I’m sorry for hurting you. I was wrong and self-centered and scared, honestly. I was afraid of you getting too close. I was afraid of showing myself to you and as you got closer, I instinctively pushed you away. I, at the time, felt that a part of me was too dark and scary to reveal to anyone else and I pushed it down, deep inside myself. I couldn’t come to know you while I was trying to amputate a part of myself.

I hope he loves you in the way that I couldn’t.

It has been years my brother, my twin, and every waking day I regret picking up that rock. Despite the many years, I still remember the details of what happened. You tricked me, I did not know that father distasted vegetables, and that he loved a good piece of mutton. I was the gardener, and you were the shephard. However, I feel I was wrong to blame you. You had no idea that father would freak over my lowly vegetable soup. While you laughed at the beginning,with your finely seasoned mutton, I now remember that it stopped the instant he poured the pot of soup, still hot, all over the top of my head. It was so hot that it left a mark that I, and everyone else, can still see to this day.

The soup ruined my best shirt, the shirt made from the skin of a certain snake that mom skinned. She made our shirts and a nice rope from that hide. I killed you the same way that mom killed the snake. Rock to the head. Except, she did it after sneaking up from behind and I did it in a moment of angry. A terrible moment She taught me how to do it, that was something that made her feel all the more worse. I was already kicked out by the time of your funeral, but I could still hear mom's cries valleys away. Those cries still haunt my dreams to this day. Mother passed away shortly afterwards. However, I only found that out after Seth found me in the mountain woods near the asgardian halls. He had been looking for years, at least 13. All those years, I was being searched for, unaware of my searcher's exsistence.

He told me what he knew, which was only a little since occurred when he was an infent. He was only three or four months old, he was not sure which, when she hung herself from the tree with the rope. Uriel found her the next morning when she was doing her rounds. She had no idea how mom was able to slip past her, and she regrets this lapse because she might have been able to stop her. Two days later, mom was buried under the tree. Years later, when father died, he was burned and the ashes were strown across his sea. Father had already been died for many years before Seth went searching for me.

That knowledge was the main reason he wanted to find me, to let me know happend, but he also wanted to know about you. He wanted to know what you were like, and I told him. I told him everything, I had the time, he was with me for four years.

I told him about the times when we jumped from tree to tree in that wet jungle that father could not name. We called it greeny cliffs. I told him of when we raced against Faunus in his fields, Faunus on hoof while we were on horse. I told him about how we got stung by bees when we were looking for honeycomb. And yes, I told him about that fateful day. After that, he shortly left. I attended his funeral years later.

I am sorry brother, I wish I was the one who died that day instead. Everyday I think about it.

-Cain

I know we cannot control the circumstances of life. We take the hand that we are dealt and we do the best that we can. You played your hand with fierceness...You repeatedly put on your armor and you fought an incredible fight for so many years. Within you was a strength that never ceased to amaze those around you. I saw you go through more near death moments than I can begin to count...I remember you smiling and waving at an empty hallway, and when I asked, "who are you waving at?" You told me it was a young boy and a young man in uniform waving at you...I watched as you squinted and saw your smile fade to confusion as you jerked back and said, "it's me." I rubbed your arm as you continued to gaze in to that hallway.

Hospice had told me so many times that everything signaled that it was your time and to keep talking you over and that I was doing great...I really wasn't. All the signs were there but so was your incredible fight. After the fourth day I told them that God and you clearly had other plans. Sure enough you rallied. They told me that they had seen people do that but not as many times as you. You had such a will to get in as many sunrises as you could.

Six months later no one could imagine how much things would change. Rehab facilities and basically everything shut down tight as this beast called Covid invaded our world. We would do duo chats they would set up and I could see each day how lockdown was wearing on you. We were four miles apart. Four miles. With each call there was decline and eventually you stopped talking for over two weeks. I prayed what came so swiftly would leave the same way and that things would open back up and you would rally like you always had...that's just what you did. The last chat call I received to my surprise you were smiling and said, "there's my beautiful wife." I was stunned. Grateful and stunned.

Early the next morning I was up preparing for a zoom meeting when I got the call...nothing prepares us for that call even when you have been told for years that it's just a matter of time. With that call comes finality. The words play over in your head as you try to comprehend what you are hearing. I am so sorry that I was not there to talk to you, to kiss your forehead, to rub your arm, and to tell you that it was ok to go and that I would see you again. I am so sorry that even though caring people were with you - that I wasn't there. I am so sorry from the bottom of my heart.

I remember later that day telling our favorite hospice nurse when she called that you had been smiling and talking. Through her tears she said, "he rallied one more time." It has been almost two years and I know we are not the keepers of time and that no one knows when or under what circumstances that our loved ones or one's self will draw that last precious breath...please know I am so sorry I wasn't there.

I'm sorry I believed him when he said you were selfish,

and it wasn't that I believed his words,

but the deeper threat behind them sank in, didn't it?

You told yourself, so what if I am a bit selfish?

but that wasn't what you felt when he said it and you knew it too

even if you pretended not to

(I knew it too, even if I pretended not to)

And I'm sorry, so sorry, that I believed for so long

that you didn't care

and would hurt others for your own benefit;

never noticing the way you

kept silent

when it mattered

The idea of causing someone else pain

scared you so much

and I never knew

(even though I was always you)

There have been tales of a mysterious being that haunts this land. The Celtic people, including my father, greatly connect it with their past and even their identity. It was my father's father's demise. And I hear it keeping my own father up late into the night, muttering to himself as he reads from his many books on the subject, and searches his scrolls for answers.

We have just two bedrooms in the house, and all of us girls use one, that acts as a reverse loft if you will, in the ground where it is cooler, with a ladder to bring us up to the main level of our humble abode. Even my mother has been sleeping down here with us lately, sharing a bed with me and my younger sister. I fear for their marriage as my father slips deeper and deeper into madness.

Finally, I had to know. Against my mother's wishes, I snuck upstairs late one night to talk to my father and ask the question I had been wanting the answer to since I could remember.

There he was, sitting at his desk, his fingers running madly through his salt and pepper wispy hair that stuck out a little further on the sides than the top. His greying bear was also quite a mess and his eyes were bleary, as if he hasn't slept for days.

I walked over to him in my nightgown and set a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Father, tell me the story about the spirits that haunt our land."

He looked up at me, startled at my sudden appearance but also looking right through me. He began to mutter just a little more clearly to me. "Long ago there was a plague upon this land. The people, my father, continued to see the glowing lights at night that floated above our crops and houses and wells, and in the morn the crops would be dead, the children I'll, and the wells dry. They chased the lights to a series of tunnels and locked them away forever. But the King wouldn't stand for it and demanded to know where such a power was kept. It would prove an insurmountable weapon against our enemies if we could learn to control it. He offered a reward for the power's capture, alive. After some of the droughts and I'll ess in our neighboring lands, there were rumors that this plague had once again been released and many who knew it's powers feared that it would return to our own lands. I must find it, before it kills us all."

He became belligerent, rifling through the many books and papers on his desk. Searching for something he hadn't found in my 18 years of living. From his desk, a map fluttered to the floor and in a quick glance as I was trying to calm him, I recognized a network of tunnels in the cliff edge about a half mile outside of town. I had been in these tunnels before, exploring with a couple town children some years ago. And many of these passages I knew well.

"Father, go to bed. Try again in the morning. You need to rest." I helped him ease out of his chair and led him to my parent's bedroom on the same level. It was empty and quiet without the snores of my mother, but my father didn't seem to notice. He laid there still muttering something, but drifting off to dream amidst wool blankets.

I snuck back down the ladder to our bedroom and grabbed a pair of pants, stockings, and my shoes, tucking my nightgown into the pants as best I could. Shimmying back up the ladder, the house well past the witching hour of night, I searched for and found one of my father's lanterns with a decent amount of wax still left in the candle, stuck another candle in my back pocket for good measure, and a box of matches. Then I picked up the map off of the floor and snatched my father's large heavy jacket off it's hook by the front door and was off, into the night, heading determinedly to end my father's madness once and for all by answering the question that had plagued him his whole life.

It didn't take me long to get to the tunnels. In the lantern light I even recognized the entrance to one of them that on the map my father had marked in red. I pulled the map out and further examined it. Surely enough, the red markings were isolated to only this one tunnel. What could he have meant? Only one way to find out.

I went into the tunnel marked on my father's map and quickly realized it went much deeper than the town children and I had ventured. The walls began to get narrower the further I walked until I was forced to hold the later directly in front of me and my elbows were forced closer to my body. The walls wound back and forth deeper and further into the cliff edge. For a brief moment I even had to duck my head down just to fit. But the strangest thing was at some point in I switch began to flip in the back of my mind and I began to regard these tunnels as hallways rather than the natural wonders they once were. The longer I walked, the more I began to realize that the walls around me we're lined with bricks rather than smooth stone. Then the tunnel widened into a large room, and I knew that something fishy was afoot.

In front of me, on the stone bricked floors, were many colorful luminescent lines of red and green and yellow and blue. Some of them were lit and some of them were not, with a few holes in the floor that some of the lines let to and lit. This was a puzzle, some red flags went off in the back of my mind. I showered the floor, looking for clues, walking down lines to see if it would change anything, stepping in the shallow, spherical holes, but nothing happened. For some reason, it felt to me that this puzzle had already been solved.

In the back of the room was an opening to a hallway again. I shrugged inwardly and began down that hallway. Not 10 feet down the way, another beautifully colored puzzle showed itself on the wall and after a little while of trying to figure it out the feeling that this puzzle had also been solved began to take over me as well. Once again I shrugged, a little frustrated that my efforts toward solving these puzzles had been for nothing.

Three more of these solved puzzles reared their heads before I finally came to a dead end: a boarded up section with large wooden planks and even metal beams pushed across. There was a glowing coming from behind this barricade that simultaneously sent shivers up my spine and out a calming warm effect in my chest.

I walked up toward the barricade. A yellow orb pops out between two planks of wood and buzzes toward me like a mosquito. By instinct I grab it, and it turns into a yellow rubber ball in my hand. I throw it back through the slats. If the story my father had told me held any bit of truth ...this orb could forebode terrible pain for the land.

Again an orb popped out from a different section of the slats. And again I grabbed it and it turned into a ball, this time a little blue rubber ball and again I threw it back. There was a giggling on the other side of the slats that caused the hairs all over my body to stand on end.

I mustered up the courage to peek through the slats at what lay behind and the sight took my very breath away. Behind the slats was a beautiful paradise. It was as if I was looking over a cliff, or on top of a mountain, overlooking a lush forest full of spearmint colored piney trees and a mountainous waterfall that cast forth a mist that overlaid the floor of the forest. It appeared to be a glorious afternoon, with a warm sunshine that didn't quite reach the slats.

What was most peculiar of all was the young face of a darker complexion than I had seen before standing to my direct left. It was a youthful boy holding a red ball and smiling impishly. He didn't say anything, but giggled once more and shoved the red ball between the slats toward me. On my side it turned into a red glowing orb that flew around like the others, before I snatched it and shoved it right back.

A feeling of dread and anger welled up inside me. This...this...this child was trying to infect our world with famine and illness and drought. I searched the room for loose planks and ended up finding a few boards on the floor. If it killed me, I was going to protect my land from this ill fate and keep what belongs on that side of the barricade on that side.

I had no hammer nor any nails, but I began jamming planks and boards between the openings. The giggling voice on the other side became less jovial and more insistent. While I was fixing the barricade he kept shoving more orbs through the slots and I had to keep catching them and shoving them back. To him, it may have been a game, but he never said.

"Stop that! You're going to hurt people! Just stay over there!" I hollered at him, a little more than peeved.

Suddenly, the ground began to tremble under my feet. The slots were full, and I turned tail and ran, winding my way back to the head of the tunnel, tripping more than a few times than I care to admit. The puzzles had erased themselves. A loud voice roared behind me, but I couldn't understand what it was saying.

I ran as fast as I could the whole way home, slamming the door to my home a little harder than I had intended, switching the latches to lock it as fast as my bleary mind could. Then I sat at my father's desk, still wrapped in his jacket and cradled my head in my hands, tangling my fingers in my hair, panting hard as I could.

I sat there, panicked for a few minutes, trying to force my heart rate to go back down. And then in the light of my lantern that was now sitting on the desk, I saw my father appear from his bedroom, almost ghostlike with wide eyes that reflected the firelight of the lantern.

"My dear, what are you still doing up?" He came up to me, noticing the jacket around my shoulders and helped me take it off. "Where have you been?"

While I was trying to organize my thoughts, I realized that he had addressed me directly, as he had not done in many years. I blinked rapidly at him, actually seeing my father as he used to be, lucid and aware of who he is and where he is.

"You haven't been visiting a boy have you?" He raised an eyebrow at me.

"No, no, no, Father, nothing like that. I just...couldn't sleep so I went for a walk." I said, reassuringly.

From down the hall I heard my mother call out quietly, "John?" And in she walked, in her white nightgown, identical to mine. "What are you two doing up? Go back to bed." I could tell she was exasperated with my father, as it was very much like him to stay up at this hour with his ramblings, but the look on her face changed when she realized it was me at the desk and he that was standing beside me.

"Don't worry dear. I just caught our little miss coming in from a midnight stroll and was about to send her right back off to bed." He said, in a comforting way. I beamed at him, recognizing my father from my early youth, and not the haunted shell of a man I had come to know.

Apparently my mom saw the same thing, because she didn't say a word, but just walked up to him and gave him a big warm hug. He seemed shocked, but not concerned.

"Why don't we all go back to bed?" I said, and began descending the ladder to the room my sister and I shared. I undressed back to my nightgown and laid in bed listening to the sound of my mother snoring from my parent's room. A sense of calm washed over me and I slept more peacefully than I had in years.