Legend XXXIX – El Dorado

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On nights when the jungle breathed like a single sleeping animal, the ancients told of a city whose walls were made of light and whose streets glowed like liquid gold in the heart of the earth. They called it El Dorado, but no one knew if it was a place or a curse, a dream or a memory from a time before time. The legend always began with the same sentence: “He who seeks the city of the golden king loses first himself, then the world.” Nevertheless, they all searched. The last to dare was a man named Serafin, a cartographer whose maps recorded not only countries but also lost thoughts. On a starry night that stretched across the sky like a frayed cloth, he found a piece of parchment, thin as snakeskin, on which burned only a single golden mark: a circle traversed by a line that never ended. “The path,” whispered Serafin, “begins where the light dies.” And so he entered the jungle. The days lost their measure. Fog devoured the sun, the nights swallowed his breath. But the deeper Serafin went, the more often he heard them—the voices. They sounded neither human nor animal, more like the soft glide of metal on stone. “Turn back,” it whispered, “El Dorado takes what you are.” But Serafin put one foot in front of the other, for within him another hunger had long since burned: the hunger for truth, even when it burns. On the seventh night, a man appeared to him, enveloped in gold dust that gathered in the air like pollen. His face was blank, yet his eyes glowed like two polished suns. “I am the guardian,” he said. “The city demands sacrifices. No one enters it without a price.” “What is the price?” asked Serafin. The guardian smiled. “Memory.” Serafin knew he had gone too far to flee. So he followed the guardian through a crevice in the rock that opened like a breath. Beyond it lay the city—El Dorado, the dream of gold. Towers shimmering like liquid twilight, streets made of veins of metal, and above it all a hum, as if the city itself were alive. But Serafin immediately felt something tugging at him. His name, at first just a whisper, detached itself from him like an overripe thread. It fell to the street and turned to dust. “The gold lives,” said the guardian. “It feeds on those who seek it.” Serafin finally understood: El Dorado was not a treasure, but a being. A city that built its walls from the memories of those who sought it. Every dream, every hope, every thought—they became gold, glittering and dead.