Maglavit is not just a plain village, lost between the Danube and the vast sky. It is a place where, for a few weeks in 1935, reality seemed to thin, as if the earth had allowed a glimpse of something older than the world itself. A nearly mute shepherd claimed he had met an Elder — a white, ageless being, whose gaze could turn people from their path. That was all it took. The plains filled with people, and the Danube seemed to hold its breath. People spoke of lights, of moments when the air...

Akili drifted through space, listening to the piano humming softly in his headphones. He had long since slipped away from his shuttle and had chosen to die beautifully. Around him, only the primordial darkness remained, and a silence as old as time itself. Far away, at the outer rim of the abyss, a single point glimmered: lost in the boundlessness, no larger than a grain of dust from the planet he had loved. It seemed to move toward him—yet how slowly it came…He no longer thought of oxygen,...

September 15, 1986 — the start of the school year in a Romania trembling under the increasingly criminal regime of Comrade Dictator Ceaușescu. George and I, Angelo, were beginning our second year at Mihai Viteazul High School, the best in Bucharest, the capital of the country. All we wanted was to be left alone to enjoy a carefree adolescence. But that was without reckoning with the school’s communist administration and its lackeys — our teachers — who were determined to transform us into...