(100) Barely enough time to turn the page.

On one of the islands of the Terra Archipelagos, lashed by storms and uncannily resembling an upright mirror, Lucian, much like the Moon Child before him, stands facing the ocean of our uncertainties. Within this mirror rises proudly a makeshift theatre—improvised, certainly, yet alive—inhabited by fragments and fables, where the wind itself becomes a character... or the author of a wandering speech drifting from world to world.
On certain eastward-facing slopes, where the light lingers longer, pioneer plants establish themselves. A careful eye may distinguish tiny sea fig trees, slender aloes with fleshy leaves edged in copper-coloured thorns, and, close to the ground, black mosses that seem to absorb light rather than reflect it... before... a moment later, scarcely enough time to turn the page... everything has vanished.

While Lucian travels through the Archipelago seeking the traces of those who came before him, Félix rediscovers in his notebooks the continuation of a letter from Lucian that he had eventually forgotten.

Félix... I am going to make a strange confession.
At times I find myself thinking that certain figures are born before the beings who will one day bear them.
You can already see the danger of such a thought... and I perceive it myself... But hear me out to the end. When a figure truly appears, it generates around itself a series of coherences that seem retrospective. Suddenly old memories become readable. Encounters acquire another meaning. Isolated images come together like fragments of metal drawn by the same magnet buried beneath a table.
That is precisely what troubles me about the drawings.
At first, I believed they represented something. Today I am beginning to fear that they produce something. Do you understand the difference?
The first hypothesis still belongs to the order of sight. The second concerns the order of causes.
What if certain images were not merely reflections, but agents?
What if they possessed that silent power of the verae causae of which Herschel spoke?
I can already hear you protesting that I am drifting dangerously toward symbolism or superstition. Perhaps. Yet the ancients sometimes knew how to recognize what our age refuses even to name: certain forms transform reality simply because they reorganize attention, memory, expectation, and desire.
After all, an entire nation may die for a flag that is nothing more than a piece of cloth.
A man may cross a continent for a face glimpsed only once.
A childhood may be governed for fifty years by a sentence overheard on a staircase or from behind a door.
Why should figures be any less real than stones?
I shall go further still.
I am beginning to suspect that the most powerful characters are not invented by their authors in the naïve sense of the term. They emerge. They condense slowly through readings, memories, fears, copies, voices heard behind doors, dreams whose ownership no one truly claims.
Then, one day, someone serves as their passage.
Perhaps that is the true writer: not the one who creates, but the one who lets them enter.
I shall stop here. Not because I have nothing more to say, but because certain ideas become more dangerous the more clearly one formulates them...
And besides, it is very late. The sea strikes the cliffs like an immense black respiration.
The drawings, though still turned against the wall, nevertheless give me the absurd impression that they continue to watch me.

Lucian