She made his brain of the white sand from an hourglass, so that the child would always be afraid of the passing of time, and then added to the sand cemetery worms, so the child would always be afraid of death. One night, after she had told him a story (one of her terrible stories about mother deer pursued by hunters and caught up in forest fires, or mother elephants kept prisoner in cages in vile circuses … always lost children, sad, abandoned animals) Zephyr gave Cliormina a kiss. Zephyr didn’t understand what magic was helping him, but he accepted the gift of the lives of these little rodents because he knew that Cliormina didn’t have that much time.