That night, Antonio dreams of violence: Lupito, Narciso, and Florence — the outcasts from town, those for whom Antonio prayed the Act of Contrition. He also sees his young friends attack one another with sticks and knives. Cico spears the golden carp and the waters run red. A priest desecrates the church altar. Florence tells him that the old gods are dying and points to the hills, where Tenorio has killed the night-spirit of Ultima, now dying in agony. Overwhelmed by all the destruction and violence, Antonio asks why God has forsaken him — and he awakens, sobbing. Ultima comforts him and suggests that he has seen too much death; growing, she says, involves change, and life is filled with sadness when a boy becomes a man. It is time for him to go to his uncles in El Puerto, where he will learn about growth, about "growing life."
Before Antonio leaves, Maria asks Ultima to bless them both. Antonio kisses Ultima and, driving away with his father, knows that he will never again see his sisters, his mother, nor Ultima in the same beauty of that sunny morning.
On the journey, Gabriel tells his son that he himself became a man when he was about seven years old, while he was learning the art of being a good sheepherder. Now it is time that Antonio learn to make a man of himself. The days of freedom on the great plains are over, and Antonio must take what is valuable from Gabriel's heritage, his strong sense of Márez freedom, and yoke it with his steady, settled Luna heritage and thereby create something new from the materials of the past. All the things that are antithetical, Antonio realizes, must be coalesced into a new reality: the plains and the river valley, the moon and the sea, and even God and the golden carp — all must merge and be changed, for religion itself must change when it cannot answer the questioning needs of the people.
