"I met her backstage for the second time after a performance in Cairo. We spoke for about an hour and agreed to establish a correspondence. Five years, two dozen meetings and one hundred and one letters later she was my wife. I had offered, as a grandiose measure, to marry her in the Grand Mosque of Cordova, and she held me to it. It cost me a fortune and about a dozen political favors to pull it off. But it was worth every peseta."

"You really didn't tell her about yourself until after you were married?"

"Well," he hesitated, "not entirely. She knew about me, I told her I was different." He leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and smiled as though remembering gave him great pleasure. "I used to tell her stories about myself; nations I'd visited that no longer exist, events hundreds of years ago that I was witness to, descriptions of people I'd known. She thought they were fantasy at first, that I made them up as I told them or thought them out elaborately days before a scheduled rendezvous. She figured it out in the end. What I didn't tell her was that there was a society of us. She was angry at first, Moroccan women are renowned for their volatility, but when I explained the reason for the secrecy she understood, or at least accepted it."

I stood up to stretch my legs and examine more of the paintings. "Poppy mentioned something about what led to the secrecy. She said there was a member who got everyone killed."

"Yes," he nodded. "Brevicepts was her name. And that's exactly what happened. She got herself and the other four killed and caused the treasury to be looted, but more importantly, she threatened to do it again after they all came back. Brevicepts wanted to sack the villages that had turned on them. She felt it was our divine right as palingenesists to rule over humanity, she thought we were endowed as we are with that purpose in mind. The Cognomina had lost everything because of her megalomaniacal fantasies. The others beseeched her to moderate and live in comfort and anonymity like before, but it was no use. The other four had attributed her conduct to madness. And that madness had attached itself to the part of us that transcends, and it returned to her as soon as she began to remember. In the end, the other four decided that excommunication was the only option. The decision, they agreed, had to be unanimous. The old man, who sits in the center of the panel during your Ascension, do you remember him?"

"Yes?" I said, turning around to face him.

"He had to cast the final vote in favor."

"What happened to her?"

"What do you think happened to her? She left and died eventually, and was reborn like us and died again and again and again. She's out there somewhere tonight, alone probably." There was no mistaking the remorse in his voice.