The Aftermath // Sebastian Sallow x MC

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐓𝐰𝐨 - 𝐃𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬

𝒥𝒶𝓃𝓊𝒶𝓇𝓎 1𝓈𝓉, 1897

The map was in my hands, blank. I tried to control my breath, making it as deep as possible, while I tried to hide the tremor of my hands from Sebastian; he was sitting with his back leaning against the headboard of the bed, with me between his legs, my back against his chest, the first light of dawn lighting the room slightly through the glass dome of the Room. We had not slept much that night — or, rather, not at all.

With the tip of his nose, he stroked my jaw just below my right ear, his arms firmly wrapped around my waist as a support. I inhaled deeply, stroking with my thumbs the yellowish parchment that I had waited so long to reveal. The fact that it had not yet happened was the damning proof of what I did not want to admit; if the only way to reveal its contents was to want it strongly, and holding it in my hands for more than ten minutes had had no effect, maybe Sebastian wasn't completely wrong.

Maybe, I just wasn't ready for it.

"It's all right."

Sebastian's warm voice rang in my ear, and for a fraction of a second I thought I should have just burned the damn map and pretend this wasn't happening, find refuge in his arms where I could forget about the outside world. And yet, I couldn't.

I looked at the old scroll once again, with a knot in my throat, and I thought intensely of my Aunt Martha; for what she had had to suffer, for what the Highwater had done to their own family, I would come to the end of all this. To end that damned dynasty, once and for all.

With an almost blinding light, so much that I had to avert my eyes, the parchment changed in front of me. I had never seen anything quite like it; a map began to appear on its surface, much like the old maps that can be found in old history books, its lines running along the paper, creating the image of a place I knew well enough by then.

"Lake Marunweem," Sebastian whispered, looking at the scroll.

Before my mind could formulate any kind of doubt or question, a small globe of silvery light formed there where, on the lake shore, the design of a house — which I immediately identified as Highwater Manor — had suddenly appeared; with as much speed, I understood that the little globe was none other than Evanora.

How could she be at Highwater Manor?

As I opened my lips to express my thoughts to Sebastian, the silver light began to move; with my breath cut off, my eyes followed closely its every movement, at least until something else entered my field of vision.

"Look," Sebastian muttered, pointing his finger at the bottom right corner of the scroll.

1846.

As the small globe moved out of Scotland, slowly traversing the length of the British peninsula, occasionally disappearing and reappearing elsewhere — apparition? — the footer numbers varied from year to year.

1847. 1848. 1849.

After having stopped for some time in the Essex region — possibly for a month or two, according to my mental calculations based on the passing of the years — the globe then began to approach the Atlantic Ocean, crossing it to land in the Americas, and only four years later, in 1853, to move back to the European continent, this time in Portugal, then Spain, and finally France.

In 1861, the light landed in Ireland, stopping in the northernmost region in 1862. From there, the years passed, but the globe never moved again.

"It's in Ulster," I murmured, when the footnotes finally indicated 1897.