The Reaper's Almanac

Versaggen: Third Letter

What a fool I was.
I tried to save them.
Desmond. Cassandra. Bethany. Abigail.

We are inevitable. We are hate.

May 7

Cassandra was Zeke's partner as he passed. She had known for a while that she was pregnant with his child. On the morning of his passing, she found out that they were going to have triplets and planned to tell him that very evening. Instead, she received word of an accident out on the highway. A malfunction, causing her children to grow up without a father. She clung onto the flask then as they found it among the wreckage. It was the only thing she knew of Zeke's that he had since they were children. She had planned to pass it on to their children when the time came.

Sometime after the funeral, she had chosen the names for the three children. It was her plan to raise them well enough on her own, though it would have been more accurate to call it a goal or a hope. Moving in with her sister Calliope gave some comfort to Cassandra. Unfortunately, this comfort would be temporary.

Two nights after moving in with her sister, their apartment was broken into by a crazed woman. She attacked Cassandra in the night, mistaking her for Calliope who was supposed to be the target of this rage. I tried to stop it. I attacked her heart, driving it to go faster than it should have. I wanted it to burst out of her chest so that she would leave Cassandra alone.

I didn't do enough. She survived and bashed Cassandra's head against the wall, taking her life as well as the lives of her three unborn children. I would wonder now who this woman was, but I know it does not matter. There would be nothing of her to remember. I made sure of it. I clung onto her back as she ran from that place, weighing her down and having her drag herself through the roads to her own home.

Once there, I attacked her mind. I drove her to maddening guilt of what she had done. I showed her that she did not take on life, but four. I replayed the scenario in her mind again and again and again, showing her more and more details of what happened for her to know that she killed the wrong woman. I drove her to douse her own bed in gasoline, tie herself to the bedposts, and set it on fire with her still on it.

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I was overcome that night. I was destroyed by my own attachment... by my own anger. I know not what will become of me. I have taken a life which was not mine to take. I am, by my own admission, guilty.

Your friend,
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