Epilogue

About ten and a half years now had passed since Leah and Keira had arrived on Mystic Island. And how things had changed… Destiny had followed its path, and there had been the struggles that Ekeze had told Leah about so long ago. Keira had survived, though, although one of her dearest friends—Hayden, the one with the power of light—had not. Neither had Keira’s father, or the Citadel of Destiny for that matter. There had been pain, suffering, and joy, too. But now, Leah knew, the struggles were over, for now at least.

She was sitting on the beach at a late hour in the night. She had long since discovered the tranquility of the ocean at night, how the reassuring sound of the waves could calm almost any emotion. Tonight was a night when she needed that calming reassurance; thoughts of destiny and of Keira’s father kept drifting through her mind, unstoppable as the waves crashing onto the shore.

Even now, she could still remember Ekeze’s words about destiny: There is no ‘why.’ It is all part of destiny’s chains. One link of the chain cannot be there without another. And as she looked back at her chain, all the events that had linked together, she realized that those words were true. Thinking back to the night when Keira had been conceived, when she had been too young and naïve to realize the complications of it all, she knew that she would not be here, sitting on the beach, if that had not happened. Destiny had guided everything in the nineteen years since Keira was born, prodding Solan to pursue his studies of the darkness, pushing Talia to take the dark half of the amulet and wreak havoc on the Citadel of Destiny, and nudging Leah and Keira to come here, where Keira would make friends with two people who would be crucial to everything in the plans of her destiny.

Leah then understood that Keira’s destiny interwove with hers, the two chains twisting and turning, each filled with hardships and happiness, weaving together to form their lives. And she knew Keira understood this too; not necessarily how her chain was part of Leah’s, but the fact that destiny itself was a chain. Keira had learned from Ekeze—actually from a letter Ekeze had written, explaining to everyone who had been present at the final showdown at the Citadel of Destiny, when Ekeze and Solan and the world itself had all met their ends, about destiny. For they all had to carry on the message of destiny now, everyone who had believed, everyone who’d had faith. Including her.

Suddenly, she knew what she had to do.

The time had come. The time that she had awaited ever since that night thirteen years ago when Ekeze had told her about most of Keira’s destiny had arrived. It was time for Keira to know the truth—the truth about Solan Arolo, the man who was her father. Leah knew now how shocking it would be for Keira to learn that he was her father; she had spent the past five years, after all, despising that man who had caused the darkness along with Talia. But the truth was better than the illusion of a lie.

Leah stood and walked with confident steps toward the tropical forest that was about a half-kilometer away. She knew that her destiny was leading her to where Keira was, so that she could lift that lie that formed a mirage in Keira’s past—of the father who she thought had died nineteen years ago, of the father who was dead now.

But, in a sense, that mirage, those false images that she had created for Keira, was true. It could be considered that Solan had died when he had given himself to the darkness, which had indeed been shortly after Keira had been born. So it hadn’t been entirely a lie. But there were many missing parts to the truth that Leah needed to add so that Keira would know the whole story of how disbelieving could pay a terrible price—because in the end, it all came down to believing.

It was time for the truth to be revealed.