At first, he doesn't pay attention. It seems to him like one of the usual scenes of the antlions, always worrying about nothing. But the buzzing of the insect-like servants increases until he can no longer ignore it. He sighs and patiently tilts one of his wide ears towards the sobbing little creature.

  “First Counselor! Please come and see!”

  Mowr Ees does not move from his desk, but gives the other an encouraging look.

  “Whatever it is, I'm sure you antlions can handle it. You always have. Efa sleeps soundly in your capable little paws,” he says with a smile.

  The servant moans louder.

  “You should see it!”

  “Right now? I'm composing...”

  “But they take things— they take them away! And things— they come back!”

  Now he is exaggerating. Mowr Ees turns in his chair, facing the antlion sternly. He knows that his bushy eyebrows, when furrowed, are a formidable weapon for silencing foolish chatter.

  But it doesn't work.

  “They pluck things off and then the things are reborn,” the other insists.

  What nonsense.

  The frayed wisps of a small cloud must have passed in front of the sun, for the golden glow in the study fades for a few moments and then gradually, slowly, returns to shine.

  It seems to have happened in a bygone era. In the same room, one day, in a moment of boredom, his Queen paid him a surprise visit and found him working on a pastel drawing with a disturbing subject.

  Her sharp face contracted in concern at the enigmatic scene.

  Was she displeased?

  “I don't know what it means either, Your Majesty. I drew it under the overwhelming inspiration of a dream,” he quickly explained.

  A strange machine performing incomprehensible actions in front of the backdrop of one of Efa's quiet, green gardens in the area behind the palace, between walls of well-trimmed hedges and flowering ponds.

  “That machine,” she whispered, nibbling a corner of her purple lips, “seems to be busy planting eggs in the ground...”

  Mowr Ees could not help but jump, a pencil almost slipping from his hand.

  “Planting what, my lady?”

  “Some eggs, in the ground, like seeds.”

  His huge eyes must have reached the size of a saucer. Though he was aware that the Queen, the Goddess, knew concepts and realities of the universe that would always remain unknown and incomprehensible to mere creatures like him, to hear her utter those disorienting words with such simplicity made him lose grip of his own reality, crushing him to the size of an insect suddenly aware of its own smallness.

  “Like what, Your Majesty?” he dared to insist, his voice trembling with fear.

  The Queen hesitated, her pointed fingers resting on her cheek in a pensive pose.

  “Something to generate new life, my good counselor.”

  An answer even more chilling than the mystery that flickered for a moment before his eyes, as fleeting and immense as the outline of a monster flashing past in the frame of a window on a beautiful sunny day.

  “But life is not generated, my lady!” he had the audacity to protest with the fire of all his indignation, and in his excitement he undid a button on his waistcoat. “You have taught us: everything was once created, exists, and will exist in the same way!”

  And finally, mercifully, she gave him a bright smile, loving but tinged with sadness.

  “Of course, dear Mowr Ees, it is as you say,” she admitted. “It's a hypothesis, a speculation.”

  A speculation he did not like. He would have destroyed the drawing at once if the Queen had not liked it so much. He would have given it to her, but she told him to keep it.

  “There is great power in this picture, in this idea,” she said. “One day it may save us.”

  “Save us from what?”

  She looked up, her forehead furrowed.

  “From ourselves, or from them.”

  “What?”

  He was getting more and more confused. And the lady was not helping him.

  “It is proper that you dreamed it. It is your role, what I myself wanted for you. To create.”

  It sounds like blasphemy to him! But if it was the Goddess herself who formulated it...

  “Dear Mowr Ees, I trust that you will know how to make the right decision when the need arises.”

  Where is that monstrous image now?

  Where is she?

  “Are you sure this isn't a trick of the Marquis Relapi?” he insists, his tone hardening. The memory dries his throat. “Or a prank by the grassgirls? You...”

  He pauses for a moment before saying you believe everything. He bites his lower lip, searching for better words. Antlions believe everything because they are innocent and sincere; they don't really know the meaning of words like lying and pretending, not even what is necessary to enjoy a made-up story or prank. This deprives them of much enjoyment, but it does not give anyone the right to mock them.

  “You people get too involved,” he concludes, sighing and getting up, his moment of meditation now over.

  In the corridor, the antlion is immediately flanked by a swarm of companions, all equally excited and trembling. The little blue hats barely stay on their elongated heads as the servants run and pass each other, climb over each other, and even run a few short distances on the walls.

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  But when they come out into the gardens, Mowr Ees and his antlion are alone again. The First Counselor struggles to keep up. The sky is the soft pink of strawberry pudding, and the air smells of honey. They enter the labyrinth, whose every secret they know. The servant runs without looking back to see if his master is still following. Mowr Ees avoids the fountains that playfully splash passersby, and the trap doors that make false screams, as if someone were trapped under the gray stone slabs. The hedges are twice his height, and when the boxwood weaves its dense branches into arches over the narrow walkways, a deep shadow falls over him.

  They reappear in the wildest part of the orchard, a hill whose purple turf sways even when there is no wind. Among the small bushes laden with golden apples, five or six pageboys and the Baroness De Laconte move stealthily, walking stooped and low among the vegetation. The lady's skirts and the pages' cloaks caught on the branches and rustled as they crawled along the stones. The group seems to be playing hide-and-seek, and Mowr Ees opens his mouth to scold the antlion for his false alarm, when he notices something strange in one of the plants. A drooping branch, crumpled leaves. And no apple.

  Mowr Ees takes off running up the slope. One of the boys sees him, rears up, and opens his mouth wide to shout something. Objects fall from his hand and the Baroness lets out an excited shriek. Suffocated, for her mouth is full.

  “What's going on?” the first councilor thunders in his deep voice.

  The bush is diseased, and this purple leaf color cannot have been caused by the carelessness or clumsy movements of orchard visitors. That is bad enough. But other, healthier plants are still fruitless.

  De Laconte shields her lips with her hand, but he can see that her jaw is moving, and there is no doubt what some of the pages have been up to.

  There are bites and chunks of apples in their hands, rolling on the ground among the purple blades of grass.

  “What does this mean? Why?” he gasps, his head spinning. Everything is falling into a senseless whirl. The antlion chirps, but he doesn't listen; he's all tensed up against the Baroness.

  The lady is fixing her monumental blonde wig, fluttering her eyelashes, and under the heavy makeup her cheeks are redder with embarrassment.

  “It was an impulse,” she mumbles. “All this fruit… we asked ourselves, what on earth are they for?”

  She is not even aware of the gravity of what she is about to say in her cackling voice.

  “Animals eat,” she continues. “Why don't we?”

  Enough, she's going too far.

  “Animals... What are you talking about, Baroness?” he reprimands her sternly.

  The lady insists.

  “It's true! We've seen them —the birds pecking at cake crumbs, the dogs waiting for a bite under the table! Ask anyone, Mowr Ees!”

  The First Counselor feels himself trembling inside. His tail, lying inert on the floor, also feels a vibration from below, from the floor itself, and twists in defense.

  “And why don't we try?” she concludes triumphantly.

  De Laconte had asked herself a question. Even a creature as simple as this, whose existence is perpetuated in dances in the vast halls of the palace, in characterless ditties sung in tandem with the Marquis Rilapi, and in ball games in the gardens, even she awoke one morning with a doubt to provoke her. And the courage to follow this restlessness, to investigate and to try.

  Everything will come crashing down, his own voice admonishes him in a whiny, harassing tone that he almost doesn't recognize.

  We are hanging on a thin crust over nothing.

  And it is his fault. He has no doubt about it. He drew that hideous thing, gave it space in his mind, conceived that disgusting idea...

  To create life. The prerogative of the gods.

  I was begotten to create, yes, but art, games, and entertainment. To entertain my lady, to uplift and nourish the spirits.

  He has failed. The courtiers think they must feed their body, and who knows how many more horrors will follow.

  But he was the first to make a mistake. He took the crayons, drew these shapes on the rough paper to calm the anxiety of a dream... But why did he have a nightmare at all, he who was always serene? For that first disobedience, that foolish act that he never even confessed to his lady.

  When he challenged the Strawberry Guardian.

  If he had told her, if he had begged for punishment! Maybe he would have saved Efa, saved Her.

  “They've already done that, First Counselor,” the antlion insists with a buzz that sounds like thunder in his ears. “Yesterday and the day before.”

  The Baroness doesn't even try to deny it. She hugs her shoulders and sighs, raising her face to the sky, her eyes half closed and her vermilion mouth stretched in a blissful smile. She stretches her arms out behind her. The pages have gathered in a group behind her, small enough to hide behind the lady's skirt.

  Mowr Ees turns to examine the plants with his eyes, as far as he can see.

  “But the apples?”

  “They grow back,” the antlion repeats, pointing a brown paw at a pair of white-spotted bushes.

  Mowr Ees has trouble focusing on those tiny patches among the green foliage. Not from lack of vision, but from sheer disbelief.

  They are flowers. Flowers on fruit trees. As absurd as if the corollas in the flower beds would close, lose their petals, and swell into berries and seeds. Or the leaves would fall, or winter would come. That seed thing...

  Something to generate new life.

  But life is not generated, my lady!

  It is over, the balance is permanently broken.

  My lady...

  Mowr Ees closes his eyes and prays. The sweet taste of his first sin enters his mouth, tingling his tongue and palate in a paroxysm of pleasure.

  And, as he had done then, he swallows.

  What have we done, my lady?