“Her? Your sister? That is your question? Very well. She lives.”
A ten-year-old boy named Peter is training to become a soldier, brave and true. In reality, he is not particularly interested in becoming a soldier, but his parents are dead and a comrade of his father has become his guardian, basically exerting complete authority and autonomy over the boy. That guardian, a man named Vilna Lutz, also tells Peter that his younger sister is dead. Peter is inclined to believe Vilna since he is a soldier, brave and true, but a feeling deep inside nags away at him, insistently whispering that his sister is alive and well somewhere and needs his help. He just has to find her. His first step on that mission is the visit to a fortuneteller. Upon asking the natural follow-up question of where she is if she is, indeed, alive, the fortuneteller’s response is much more ambiguous. She informs Peter that he must follow the elephant and the elephant will lead him to where he needs to go.
"And in the cold, dark dorm room at the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, Adele continued to dream of the elephant. The dream was so persistent that Adele could, after a time, repeat verbatim the words that the elephant spoke to Sister Marie when she came to the door."
Peter’s six-year-old sister is alive. Her name is Adele and she has spent her life inside the cold and dark environs of an orphanage. She does not even she has a brother, much less anything specifically about Peter. Nevertheless, an image of an elephant connects the two across time and space. While Peter prepares him to search for any elephant that may happen to cross his path, Adele’s nights are filled with dreams of an elephant that speaks. The particularly important thing the elephant referenced in the quote above is murky and unclear but still manages to fill the little girl with hope in the cold and dark. In her dream, she overhears the elephant saying to Sister Marie that it is the child she calls Adele she has come for and to keep.
“I intended only lilies. That was my intention: a bouquet of lilies.”
The magician had been performing for a crowded audience inside the Bliffendorf Opera House who was, collectively speaking, comprehensively unimpressed. Tricks were performed to perfection with the expectation of satisfaction, yet there they all sat impatiently waiting for the magic act to reach its inevitably end and then clear the stage for the magic of a master violinist. The intention was to produce a bouquet of lilies, but at that moment before actually performing the trick, the magician was suddenly overcome by an epiphany of existential dread: he had wasted his entire life performing these routine magic tricks before audiences that routinely failed to appreciate the wonder of it all. And so, in a single moment of an ill-advised decision to assert meaning to his life through sheer force of will, he alters the spell intended to produce a bouquet of lilies so that what magically appears from nowhere and transforms from nothing is not a group of flowers one can hold in one’s hand, but an enormous beast that smelled of apples and dung and inside which actually beat a living heart. And like that, the concept of an elephant is conveyed to Peter and the dream of the elephant inspiring hope in Adele becomes flesh and blood and very real. In addition, she also arrives with a built-in purpose to her magical appearance, though this isn’t clear at the moment.
