The Island With No Parallel

A Letter to My Son

Manuel leaned over his nightstand and lit a candle. The darkness of his bedroom became illuminated by the little flickering flame on the wick. He pulled his covers aside and retrieved his father's book from the bookshelf where he left it. His father's second book, it seemed. Manuel hefted it. It was a lot heavier and thicker than the first one.

His head was still spinning from all of this mess. Monsters, Naiads, Fairies and such. He climbed back in bed and turned to the page with his mother in it. Hours had already passed since he spoke to Fernando and he used that powder. He now saw her as a black human. So many years he spent wondering why his father married her. Why would he marry a woman of color and ruin the family name like he did? And now it turned out he didn't even know who this woman was. He took out the little bag of powder Fernando had left him, pinching a little in his fingers and flicking it towards his eyes. It stung for a few seconds, but when his vision cleared, he saw his mother for who she really was. A fairy with magnificent long wings on her back, looking at him.

He had to admit, she was beautiful. His father did an immaculate job depicting her. She looked to be in her thirties or forties in this drawing. Her smile reached her eyes, the crows feet creases deepened. Manuel numbly fingered another page before finally flipping it. He was in the middle of a description on fairies. The country they came from, his father wrote, was Ecencia. They were a people of all colors, but were a mainly black race.

He wondered about where Yunara was from. She was black, too. He searched through the pages of the book and found a section on Naiads. Naiads were from a country called Crila. Now that he thought about it, Yunara and Fernando had mentioned it before, hadn't they? The girl they were supposed to find in Ecencia was from there. It said that Crila was the country right next to Ecencia, and that many Naiads came to Ecencia to escape the rampancy of Aracs there. As Crila was a poorer country than Ecencia, the richer Aracs hired Crilans to do their dirty work in Crila, which caused the crime rate in Crila to soar.

Manuel thought about Yunara. Is that why she worked for the princess of Ecencia? Was she too running from these Aracs? Manuel wondered if his father wrote about them.

He started flipping through the pages, but didn't find anything with a title that had to do with Aracs. He found descriptions on Unseeables, descriptions on the definition of relics, a section on theories. Then as he was leafing through the pages, the word caught his eye. Something had said something about Aracs. He turned back and saw that the page wasn't titled like the others. Instead, it had a date at the top. It was a diary, it seemed like. Forgetting his initial interest in what his father wrote about the Aracs, Manuel turned to the beginning of the diary. There, there was a title that took up the entire page. "A Diary For My Son, Manuel." There was also a subtitle.

After a lot of thought over the events that have happened over the last few years, I decided that this diary would be the best method to record everything I will one day tell my son, Manuel so that one day when he's old enough to read it, he'll understand everything in detail and the order in which it happened. My life has been too much to explain in one conversation, or perhaps in a lifetime of conversations, and I feel that this way, my son will experience the encounters I've had, in a sense, along with me.

Manuel turned the page, with awakened feelings that he hadn't felt in a long time about his father.

December 30th, 1834.

Today I decided to start a diary. I decided it was the only way to keep track of everything that Aznia and I are going through right now, and frankly, to remember that all of this is actually happening.

It all started when I met Paz at a party eight months ago, in April, the mysterious rich Lady of Málaga. All of my compatriots were absolutely fascinated by her, and always invited her to parties, mainly affirm that she's real. She was a rich, colored woman, with no husband or name of renown. How could it be?