024: Into The Fire - Augustina of Aragon

Intro
[Intro Tone]
So, the story begins like this.
Stephen Gerard Siller was the youngest of seven children, and his childhood had been one of loss and hardship. When he was eight years old, his father died unexpectedly. A year and a half later, his mother passed away as well, leaving him an orphan to be raised by older siblings. Though he struggled for a time with feelings of abandonment and despair, his difficulties eventually led him from darkness toward a greater sense of empathy for others, a powerful sense of duty, and an outsized level of courage.
These personal qualities led Stephen to become a firefighter in New York City, where he was assigned to Brooklyn’s Squad 1. On September the 11th 2001, he had just finished his overnight shift. Stephen changed his clothes, got into his truck, and began driving to play golf with his brothers while casually listening over his scanner for reports of calls.
Suddenly, he took notice when the dispatcher announced that an airplane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in the heart of Manhattan. Although the World Trade Center had never been struck by an aircraft before, such incidents were not unheard of. A military bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building during WWII, and another military plane had hit the 40 Wall Street building just a few years later. However, these crashes had been precipitated by foggy conditions, and the morning of September 11th was bright and clear.
For whatever reason, Stephen decided that he needed to help. He called his wife Sally and asked her to tell his brothers that he would catch up with them later. He turned around and went back to Squad 1, collected his gear, and drove his truck to the entrance of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel – which provided access to the Twin Towers. He found the entrance to the tunnel closed for security purposes. Regardless, Stephen was determined to carry out his duty. He strapped the heavy gear onto his back and raced on foot through the tunnel toward the Twin Towers.
He was never seen again.
Minutes after he had disappeared into the tunnel, the first tower collapsed with Stephen somewhere beneath it. He died while trying to save others, while trying to turn the tide against the darkness, along with 440 other first responders, most of whom had run into the burning buildings to help as everyone else was streaming out.
Stephen and these others were not superhuman. They were not demigods. They were ordinary men and women who displayed extraordinary bravery when the courage of others was failing all around. They did this to make difference in the world, and they paid for their actions with their lives.
What they did that day has become the stuff of legends, but here is the thing. What they did happens around the world nearly every day as individuals put themselves in harm’s way for a greater cause, whatever that cause is. And every day, these courageous actions change lives and change communities. Some, like Stephen Siller, step into danger as part of their job – firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians, and the like.
However, many are just regular people who rise up in moments of calamity to do the improbable. Like Joseph Blankson of Nigeria, who when a boat capsized, dove into the water repeatedly to save 13 people before drowning while trying to save just one more. Or like 71-year-old William Ayotte of Canada who confronted a bear while armed with a shovel to stop it from mauling his neighbor. Or Vicki Williams-Tillman, a small woman who rushed to the aid of a wounded police officer and helped overpower the man who was trying to kill him.
The compulsion to “do something” in the face of danger is usually some combination of a moral reaction and a chemical one. As with most creatures, we possess a “fight, flight, or freeze” instinct that has served us well since the dawn of our species. When flight is available, we usually choose it. When it is not, we tend to freeze. However, every once in a while, an ordinary person who has the opportunity to flee or simply not get involved instead rushes headlong into danger, driven by complex factors that only emerge in the moment of decision. Sometimes, these actions are forgotten very quickly.
But sometimes, they echo through the centuries.
Hello! And welcome to another episode of Plot Twisted History, where we dive down historical rabbit holes in search of the stories with surprises and plot twists along the way. I’m your host, David Nix, a writer of historical fiction and an amateur public historian. Today, we meet an ordinary woman caught in dire circumstances whose singular act of courage altered history.
[Opening Music]
Act 1: Courage
Now, the story I’m about to tell you has been mythologized. This is true of almost any story of heroism as people tend to lionize the hero or twist their actions to suit a particular narrative. In this case, we have some conflicting accounts and conjectures. That said, I will attempt to draw a bright line between what we know for certain and where the narratives blur. This won’t be simple, as we have narratives in three languages, and each has mythologized this tale in different ways. Nevertheless, away we go.
The year is 1786. The young married couple of Pedro and Raimunda are living in the Ribera district of Barcelona performing jobs of manual labor. They are a humble family from a small rural village who have come to the city for better prospects, and Raimunda is pregnant. In March of that year, she gives birth to a little girl whom they name Augustia Raimunda Maria. Because they are a peasant family, they have no surname. Surnames are for notables, not for the daughters of manual laborers.
As with many historical figures, we know very little Augustina’s early childhood other than that she was baptized in the Barcelona church of Santa Maria del Mar and lived sometimes in her parents’ home village of Fulleda. However, by the time she is 13 years old, we begin to see something of who she is. Attractive, intelligent, curious, and strong-willed, Augustina can be found visiting places where her parents would rather she not be.
In particular, she begins hanging around the soldier barracks where there are, well, soldiers. At least one of the soldiers takes notice of her. His name is Juan Roca, and he is a dashing corporal in an artillery regiment. At the age of seventeen she marries Juan, possibly because she is pregnant. In any case, she soon gives birth to a son whom they call Eugenio. Because she is married to a soldier now, she becomes a military wife who goes with her husband to his various postings around Spain. It is not such a bad life. Although Europe is in turmoil because of a man called Napoleon, Spain is allied with him and, therefore, safe.
Or so it seems.
This illusion of safety begins to unravel in the year 1807 when Augustina is 21 years old. The War of the Fourth Coalition has just ended, and Napoleon is irritated that Portugal continues to trade with Napoleon’s archest enemy – Great Britain. When Portugal resists his demands to stop the trade, Napoleon invades Portugal. He does so by marching through the lands of his ally, Spain, to reach Portugal.
However, Spain is only a tenuous ally. Social unrest grips the country, and Spanish leadership is looking for a way out of its close alliance with France. Napoleon knows this and decides to do something about it. After defeating and occupying Portugal, Napoleon marches on Spain. In May of 1808, he forces the abdication of its king and seats his brother, Joseph, on the throne.
In response to this and the murder of hundreds of citizens of Madrid, the people of Spain erupt into full revolt. Napoleon’s forces begin pushing north at an astonishing pace, taking one Spanish city after another. At some point during this period, Juan Roca is promoted to sergeant and sent to fight against the French. To protect his family, he sends Augustina and their son about as far north as they can go to remain out of harm’s way: the city of Zaragoza, which is possibly the home of Augustina’s sister.
A Roman-founded city, Zaragoza had fallen under the sway of Muslim invaders during the middle ages and became the capital of the Al-Andalus. After returning to Christian control in the twelfth century, it remained an important city as the capital of the Kingdom Aragon. Despite its tumultuous history, Zaragoza of 1808 has not been attacked by an army in 450 years. Furthermore, the city walls are thick, Zaragoza houses a garrison ready to defend the city, and it is led by a capable man, José de Palafox. It seems to Juan Roca like the safest of havens during a chaotic time.
As the French continue their relentless push north, they push a flood of refugees before them, like chaff driven before the storm. These refugees end up crowding into the walled area of Zaragoza, choking the streets with people and animals.
On June the 15th of 1808, the inevitable happens. An army of French troops under the leadership of General Lefebvre (le-fev-re) appear at the walls of the city and launch an attack. They choose as their attack point the Portillo Gate, which they consider the weak link in the walls.
As it happens, a Spanish artillery unit consisting of several cannons and a brigade of artillery men is stationed at the gate. Because of her familiarity with artillery units and artillery men, Augustina has assigned herself the task of helping the men by ferrying food and water to the artillery position. As the attack commences, she is there at the gate making deliveries.
She witnesses the initial French attack, which kills or wounds more than fifty defenders, including most of the artillery men. The few remaining gunners, covered by sharpshooters in the nearby building, are working frantically to reload and fire a huge twenty-four-pound cannon with the help of a few civilians who have braved the bullets. Through the smoke, though, the defenders see a line of French infantry advancing rapidly with bayonets fixed. They are storming the gate and will arrive in moments.
This is the instant of fight, flight, or freeze for those defenders at the wall. The civilians break first, rushing back toward the town square. Within seconds, the last surviving gunners decide that defending the position is hopeless, and they begin to retreat, leaving their dying comrades behind. Nothing stands between the advancing French soldiers and the city of Zaragoza except a few sandbags, a scatter of corpses, and the exposed backs of all those who are fleeing.
This is the beginning of the end for Zaragoza. The scale has tilted, and the French are seconds away from invading the city as every defender runs away.
Well, not every defender.
One remains. As those fleeing look back over their shoulders, they witness an improbable sight. A young dark-haired woman emerges through the haze of smoke and dust on a dead run toward the big cannon, ignoring the hail of shots from both sides. When she reaches the cannon, she snatches the still smoldering linstock from the hand of a dying gunner and touches it to the fuse.
The big gun roars. In an instant, the single file line of advancing French infantrymen disintegrates, cut to pieces by the cannon’s shrapnel. Then, the woman turns to face the now frozen defenders. She shouts for them to return to the fight – and begins reloading the cannon.
The young woman, as you might have guessed, is our Augustina. She has been married to an artillery man for five years, and as I mentioned, she is intelligent, curious, and determined. During those five years, she had learned how to load and fire artillery of all kinds.
And now, that is exactly what she does. Astonished by the sight of a lone woman in a billowing skirt defending the city against an attacking army, the defenders find new depths of courage, turn as one, and rush to the cannon. They help her reload it and fire it almost point-blank into a second wave of French invaders. Meanwhile, the newly inspired defenders begin pouring musket fire into the gap, even while Augustina leads her band of civilian volunteers in reloading the cannon as musket balls whiz past her ears.
In the face of the fierce and unexpected resistance, the French attack wavers before collapsing in retreat. As the enemy takes flight, the people of Zaragoza look around with bewildered disbelief. The act of a single young woman, Augustina, has saved the gate from certain capture, and has thus saved the entire city. Not only that, this marks one of the first times a group of civilians defeat an army in direct combat. The result is no less than shocking, and the reason for the success is nearly beyond belief.
With the failure of the attack, the French general decides he no longer has enough men to storm Zaragoza, so he retreats from the city. When the story of what happened at the Portillo Gate leaks out into the world, Agustina's heroic action seizes the imagination of all Spain, and then of all Europe. The popular heroic image of a slender girl, leaping forward to take the place of the dying gunner, then firing the great cannon single-handedly and remaining by it to defy the oncoming French and put heart into her fellow-countrymen? Well, it is both romantic and inspiring.
From that moment, Agustina comes to symbolize the heroism and determination of every Spaniard who stands against the might of Napoleon, the odds be damned. However, is it enough?
[Transition Music]
Act 2: Resistance
Now, what I just described to you likely happened just as I told it. Multiple sources describe the battle in much the same way, and all agree that Augustina faced the French alone at one point and fired the cannon that stopped their advance.
What happens next begins diverging from account to account, and sometimes, dipping into myth. For example, some accounts say that General Palafox, who was leading the city’s defense, witnessed Augustina’s heroism first-hand and granted her the post of artillery gunner with corresponding pay, meaning she would wear the rank of sergeant. This can’t be confirmed. Regardless, she did become an active part of the city’s defense, rather than just a young woman relegated to delivering food. How do we know this?
Well, because history calls this attack by the French “The First Siege of Zaragoza.” Which means there is a second siege, and it comes too soon on the heels of the first. After six months of shoring up their control of Spain elsewhere, the French return to Zaragoza with a larger and better armed force to finish the job they had started earlier.
In the meantime, General Palafox has accrued 30,000 soldiers and 10,00 armed volunteers to defend the city from the next French attack. The French arrive with 40,000 troops and begin to bombard the walls of Zaragoza on January 17th, 1809. Ten days later, they breach the city walls in three places. However, the Spaniards have turned the city into a series of barricades that force the French to take the town street by street.
To add to the chaos, the entire citizenry is taking an active role in the conflict, either fighting or loading weapons or tending to the wounded. And the city has become a death trap for both sides. This viscous street fighting lasts for three weeks before the now ill Palafox resigns his post and the city surrenders. The death toll for the six-week battle is horrific. The French lose 10,000 soldiers to battle wounds and disease. However, Zaragoza suffers 54,000 dead, including three-quarters of the civilian population.
So, what has happened to Augustina during the second siege? Again, the narratives shift into contradictions. The Spanish narrative claims that she fought as an artillery gunner at the city walls and even outside of them, wading at times into close combat with the enemy. She did so until she fell ill and withdrew from the front line. As the French took the city, she was captured along with her son and sent toward the town of Ólvega. However, we must leave it here for a moment while I tell you a second and more remarkable narrative.
A French soldier by the name of Francois Billon fought in the bloody battle where he claims to have seen, met, and spoken to the now-famous Augustina, now know widely as Augustina Zaragoza or Augustina of Aragon. She has a surname now, one earned through remarkable courage.
Billon later wrote a memoir of his travels, including the siege of Zaragoza, and he might have exaggerated or even invented the meeting with Augustina. We don’t know for sure. However, in the interest of drama, let’s at least hear what he says.
He first sees her from a distance during a street battle, a woman in a sea of men defending a street from the invaders. From that moment, he becomes fascinated with her, writing of her, “in creating this marvel, heaven has exhausted in her all its resources of beauty, delicacy, and vigor". He says she has been promoted, has been given a gunner’s pay, and wears a shield of honor embroidered on her sleeve.
As the street battles wind to a conclusion, Billon enters the house of a wealthy person where fifteen French grenadiers have gone in search of plunder. There, they encountered a small group of Spaniards that includes Augustina and are involved in a pitched gun battle.
Agustina, he writes, is in the act of ordering the outnumbered French to lay down their weapons or be killed when Billon and a detachment of infantry storm the house and save their comrades. A sergeant holds the woman by the throat after the rest of the Spaniards have been killed or driven off. When at last the sergeant releases her from his grip, she appeals to Billon with these words:
"I have made a count of persons dead in Zaragoza since December 21 until February 21, the day of our entry into this city. 54,000 odd persons have died. It is inconceivable. Since our entry a good 3,000 to 10,000 more have died, so that this city is at this moment reduced to about 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants. It is impossible that Zaragoza should ever recover. This city is a horror to behold."
Now, did this really happen? Did she really say these things? Again, we don’t know. However, the fact that the French believe this story about her is a testimony to her fame and the great respect and fascination they hold for her as a worthy opponent.
At this point, the narratives converge. Billon records that Augustina is taken prisoner along with her young son and sent westward. When Augustina and her boy reach the town of Ólvega, her son dies – either of illness, malnutrition, or just plain fatigue. At this point, Augustina’s world has collapsed. Her husband is far away. Her son is dead. Her adopted city has been destroyed. She is a prisoner of the French and on a forced march. This could be the end of her story – and if so – it has been a remarkable one.
However.
This is not the end. The death of her son appears to the restore Augustina’s determination to resist the French. She and a few others make a daring escape from their French captors and flee into the countryside. She makes her way to the city of Teruel where she meets with the military leaders of Aragon. They send her on to Seville to meet with the Central Junta – the effective government of northern Spain that still fights the French.
Now, the Central Junta consists of elite men in a society where women remain deeply second class. Nevertheless, they thank Augustina for her contribution to the defense of Zaragoza. At this point, you might expect them to pat her on the head and send her away. But they do not. The Central Junta instead promotes Augustina to the rank of second lieutenant and sends her to meet with the leader of the British forces that have come to aid the Spanish – General Wellington. You know. The man who will lead the effort in finally defeating Napoleon. But that is still five years away.
After meeting with Wellington, Augustina returns to the resistance, where she collects a band of freedom fighters and organizes raids to harass the French. The British narrative claims that Wellington himself provides training and supplies to Augustina and her band.
As 1809 drifts into 1810, the allied British and Spanish begin to turn the tide against the French army. By the end of 1810, Augustina is serving in a battery in the defense of the city of Tortosa where, once again, she is captured by the French. And once again, she escapes. The British narrative says that after this incident, Wellington brings Augustina into his army, where she rises to the rank of captain as Wellington’s only female officer.
According to that same narrative, she is present at the pivotal Battle of Vitoria in 1813 where the allies finally break the French Army and end the war in Spain and Portugal. During that battle, so the story goes, Augustina leads a front-line battery. Now, the British version is disputed. That said, this either happened that way, or she was so famous and such a figure of resistance that historians conspired to write her into the narrative – which is the direct opposite of what usually happens to women. Usually, they are erased from the narrative. So regardless, the fact that this narrative even exists – is remarkable.
[Transition Music]
Act 3: Echoes
With the long war finally ended, Augustina is final able to reunite with her husband back in the shattered city of Zaragoza. There, she learns that the king himself has granted her a military pension for as long as she lives. She and her husband return to her childhood home of Barcelona, where in 1818, she gives birth to her second son. However, her newfound peace is not to last. Her husband Juan dies of what is probably tuberculosis in 1823. At the age of 37, then, Agustina is widowed and with the care of a 5-year-old son.
Less than a year later, however, she marries a doctor called Juan Cobos, with whom she lives in Valencia and with whom she has a daughter called Carlota.
Shortly afterwards, the family moves to Seville, where Agustina’s son goes on to study medicine, which he practices until his death in 1885. In 1847, Carlota marries a soldier who is stationed in the North African Spanish city of Ceuta (soo-tuh). At odds with her husband over politics, Augustina decides to move to Ceuta with her daughter. There she lives out her last years until her death from a lung ailment on the 29th of May 1857, at the age of 71.
Two weeks later, the City Council of Zaragoza lays claim to her remains. Over a decade later, a procession accompanies her coffin through a tour of Spanish cities, where she is paid military honors in Cadiz, Seville, and Madrid before arriving back in Zaragoza. There, she is buried in the Basilica of El Pilar.
In 1908, her remains are transferred to the church of El Portillo, not far from where she’d leaped into the world’s imagination by standing alone against a French army.
Now, if I had to guess, I’d say that most of you listening to this story are learning about Augustina of Aragon for the first time, or perhaps you’ve heard the name but not the details of her story. While she is an iconic figure in Spain, equivalent in stature to Joan of Arc, her story has not persisted in much of the rest of the world. That said, her legacy has, whether you are aware of it or not.
The famous British poet, Lord Byron, had gone on a European tour even while war was raging. While in Seville in 1811, he might have met the famous Augustina in person. When he returns to Britain, Byron wrote the work that would put him on the map, called “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage”. This book of poetry was a partially fictionalized tale of his travels.
In it, he wrote about none other than Augustina of Aragon. What he writes is almost surely fiction, but it makes for great reading. And through his smash hit book, everyone read what he’d written about her, true or not. He did meet her later – that we know for sure.
Also, In Francisco Goya’s famous painting, The Disasters of War, Augustina is the only recognizable figure – a lone woman lighting the fuse of a cannon. You’ve almost certainly laid eyes this picture at some point in your life.
All that said, if I left it here, the life of Augustina of Aragon would be truly extraordinary. However, you might ask the obvious question. Sure, her actions pivoted the first siege of Zaragoza that spared the city. But if the city eventually fell anyway, did she really affect history? Or is her contribution to the world today just as an incredible but fading story of heroism?
These are good questions.
With all the competing narratives about Augustina’s life, we experience a significant level of fog about what she really accomplished during the war. However, with all the myth, we can realistically nail down one piece of truth – her heroism at the cannon at the Portillo gate. Why? Because so many independent sources report approximately the same story.
If you dismiss virtually everything else said about her as myth, this singular act of resistance would stand on its own in a way that ripples through time. And why is that, you ask?
Well, to answer this question, I’d like you to come along with me as I pull a plausible thread.
During the first siege of Zaragoza, the city was moments away from collapsing when Augustina ran to the cannon, lit it, and initiated the defeat and withdrawal of the French. Had the city fallen, it would have been off the board. However, because it remained a free city, the French would need to come back to it.
During the months between the first siege and second siege, the British army in Portugal had been in a fighting retreat toward the western Spanish coast for evacuation. The French forces caught them embarking at the port city of Corunna. However, they did not have quite enough soldiers to stop the British from embarking, and so 26,000 seasoned British soldiers escaped capture. And why did the French not have enough men to stop to the British escape? Well, in part, because they had committed a huge force to siege Zaragoza a second time. And those same British troops would return later to begin pushing the French out of Spain.
Meanwhile, the second siege of Zaragoza shook French military morale to the core. The French had run roughshod over the regular armies of Europe under the leadership of Napoleon. They were not only used to winning, but to winning easily when faced with lesser foes.
What happened instead was a well-trained French army needed two months to take a single Spanish city at the cost of 10,000 dead and only after they had killed most of the city’s population. The primary reason for the difficulty was the almost fanatical resistance put up by the defenders, most of them not soldiers. And one of the reasons for the fanatical defense of Zaragoza was the collective desire of the city’s inhabitants to emulate the resistance of their hero – Augustina of Aragon.
The French concluded that if every city was this hard to capture, then how could they possibly hold Spain? Their worst fears were realized when the city of Zaragoza and its two most famous fighters, Augustina and General Palafox, became not only national symbols of defiance, but international symbols of resistance against Napoleon.
What emerged as a result was Guerilla warfare, where small bands of Spanish citizens, including one band led by Augustina, harassed the French at every turn. The guerrilla style of fighting was the Spanish military's single most effective tactic, and it facilitated the conventional victories of Wellington and his Anglo-Portuguese army and the subsequent liberation of Portugal and Spain.
The defeat of Napoleon in Spain in 1813, led to his defeat in France in 1814 and his abdication. When he returned a year later, he was defeated again at Waterloo. His defeat led to the Congress of Vienna, where European leaders met to restore pre-Napoleonic borders but also to create a power balance on the European continent.
This was a noble cause, but it had disastrous unforeseen consequences. In the new power vacuum, European nations began to form new alliances all while treading ever deeper into the cesspool of uber-nationalism. This pot would simmer for nearly a century through a series of smaller wars before erupting into all-out conflict in 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand precipitated World War I.
The over-the-top punishment of Germany after that war, even though its role had been little different from those of the victors, led to an economic collapse in the country. That collapse seeded the ground for the rise of the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler, who plunged Europe into a second world war that saw tens of millions of people die.
The chaos in the aftermath of World War II led to an expanded Soviet Union, which Western Europe and the United States countered with NATO. This led to the Cold War, the space race, the moon shot, and runaway nuclear proliferation. Even though the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, one of its dregs, former KGB agent Vladimer Putin, continues to wage war on the continent driven by ideologies left over from the Cold War.
So, if you turn sideways and squint a bit, you can draw a crooked line from Augustina’s lighting of the cannon at the Portillo Gate on June 15, 1808 and the military, political, and social landscape of the past two centuries up until today.
What if an unknown woman hadn’t lit that cannon, or what if she’d been cut down in the attempt? What if the French had taken Zaragoza that day, and had not been forced to spend men and time besieging it a second time? What if the British had not escaped at Corunna as a result? What if the French had held Spain more comfortably against a less inspired populace? What if, as a result, Napoleon had not gone down to defeat, but remained the ruler of an ascendant French Empire and passed that power down to his descendants?
Would the world wars have happened as they did? Or when they did? What would the world look like today as a result? I can’t say, and none of us can. However, it is quite possible that Augustina’s single act of defiance still echoes through who we are to this day.
All that said, one question remains. Why did Augustina run through a hail of shot toward the bayonets of an invading force when everyone else had turned to run? Unfortunately, we have little in her own words to answer the question. However, I believe we can say this.
At some point in her life, Augustina had decided that she was the kind of person who would endanger herself to do what she thought was right. So, when that moment actually arrived, she did not falter as those around her did. She did not dither while trying to decide if she was the kind of person who would rush the enemy. Given the instant and determined manner in which she ran for the cannon, she already knew who she was.
In my opinion, this is the great lesson of Augustina of Aragon. That each of us should decide if we are the kind of person who would race into a burning building to save strangers, or jump into a river to rescue the drowning, or fight off a bear to save a neighbor’s life. Or, run toward the fight rather than away from it.
We must decide who we are before those dramatic moments arise and not wait until we are in them to determine who we are. In doing so, we can all be heroes in the making, heroes ready for the moment, heroes ready to change the life of another person. And every once in a while, an individual act of heroism can literally change the world.
And that, my friends, is the story.
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Outro
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If you want to learn more, I recommend the novel Augustina of Aragon by Gail Meath, but not as a historical read. It is historical fiction where the author has taken liberties to fill in the unknowns, but it is a good read all the same. Her story has been put on film twice, in 1929 and 1950, and both in Spanish films. Sadly, she has been neglected in much of the rest of the world, but hopefully that will change. Who knows. I might write about her.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Plot Twisted History. I have been your host, David Nix. If you found this podcast interesting, you can help expand its reach by leaving a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. And please, recommend this podcast to others who might find it interesting.
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And so, until we meet again, may your story hold surprises and your plots be slightly twisted.