Twenty years does not wash away memory. The best it can do is impose a patina that blurs horror, making those things we would rather forget more acceptable, allowing us to look at the past with a more dispassionate eye. The passage of time creates its own objectivity, and we can view events in the light of cause and effect. At the time I hated Falconi with an intensity bordering on the murderous, but even that had dulled with the years, until in a way I felt I could find some small understanding of the forces which drove him. His actions could never be condoned, never excused. They were beyond forgiveness, perhaps even by God, but could be put into a perspective from which the historical causes leading to his obsession could be understood. Two thousand years is a long time. Centuries of tradition cannot be wiped away by reasoning, for obsession knows no reason, how can it, or it would not be obsession. But obsession always extracts a terrible price, and part of that price stood before me in ruins. Duality. Good and evil, two sides of the same coin: unacceptable to many, but a logical argument, maybe a reality. The Universe was set in motion with laws we call physics, and not even its Creator can change the laws of balance. Good and evil co-exist, check each other, and though the pendulum swings from time to time, it must come back. Unless - something was set in motion nearly two thousand years ago, and has been the ward of the Falconi family since then. It is called The Keeping, and the end game is fast approaching. The circle had closed.