The white realm deteriorated. It shattered into countless white sparkles that fell down like a waterfall, leaving behind a world of complete darkness, where a familiar environment slowly faded into being.
We found ourselves in one of the library rooms of Ventoria, standing right at the closed wooden door.
Standing a good few meters away from us were young Helvega, dressed in the same clothes as ‘Helvega’, and her mentor Miriam Cowright, dressed in a brown shirt with dark brown jeans. I assumed this must have been somewhere in the ‘80s due to her as well as Miriam’s younger appearances. Strangely, I was able to hear them, and their movements did not resemble marionettes. It was quite literally watching the past unfold, as it was, right before my eyes.
Because of this, I walked towards them both to hear their conversation better. ‘Helvega’ and older ‘me’ followed my trail, leaving younger ‘me’ by himself, who playfully took a seat on one of the tables.
We eventually got close enough and could hear every detail of their conversation.
“You dreamed about me?” Helvega asked, her eyebrows slightly frowning.
After a deep breath, Miriam stepped towards the middle of the room, placing her hands in her pockets, lowering her head, and responded in a solemn tone.
“It was a short, but impactful one. It all started with me standing at a closed wooden door in a dark, barely visible room. I stood right in front of it like a statue, completely motionless, aimlessly staring holes into the wooden surface before it was gently swung open by a silhouette resembling an angel who seemed to bear no face.”
She then raised her head and turned towards Helvega.
“He spoke to me in a gentle tone, telling me to take his hand because there was something at the other end of another door adjacent to us only I had to see.”
After saying this, she planted her right hand on her face, as if caught in distress.
“At that moment, I was in a state of complete submission. I was basically at his mercy for anything that could have happened to me. I was powerless, senseless, thoughtless, purposeless… until our hands touched each other.”
“Hand in hand, after reaching the door, he opened it with his left hand, and we found ourselves in this… dark and desolate room that was shrouded in a black mist. However, a dim light was cast upon a stone pillar in the middle of the room. That pillar was carrying you; You were seated on it with your legs folded, holding a pale crying baby in your arms.”
“A… crying baby?” Helvega asked.
“Yes. There were some peculiarities, however. One was that both you and the baby were completely undressed. Your vital areas were covered, but it only took me one-tenth a second of a glance to understand that the both of you were naked.”
“You were crying with this baby,” she continued, spreading her right palm in the air in explanation. “But, there was one notable difference. The colour of the tears you emitted was crimson red, blood-like. They glided down your face, tainting it partially, and they never stopped pouring down from your eyes.”
“Both your sobbing sounds blended in with the baby’s, whose tears were black. The tears strolled down your bodies and glided over the pillar beneath you. The angel silently watched a horrifying spectacle with a closed smile on his face, which was the first feature I was able to see at that point.”
“He then turned towards me and said that the Perished One was already born, but not exactly in an eternal-esque fashion. Much like ‘His’ temple, it always existed, just like we spoke about a few moments ago. The Perished One was as eternal as it was obsolete.”
She lowered her head, aimlessly staring at the ground, as Helvega seemed to grow more agitated as seconds passed by. Her grip around the surface of the table she was leaning on tightened as she continued listening to Miriam’s anecdote.
“This is because the prophecy came from ‘His’ tongue, and spoke out redemption and despair. It made sense because sinners of this world never perished. They are only waiting for their unholy vessel to be born, and bring back the salvation of Humanity. It is only partly eternal because ‘He’ is eternal. And we—as Humans—the original harbingers of ‘His’ curse, have some sort of resemblance to ‘Him’, since we were made in ‘His’ image.”
Helvega slowly shook her head.
“…But, what does that have to do with me?”
“That is what I fail to understand too, Helvega,” Miriam answered, sighing. “The angel said nothing about you. It only showed you alongside the child. Forgive me, but it made me consider if you could have actually been the Perished One, but that would contradict the verse in the Golden Book, the thirty-sixth chapter, which goes as follows:”
“His birth will be marked with death, symbolized by the passing of his earthly Mother.”
…As soon as I heard Miriam utter these words, I gulped and eagerly listened along to the continuation.
“As far as I know, Aurora is doing well. So for me to continue assuming this would make me a blasphemer.”
A tense silence followed after her words. It looked as if Miriam was doing her hardest to word her thoughts out, but the same couldn’t be said about Helvega. She looked like she was embracing herself for what was to come, as though she already knew what Miriam was going to say.
“But then… the verse in the second half of that chapter came to mind: ‘The Perished One will not be by himself. He shall be alongside his own creation of tears and blood, which will manifest itself as the Angel of Despair; His messenger who shall scream for him, cry for him, fight for him, and die for him.’
“..No…” Helvega muttered, stammering over her words. I then lowered my head, and spoke to older ‘me’.
“I… read about this. Vaelen once showed me a paragraph from the Golden Book, where it was stated that some sort of angel would serve as the Perished One’s consort.”
“How do you think she grappled with this revelation?” older ‘me’ responded. “Even though Miriam never explicitly stated that she was indeed the Angel of Despair, the dream she experienced basically told her the truth.”
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“…She most likely never wanted to accept it. I would assume she simply threw it under the rug and continued with her life, unbothered by it.”
That is what I did, to a degree at least. Why would she be the Angel of Despair? If I were to be in her shoes, I would do exactly that; Think of it as nothing more than a bizarre dream.
“That is true,” older ‘me’ said. “She would eventually avert her gaze from the prophecy and commit her time to other professions. But, eventually, she will have to be saved. Saved by someone none other than you, Caelum.”
“Why?” I said, turning towards him. His voice turned solemn, as he answered,
“Because she is the Angel of Despair.”
“But… how?” I asked, frowning. “I don’t understand. What makes her the Angel of Despair? How does she become it? What events caused her to turn into it?”
“The answers to those questions, for now, are as ambiguous as your recent circumstances,” he responded, sighing. “Your experiences with the prophecy were of course much different than hers. You encountered Mother and rejected her, whilst Helvega only heard tales, and never had a moment where she would be met with the actual truth.”
As I stared at him with a befuddled expression, the surroundings changed. It transformed into a much older, presumably somewhere in her twenties version of Helvega. She was seated at a wooden table, writing on a piece of paper in a Victorian-styled office room, probably another place in the office. She wore a dark brown coat over her white shirt.
We stood right in front of her, and older ‘me’ continued his anecdote.
“There seemed to be a different motif that permeated her mind, but I was never able to discover that motif. She appears not to have changed much in contrast to her fourteen year old self, but something caused her to become a lot more… stoic, in a sense.”
“Well, she was always inebriated with the history of her family,” I responded. “More specifically the history surrounding her father. Whenever Vaelen and I would ask her about it, she would always brush the topic aside, as if saving herself from becoming enraged.”
“That I do remember,” he nodded. “It would be safe to assume that the annals of the Jinton family have caused some significant turmoil within her. If this was able to overthrow her dread of the prophecy… then it must have been something great.”
“But to her, the prophecy and how it could have affected her as a person were just words that were thrown at her. It’s… much like how I dealt with it. Why would I all of a sudden become the Perished One?”
As I said this, the moment when ‘Mother’ decapitated me inside of that dark castle rushed through my mind. I placed my chin between my fingers, and asked,
“…I do remember that lady telling me that I was immortal. That must be why I’m not dead yet, right?”
“Correct. You are indeed immortal. But that is not our focus for now,” he responded. “What I hope to accomplish by showing you Helvega’s memories is to pass the torch of responsibility to you. Would you let the prophecy rule your own destiny? Your own free will? Would you not accept Helvega for who she is, despite having now become someone entirely dependent on you?”
I remained silent in response. I was stuck at the ‘destiny’ part and didn’t truly consider the last parts of his words. I felt… indecisive. I couldn’t come up with a solid answer, but, just like earlier, I felt motivated. Motivated to learn more about… everything.
“Come, there are two memory fragments left,” he said, as ‘Helvega’ reached her hand out to me once more. I took it, and the door of the office room opened, which projected a totally different place. It looked like an abandoned building site, where construction work was planned to take place in. We stepped into this ‘fragment’, and four individuals would then fade in just a few steps away from us.
I grimaced, my mouth left ajar, as I beheld the confusing sight. I saw Helvega standing on the far right, Mother’s former colleague Zaccheus on the far left, and in the middle… the masked man, and Father.
“This was a little over a week ago, soon after you and Vaelen enrolled in the Inquisition.”
“So… he really is still alive…”
“The claim of his death was never true,” he said. “He had always been alive and well. He knows you, and has been closely following your life ever since you were young.”
This was… so weird. He had been… following me for all these years?
“There’s a reason why he wasn’t able to intervene directly with your affairs. But you will eventually know the reason once you accept yourself. Not only that, but he will give you the answers to anything you may want to know.”
He looked at me over his shoulder, and said with a fervent tone,
“He is waiting for you, Caelum.”
I remained silent in response, prompting him to continue.
“Do you not want to know? About who he is, his past, when he was just as young as we are? How many nights have you spent staring at the ceiling, thinking how life would be if he lived alongside you?”
“…I do,” I said softly, a shadow falling over my face. He stared at me with a somewhat pitiful expression. I slowly raised my head to meet his eyes, and asked,
“But, what happened to Helvega? Why are you telling me that she will depend on me?”
As if triggered by my words, everything around us dissipated, and we were shrouded in complete darkness. I didn’t feel any surface beneath me, so it felt as if I was descending into a bottomless pit, but suddenly, I could feel a hard surface slowly materializing beneath my feet once more.
It was the infinite stone path. It gradually stretched outwards, slowly expanding into a broad, gray road that seemed to stretch infinitely into the void. The surroundings were still dark, but dimly illuminated, as if standing within a forest in the middle of the night.
‘Helvega’ seemed to have disappeared. It was only me, and my two other versions. Standing before me was older ‘me’, who gently tapped my shoulder, and said,
“For you to understand this, I will first have to show you Lunar’s recent memories.”
I remained silent in response.
…It seemed like I finally came to the point of having to accept some kind of harsh truth.
“I know how you’re feeling,” he continued. “He was the one who killed you. I fully understand. But it seems like you are deliberately staying oblivious to his deed. As if you don’t want to accept the fact that he just killed you.”
He was right. I didn’t want to accept it. For this entire duration, I stayed oblivious to the elephant in the room. I did not even want to think about it. But now, I felt like standing against a dead end wall. There was no escaping it. I had to confront it.
“Again, you are not exactly ‘dead’. I did say earlier that you were immortal, but you actually have the choice to become immortal, or die as the person you are now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You either take my hand and be the person you always wanted to become, or you take your younger’s hand, and get lost eternally. Your death was already planned by someone. The reason why being the prophecy you indefinitely are the central figure of.”
“My death… was planned?”
“It was. You were supposed to die during the Inquisition, through the orchestration of Michel, the masked man who killed Father. You don’t know Michel, but Lunar did. He did everything he could to save you.”
Thinking about how the man named Michel murdered Father, and presumably ordered the lady in black to murder ‘Mother’, it wouldn’t seem too far stretched to assume that he had plans for me, or Vaelen, especially after leaving us both alive on purpose.
This alone was bizarre enough. However, Lunar killing me for any reason other than this would be even more bizarre. To do something like this, killing me for the sake of… saving me, would be in character for him. This whole journey through memories, awakening in this mystical world, encountering vessels of memories…
…it all seemed absurd already. Hearing about this, by all means, made me feel a lot more relieved than I thought. It made me relive my ignorance towards his ‘deed’. He did kill me, but I now had something to break that dead end wall with. A truth I wished to believe.
And at last, footsteps were approaching us from behind. I turned around and saw Lunar, dressed in a black windbreaker robe, approaching us with his usual closed smile on his cunning face.