Dark Water

Chapter Sixteen

All three angels have vacated the boat, heading for heaven for two days in order to update their superiors of the encounter and to try and decipher what they should do about it.

Flynn decides this is the perfect moment to settle down and read through the two journals he found on the abandoned boat where he first encountered the creature face to face, hoping to understand the being a little better.

He picks up the oldest looking of the two journals, opening the front cover and noticing a name marked neatly in the corner of the first page.

'Property of Caeserni X'

"Caeserni..."

Flynn lets the name roll off his tongue and smiles as he writes it down in a large notebook on the table next to him.

He turns to the first entry, written nearly forty years prior.

'I am grateful for all they have done for me but I cannot remain here, surrounded by those who view me as deformed and refuse to understand my mother's decision to make me this way.

She would support my choice, my desire to journey away from here now they have brought such a threat to my home.

Angels, the sons of heaven, arrived two days ago following the call from the colony on the west side of the island. They came right to my door, requesting I join them and becoming enraged when I declined their invitation.

I hope to leave at the end of this lunar cycle, when the sea is calmest.'

Flynn is very familiar with visits of the angelic nature, a similar event led him to leave his home island and take up residence on a small isle of his own. He makes a few more notes and turns to the next entry.

'My plans have changed. I refuse to remain here any longer than a week.

The angel leader, Sammael as he calls himself, ordered the stonemason to carve my mother's name from the monument and destroy her tombstone because she was not a follower of his father. He is a pathetic being, desecrating the tomb of a dead woman in front of her own son.

I am afraid my temper got the better of me and I allowed my aggression to take hold.

I do not regret punching him. He deserved it.

The healer and a few of the local women have stocked my boat with supplies and I am to leave tonight under the cover of the dark.

I have decided to lose my latter name, with mother dead and myself leaving for a life of solitude there is no need for my legacy to be held. I think I shall simply write X from now on, uses less ink anyway.'

Flynn is disgusted but not surprised that Sammael was involved from the beginning or that the angels would go so far as to vandalise a grave just to prove a point, he feels a small amount of satisfaction as he writes down a point about how Caeserni punched Sammael.

He reads through the many entries which document the young man's journey across the ocean away from his home in the hope of finding a sanctuary.

Caeserni writes of merpeople, whales and all manner of other creatures he encountered along the way. Flynn gets the sense that the ocean meant a lot to him, that he enjoyed being free to sail and swim as much as he pleased.

Finally he comes to an entry that contains a faded Polaroid picture of a young man with a Mohawk dyed red and tattoos decorating tanned skin. Caeserni, on his 19th birthday, the same day he came across The Oasis and decided he had found his paradise.

'At last I am home, among the sacred rocks and surrounded by water so deep that all manner of ocean life can visit me. This Oasis, this paradise where I will be safe in solitude, is perfect.

I shall decorate the rocks with my symbols and sigils, claim this place as my home and nothing shall ever bother me again.'

For a moment Flynn forgets how the story ended, forgets that there's a second journal.

He forgets that caeserni's suffered further until he reaches for the second book, turns to a clean page in his notes and begins once again.