Chapter 1 The Geometry of Linen
The light in the Valley of Eterna was not an astronomical phenomenon; it was an administrative decision. At seven o'clock sharp—not a second before, nor a second after—a golden, absolute clarity materialized behind the linen curtains, transforming the bedroom into a sanctuary of surgical stillness. There was no harsh sun to cast long shadows or suggest the inexorable passage of the hours. Instead, a static illumination made every speck of dust suspended in the air appear like a laser-cut diamond, floating in a vacuum of perfection.
Gastón awoke with the sensation of being a newly conceived idea. His shoulders felt weightless; his back held no memory of the tensions of years past; and his lungs filled with air that tasted of distilled purity. He was swathed in sheets of such blinding white that they hurt the eyes if looked at directly—sheets that exhaled the precise scent of freshly laundered cotton, along with a trace of lavender designed to stifle any lingering ember of anxiety before it could crystallize into a thought.
Beside him, Clara slept with an elegance that defied the laws of human biology. Her skin was a canvas of flawless peach—devoid of pores, freckles, or those tiny lines of expression that tell the story of a life. Her breathing was a musical rhythm, a sweet cadence that seemed synchronized with the very heartbeat of the house. Gastón lay watching her, captivated by the symmetry of her face. There was something about her beauty that evoked a porcelain doll from a private collection—something one admires yet fears to touch, for fear that its perfection might fracture beneath the pressure of a human finger.
"Good morning, my love," she whispered, opening blue eyes so clear they seemed made of blown glass.
There was no trace of sleepy disorientation in her gaze—only absolute devotion, a total surrender that felt, at once, both comforting and terrifying. "Good morning, Clara," Gastón replied. As he spoke, his own voice sounded strange to him—as if he were listening to a high-fidelity recording of himself, processed to eliminate any trace of roughness.
He rose and walked across the rug, which had the texture of a solid cloud. As he descended the polished oak staircase—where every grain of the wood seemed to have been hand-drawn by an obsessive artist—the aroma of pancakes and maple syrup greeted him like a physical embrace: warm and dense.
In the kitchen, the scene was a still life of domestic bliss. His children, Leo and Mía, sat at the white pine table. Leo, eight years old, wore a perfectly ironed button-down shirt, without a single crease or smudge to suggest he had played or run around; Mía, six, sported two braids so tight and symmetrical that they looked as if they had been sculpted from golden marble.
"Daddy, the sky says today is going to be the best day of our lives," Mía said, as she drizzled honey onto her plate.
The honey fell in a steady golden stream, forming a perfect spiral atop the pancake—a geometry that never broke, defying its own natural viscosity.
"Every day is the best day, little one," Gastón replied, taking his seat across from a plate that looked as though it had been prepared for a gourmet food photo shoot.
The food tasted like pure bliss. It wasn't merely sweet; it was an explosion of flavors that awakened every taste bud with an almost painful intensity—a sensory saturation that left no room for anything else. Yet, as he chewed, Gastón felt a brief pang of doubt. Had he always had this family? The memory of his children’s births was there, filed away in a mental folder labeled "Memories," but it felt like a movie he had watched too many times. They were vivid images: a hospital of unreal whiteness, the high-pitched cry of a newborn, the scent of talcum powder and roses. But there was no pain in the memory—neither the exhaustion of sleepless nights, nor the bloody, beautiful chaos of real life. It was a clean narrative, free of cross-outs.
After breakfast, Gastón stepped out onto the porch. The air in Eterna always smelled of a blend of vanilla, jasmine, and freshly cut grass. There were no insects to pester him, no wind to ruffle his hair—only a gentle breeze that kept the temperature at a constant, artificial 22 degrees.
His neighbor, Mr. Pino, was on the adjacent porch. He was an elderly man with large, calloused hands, who always wore an impeccable leather apron—without a single speck of resin on it. Pino guided his chisel across a piece of wood with the grace of a surgeon.
"Good morning, Gastón. Today, the pine sings beneath my hand," the old man said, offering him a smile that crinkled his eyes charmingly—like a character from a children's storybook.
"Good morning, Pino. What are you creating today?"
"The usual, son. Searching for life in what appears dead. One of these days, this wooden leg will take its very first step."
The village was a massive choreography of everyday life. Mrs. Rosa pruned her rose bushes—which, strangely, never had thorns; the Woodcutter sharpened his silver axe at the edge of the forest with a hypnotic rhythm; and the girl in the red hood always ran toward her grandmother’s house at the exact same time, offering a greeting with the exact same nod of her head.
It was a symphony of perfection that should have been soothing, yet it began to feel like a mounting pressure in Gastón’s chest—as if the very air were too thick for his lungs.
It was near the confectionery in the town square that Eterna’s sugary aesthetic began to ooze something dark. Standing before the façade—adorned with sugar candies and pink icing—Gastón spotted two children who simply did not fit into this aesthetic of enforced happiness. They were Hansel and Gretel.
In the village, it was said that they were the bakers' children; yet as Gastón drew closer, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. Gretel—clad in a dress of coarse wool that stood in stark contrast to the silks worn throughout Eterna—had eyes brimming with a moisture that simply should not exist in a happy world. Her fingers were sticky—not with sugar, however, but with a bitter resin that reeked of panic and confinement.
"Mr. Gastón..." the girl whispered, taking his hand. Her fingers trembled. "Grandma says tomorrow is the banquet. She says Hansel is already 'sweet' enough."
Gastón looked at Hansel. The boy was strangely bloated, as if he had been force-fed to the point of bursting. His cheeks were stretched so taut that his skin appeared on the verge of tearing, and his eyes—sunken deep within the fat of his face—gleamed with an ancestral terror.
