Prologue: The Black Day

Come here grandmother, take a seat next to me, and let us be very clear. Tell me about those lines that crease your olive skin, leaving behind them endless trails of a thousand silent sorrows. Of the lost world in which only comfortable familiarity arose on the edge of the eastern sun towards the lands of the Prophet and dutifully set in the west towards the lands of those people who they told you were the Crusaders. Those days in which your friends were the laurel and the carob trees, and in which your lives were named with vivid events.