfectly. He had calculated so well that the death of one of the women was a mere trifle; it required only a minor adjustment to his plans. The moon hung in a sky as black as pitch. Lina, the woman who had remained in the shadows, stood shattered, paralyzed by a cold terror. When she finally forced herself to move toward Silene, her suspicions solidified into a horrific truth: her friend was dead, and the moon was already high. It was then, for a heartbeat, that her mind’s eye repainted the sun and moon grazing the horizon together, their destinies entwined for a few brief breaths.

Like Silene, she did not know that what they had witnessed was no mere coincidence. Neither understood the true weight of the omen they had seen.

The sun had set; Silene had been dragged into the abyss with a shattered heart. All that remained was little Guglielmo and a Great Red Moon in the sky. That thought jolted her back to reality. She had a task to finish. The man likely hadn’t foreseen Silene’s death, and Lina had no inkling of what to do with the child. She decided in a flash: she would never tell a soul what had happened. If the boy were raised in a normal family—one untouched by the horrors of this night—he would be safe. Besides, unless that man was a madman, he would never seek her out again; the risk of exposing himself was simply too great.

It was over.

A sudden chill seized her, and a sharp, serpentine pain coiled through her womb. Without another thought, she wrapped the infant—now drifted into a shallow sleep—in the dressing gown Silene had been wearing when she was taken. She fled those dismal walls, leaving the stagnant air for the cool night. Behind her, she left Silene’s body, still warm with the ghost of life, resolved to leave the newborn on the doorstep of the first beautiful house she found. Destiny had been fulfilled.

PART ONE

And then I am alone.

What remains

is the sweet company

of luminous lies.

(Sandro Penna)

One

December 1999

T he air in the gym was thick, a heavy musk of sweat and raw exertion. Guglielmo was hoisting a gleaming barbell, his fingers locked in an iron grip. Veins traced maps across his tensed biceps, and his skin was bronzed by a light sheen of sweat. He lived for these afternoons—hours spent in this cavernous space, purging the darker parts of his soul through physical strain.

With a quiet, undisturbed intensity, he watched the women around him, their bodies encased in vibrant, form-fitting spandex. Covetous, he scanned their silhouettes against the light, searching their forms and souls for something he couldn’t quite name. He followed the rhythm of their movements, the flickers of their expressions, the way their hair caught the air—clinging to the countless fragments of lives he would never truly know.

Claudio, a university classmate and gym regular, took his place on the bench beside him.

“What are you up to? Still drooling over the fairer sex, I see?” As he spoke, Claudio’s gaze locked onto a lithe girl who filled out a teal leotard to perfection. “Can’t say I blame you,” Claudio muttered, narrowing his eyes as he sized her up. “If God exists, He shows Himself in moments like these.”

Guglielmo continued to press the barbell over his head, his eyes fixed on a group of five girls talking nearby, their hands moving in small, graceful gestures. “When I was a boy, I used to listen to my mother and her friends talk about men,” Guglielmo said, his voice so low that Claudio had to lean in to catch it. “They said we were predictable… I promised myself I never would be.” He paused. “We look at them as if we could understand them. We can’t.”

“You, Guglielmo, are so sentimental and philosophical that you’d have me believe you’re watching these stunners just to enrich your ‘knowledge of the feminine universe’?” Claudio struggled to keep a straight face. For him, a non-sexual interest in a woman was a foreign, if not impossible, concept. A booming laugh burst from him, once again underscoring his stance on the matter. “You’re always the same. You’d give your soul to be a gynecologist just so… well, you know what I mean. But I love everything about women—their minds, their thoughts. Most of all, I love not letting them down. I like giving them exactly what they desire from me.” Guglielmo was a young man of great promise: tall, with dark hair that held a faint, natural wave and a complexion like burnished gold. Long, tapered legs supported a physique that was lean but far from frail.

His fingers were long and elegant, ending in nails that were smooth and wide, like blanched almonds. Once, at a street market, a fortune-teller had read his palm. She had been transfixed by his hands, whispering that such wide nails only developed in those who had fought a war between life and death.

At the time, Guglielmo had dismissed it as the idle chatter of a woman who traded in tall tales to make a living. In his own memory, there was no trace of any such struggle for survival.

Yet, that woman had bid him farewell with an assertion that remained etched vividly in his mind: “No one remembers such agonies, yet they course silently through the blood. Were it not so, you would all be destined for madness or damnation.”

Two

A ngelica was a woman of profound gentleness. This nature was woven into her very presence: she was slight, almost frail, with delicate hands and nails as rosy and perfect as tiny rose petals. She observed the world through cerulean eyes and with a soul of absolute clarity. Often, her age was an undecipherable secret. One moment, she resembled a young, defenseless doe peering out at life for the first time with uncertain steps; the next, she appeared as the towering column of an ancient temple—imperious, enduring, a silent witness to a thousand years of history. She and her husband, Filiberto, lived in a magnificent house—a place of intricate stuccowork, somber oils, and heavy, draped velvet. It was a home filled with heirlooms that could, on their own, recount the lineage of every ancestor they possessed. Theirs was a tranquil existence, drifting almost entirely outside the rhythm of the modern world.

Angelica loved her husband, and he—though little inclined to let his feelings show—strove to indulge her every whim. Filiberto had proven his devotion on many occasions, but the one she cherished most reached back twenty years. It was a black night, the moon unnaturally large, when a pregnant woman with a terrified gaze knocked at their door. She clutched a ragged bundle from which came the thin, sharp cries of a newborn.

“Take care of this little one,” the woman pleaded. “His mother… she cannot… she has abandoned him. She is dead, and I have no strength left to knock on another door. Soon, I too must bring my own child into the world. I beg you, take in this babe—he is guiltless, save for the crime of being born. Someone, somewhere, will be grateful to you. His name is Guglielmo. I ask only one thing: never tell a soul of this night. Never.”

Angelica had never been able to carry a pregnancy to term; it was as if her body refused to bear the weight of a new life. To her, that strange visit was a divine omen, written in letters of fire across the heavens. With the arrival of little Guglielmo, Angelica knew the time had come to end the long, agonizing cycle of failed attempts to conceive. She felt frayed—exhausted in both body and mind. Surely, she thought, Guglielmo had been a gift—a sweet comfort, a balm to soothe the ache caused by the knowledge that she could never bear children of her own. Without a word, and knowing nothing of the events that had led to this moment, Angelica took the infant from the stranger’s arms.

The woman turned and moved away, her gait heavy with the life she still carried within. She retreated into the night that seemed to swallow her whole, her gloved hands moving furtively, soundlessly.

Before she could vanish entirely into the gloom, a violent contraction seized her, forcing her to collapse upon the ground. She looked back one last time toward the open door. A soft glow spilled from the house, silhouetting Angelica in her long, pale robe, the child still swaddled in the rags of his birth and clutched tightly in her arms. Beside her stood the man—his dark, thick mustache shadowing a gaze full of suspicion.

Angelica begged her husband to help the woman, to take her to the hospital. He lifted her from the street and carried her to the car, only to drop her at the hospital doors and disappear. Filiberto had sensed something foul in the stranger’s arrival, but his wife had met his eyes with a look of such desperate pleading that he could not deny her the joy of raising a child.

From that night on, they never heard of the woman again. Honoring her final wish, they told everyone the child had been adopted through the intervention of highly influential friends. Filiberto—a high-ranking military officer, stoic and bound by duty—carried this secret into his home. With his sharp mustache and thin lips separated by a pointed nose, he lived alongside his son in a world built on silence. He would have preferred a recruit to train—perhaps because he knew no other way to communicate with his own kind. Guglielmo, however, with his unconventional and at times rebellious spirit, could not imagine confining his will to live within a uniform—a garment that would have shackled him to an endless, hollow litany of “Yes, sirs.”

There was no conflict.

There were never any direct confrontations, yet it was undeniable that Guglielmo felt his father’s presence only as a fading shadow. With his inherent aversion to military life and the rigid formalities that the world demanded, he was destined to fail the expectations of his father—a man accustomed to never, ever being contradicted.

***

The years flowed through the house like river water— never fully stopping, yet never truly hurrying. Guglielmo grew up suspended between two forces that did not realize how vital they were to him: Angelica, with her silence composed of imperceptible gestures, and Filiberto, with his presence made of decisive steps, brief words, and orders that seemed to shape the very air. Angelica watched him move through the rooms with clear eyes, a gaze always holding a nuance difficult to decipher— something between adoration and melancholy, a tenderness she dared not fully release for fear of breaking herself, or him. When she called his name, her voice seemed to come from a great distance, as if every syllable had to cross an ocean of thought before reaching the world. There were moments she would pause at the threshold of his room without entering, breathing softly, as if merely seeing him sleep was enough to signal that her vigil was over until morning.

Filiberto, conversely, knew no thresholds. He entered and left every room like a gust of wind, like a sunbeam that asks no permission to pierce the curtains. In him, there was never hesitation. He was not cruel, nor was he sweet; he was simply inevitable. He rarely raised his voice, but when he did, it carried the echo of commands shouted across open plains—of men in ranks answering in unison, of boots striking the earth rhythmically until it vibrated. Guglielmo learned early on that certain feelings manifest only in this way: in discipline, in posture, and in the way a man wears his uniform as if it were armor. Angelica and Filiberto shared nothing in common, and for that very reason, they held in perfect balance a child who belonged to neither of them—or perhaps belonged to both in entirely different ways.

She was night, silence, care, the unspoken word. He was day, high light, command, the defined gesture. Between them, Guglielmo walked as one walks a tightrope: not yet knowing which way he would fall, and unaware that perhaps he was not destined to fall at all. It was in this suspended climate, built of withheld affection and rules never truly explained, that the boy began to perceive a secret harmony in things. The house itself spoke to him: in the creak of the stairs, in the rustle of curtains breathing with the breeze, in the way the light entered the windows at dawn only to surrender to the evening. He learned to recognize the scent of wood as the seasons shifted, the crisp sound of paper as Angelica turned a page in her room, and the low hum of the radio as Filiberto gathered news of the outside world—like a general surveying the map of a still-hostile continent. Yet, beneath this apparent calm, a silent current existed— like those subterranean rivers that flow beneath floorboards, unseen by all. It was a subtle restlessness, a formless question, a tilt of the gaze toward something that did not belong to the visible world.

Angelica felt it—because mothers feel what cannot be seen—and so she remained silent. Filiberto did not feel it—because certain fathers recognize only what can be commanded—and so he spoke little. During those years, Guglielmo began to assemble the pieces of a mosaic that had no defined image yet: a phrase from Angelica as light as a breath, a gesture from Filiberto as hard as stone, a light filtering through the windows at dawn that looked like a fiery gash in the night. And while the world continued to sleep, and time wedged itself between the pages of the days without haste or judgment, something inside him prepared to emerge. It was not a thought. It was not a memory. It was a form in waiting, an ancient calling, a wound that did not yet bleed.

For there are truths that do not announce themselves with words, but through a long, silent gestation. And so, between the slow-climbing moon and the sun that had not yet claimed the rooftops—between Angelica’s vigil and Filiberto’s order—the days began. Without anyone truly noticing, the gears began to turn, setting in motion everything that was destined to explode much later. The rest—that dark and secret rest—would take its shape in time.

Three

T he first time Guglielmo realized the house was a living thing, he was still a child with his milk teeth. It was night. The air was heavy with the cloying scent of weeping candles and the prowling wind—that same wind that slipped through the shutters like a beast seeking a hollow to hide in. In the dark, the villa seemed to have drifted into another century: the figures trapped in the stuccowork began to stir, the staircase drew long, wooden breaths, and the curtains—swelled by invisible currents— became feminine specters uncoiling from centuries of silence.

No one noticed, except for him.

Filiberto dismissed it as a simple draft. Angelica, however, said nothing, and in her stillness lay a haunting form of recognition.

That night, Guglielmo slipped from his bed and haunted the corridor like a small, pale ghost in a dressing gown. Every step was a sacrilege.

The lights had been extinguished for hours, and the floor had grown so cold it sent a shiver through his bones. He reached the portrait gallery with his breath shallow and his fingers poised, trembling.

The door stood ajar. A sliver of silvered moonlight stole into the gloom, carving a sharp line across the parquet—a border between two worlds. Guglielmo stepped onto it and felt a sudden, dizzying pull, as if his heart had—just for a heartbeat—lost its rhythm. Inside, the portraits slept with their eyes wide. Men and women from forgotten centuries stared him down. The moon, filtering through the high window, fell across their faces, hardening them into ancient, frozen visages. There were medals, uniforms, corsets, and lace: the relics of a past that memory had all but surrendered. Guglielmo drifted toward the largest frame. Of all the figures, it was the woman with the swept-back hair and a gaze of glacial sweetness that drew him like a magnet. He felt he knew her, though they had never met. Beside her, a man with a thick mustache and pale eyes stood with a rigid, military bearing. A halo of wan light clung to his face, as if the moon had claimed him, demanding a reckoning.

In that instant, a different radiance swept the room. It wasn’t natural light, but a subtle, warm luminescence— almost gold—that clung to the wall behind the paintings like a dawn struggling to be born.

The moon… and a trace of sun.

Guglielmo squinted.

The moon… and a trace of sun.

His lips barely moved. “Why do you shine together?” He was too young to understand the question, yet the question existed nonetheless.

“Guglielmo.”

The voice came from the doorway, clear and fragile. Angelica stood on the threshold, her pearl-colored dressing gown brushing her ankles. Her face was split by the light: half illuminated by the moon, half swallowed by a slow-moving shadow.

“The night is no place for children,” she said, her voice devoid of reproach.

Guglielmo didn’t move. Angelica offered her hand. It was cold and slender; when he touched it, it felt like the rain-soaked silk of a petal.

She led him to the kitchen. There, the floor felt warmer, and the scent of milk and honey still lingered in the air. They sat by the window. The moon arched over the rooftops, pale and bloated like an unsleeping eye. “I hear you sometimes,” Angelica whispered. “When the house calls you, and you wander through the dark…”

“Does it call you, too?”

Angelica offered a ghost of a smile. “The house calls what is its own.”

She watched him as one watches something so delicate it might shatter from a mere look. Her hand, resting on the table, trembled.

“There was a sun, too,” he said suddenly. “But it wasn’t day.”

Angelica lifted her eyes to the window and held them there for a long, silent beat. A shadow crossed her face—a mixture of awe, terror, and recognition. She did not ask for an explanation. She did not deny him. She did not smile. “Let us sleep,” she said finally, and the words carried the weight of a prayer sent to the heavens.

***

The years sank into their lives like a blade into wax. Guglielmo was fourteen when he first began to truly confront his reflection in the mirror. At that age, bones lengthen, voices break, and the very rhythm of one’s breath shifts—but he did not experience these changes as his peers did. He stood before the bathroom mirror, naked and damp from the shower. The steam had transformed the room into a clouded, translucent tank, and his silhouette appeared as a shadow struggling to emerge from a sea of milk.

He traced his arms with his fingertips. His skin was smooth but mapped with dark veins—like restless branches pressing against glass. His nails were larger now, more lustrous and polished than those he saw on Filiberto’s hands. He leaned in closer, and the face that met him felt like a stranger’s: blue eyes that whispered of Angelica, but the arch of the brow, the heavy set of the jaw… these belonged to no one he knew. “What are you?” he whispered.

The question, breathed into the silence, was neither vain nor desperate. It was a simple recognition. On the walls, the condensation slid down the tiles like silent weeping. A knock.

“Are you finished?”

Filiberto’s voice was more metal than flesh. Guglielmo did not answer at first. He felt suddenly trapped between two worlds: the world of his body, which was beginning to reveal its secrets, and the world of his father, which sought to hammer him into a disciplined shape. “I’m coming out.”

He opened the door. Filiberto watched him with narrowed eyes. He was still in his military uniform; the light from the corridor caught the brass buttons, turning him into a cold, extinguished sun—a star that still demanded the right to dictate orbits.

“Don’t waste your time in front of a mirror. The body is

forged in action, not in reflection.”

Guglielmo simply shrugged and brushed past him. The sun did not understand the moon.

***

One autumn evening, when Guglielmo was sixteen, a storm broke over the city. The lights flickered and failed by turns, and the house seemed to thrum with unseen guests. Angelica knocked softly at her son’s door. “May I?”

She entered, a plaid shawl draped over her shoulders and the weariness of a sleepless night in her eyes. “Do you ever feel like you belong to nothing?” he asked his mother, making room for her on the bed. “As if the very ground were transforming beneath your feet?”

“Yes…” Angelica replied, nodding slowly, as if she had finally received a signal she had been awaiting for years. “There are births that do not choose a single light,” she said. “There are children of the day, and children of the night. And sometimes… someone is both.” A flash of lightning tore open the window in a ferocious whiteness.

Angelica and Guglielmo clung to each other, staring out into the chaos. There, between the clouds, they saw for one impossible heartbeat something that should not have been: the moon, and a shred of sunlight that had no right to exist at such an hour.

Angelica went pale.

“You mustn’t be afraid,” she said, though her voice was a trembling thread. “We are simply made of different substances… you, more than anyone, Guglielmo.”

“And you?”

Angelica pulled the shawl tighter around her. “I place my steps on whatever ground I can find. But even that is not always enough.”

Four

P reparations for the end of the second millennium were reaching a fever pitch. In every corner, the air hummed with talk of parties, galas, and elaborate masquerades — a kind of millennial Halloween designed to ward off ill fortune. Everyone seemed desperate to bury the scars of the twentieth century, eager to turn a clean page and begin a new chapter, if not with the certainty of progress, then at least with the benefit of the doubt.

Guglielmo threw himself into the organization, though he moved between the frantic hours of planning and the hushed stillness of his studies. He was currently deep into a thesis on the collective terrors of the medieval populace in the Year 1000.

A strange subject, he had thought when his history professor first assigned it. But as his research deepened, he found himself seduced by the mystery. The thrill was heightened by the scarcity of the records; very few texts bothered to mention the internal states or the anxieties of those who lived through the first turn of the millennium. The university librarian often saw him perched precariously atop rickety ladders, unearthing dusty volumes from the highest shelves—books that had remained untouched for decades. He would carry them down to the heavy oak tables, leafing through them with a desperate hunger, searching for a key to that ancient, shadowed mystery. More often than not, his efforts were in vain. In many chronicles, the Year 1000 wasn’t even documented; there were only fleeting, insignificant notes from years before or after the millennium of the Redeemer’s birth. Guglielmo lived those weeks in two dimensions. On one hand, he was a son of his time, united with his peers in their deliberate attempt to entomb the final breaths of 1999 beneath a mountain of celebration. They were preparing dances and great feasts to honor a “dying” century that no one intended to mourn. On the other hand, he felt utterly estranged—obsessively sifting through the ruins of ten centuries in search of a trace, a clue, or even a guttering spark of light that might reveal what truly terrified the people of that first great crossing. He carried these two worlds within him. Often, in the most unexpected moments, he wondered why he and his friends—true specimens of the “second-millennium denizen”—felt not even a flicker of dread as they approached the threshold of the new century. Was it a healing recklessness that numbed their fear? Or was it the hubris of too much knowledge that had blinded their minds, stripping them of the ability to sense a looming danger? He spoke of these theories to no one. Instead, he tended to them almost lovingly in the dark of rooms lit only by dim lamps, which served to make his quest feel even more spectral. He had a girlfriend, Gemma. They had been together for a few months.

Before this, he had never truly tested his capacity for monogamy. He had flitted from flower to flower, at one point even managing the company of four girls at once. The astounding thing was that he had always kept the situation in hand, never leaving a trail of broken hearts. It was, in its own way, admirable.

But now, since meeting Gemma, it seemed she alone was enough to fill the void left by dozens of others. She shared nothing with the girls he had known before. She wasn’t an easy conquest; she had no love for dark corners; and she possessed a wild, golden mass of tangled curls. They often sat on park benches in the brittle sun of December, where Guglielmo would lose himself in the gilded reflections of her hair, as if hypnotized by the shimmer of a rare jewel. It was early morning on the final Tuesday of the year, and Guglielmo was already in the library. He had woken with the absolute conviction that today would be the day he found something of substance. From the top shelf of a case crowded with ancient tomes, he pulled a small volume. It was different from the rest—its pages were gossamer-thin and jaundiced with age. He opened the book and plunged into the text:

“The image of the Year 1000 that survives today is that of a

people terrified by the imminence of the world’s end […] in the

collective consciousness, these millennial schemes have never quite

lost their seductive power […] the Middle Ages, a dark and

subservient era, the mother of all superstition […] the first

description of the terrors of the Year 1000 appears only with the

triumph of the new Humanism, reflecting the contempt the young

Western culture felt for the Dark Ages it had just escaped—

securitizing that abyss of barbarism to look toward Antiquity

as its model […] in the midst of the gloom, the Year 1000

stands as the antithesis of the Renaissance, offering only the

spectacle of death and senseless prostration.”

Finally, he had caught a thread of that tangled skein—a small glimmer of hope that promised to lead him somewhere deep. He pressed both palms flat against the open pages and drew a long breath, leaning back against the rigid spine of his chair.

If he hadn’t found a clue today, however small, he would have requested a meeting with his Medieval History professor to declare his research a failure. He returned to his reading, his suspicions confirmed regarding the scarcity of records from that time. During those days of fear—if fear there truly was—everyone had been too busy bartering their salvation and their worldly goods to bother describing the state of their souls. And when the panic finally subsided, many felt it unseemly to recount a danger that posterity would only ever view as imaginary. Furthermore, Guglielmo knew that no scholar of that age would have bothered to interrogate the “mental life” of the common people. History then only saw fit to record the exceptional: the omens, the unusual, and whatever dared to interrupt the orderly march of events.

“A savage world, nature nearly virgin, and a sparse

population armed only with rudimentary tools—men fighting

with bare hands against the encroaching forest and the powers

of the earth. Unable to master them, they wrenched a meager

sustenance from the soil, ruined by storms, periodically

scourged by famine and disease, and perpetually haunted by

hunger […] a deeply hierarchical society of slaves and a

peasantry living in squalid misery, utterly submitted to the

dominion of a few great families—branches gathered firmly

around a single, unyielding trunk.”

He had been desperate to unearth stories of those people—souls so weighed down by the drudgery of ordinary life and the looming shadow of an apocalypse that seemed to hover over them like a ghost. His ears had caught no sound, but a shadow suddenly fell across the pages of the book, snatching away his attention and startling him from his thoughts. Irritated, Guglielmo looked up, fully expecting to see the librarian curious about his progress.

His scowl vanished instantly, replaced by sheer surprise. There stood Gemma, arms crossed over her chest, a thinly-veiled smile playing across a face that was, in itself, a springtime.

They stood frozen for a long beat, as motionless as actors upon a stage.

Gemma was wearing a sage-green twin-set. It looked as though she had plucked two tufts of that soft wool to color the irises of her eyes—eyes that were now fixed on Guglielmo, dissecting every detail of him, tirelessly hunting for some thought that might have escaped her notice. She was a brilliant girl.

She took the seat beside him, resting her hand over his— which was still anchored to the gossamer-thin pages of the book that had saved him from the precipice of academic despair. It was the only thing that could slake his thirst to understand the frustrations and terrors that had haunted the men of the Year 1000.

“I thought you’d gone and got yourself lost in here!” she teased.

“I stopped by your house, and your mother said she

hadn’t even heard you leave this morning. I figured you must have had a stroke of genius in your dreams and rushed straight here. After all, what better place for Guglielmo to expend his morning energy than a dusty library?”

Gemma approached in silence. She rested her fingers on Guglielmo’s shoulder—a touch as light as a breath. He turned slowly. For an instant, they simply looked at one another, saying nothing.

“Are you hiding in here?” she asked, a half-smile ghosting across her lips.

“I just needed a moment to myself.”

She gently took the book from his hands and eased it shut, setting it on the table. “You’re allowed to come up for air sometimes, you know.”

Guglielmo watched her. His gaze held no irony, only a deep-seated weariness that Gemma knew all too well. It was she who closed the distance—not with a rush of passion, but with a slow, almost timid grace. Their lips brushed, a contact so fragile they seemed afraid of breaking the silence. They stayed like that for a heartbeat, suspended in time.

Then Gemma pulled back slightly, her fingers tracing the line of his face before her gaze dropped to the closed book between them. “So? Did you find anything about these poor souls terrified of the apocalypse?”

“I found something, Gemma. It’s vague—infinitely smaller than I’d hoped—but it’s an opening. The mystery surrounding these events feels… unnatural. It doesn’t sit right with me.”

He stared off into the void, as if peering through a tear in the atmosphere, seeing things no mortal was ever meant to witness. “Perhaps there is something more—something written between the lines of these centuries that was never meant to be known. I wonder if I’ll ever truly reach the end of this road.”

“Your mother told me you had another run-in with your father last night,” Gemma said softly. “She was upset, and I can’t say I blame her. Couldn’t you at least try to…”

“You know exactly how it goes, Gemma. I was in the living room, reading. He walked in, looked at me, and told me I was wasting my life. ‘Life is something else entirely,’” Guglielmo said, his voice dropping into a cold, metallic imitation of his father. A bitter half-smile crossed his face. “With him, there is no discussion. Only inheritance. Soldiers. Tradition. Discipline. The script is already written.” He looked up at her, his eyes searching. “I love my parents. But I refuse to become their project.” Gemma met his gaze with a sweet, aching understanding. It pained her to see him suffer like this, yet she felt powerless to help; she knew instinctively that family matters of this weight had to remain just that. The thought flickered through her mind before she snapped back to the present, glancing at her watch. It was a quarter to eleven. Her Civilization History lecture started in fifteen minutes. She stood up and slid the straps of her black backpack over her shoulders—the one thing she was never without. “Guli, I have to run! If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

She pressed a hurried kiss to his forehead, then vanished among the towering shelves.

Five

G uglielmo strained to focus on the slender volume. After an exhaustive search, he had finally managed to track down the cover of the meager booklet, which had revealed its title and author: a certain Duby, and the work was simply called The Year 1000. He had checked it out of the library under the watchful, curious gaze of the custodian, eager to carry it home and read what remained of it in the quiet sanctuary of his room.

It was the dead of night. Laying flat on his bed with the book resting against his chest, he devoured the text, his eyes chasing the words across the pages in search of something still unknown to him.

[…] From the feudal era, only a single chronicle survives that

speaks of the Year 1000 as a time of tragedy: that of Sigebert of

Gembloux.

In those days, many prodigies were witnessed: a terrifying

earthquake, a comet with a blazing tail, and a vivid, piercing

light that flooded even the deepest interiors of the houses. In the

heavens, which appeared to split wide apart, the light traced the

unmistakable image of a serpent. […]

[…] within the Annals of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, there is an

extensive account of the year 1003, a year marked by

unprecedented floods, a mirage, and the birth of a monster that

its own parents drowned; yet, the space for the thousandth year of

the Incarnation remains entirely blank.

Further along, his eyes caught a reference—a mere handful of lines that arrested his attention with a sudden, magnetic force.

Abbo, the Abbot of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, left behind a

memory from his youth:

[…] concerning the end of the world, I heard a sermon

preached to the people in a church in Paris, declaring that the

Antichrist would arrive at the close of the Year Mille, and

that the Last Judgment would follow shortly thereafter.

He read those words while his mind began to drift, wandering back into the deeper vaults of his memory until it struck a nerve from a few years prior. In the spring equinox of 1997, a comet named Hale-Bopp had cut across the heavens, burning brightly in the night sky. An unsettling madness had followed in its wake. A cluster of tech-savvy disciples from a Californian cult— men who traded in code and digital shadows—had orchestrated a mass suicide. They died in the absolute conviction that their passing would allow them to board an alien spacecraft trailing behind the comet, escaping the human condition for a higher state of being.

In a farewell video recorded as the poison took hold, they claimed to be the chosen ones, radiant in the certainty that they were finally being delivered from earthly misery. That very same year, a chaotic malice seemed to scourge the globe without rhyme or reason: earthquakes, howling winds, torrential rains, and tornados tearing through wretched souls. History, it appeared, was merely repeating its choruses. In another text—a fragment of photocopied pages by Jules Michelet—Guglielmo read of how the oppressed of antiquity had similarly prayed for the end of the world, welcoming the apocalypse as the ultimate release from their chains.

“The prisoner waited in the blackness of the keep, within his

sepulchral cell; the serf waited over his furrow, beneath the

shadow of the hated tower; the monk waited amid the starvation

of the cloister, battling the solitary riots of his own heart, caught

between temptation and fall, remorse and surreal visions—the

wretched plaything of a devil who frolicked cruelly around him.

A devil who, in the dead of night, would yank the blankets

away and whisper into his ear: ‘You are damned.’”

Every soul hungered to escape their agonizing reality, no matter

the price. And there must have been a terrifying beauty to that

imagined hour, when the piercing, shattering blast of the last

trumpet would finally strike the ears of tyrants.

Then, from the keep, the cloister, and the muddy furrow, a

terrible laughter would erupt from the midst of the weeping.

To demystify the mass suicide, scholars of the nineties had done everything in their power to convince the public that the anomalies behind the comet’s tail were mere starlight, arguing that the cult members had been brainwashed by the delusions of a charismatic leader. Yet the newspapers refused to let the fire die, printing sensationalized, ominous headlines.

Was the end of the world truly so far off? Would the terrors of a new Dark Age invade humanity in the span of a few short years?

Guglielmo’s mind raced, overlapping theories, mapping history, drawing lines between ancient fears and modern madness. Surely, he reasoned, on the precipice of the Year 2000, it would be infinitely easier to broadcast panic and cultivate a universal psychosis. After all, back in the year 999, it had taken only a single inspired voice—a madman in a public square or a priest at an obscure pulpit—to convince an entire populace that their world was ending. Guglielmo felt a deep, unsettling kinship with the text. He was frightened, yet utterly intoxicated by these records that blew the boundaries of his imagination wide open. Meanwhile, outside, in the city that sprawled at the foot of his window, life drifted on with no inkling of doom— without the slightest whisper of catastrophe. The amber glow of the streetlamps stained the falling raindrops, and cars chased one another down the slick asphalt, kicking up sprays of mist that looked like steam.

Inside his room, however, it felt as though time had ground to a halt. The clamor of the world filtered through only as a distant, almost surreal murmur. Guglielmo closed the book, setting it beside him with a calculated gentleness, as if terrified of breaking a spell. He slid backward onto his pillow, and for several minutes he simply lay there, watching the ceiling flare to life each time headlights swept past the house below. Every beam traced trembling lines across the plaster—like glass serpents uncoiling in the dark.

“The terrors of the Year 1000…” he murmured, entirely unaware the words had escaped him. His voice dissolved into the quiet, like water sinking into stone. He thought how strange it was that humanity knew how to fear what it could not understand with such devastating force, yet could forget the lesson so effortlessly.

Guglielmo could not tell if what he felt was dread, or merely curiosity.

Perhaps it was neither.

Perhaps it was both.

He rolled onto his side, searching for a comfortable position. He breathed in the familiar scent of paper and ink, mingled with the dry aroma of wood baked by the radiators.

It was late.

Very late.

Yet sleep refused to come.

It was then, with no apparent catalyst, that his mind drifted back to Michelet—to the monks waiting in the starvation of the cloister, the serfs in the furrows, the prisoners in their keeps, and the way a shared terror could forge a single, collective voice out of sheer anticipation. To await the end of the world, he realized, was perhaps a desperate way to give existence some semblance of meaning. To await salvation, conversely, was merely a way to outrun the pain.

The distant shriek of a siren dragged him back to the present like a violent tug on a line. An ambulance tore down the street, slicing through the night with its discordant wail.

Guglielmo drew a long, slow breath. He closed his eyes and allowed those thoughts to sink into the wordless vaults of his consciousness—that liminal space where things have not yet become words, but are no longer merely silence. Outside, the rain had stopped falling. The city breathed a quiet sigh.

The world was not ending.

But Guglielmo had touched something. Even if he could not yet give it a name.

Six

N ight had settled over the city without a sound. It was not a dense, stagnant darkness; it breathed, like a sleeping animal shifting ever so slightly beneath the skin of the world. Guglielmo had drifted off late, his mind still a chaotic tangle of dates, notes, and fragmented thoughts. Sleep claimed him all at once, swift as the sudden beat of a wing.

In the dream, the scent arrived first: a familiar draft of damp stone, weathered plaster, and laundry crisping on the line. It was the distinct aroma of old houses, of whitewashed rooms and sun-drenched courtyards. He recognized it instinctively, though he could not say why. Then came the light—not a steady beam, but a shifting ripple, like moonlight dancing on water. He could not find its source, but it felt warm against one cheek and icy cold against the other.

Guglielmo was walking barefoot. He could feel the rough grain of the floorboards beneath his soles, and the stark contact sent a jolt of lucidity through him. Every step produced a dull, muted echo—thud… thud… thud— barely fracturing the silence. The air tasted of metal. And within the iron taste lay the flavor of memory. A courtyard materialized without warning, like a photograph submerged in water and pulled out too quickly, its edges still blurring. Shadows trembled between terracotta pots and mismatched chairs. Somewhere in the dimness, a hand brushed against a clothesline—snap… snap.

But it was the door that drew him. It stood ajar, and beyond the threshold lay a room drowning in a pale, ethereal glow. As he drew near, the scent of soap and lemon washed over him—the clean fragrance of a Sunday morning, of freshly ironed shirts and scrubbed floors. Angelica was there, moving with a slow, almost ritualistic rhythm as she folded linens across the bed. The light poured through the window, catching her loose hair and tracing threads of silver and copper through the strands. “Mama?”

The word escaped his lips entirely on its own. Angelica lifted her head with a gesture he knew by heart— a look of guarded tenderness and hidden anxiety, but entirely devoid of shadows.

“You mustn’t be afraid,” she said.

Her voice possessed the soft, slightly melancholic texture of rustling fabric. Guglielmo stepped closer, catching the warmth radiating from her skin—a comforting blend of talcum powder, warm milk, and something deeper, something ancient and wild. She brushed his cheek with her fingers. The touch was real. More real, even, than waking life.

Then the room shifted. Without a sound, without a shudder, the space reconfigured, and Filiberto appeared. He sat at a table of dark, heavy wood, his elbows planted firmly, his spine unyielding.

The window behind him stood wide open, inviting the sharp scent of chimney smoke and the bitter night air. From somewhere outside, a lone dog barked at intervals. Filiberto did not speak, but the house spoke entirely for him: the crisp rattle of the newspaper, the rhythmic drip of the faucet, the low, steady hum of the refrigerator. The ambient sounds of ordinary life, hardening into a solemn litany.

On the table sat a forgotten cup of coffee, nearly cold, its bitter aroma steeping the air. And in his eyes lay a mystery that was not harshness, but sheer exhaustion. The window framed an impossible sky: on one side a full moon, sharp as a blade of bone; on the other, a golden disc, suspended and stubborn—like a sun refusing to die. Light and shadow confronted one another in absolute silence. Neither would yield.

Filiberto looked up, and in that moment, he was neither father, nor soldier, nor man. He was a borderland. He did not speak. Yet his silence arrived with the weight of an entire declaration, built of commands left ungiven and embraces never dared.

Then the scene contracted, sharp as a tightening pupil. And Guglielmo saw himself as a child. He was sitting on the floor, his knees tucked beneath his body, a blank sheet of paper spread before him. There was the rhythmic whisper of graphite on paper—scratch… scratch…—and the dry scent of lead and dust. Angelica was kneeling beside him, her chin resting on her knees, her hair gathered in a loose, soft braid. Every now and then, she would press her hand to the nape of his neck, as if to reassure herself that he was real, that he was truly alive. “What are you drawing?” Her voice emerged like a breath caught on glass.

The child replied, “The sun. But it’s night.” Angelica smiled, but it was not a smile born entirely of sweetness; it was a smile traced with a fine vein of dread. “And the moon?”

The boy tilted the page toward her. “It isn’t round. There’s a piece missing.”

“Why is a piece missing?”

The child did not hesitate. “Because they are speaking to each other.”

Angelica caught her breath. You could hear the sharp draft of air entering her throat—a fragile thread of terror and awe. “And what are they saying?”

The boy made a final mark on the paper, a dark, heavy stroke that fastened the two circles together. “That nothing truly dies. It only changes rooms.” The page slipped slowly from his fingers, brushing through the air until it struck the floorboards with a sharp click— and the vision dissolved. Darkness rushed in, and out of the blackness came a voice. A summons carried within a name.

“Guglielmo.”

He awoke with a jolt.

The room was cold, deeply freezing, and from outside drifted the scent of winter: snow, cold metal, and burning wood. The window stood ajar, and the wind nudged the curtain, producing a hollow rhythm—flap… flap…—like the beating of wings. His heart paced slowly, not with the frantic panic of a nightmare, but with the steady weight of a revelation.

Guglielmo sat up, swinging his feet onto the cold floor, and remained entirely motionless. He could not recall every detail, yet he remembered enough.

Then he raised his eyes to the window. The moon shone high and silent, as though it had witnessed the entire theater of his mind without ever choosing to intervene. When he finally closed his eyes again, the night was still whole.

Morning claimed him without ceremony, spilling a pale light through the slats of the shutters, carrying the fading coolness of the night. And reality, as it so often does, was the first thing to return.

Seven

New Year’s Eve 1999

The lights that evening seemed to illuminate a bottomless, dense, lead-colored sky, and the air, filled with a persistent fog, appeared translucent. They were the final hours of a dying millennium, glimmers of light in the darkness of a sleep that was now irreversible.

Guglielmo was in his room. He had already put on his Count Dracula costume, lord of the night, with the tailcoat and the black cloak, the white shirt matching the skin of his face, which was covered in greasepaint, making two prominent dark circles stand out. A pair of sharp, gleaming fangs protruded from his lips.

The boy stood in front of a large oil canvas that had probably hung on that wall, above the fireplace that dominated his room, for a century or more. A male figure, with slender legs encased in tall riding boots, an austere leather crop, and shining frogs on the epaulets, posed with a hint of vanity, fixing his gaze on anyone who passed nearby. That was one of the illustrious ancestors of his father’s family and, naturally, he could be nothing other than a high-ranking cavalry officer.

As had happened a thousand times before, looking at that painting, it seemed to Guglielmo that, from time immemorial, the members of his family knew how to do nothing else but wear a uniform and command legions of soldiers.

He stepped back a few paces and, with surprise, found his own image in the mirror not far away: the black cloak slipped over his shoulders. For an instant, he did not recognize himself. His face was pale, his eyes darker than usual.

That night he would be the lord of darkness. He would live off the moments of others, he would pretend to suck life from the necks of his unsuspecting victims. It was a game.

Or at least, so he told himself.

He opened his arms, allowing the cloak to spread out behind his shoulders. In a few hours, he would say goodbye to an entire century. And for an instant, without knowing why, he had the sensation that this was not just a party.

Gemma was waiting for him at her house. His father stood at the bottom of the stairs, in the wide entrance hall of the house, his glossy satin robe tightened around his lean body, a newspaper clutched in his hands. “So, Guglielmo, have you truly decided not to come to the officers’ club to commemorate the transition to the Year 2000 with me and your mother? You know, don’t you, that it would be a very important thing? After all, you are also turning twenty, and family is a sacred institution that demands respect.”

Filiberto would not look his son in the eyes; he evaded his gaze, and Guglielmo was unnerved by this to an unbearable degree. Why couldn’t his father make an effort to understand him, just for once? Why did nothing exist for him except the officers’ club, the recruits, and those damned insignia of his?

“Dad, you know I care a lot about celebrating this occasion with my friends. And besides, what would I do at your barracks’ officers’ club dressed as Count Dracula?” the boy said, spreading his black cloak with a twirl to try and lighten the situation a little.

“Dressed like that?” the man said, letting his gaze sweep over the cloak. “At the club, they wouldn’t take you seriously.”

“Dear, come now, let us not ruin this beautiful festive evening. Let us wish a happy twentieth birthday to our Guglielmo, who is slowly becoming a man…” Angelica had entered the conversation with her flute-like voice at just the right moment, before either of her two men could boil over. It was becoming difficult even for her to keep those two hotheads at bay. She held a small light-blue packet tied with a blue ribbon, and every eye in the room instantly turned toward her.

“This is for you, my son. I have waited twenty years to give it to you—twenty long years…” Guglielmo took the packet from his mother’s hands, which seemed to contain who knows what, and stripped away the paper wrapping it: a rounded pendant of translucent alabaster. A black cord, tightly twisted into a thick string, secured the jewel and wrapped around a slender volume with a worn leather cover… a truly strange gift, the boy thought. “I haven’t gone mad, Guglielmo; your mother hasn’t lost her mind. It is a long story, a very long story. Come, let’s sit on your favorite sofa.”

With his left hand clasped in his mother’s, and the strange pendant anchored to the small book in his right, Guglielmo followed her docilely, just as he used to do as a child when waiting to hear his favorite bedtime story. Filiberto, suspecting the subject of the story his wife was about to tell, said in a sharp tone:

“Angelica, have you thought carefully about what you are about to do? I do not think it is appropriate… Don’t you remember what that woman told us? If I were you, I wouldn’t do it…”

Mother and son had already taken their places on the sofa. At those words, Angelica lifted her blue eyes to her husband, fixing him with a gaze that was steady, deep, and at the same time, immensely gentle.

Did they truly still possess the right to conceal Guglielmo’s true identity from him?

Could they truly continue to do this forever? Perhaps with that revelation she would shatter her son’s tranquility, but she was certain that he needed to know everything.

“Filiberto, Guglielmo is grown up, and there is no longer any reason for us to keep hiding something from him that he would find out eventually on his own anyway.” Guglielmo, meanwhile, unnerved by the fact that his parents were speaking as if he were not in the room, felt frustrated by these concealed truths, which until that moment had been entirely unknown to him. What were they talking about? What had they hidden from him for all those years?

With an instinctive gesture, he pulled out his two fake fangs, as if to say: Alright, let’s stop joking around and get serious.

He looked at his mother sitting beside him, and his father, who remained standing. Those moments of anticipation felt like boulders hurled in slow motion, never hitting the ground, and the wait for them to fall seemed interminable. “You must know, my dear son, that on