SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGIES | PROPHECY

When I conjured those magic words, I was trapped before the eyes of a horrifying sky that whispered cruel fates of people who reached the ends of the world. My unbowed soul wanted to leave the stations of my body, desperately disjoining the links that bind me to sanity.

I met my father for the first time, after twenty-six years. He was a drunkard who danced with licentious and wicked women who took advantage of his frailty. He prayed lying among the cold streets of "Sanhain", looking at the sky with an expression of astonishment. I despised him for the life he led, and yet he claimed to love me.

I repudiated even his stench and the breath that emitted from his purple mouth, riddled with the vestiges of harmful vices. He told me that everything would finally be solved when I managed to solve the riddle of "The Great Stele", but I didn't believe him. I took him for a madman and walked away, as far away as I could, returning to my mother's house where my mother ceased to exist. She, so fragile and good, in the end could not bear the abandonment of my father, so she committed suicide on her bed and helpless.

It was at the age of sixteen when I lost her, and passed to the tutelage of my aunt; a stern and bitter woman who tried to instill in me hatred towards my father but, for some reason, I could never hate him completely, perhaps there was a strange connection that tied me to him, perhaps it was curiosity that did not allow me to feel abhorrence, I do not know, but my yearnings were fixed on finding him and finding out why.

I pondered over my father's insane words, searching for the answer to the question I held for so many years, and investigating among the old bookcases my mother kept in her room, I found an old book written in an archaic handwriting. I cannot deduce how old that writing was, but I can mention how strange it was to me.

Looking through its dry pages, I found a white, stained page written in my mother's handwriting. I took it without thinking and was surprised that my mother had such a particular object. I read aloud what it said, clearly I did not understand anything, suddenly, the atmosphere became opaque; everything was gray and cold.

I appeared in the midst of darkness that evoked the sky and ascended to it. The ceiling of my mother's room opened, leaving me completely exposed. A haggard and cloudy face imposed itself before my eyes, it fell apart and then became a whirlwind of darkness that then descended towards me. I was paralyzed, I could not even run away.

Suddenly, someone grabbed my arm and pulled me safely to the outskirts of my house. It was my father, who apparently knew what would happen, came to my rescue. We stopped in an open street in the middle of the suburbs, people were screaming in panic as my father pulled out a strange inscription from his shaken coat; it was like a rune, very old like the Scandinavian ones, he placed it in front of the demonic mist causing it to stop.

After I was out of apparent danger, my father stared at me with his eyes wide open to the limit and held my shoulders tightly. I could detect the terror in his pupils and his broken blood vessels in his sclera. He opened his mouth, not only to rebuke me, but to bestow upon me a truth that has been in store long before I was born:

"What have you done son? You have read your mother's final incantation just as the prophecy said. She... she was a witch."