Beside La Llobregat.

He had left the terracotta boots behind. The heavy, clay-caked feet of the solitary warrior were now just feet again, and the imprints they left in the mud were no longer a burden, but a testament to a quiet victory. With the last of the clay behind him, he moved up from the banks of the Llobregat, guided by the wild, yellow flowers of the fennel that grew along the path. The paw prints that had been a silent companion, a separate and solitary track through the terracotta, were a memory now, an ephemeral mark to be washed away by the next rain or buried by the relentless march of time.

This was the truth he had found: the unity of his own quiet sufficiency and the enduring will of the Earth. He had seen the future, a terrifying vision of a world that had consumed itself, leaving behind only the broken monuments to its own hubris. He had heard the nightingale, a song of hope that would outlast the asphalt, and he had felt the weight of a lineage that stretched back through the millennia, a spiritual connection to the Mesolithic hunters who had walked this very earth.

Now, as the bells of sheep and their answering bleats echoed from the valley, he knew the pilgrimage was not an escape from the world, but a way of moving through it. The journey was not about avoiding the noise and the chaos, but about finding a way to carry the quiet within him. As he approached Manresa, he was returning to the World, to the world of Cain. But he was no longer a part of it. He was a Son of Seth, a wanderer and a wonderer, who had found his place in a story that was both ancient and new. He was a living prayer that even after the World had passed away, the Earth, with its mud, its rivers, and its fennel, would endure.