The Mad of Gorr
For Gorr, every night was a mad night.
All that wandering through pubs, squeezing between walls, dances, and brawls around the bonfires had begun one early morning.
It was hot, a summer's day. He had descended to the streets because the house burned when the sun drew near, and he had promised himself to find the love of his life by seeking her in the great City: all this unfolded as a consequence of a catharsis, an epiphany that struck him while reading books with curled pages, written in that Italian no longer in use, where the sense of things is lost in the pareidolia of symbols and imaginations.
The cannon blast from the Citadel suggested noon as he sought refuge among the shadows of an old church. Distorted echoes of truth echoed from all directions, saying, "You will never find her."
So he fled. He only wanted to lose himself, find her by chance when the night was deepest, and what occurred was almost always the illusion of a desperate and sleepless heart.
He did not know that on the other side of the bridge, a woman was pouring her soul onto the silver tarot cards of a fortune teller, at the top of the deck, the reversed Lovers, whispering to her, "You will never find him."
Since then, he had discovered that the night opens to all those with tears to shed; to all those who wish to be immortal, forever children, those who do not believe as dogma in things that end.
He would forget the day, the sun, the scent of fresh air at dawn; but he did not yet know this.
Some nights are special, they remain like a war scar. Other nights, like Gorr's, are truly Mad Nights. Truly, I say, because he had met all the broken hearts that drink and raise their hands both inside and outside the bars; and he had seen the ugly side behind a parking lot, in the alley behind the Red Gate when he had decided to swear allegiance to Melancholy and had been saved at the last moment by the Gentle and the Brave, behind the machinations of the Trickster - his Majesty! - to have him sit by a bonfire to hear the story of old Rotthardt.
And spinning, drinking, smoking, between a fight and a prayer, he ended up with a curse.
The Trickster had searched high and low for a solution, pulling levers from the other side of the world, seducing beautiful women, playing with poisons and knives, disguised as a cat or a cripple: he found her in the metro tunnel; she said she had arrived there through a series of strange coincidences that night - very strange coincidences - that she did not understand, that her heart overflowed with tears at the sentence of the cards: the alleys of the crooked tall buildings would be her home, the squares, the night that descends into madness when one is alone.
The Trickster had searched high and low for a solution, pulling levers from the other side of the world, seducing beautiful women, playing with poisons and knives, disguised as a cat or a cripple: he found her in the metro tunnel; she said she had arrived there through a series of strange coincidences that night - very strange coincidences - that she did not understand, that her heart overflowed with tears at the sentence of the cards: the alleys of the crooked tall buildings would be her home, the squares, the night that descends into madness when one is alone.
The Trickster then took her to the rooftops, leaping from chimney to laundry line to avoid breaking their necks a hundred meters above the steam: they jumped from the red and green traffic light to the city's edge, traveling on the edge of light, and found Gorr sitting around the fire with the Gentle, the Stele, the Brave, and the Professor.
A synchronized spark lit up both their eyes: they had already met when they were children.
