“My Father used to say; only fools wear their heart proudly on their sleeves…”

Decades after his father death and years after the Paradise was built, he still found himself saying this to a crowd of eager blackheads and redheads: his children, grandchildren, even later, his great-grandchildren. Smiling to those little chirps of “What was he like?” “What did he say?” “Was he like you at all?”, He would find himself going back along those decades, or centuries now, to those years when his life was like a silent bomb, ready to explode to a million sad little fragments any minute. So small that it will cease to exist. Yes, those troubled years. But that’s all over now. Those children, they won’t realise how lucky they are. They have a family. A loving family. Unlike father and I. They were born free of those tangible evils looming over him and his father like a gigantic phantom, refusing to go away. To those who are older, he taught them Light and Dark, Evil and Goodness, how to steer away from evil, both tangible and abstract. Once, one of his sons had said:

“You don’t find evil in a Paradise do you Papa? Paradise is the essence of what is pure and good!”

He told him, and every other child that came into the world to him, he told all of them firmly that whenever there is goodness, there is always evil. Abstract, luring, like the Snake in that perfect paradise-Eden. He told them how the boundary between Light and Dark, or Evil and Goodness is blurred where they meet, as all poles meet somewhere; how you should never go to the extremes of Light, as drawing a line between good and evil is so hard. The line thins and blurs, and you get lured to Dark on your mission for Light. Like I did, nearly. He told them stories, darker, truer than the ones he told the younger children.

“My sister, Aeolia, taught me the difference between tangible and abstract evil. Of the later, I was barely one second away once. It was surprising at that time, for I was supposed to be the perfect example of both abstract and tangible goodness. I turned out, in those troubled years, to be nearly neither. Aeolia rescued me from that fate…” Yes, his sister. How odd the word still sounds on his tongue, almost alien.

Well, who knew it would be like this? Not Remus, not Dumbledore, not Sirius or anyone, nor me, nor father. It was just another piece of Fate’s lustrous imagination.