Evensong: Paradise Lost

"Paradise Lost" is the eighth installment in The Vampire Diaries, and the first book of the Evensong arc. Whilst not officially endorsed by publishers as canon, the novel continues the line established by L. J. Smith. The novel was published in 2014, three years after the previous installment, "Midnight."
==Summary==
Damon is back and enjoying his vampire existence to its fullest. Elena, Bonnie and their friends are in their third week at Dalcrest College, ordinary students aware of an extraordinary world that verges on their own campus.
Stefan is scarcely aware that he is living in a fragile paradise with Elena as his devoted girl . . . until one night it all shatters. He wakes from a dream to find Elena limp and white in his arms and rushes her to the hospital for a massive transfusion.
Elena survives, but Stefan decides that there is only way that she will ever truly be safe is without him. To make his exit complete, Stefan removes himself from the memories of Elena, her friends, and all of Fell's Church.
Can true love ever really be forgotten? Will Damon finally have Elena by his side as his Princess of Darkness? The story begins in Evensong: Paradise Lost.
==Plot==
The story begins a few weeks after the events of Midnight, probably in early September (before the beginning of autumn).
Damon has returned alive from the dimension in which he had died and is now having a conversation in a bar with a young girl named Kenzy, who initially tried to scam him by mistaking him for a college boy. Near Pine Grove, in the town of Dyer more specifically at Dalcrest College, Bonnie has a strong feeling that something really bad is going to happen and, although at first she tries not to tell anyone to avoid scaring them and because she doesn't feel entirely sure about it, but it doesn't take long for her to be rebuked by Meredith who noticed the concern on her best friend's face. She was writing a letter to Alaric Saltzman, who was then on a trip to Scotland where there was no signal. In the letter she tells him that she misses him and that it would be good for him to investigate the city of Fell's Church because she feels that there is something there happening (just like on the Dalcrest college campus). In the end, Bonnie confesses about her intuition and Meredith reminds her that it was the same one that Elena had had in the past and that she had left in writing in one of her personal diaries.
On the other hand, Matt frames a hundred dollar bill given to him by his Uncle Joe and can't help but remember and feel a strong nostalgia for that first date he had with Elena. He tries to study but a party upstairs doesn't allow him, so he wonders when his roommate will arrive because, despite the third week of classes, he still hasn't arrived.
Caroline Forbes is still pregnant and she and her father do not yet know when the official delivery date will be. However, she is now part of Elena's group and, despite everything she has experienced, she feels gratitude for it. Still, she is worried and thoughtful about her being a werewolf.
Elena Gilbert disguises herself as her to go unnoticed through the hallways and get to Stefan's room, however, two first-year students stop her and lasciviously harass her. Elena, having already been entered by Meredith herself, attacks them in self-defense and wins the fight. Once in her room, Stefan gives her a locket of black diamonds and rubies that formed the image of a red rose, fully bloomed, against a midnight background. During that same night, Mrs. Flowers performs a reading of the bottom of her teacup, coming to the conclusion that both Elena, Bonnie and Meredith were in danger and that there is a not-too-distant future filled with tears, sadness and pain. In order to find more answers about this, she decides to enter a spiritual trance to start a conversation with her Mom.
Stefan and Elena entered a psychic trance as they have usually been doing in recent times when she was bitten by him, Stefan always treated such a connection with caution but this was not the occasion. Elena felt the impulse to merge and become one with Stefan, so she let herself be carried away by the euphoria of the experience and, when she tried to come to her senses, she knew that it had already been too late, but she did not regret it anyway. When Stefan Realizing that his girlfriend is on the verge of death, he decides to take her to the hospital in Campbell, about 10 kilometers away, avoiding giving her his blood so as not to risk transforming her into a vampire. During the drive, he projected her power into Elena's body to keep her still alive. Due to all the Power that now resided in Stefan by drinking practically all of Elena's blood, he was able to influence the police officers who scolded him and all the medical staff so as not to be questioned or even remembered. Once Elena could be stabilized, Stefan implanted a virus in his girlfriend's memory through his powers so that she would forget everything that had to do with him and everything she had experienced so far, as a result of his feeling of deep guilt for bringing her almost to death. Later, once the process was finished, he called Matt, Bonnie and Meredith to repeat the same process of removing memories.
When Bonnie was attacked by Stefan at the time of planting the virus, she sent psychic signals of danger and help to Damon who, after leaving Kenzy and turning into a crow, flew to the town of Campbell to confront whoever was harming her. Due to the permission that every vampire needs to enter a place, Damon ordered his brother to go up to the roof and explain the entire situation to him, noting how the latter emanated too much power and how Elena was practically on the verge of death and Bonnie completely weak.
They had a conversation where Stefan explained his plans: he would delete all of Elena's diary entries and plant a neurological virus on Judith, Margaret and Robert, like everyone in the small town of Fell's Church. He would then go to Florence or any country in Europe, without breaking the promise he made to Elena to protect Damon. Before leaving, Damon warns him of an old diary that Bonnie began writing after Elena's death, Stefan returns to Bonnie's mind and manages to find the location of the diary but does not mention it to Damon.
Once most of the plan has been carried out, Stefan implants the neuro-virus in Margaret in the same way with Judith and Robert but with them he did not need to touch. When the time came to do it with Mrs. Flowers, she tells her to go back on everything she has done because her Mom and Grandma (her ancestors) warned her with strange fragments of poems that revolved around paradise, hell, life and death. Still, Stefan doesn't stop and manages to implant the neuro-virus in her, then takes his things and leaves in his car.
Damon manages to enter the hospital thanks to the fact that he influenced the mind of a boy named Ethan. When he entered the waiting hallway, everyone present was happy to see him, which took him by surprise because he understood that it was because they all believed that he was Stefan in terms of personality, only with a different name, thus Damon being the Elena's boyfriend. When the young woman woke up once stable due to the massive blood transfusion, she also believed that Damon was her boyfriend of a year ago, however, both Elena and everyone there were unaware of anything that had to do with the supernatural (witches, vampires, werewolves, etc.) since Stefan had also erased all that information from them. At one point, when Meredith and Bonnie were with Elena in her room, Bonnie went into a trance and told her friends that everyone will die and that the first to die would be Elena; When Damon enters her room, he blows on her eyelashes, and Bonnie comes to, not knowing exactly what had happened and believing that her friends had played a bad joke on her.
At Dalcrest University, Stefan deletes all photographs linking him to the group, also stealing the Sulez family cane. When he enters Caroline's room, he asks her about Bonnie's diary and any other items that might give Elena any clues about Stefan, however, she doesn't know any more than Stefan already knew. The vampire tries to implant the neuro-virus in her but Caroline resists at first, however, when Stefan asks her not to do it she relents allowing the vampire to see some of the reasons why the young woman hates Elena and her friends.
Days pass and Elena goes through a progressive recovery. One day, while Matt, Elena, Meredith, Damon and Bonnie were having a nice chat about her studies at Dalcrest College, Bonnie suddenly goes into a trance and insists that Elena will be the first to die. Given this, Damon separates her from the others and tries to telepathically investigate what was happening, so to generate such a bond from her he kisses her on the lips. He found a strange grayish-pale bacteria in a sector of Bonnie's brain, then he threw her Power into it, making it disappear, this is how he sealed the link with a kiss on the forehead and making the young woman forget what happened. Meredith and the others don't understand exactly what Damon did, and even feel that it was disrespectful and in very bad taste to do that to Bonnie, so she walks up to him and then slaps him. Due to Elena's insistence, everyone chooses to close the matter and not continue talking about it.
Meanwhile, at Fell's Church, Stefan erases all memory of him in Meredith's parents, then hides the Sulez family staff in one of the trees in the Campus forest in Dalcrest (but not before protecting it with Power, making it invisible to every type of beings). It is mentioned that all of Elena's diaries are in his car.
The next day, Elena is finally back in her new room at Dalcrest University, after a tedious morning where she and Damon worked out any bureaucratic problems to register. The night before Stefan had consumed the blood of two animals and was now strengthened, however, something on the radio made him return to Dalcrest: a young woman in Fell's Church was taken to the town hospital after a terrible loss of blood. Elena and her friends were in her room celebrating her discharge, when on the news they saw what happened at Fell's Church and they couldn't help but think about the many parallels with Elena's case. It is then that Bonnie has a trance again where she tells them that everything is about sacrifices, especially blood sacrifices, that someone is plotting it just for fun, then she falls unconscious against a wall while Elena tries to maintain her composure.
Stefan, in the other room, orders Damon to come over so he can give him an explanation about what happened at Fell's Church and thus find out about Elena's health. The brothers argue heavily to the point of fighting in the dark, causing complete chaos of destruction in the small room. However, they both come to the conclusion that Stefan could not have been the one who caused the bleeding in the young woman from Fell's Church and that perhaps it was due to another apparently non-vampire enemy that Damon could not probe with his Power from Dalcrest.
When Damon returns to the room, Elena stands by the promise she made to her Aunt Judith to not let any man sleep in her bed with her, leading to a heated argument between Elena and Damon. The vampire tried to hypnotize her but in her first attempt he failed, and Elena was the one who tried to throw him out of her room because she was slowly realizing the mental gaps that the neuro-virus left in her. However, after Damon drank his entire flask full of Black Magic, he manages to hypnotize her to make her forget everything about the fight that happened so far.
Meanwhile, at Fell's Church, Mrs. Flowers rereads the grounds on her teacup confirming that there is an enemy lurking, as well as many lies surrounding the group.
In Dyer Wood, Stefan lies down to sleep in a tree thinking about everything that has happened in the last few days, feeling enormous regret for his actions. It is there that he comes to the point of finding the meaning of Paradise Lost from one of the fragments that Mrs. Flowers' Mother and Grandmother told him before he erased all the old woman's memories of him. The novel ends with a quote from John Milton: «The mind is its own place, and can make of itself a paradise out of a hell, a hell out of a paradise...».
==Characters==
===Main===
*Elena Gilbert
*Stefan Salvatore
*Damon Salvatore
*Caroline Forbes
*Bonnie McCullough
*Meredith Sulez
*Theophilia Flowers
===Secondary===
*Kenzy
*Grace
*Ariana
*Ethan
*Jacob
*Mia
*Abby
*Jim Bryce
*Isobel Saitou
==Locations==
*Pine Grove
*Dyer
**Dalcrest College
**Dyer Wood
*Campbell
**Mercy Hospital Havenwick
*Fell's Church
**Sulez Residence
**Flowers Pension
**Old Wood
==Body Count== 
*No human or supernatural being died in this installment.
==Gallery==
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==Trivia==
*This is the beginning of a fanfiction series written by L. J. Smith and her original intention of the continued story after The Return series.
*According to the timeline, this novel begins only a few weeks after Midnight, beginning the college class period and the events being described after the third week of classes.
*It is mentioned that Stefan drives a Porsche Panamera Turbo Executive.
*Damon is mentioned to drive a Ferrari 458 Spider.
*It is mentioned that Teophilia Flowers turned fifty a few weeks before the hospital incident, so her birthday is probably in September.
*It is mentioned that Elena's blood is A negative.
*It is the first novel written by L. J. Smith within the Vampire Diaries universe that does not contain a single entry from the diaries of some of the characters, despite the fact that it is mentioned that Elena had begun writing in a new diary.
==References==
*Evensong: Paradise Lost
==Navigation==
Category:L. J. Smith
Category:Novels
Category:The Vampire Diaries
Category:Evensong series