The Pâtissier

PART FOUR: A LEGEND TO FORGET

I can't tell you what happened to the merchant's fortune, because Angelika Cadieux never had a son.

    She'd had a daughter.

    I also can't tell you what happened to the pâtisserie, or if it even existed. For after it burst into flames, no one saw the Pâtissier ever again, and those who claimed that they'd once benefited from his delectables were soon regarded as old folk with stories fabricated from fading memory, legends that parents would tell their children to quell away the nightmares of their dreamscapes.

    But as I'd said in the beginning, indeed a troubled widower once told me that something powerful was embedded within legends. Special legends. Not because of the outlandishness of some of their stories at times, but because of the strange doubt that clouded them and somehow made people more receptive to their morals.

    I still don't know why it's this way — why untruths seem to draw people in more than solemn fact, or painful memory.

    Maybe it's because they're far more interesting to read about, (I'll be the first to admit that) or maybe it's because The Pâtissier's words, although I can never align myself with them, did have some truth braided within them.

    But if there's anything I know for sure about this man, it's that when Angelika ate the quesillo, she was healed.

    Not of disease — for they had been wrong.

    It had never been a disease.

     It had been a curse.

    And I remain the key to that curse, even as I hold the Era to my chest — the only surviving relic of the fire, and the only reason I can tell you this story today.

    Without this account of events, of the only known records of my direct genealogy that I could find, all that I've told you would indeed, simply be a legend.

    And maybe that's what it was supposed to be all along.

    But you and I know better.

    So, as I tossed the book into the mouth of the ocean, watching the froth and foam swallow it up amid the breakers that crashed against the side of the boat — I felt a sense of peace instil itself within me.

    The same peace that perhaps, instilled inside the Pâtissier that tragic day.

    Because now, the sting of the curse had been numbed for future generations. Ah, yes, even yours. For no one will ever know.

    There's simply a different story — a lot less tragic, filled with a little less... dare I say, madness — that you'll tell. And it goes like this:

   There once lived a terribly wealthy man named Alistair Cadieux, and he'd had four daughters, not five. He'd never had a favourite. And all of his daughters were of truly despicable sight. Every one of them — absolutely awful, warts and all — with not a single exception.

    Aiah was a fictional character created by aspiring artisans of music to inspire them to reach greater heights. He never walked this earth. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

    Soralin Sato came from an early folktale about a witch who placed curses on her husbands.

    And The Pâtissier, with all who found themselves tangled up in his life, never existed.

    They were merely a legend.

    And somehow... through some manner life and death I couldn't understand yet — that seemed to make everything that culminated worth more value than any story that I'd ever read.

    Because of me, of Angelika's bite... that which sunk deep into her belly and birthed a different kind of life — the curse had been numbed.

    I am the Pâtissier's prophecy.

    Wholly and wonderfully and completely fulfilled.

    Although I must say, it couldn't hurt to go for seconds.

END