Grillo Aleph is a half-elf monk of the Order of the White Cherry Trees on the Hill of the Exarchs, in the Invisible Cities.
| Spanish entry | Grillo Aleph |
His plate shows him shaven, in gray wool with staff and straw sandals, on the snowy, blossoming hill, by a stele inscribed COLLE DEGLI ESARCHI — UT UNUM SINT, SED NON UNUM SUMUS.
Background
Son of a long-lived elf and a short-lived human, a forbidden union, he was raised by the Order, a Nestorian-Gnostic monastery of Buddhist geometry, learning Nestorian Christianity, Tibetan bodily discipline, and the Gnostic idea that one does not imitate Christ but becomes him.
Aleph, a school nickname for the quietest pupil of his generation, comes from the South American story a traveler left in the library (not the Hebrew letter): the point where all points of the cosmos coincide, used by the monks for meditation. He has not reached it; by rule, it comes when it comes, and the monk’s office is the path, not the point. What it is here is the Order’s inner teaching.
His recorded day sketches the Invisible Cities: a Tokugawa-style reign, the Hill as core, the Order as beacon.
Day zero
In Joteniem/Shotenim, the first city.
- Forbidden birth. Born wrapped in the black cloth of virility, he was tied to the seraglio of the emperor in the shadow, a kind of retired shogun who still rules. Possibly his mother’s slip was grave because she was reserved for royalty; or someone used the cloth to mark his double origin.
- Soul-rock. His order serves no god but a Stoic philosophy of natural law, in which the undead are the supreme aberration; it sends silent guardians against them. After the trials (embracing the burning pot, branding tiger and dragon) he received, in the same black cloth, a rock: “This is, for now, your soul.” It was warm and seemed to beat; he heard something like the Ring’s voice and chose not to look. “When you understand what you hold in your hand, you will be ready to return.”
The nickname is a homonym of the organization the Aleph.
Open questions
- The circumstances of his birth remain the mystery he seeks to solve.
Gallery
