– Thursday: Journal Entry

For more than four hundred years I had been obsessed with getting Sebastien back from the Realm of the Dead. For that entire time, I sought, searched, experimented and continuously failed.

Then came the day when all was in alignment and I had all but given up. Azazeal had offered a suggestion, just a mere suggestion, moved my elbow in the Rite and even in a somewhat delayed reaction, all that I had aimed for in those centuries came to fruition at last. And as if to affirm that what we had done was right, and just and necessary, Jocelyn Ysabetta was conceived. Sebastien could not have been happier.

Oh, yes. We already had Caroline – a daughter that I raised alone. A child that I was pregnant with when he was killed. Being dead, how could he know? And now Caroline, at the time of their introduction to one another, was herself four centuries old. It is hard to explain to a man once human, now made Immortal by bargains and bought by my own Sidhe blood about these things. Sometimes he looks at me in absolute exasperation at the world I have forced him back into. Was being in limbo, somewhere between not quite being in Hell nor in Heaven, nor being able to touch that which is on Earth somehow preferable to actually being here? Both he and Caroline were often confused by their newly discovered relationship to one another, but they both did their best.

Then came Jocelyn.

When she was still bloody and screaming, fresh from the womb, his one remaining eye glistened with tears. I have never in any of the Seven Realms of Existence ever seen a father more taken with his progeny. Even as she cried, I could see the absolute adoration for her in his expression. And within his arms she turned her tiny face toward the sound of his voice and quietened for just a moment or two -before the instinct of all infants asserted itself and she began rooting, howling when she could not find a breast immediately. Unlike so many fathers react when faced with a screaming infant, it was with great reluctance and the coaxing of Amarante’ that Sebastien finally handed Jocelyn back to me so that she might nurse.

For the whole of her childhood, Jocelyn adores her Papa certainly as much as he adores her. He has a bond with her that even I, as her mother cannot compete with. I adore my daughters and I am quite certain that they love me, too. But Sebastien has a bond with both of them that I have never known. Maybe it is because I lost my own mother at such a young age that I know not how mothers should be with their children. Perhaps I have spent so long being a Mother to my People that treating my blood daughters any differently seems so foreign to me that I am unable to do so. It often perplexes me, for Sebastien has no trouble separating the two instances. Come to think of it, even my Anam Cara, Hsu, who is unable to feel love, treats Daniel far differently than those whom he rules – or even has affection for. I sometimes lie awake at night trying to wrap my thoughts around it, but it still evades me.

Tonight on the Eve of Jocelyn’s fifteenth birthday, and the night before she is to embark to spend the next three years of her life on the Fortunate Island, away from France, barely seeing her father, I wonder just what it is that I have wrought. Neither of them know what I know. Sebastien knows not of Azazeal nor his involvement in everything, nor does Jocelyn know how dangerous dealing with the Fallen Ones can be. I have informed her and armed her as best as I can, but still she and Azazeal are quite taken with each other as friends – so I can only hope that she remembers what I taught her and he respects Jocelyn and myself and the alliance of the Sidhe and the Fallen Ones enough not to do something that all of us might regret. And yet….. I feel disturbances, tremors in the Seven Realms of Existence, and I face queries from every corner; ‘What is happening?’ and ‘Did you not feel that? ‘. Everyone is on edge, including myself and yet, just when I think I have discovered from what source these phenomena are coming, it evaporates and disappears completely. And when it manifests in another place and I look to it, it vanishes again in the same way that a firefly might dart and weave in the twilight. Only the most careful of observers can calculate where it will appear next.

At daybreak, Jocelyn and I will go to the Fortunate Island – and her father, according to custom, must remain here for a period of time. The fact that he the Consort of the Queen has nothing to do with it. I know that there will be tears and Sebastien will take out his melancholy at her absence on everyone in the vicinity. It is my hope that Hsu, Marius, or even Amrante’ and Thomas might be able to distract him just enough that he makes life at the Château de Rochefort completely unbearable for everyone else. Hopefully Jocelyn can also be distracted with how busy she will be learning all that she must on the Fortunate Island – but I am expecting her to be equally petulant and stubborn in her resolve.

I have a feeling, however, he will be completely unmoved by any of our efforts until he has Jocelyn back here with him once more.