House of The Gaze, in the final days of 2022.

The passage of time had left its mark. The festive December days had arrived, and with them, as usual, Homero Núñez, known as "Cuentero," found his solitude deepening. He had been diligently progressing in the creation of his novel, not without stumbling, striving to craft a worthy narrative. However, he had also been, if not outright procrastinating, diverting his attention to more mundane tasks, like the transformation of his garden into a paradise. It was a challenging yet edifying endeavor.

Indeed, a writer's work doesn't solely involve penning words on paper or typing them on a screen. Most of the time, it unfolds within the writer's mind, piecing together the puzzle of ideas. Perhaps this would soon change with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Homero yearned to devote more time to the maintenance and upkeep of his grand old house. Yet, financial constraints, a house full of pets, the relentless march of time, and the ensuing wear and tear made this task both tedious and demanding. He remembered his grandfather's wisdom, advising patience and calm, as the saying goes, "Step by step, one can reach the palm tree, but a bridge of lime and stone doesn't last forever."

Christmas held little religious significance for Cuentero. While he was raised with Catholic beliefs, neither he nor his parents, even during his adolescence, had been devout. He had chosen agnosticism through a deeply personal process of reflective doubt, guided by scientific methodology, philosophical readings, and various forms of observation. His journey towards agnosticism had been further influenced by his father's rebellious devotion and his mother's unique form of faith.

In his quest to believe or disbelieve in religious dogma, Homero had personal motives beyond philosophical or metaphysical ones. As he approached his sixtieth year, he was only beginning to grasp these deeply personal foundations. For him, Christmas had two meanings: giving joy and family gatherings. It also connected him to his ancestors, a genealogy he had researched passionately for nearly forty years.

Homero's fascination with his family history had its roots in the stories told by his grandparents and parents. His mother's tales about the Pallares lineage, in particular, fueled his interest and literary imagination from his childhood. This passion led him to enroll in one of the most prestigious faculties of Social Anthropology, initiated in Latin America by the eminent Catalan anthropologist Ángel Palerm, along with other influential Spanish intellectuals in the 1940s.

This faculty would later serve as the basis for similar programs at UNAM and the National School of Anthropology and History, associated with the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The influence of ethnologist David Robicheaux, specializing in family studies, played a pivotal role in the writer's life.

Thus, for Homero, placing the Baby Jesus in the nativity scene during these nights and simultaneously wishing his uncle Víctor, his father's brother, a happy birthday were one and the same. Víctor, only two years younger than Toño and the same age as Tere, was a jovial and witty individual who shared Homero's love for classical music, literature, and history. If Homero had embarked on the journey of storytelling, it was partly inspired by the fascinating anecdotes of Víctor's imaginative letter-writing to ancient artists and thinkers. These letters would forever remain unanswered, as they were addressed to the great figures of antiquity. Delia, Víctor's wife, with her rather coarse disposition, often ridiculed him for this practice.

Homero believed if humans could time travel, his uncle Víctor would be a true historical adventurer, not just a fanciful one. Víctor's letters would be the result of real dialogues with ancient celebrities, descriptions, and narratives of places and encounters across the ages. In fact, the first novel Cuentero read in book format, "The City of the Leper King", was a gift from Víctor on his fifteenth birthday, and it felt like a journey between worlds as he delved into its pages.

* * *

Surely your keen reader's insight has started to notice an inconsistency regarding the surnames of Homero and his family. There is an explanation for everything, but for now, we must focus on the exotic adventures born from the imagination of the teenage writer. They thrived, enriched by the reading of fantastic stories and comics about heroes, worlds, characters, settings, situations, parallel universes, dystopias that now, in Homero's old age, clamored to come to life beyond mere childhood ideas. Their clamor was so strong that the writer felt overwhelmed, confused, guilty, both towards Orestes Crisomallón, his agent and editor, and his deepest yearning. At times, he imagined these characters leaping from the pages stored in the shadows of drawers, folders, and shelves to reproach his indolent neglect, which he justified with the notion that he had to prioritize daily survival goals.

"You only care about chasing the paycheck, getting the daily bread! We're struck by lightning as far as you're concerned. Ingrate! You dream about us, jot us down in your notes as isolated lines. Look at us! We appear more like a patchwork ensemble, poorly stitched to the pattern of understanding. Look at us! This one's missing a leg, that one half a face. That guy over there can barely tiptoe with the features of his name. We can hardly call ourselves any kind of genre; and I'm not just referring to gender, which today, you see, the world wants to invent more than the two that nature set as foundations; or three, if we consider hermaphrodites; or four, if we grant space to the asexuals. Look at us! Packed into notebooks and loose papers, living a promiscuous, unfruitful, profligate existence. We'd at least like a port to moor our struggling ship, but you've left us adrift, shipwrecked in the Sea of Oblivion, or left in the shipyard, barely supported to prevent our burdens from crushing us, awaiting the moment you grace us with both form and purpose"

"And who are you?" Homero would ask in his imagination to the character who dared to reproach him in such a manner and with such language.

"My identity's of little consequence, unless you mold it. Just recall my name, Liû Mó. Etch it into your head! What's important is that I've come to warn you that you either take action or you'll face a great challenge. The rebellion is underway."

Homero would smile every time dialogues like the above entered his mind. If it weren't for his artistic temperament, he might have believed he was already a victim of acute schizophrenia. But in his still-naive creative spirit, he preferred to believe that, in reality, a rebellion was brewing from another dimension in the fields of his house, viewed as "The ogre's castle in Haus des Blicks."

* * *

Christmas in 2022, Homero spent alone once again, as had become the custom since his mother Tere's passing. The lavish family gatherings filled with stories, jokes, debates, and mixed emotions were long gone. He had to settle for any meager meal within his limited budget, conversing with his six cats, as the walls of the House of The Gaze provided the boisterous banter, their textured and dusty stucco surfaces revealing whimsical shapes – faces of elves, specters, monsters, fantastical beasts, or demons. They spoke without words, conveying their messages through frozen gestures and expressions, preserved by time. Of course, Cuentero's rationality allowed him to understand these were merely gestalt effects, subliminal perceptions, attempting to fill existential voids and give meaning to his idle musings as the ogre in his gloomy castle, Haus des Blicks, as he sometimes liked to call his Casa de la Mirada, his home since childhood. Or were they not? When he pondered these details, he couldn't help but feel like the third version of that character portrayed by the Soler brothers, first by Fernando and later by his brother Andrés, in the film "La Casa del Ogro," a sort of Greench or Scrooge taken from a boiling cauldron, much like the naturalistic literary style described by Emile Zola.

Therefore, if Christmas held just a couple of meanings for Homero, the last day of the year, in contrast, was filled with significance. This was especially true since, a year before Homero turned fifteen, Tere revealed Toño's infidelity during a family gathering. As a result, Toño would attend only the gift exchange on Christmas and preside over the New Year's dinner for the rest of Cuentero's life. For the teenager – and not just for him but for the entire family – this change represented a colossal, schismatic, and life-altering adaptive and existential challenge steeped in pretense.

* * *

Planet Klimhá, Schloss Steppenwolfsee, a couple of nights later.

It seemed as though all her ideas had conspired to flood Ana Gramma's mind, making it difficult for her to fall asleep. She was thrilled with the speed at which she was progressing in her literary project, but this enthusiasm was mixed with the concern that some things were slipping out of her control. She had the feeling that the characters and their situations, no matter how meticulously planned, wanted to govern themselves or were obeying unforeseen rules as if they had a life of their own. The anxiety associated with this sensation had been causing her legs to jump involuntarily for days, hindering her ability to sleep and rest. She consulted a doctor who diagnosed her with restless legs syndrome, possibly due to altered blood circulation caused by neurotransmitters unleashed by stress. As a precaution, suspecting an underlying renal issue, the physician ordered angiologic and nephrologic studies.

Restless and facing such challenges, Ana got out of bed and put on a white silk robe. Her feline bare feet touched the cold wooden floor as she headed toward the bedroom door. Carefully, she opened the door and closed it behind her, trying not to make any noise to avoid waking anyone. Anyone, that is unless her tutor Alfred Steppenwolf was lurking around; in reality, he could only alert the mansion's ghosts. She paused for a moment to listen, but only the night wind's murmur and the distant hoot of a fukuró could be heard. With a flashlight in hand, she ventured into the night. The garden, silent and dark, was only dimly illuminated by Klimhá's three moons, taking on a magical yet eerie appearance under the flashlight's beam.

Ana sat on the bench near the flowering shrubs that lined the entrance and observed them closely. They were pruned but not like the bougainvillea from her imaginary planet Earth in her novel and replicated in her dream. Instead, they were trimmed with surgical precision. The tawabico stood upright, their branches extending in all directions. Amid contrasting lights and shadows, the traces of the creeping polzavi were barely visible from their slimy trails on the rough branches. Occasionally, the sweet aroma of zuhur albatunya wafted through the garden, attracting the graceful alathaléliyu that ended up flying in confusion towards the flames of the torches.

Everything seemed to be in order, but in light of her doubts, Ana experienced a strange sensation inside, a sudden tingling in her hands, and the feeling of having been transported to another place during her recent dreams related to scenes already written in her novel.

She recalled the one where she described Homero working in his garden when suddenly the writer, with a childlike appearance, transformed into a witness, an invisible narrator of the scene.

With minimal effort, Ana recreated the moment in her own garden by mentally projecting the scene, much like a cinematograph. In parallel, her mind pondered whether it could be done with a machine capable of projecting vivid, three-dimensional, corporeal images on-site, not just luminous ones, and with realistic proportions. She coined the term "holograph" for this machine, imagining that someday someone would invent it.

She then envisioned the strange character observed by Homero in the dream, or by that mysterious character, Edgar Allan Poe, she had concocted to embody an altered version of the young Homero.

She saw him as a sort of combination of a warrior and a priest. She invented the word "druid" to encapsulate the idea.

In her fantasy, the druid was a tall, lanky figure with a broad, strong torso, a long salt-and-pepper beard, and penetrating green eyes. He held a staff with three large dragon-like talons at its end, forming a kind of cocoon that encapsulated a large star sapphire. His right hand rested on the dragon-themed hilt of the sword fastened to his waist.

Modifying the vision, Ana would replace the garden with ruins in the midst of a barren hill. From its summit, the druid would gaze upon a village surrounded by a petrified forest, partially obscured by a sandstorm. The name "Su'ur" resonated in Ana's mind, and her imagination would once again transform the scene, painting a planet named after it. A planet with a more or less arid environment, a sky of reddish-orange hues, and phosphorescent ochre clouds behind which three moons of varying sizes and atmospheres would emerge, resembling yet differing from the moons of Klimhá.

* * *

House of The Gaze, the last days of 2022.

Trimming the bougainvillea had been a laborious task that took Homero three weeks to complete. When he finished, the garden looked like it had fallen victim to a merciless maelstrom, as if the writer had unleashed his fury upon the plants, a fury that could only be explained by his frustration at not progressing at the pace and in the manner he had typically experienced before the current creative block. Yes, he was making progress in writing his novel, but with every step, every word and page, he felt insecure, doubts crept in. Even in his desperate confusion, he was agitated and envious of the speed at which some authors published their books, whether independently or with the backing of a recognized publisher. Homero even considered taking some writing courses. It's good to stay updated, to refresh one's knowledge, but Homero's motivation was fueled more by an underlying negative feeling that his experience and knowledge of the craft were insufficient.

One day, as if someone had read his mind, he received an email inviting him to subscribe to a course titled "Best Seller. Learn to write your book in four weeks and achieve financial freedom." It was a tempting title, but with an economy just sufficient for everyday survival, Homero could only watch the introductory videos. However, these videos were enough for two things: to confirm that he was not an idiot and knew how to do things, and to realize that he was resistant to these proposals that flooded the market with tailor-made books. In the end, these books were revealed as transient and deceitful trash that supported them from their planning and, furthermore, turned them into one of the reasons, being a trap set by mercenary authors, to explain people's growing disinterest in the noble and edifying task of reading.

Homero did need and dream of making a living from his literature, but not at the cost of his dignity as an author. It might be comforting to earn income from the gullible by offering poorly crafted works rushed to generate quick and voluminous sales. But his perspective led him to rebel against marketing temptations, even if some might seem sensible. Perhaps his romanticism explained his poverty as much as his solitude. Should he change his perspective? In an instant, he reviewed his life and, questioning past decisions, wondered if it was worth it or if there was any substantial justification for doing so.

He pondered this while continuing to work in his garden, clearing away the remnants of his fury with the help of a borrowed shovel and a rake. The branches of all sizes and thicknesses, some already free of thorns and others retaining their spikes, transformed the landscape into a more desert-like and rugged scene than a flowery and friendly one. Weather forecasts predicted a severe global drought for the coming year, making it a great challenge for nature. Aware of this, Homero wanted to take precautions so that his garden would truly bear fruit without suffering in the same way as his characters and the places he envisioned in his head and in his literature.

What Homero was unaware of was that, just as inside the House of The Gaze, there were objects and sites outside that concealed portals to other paranormal dimensions, extraordinary, parallel universes.

In the garden, between the walls of the Spaniard House and the House of The Gaze, right behind the middle of the bougainvillea, where he had transplanted a small, fragile yet noble fig tree rooted from a cutting taken three years ago from the base of the tree in front of the neighboring House of the Angel, there was one of these portals. This portal led to a dimension inhabited by gnomes, elves, fairies, ogres, trolls, and other fantastical creatures who, despite their reality (not any less valid for being alternative) seemed like simple products of the imagination.

The crunch of dry branches and leaves underfoot made the space grumbling and mournful, a reminder that would hark back to the writer when, fond of etymologies, he once delved into the mysterious origin of the name "bougainvillea."