Racho is the boy born of an infernal birth in a forest beyond a portal, who is carried off by the old midwife Mamá Racha and seen twenty years later in a tavern. His story is told as “like the founding of Teodora”.
| Type | Characters (a boy and the midwife who took him) |
| Appears in | Invisible Cities (infernal interlude; epilogue) |
| Father | Armagedón |
| Spanish entry | Racho y mamá Racha |
The birth
On the far side of the portal, in the forest on a cool morning, a pregnant woman gives birth on the blanket of a magus king. The boy has dark hair and bright green eyes. The mother dies: Armagedón’s seed is infernal and potent, and the accelerated growth destroys her organs. Luca, who could never be a hero for his family, acts as midwife.
Mamá Racha
An old midwife, wrinkled, was called “mamarracha” and the name stuck as Mamá Racha. She looks at the newborn with maternal instinct, wraps him and carries him off through the morning forest. She was a witch: she gave everyone water of the Styx so that nobody would ever remember the birth.
Racho at twenty
Twenty years later he is seen in a tavern in the conurbano, shirtless, with a tattoo, using an archmage’s tunic as a rug on his bedroom floor, eating a fruit and throwing the pit out the window. He had passed through the Pits of Azharul, through the green, the red, all the colors.
Teodora
This was “like the founding of Teodora”: the city that seeks God, whose people persecute the woman who made her son pay. There the color code was founded: the blue of government, the red of blood, the green; the greens and blues of the factions of the Byzantine circus. Teodora is a sealed world behind the portal, without magic or pantheons, dual between the church and the Amazons, between God and Tiamat.