"My grandmother doesn't have a grave in the cave", she stated.

We looked at her with suspicious eyes now, and I was regretting coming here. She isn't moving past this.

"Why don't we come straight to the point?", Adam asked her.

"Just tell us what is it in that cave, that is making us all suffer, or is it just me being paranoid", I said to her in frustation.

"You are not being paranoid", she said.

"Please continue", Adam said politely, like warning her to stop talking in circles.

"I was born into a family which was cursed. He had cursed our family, cursed our happiness, our lives." Athena said.

"Who was he?", I continued, "The one's who cursed your family".
"Dimitri Solvakshi", She said looking into air, thinking something, terrorized by something. "A witch", she continued. "He was in love with my grand mother Amara, and he proposed to her, but her father didn't wish to get her married to a poor refugee, who the people would call the witch".
"She was married to a man in the village soon after, and in a year she had a daughter, my mother. This child survived, but no other child in the family did. They started believing they were cursed, and one day they found the witch standing in their lawn, enchanting something." She moved towards the window and looked outside continuing, "And in his blood he wrote 'I loved you but you couldn't accept me as your own, so as the new sun rises, your blood will be cursed, forever, till the doom's day arrives', on a piece of silk and sent this to Amara."

"He cursed your bloodline", Adam said."Wasn't there a cure for it?", I asked.
"My grand father tried to find a cure is what we were told, he met Sister Arina at the Church in Winslow, but he didn't tell anyone about it and kept it a secret until Amara read his diary", she said earning shock from all of us.
"Why didn't he tell anyone?", Adam asked."Because when he connected the dots, he understood that his bloodline was cursed forever,which meant that if she was his daughter, she would have never survived, and though he didn't want to accept the child, he loved Amara, and the cure was loosing her forever, and as a consequences of his anger, he buried the witch under the cave alive " she said.
"He did what?",Adam asked.
"Which meant that Dimitri was the father of the child that survived?", I said as I realised what she meant.
"Yes", she continued, " But that didn't change anything. My mother Taniyah was on her last bed with worsening health conditions on daily basis, so Amara pleaded her husband to perform the cure to save the innocent child. They found a priest who was ready to perform the cure."
There was complete silence in the room, no one spoke anything possibly due to the shock and intensee atmosphere surrounding the room.

"She was buried alive in the walls of the cave while the priest wrote the inscriptions on the wall to bury the curse with her. That's where the blood comes from. We were told that since they tried to bury the curse with her in the walls of the cave next to Dimitri's body, the curse wasn't stopped forever, it was taken off our family but that was for the worse. It changed its form from the curse on our bloodline to the curse of her blood. So now whenever, anyone guilty of his sins touches the walls of the cave, her blood is drawn,is what is believed,and it marks that person.", she said.

"So who gets the blood gets the curse?", I asked.
"How is that possible, you said they buried the curse with her", Adam said.
"He was a witch, witches draw energy from the universe, the nature. And when some energy has been drawn from the universe, it can't just be buried, to stop it you need something powerful, something equal and opposite to its energy, they never found anything like that. And when Sister Arina told them about the cure, they thought it would work", she said.

"What is the proof that what you are saying is the truth", Adam asked her."You say? Think about it, your friends, because of who you came here, and besides you want to believe me, here", she got off the couch and moved towards the bookshelf.

She came back with a journal in her hand. The journal seemed old. It had a leather covering and the leather was all worn out. It was tied around with a thread like was done in old times, and it seemed like two generations old.

She placed it on the table and looked at us. Adam was about to pick the journal from the table, but listening to what she had to offer us next,stopped him.

"But the curse was never on our family", she stated out of no where."What do you mean?", Adam said.
"It was all a lie",she continued speaking with disgust in her voice,"A big fat lie, that was fed to Amara, a lie which originated due to obsession and made people suffer."
I grew my eyebrows to form a frown."A lie?", I asked.

Adam and I looked at each other, not knowing if we should listen to the shit we were just being fed or leave right away. Since we had come so far with her story, we kept sitting in our places to know the whole story.

She moved towards the window and looked outside.