Just outside the tent, the world seemed to be on fire. A red moon hugged the tips of the mountains, almost too large to believe. At first Adelaida thought that they had perhaps come to a new world where the moon was always red, not off-white. But then she saw the corpses being burned in massive piles, the flames rising up higher than many trees. The smoke itself was red-tinged, and it was through that screen that the moon took on its sickly visage.
Adelaida was mesmerized by it. The features of the man in the moon, which always seemed to her to be a man singing, now seemed to be a man screaming from pain. She looked down, trying to focus on a mundane detail, any mundane detail at all. She found, instead, the eyes of her father.
Mirnían stared directly at her with a look she hardly recogn
