And it worked, after a fashion. I watched the part of me that was still in Pripyat over the next few days, even protecting him from the guard at the end. I would like to say that was due to Angelica’s bewitchment, but I don’t know that it was. Even after all my efforts to right my wrongs, I am fearful and selfish, and I know I have become far more like Angelica than I care to admit.

But at least there was you. You were living a good life and seemed to be a good person the few times I got to check up on you. But I had to be very careful. You were my one secret from Angelica for the longest time. And then I had another.

A few years ago I managed to trick her. Trap her deep within one of the darkest recesses of Incarnata. It freed me and many others from being under her will, and allowed me to finally leave the hotel once and for all. I returned here, to the only true home I had ever known.

In the years since the Chernobyl Plant incident, the Bowl isn’t visited as much anymore. It is guarded, but never studied or approached more than a handful of times a year. Most of the tunnels connecting its cave to the outside world have been filled with cement, and the few places like this that are left are largely forgotten by the outside world.

I am part of the reason for the forgetting. I am not seen unless I mean to be seen, and I have made it so people do not remember the Bowl much, if at all. My original plan was to just guard the Bowl myself and stay in exile until this unnatural form finally died.

And then one day I heard Alena praying.

She had been evacuated back in 1986, and once the area had been cleared for visitors again, she began making yearly trips back to Pripyat. In part, to visit all that had been lost. In part, to look for me, despite what logic and her worried family kept telling her.

It was on one of these trips that she found her way to the strange ventilation pipe in the clearing above us. She spoke to it like it was my gravestone, telling it how much she still loved me, but she needed to accept I was gone and finally move on. The miracle of hearing her voice joined with my terror at her never coming back, and before I had time to reconsider, I showed myself. It was a terrible ordeal, but not in the way I had anticipated.