Dearest Naidasha,
I know many things, my dear Naida girl, but I do not know everything. I know that I love you, and that somehow I am also to blame for your actions. The decisions you have made only highlight to me the poor example I have given you, and the poor choice I made when sending you to that coimheach school. I should have kept you home with me, with the family, and you would have avoided such darkness.
Alas, I cannot change the past.
You have borne the cost of your actions and lost your words forever. I am more deeply wounded by this than I can say. Your voice, calman, was precious to me. It seems as though this should be enough of a payment. But, as is in the nature of the Olen, payment is never as simple as we mortals think.
My eyes are old, but my mind is not, and I see such darkness in my dreams at night. There is a price that must still be paid, a balance that must be regained, yet so you are there and I am here—there is a gulf between us. The fairies are coming, they are calling you, Naida child.
They do not wait. It will not wait.
The fairies are calling.
They call for you and they call for Haji, departed soul of our land.
May the Olen be with you.
Seanmhair
Date and time not noted
My grandmother is an intelligent woman. She knows what I have long feared. That I was not careful enough, smart enough, or wise enough to defeat the demon inside Kaitlyn. That in some way, it is still here. With me. With the word it scorched into my mind. The word that can free it into our world, the lock to open the gate behind which it waits. Somewhere, out there.
She has seen something in her visions, with her faintest sight, which still runs in the Dupré clan, diluted as it is, and she begs me to come home to Fairy Island. She wants, after everything, to help me.
I’ve been having dreams again. Like some of the ones Kaitie told me about. I am in the Dead House when I dream them. My Dead House, my mind, where the viper is laughing at me. I did nothing by trying to save my friends. I did nothing when I watched Kaitie go to her death. I did nothing because I thought it was the only way.
How stupid humans are.
Our pride, our hubris. My pride. My hubris.
He had already left her then, hadn’t he? Or did he just split himself in half? Who knows the way of the Demonic in the end?
So here I am, in a psychiatric ward against my will, with a viper in my head, like a bomb ready to explode. It will do what it did to her. It will take over, piece by slow piece, until I don’t know what’s real and what’s not, and I do whatever it wants me to. And I have the word inside my head as well. No, I’m not just a bomb. I’m an atomic bomb.
I thought I knew it all. Pride before the fall, and this is one hell of a long drop. Because… I never got rid of it, did I? Kaitie never got rid of it.
She burned up for nothing. They all died for nothing.
NOTHING.
The demon is with me. And he forced his decaying, rotten, powerful word-key into my mind as well. So, I, who tried to undo it all, fix it all, put everything back into place… just gave the demon what it wanted all along.
And now I am a danger to everyone.
Date and time not noted
Jeanie knows something has changed. She keeps trying to make me feel better; but she can’t. Nothing can ever again. It’s hopeless.
Even Scott betrayed me. He saw Seanmhair, passed on her note, and said nothing to me about it until he was leaving.
I wonder if she knows what he is to me? I never told her so that I could keep him secret. My secret, away from my family. My little thing to keep, safe and precious, alone. And yet… he met with her. They spoke, presumably. But how? Why?
I fidget with the letter all the time. It’s falling apart.
I sleep with it between my hands, like a prayer I’m making.
A prayer no one can hear.
GET ME OUT.