She stopped herself from doing so and looked up. “How is everyone? Do you know?” she asked.
“Balthazar made his family proud. His father had tears in his eyes when he hugged him tight and welcomed him home.” He chuckled. “Harvard is now the leader of the pack. Siphon has become an archangel and works for Michael and the best thing is, Capernaum’s statue is made in Heaven and the words, ‘The Loyal Servant,’ are written upon it. As for Raphael, he is...well, let’s say like every other rogue angel, he had disappeared.”
“That’s actually really good.” She beamed. It was the first hearty smile she had given in months. “It’s great.”
“I never told anyone, but the cane which Caspar used was my seal.” “But I thought you gifted him . . .”
“I gifted him my seal. It was safe and it was in the right hands. Now he has taken it with him wherever he is right now. When he was poisoned, he thought he was going to die. At the time, he didn’t even know he had an Achilles’ heel so he thought he would die.” Death was speaking to himself now rather than to Ivy. “I didn’t bring him a cure. It just took him some time to cure himself.”
The thought about Caspar being alive, but lost, was something she didn’t want to hear. Her ears started to hurt. She looked down at the letter so she wouldn’t have to face Death.
“Are you going to open that?”
Ivy kept looking at the envelope. The letter...she was sure that it unlocked everything about Caspar, of what he was trying to hide from everyone for so long. It might explain why he was like the way he’d been and how he and Manfred knew each other, what was his history. Perhaps it spoke of how he got his Achilles’ heel and how did he end up like this. The letter held answer to each one of her questions, to everything she was looking for.
She approached the fireplace and dropped the letter into the flames. She saw it burn, slowly, as the flames engulfed the paper and turned it to ash. Instead of seeing a piece of paper burning, she saw something else. She saw that the answers to her questions were now left behind. She knew, as one flame caught another, she would never get the answers she sought. Yet, somehow, she didn’t want to know. Perhaps it was her choice. Perhaps it was what she wanted now.
“Why did you do it?” Death asked.
“Sometimes, it is better to live a life with a lie, than to know the truth,” she replied, tears shining within her eyes.
EPILOGUE
It had been days.
After the day she had met Death and had burned the letter, Ivy was feeling that she had a new life. The past was past. She was now looking at the present and the future. The snowy afternoon was a chilly experience for her. She wasn’t really acclimatized to such weather.
Walking along and stamping her warm leather boots, she made her way to the university with a bag slung across her shoulders. The gates were big and security guards with furry jackets were standing nearby, blowing the warm air of their breaths against their naked hands.
She stopped within her tracks as she drew closer to the gates. She frowned and turned around as a familiar smell of someone she knew, a scent from the distant past, assailed her senses. She looked around, trying to detect the person’s presence, when she caught sight of a bench hidden in the shadows of several trees nearby. Someone sat there, waiting. Her eyes widened as she saw the cane.
“Miss, are you coming?” the guard asked with irritation. “Wait!” she breathed.
She dropped her bag and ran toward the bench. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be! He’s back!
Her chest burned as she breathed in the icy air as she ran, yet she didn’t care. She just wanted to see, to know if he was back. Was he sitting there watching her? As she drew closer, she saw that the shadows were not able to cover the bench. There was no one was sitting on it.
Ivy rubbed her forehead. Damn! With a sigh of angst, she turned about when something caught her eye. She found something familiar, something she remembered from her past. A small, red rectangular diary sat upon the bench. Caspar’s diary. She knelt within the snow and with trembling hands, she reached for the diary. It was empty. She flipped through its pages and only saw a blank page.
I never knew you wrote diaries, hotshot.
She remembered that she’d said that to Caspar before they were going out to find Solomon’s descendant.
I always wanted one of those. I always wanted to write my feelings down on a piece of paper. I wish I had one like yours.
Her heart started pounding. She had requested...no...she had generally told him that she wanted one of these. He had bought one for her.
But how did it end up here?
It was a startling thought that she tried to leave behind, but all it came back to one conclusion. The one thought she was having difficulty in trying to accept. A diary sat on the bench, the very one she’d wanted before, could only mean one thing.
He was back!
About The Author
Kevin Solomon Missal is a sixteen-year-old boy studying at the Faith Academy in New Delhi. At the age of fourteen, he wrote his debut novel, Damien Black: the Battle of Lost Ages. He enjoys the following hobbies such as reading, books, and writing.
You can contact Kevin via his email address: [email protected] .
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