There is a place called Silencio Falls.

It's not to be found on any map, cannot be charted with any degree of accuracy. It's a location of the heart and soul, a place where reality crashes to a halt and leaves nothing but tears and confusion behind. It's a place that takes the laughter and light and sucks them into a deep pit of rushing, tumbling water, falling ever deeper into the abyss of how life changed.

There is a place called Silencio Falls. A place where spiders and impossible astronauts look down from above and rise up from the depths and shatter hearts and lives and hopes and dreams. A single shot, a missing word, a phone call, a letter…notes for goodbyes and secrets unspoken. Shouted names, shocked silence when the last body hits the ground, shuddering gasps as life departs from crucial eyes.

There is a place called Silencio Falls. Here, left-behind friends and satisfied enemies are left on the brink, feeling the spray wash up on their faces, listening to the cry of the tumbling tons of troubled water: a nearly human cry that sends chills down the spines of the most practical and weakens the knees of the sentimental. It cannot be the cry of those lost, but it cannot be merely waves of watery sound. It means something. It means everything.

There is a place called Silencio Falls. Where spiders fall to their own poison and astronauts sink beneath the sunset-dyed waves and loved ones weep without hope. They don't see—they cannot see—that Silencio Falls is not the end. For the fall can never be the end, just as it is not the beginning. The beginning was flight, the fall is the middle, and the rising is the end. It is the concept of the eucatastrophe. When all seems lost, all is darker than dark can be and deeper than grief and fear and hope…There is light. The eucatastrophe is the Great Turnaround. The Great Getting-Back-Up. The eucatastrophe is when the hero has fallen…but he's got an ace up his sleeve. One the spider's web didn't detect, one the astronaut's masters couldn't suspect. The eucatastrophe is the hero's return.

There is a place called Silencio Falls. But it is not the silence that triumphs, nor is it the fall. It is the love and loyalty and friendship and the knowledge that we have cheated death once more time. And Silencio Falls will become a byword. The name that meant sadness and death and grief that tastes like defeat will come to mean joy and life and belief. Believe in the hero. Believe that he has a plan. Believe that the spider will be crushed and his web torn to pieces. Believe that the impossible astronaut will be reclaimed and redeemed.

There is a place called Silencio Falls.