The Fifth Healer

84.

After she finished crying over Nikolai's body on the cold stone floor, after she ran out of tears so all that remained was the quiet void of unfathomable sadness, Ainsley discovered the following mysterious letter in Nikolai's pocket.

...By now, you will have passed through the final gauntlet, making you a fully instated chronopath. Which is why this will be your final letter. This will mark the end of the parchments's chronopathic enchantment, so the ink will remain visible permanently. Therefore, you must destroy this parchment as soon as you've read it.

The Guild of Helios recruits Fifths on their seventeenth birthday. Therefore, for over a century, it has been a tradition of the House of Sterling to allow our children a choice on that same day. Our children may choose to live the rest of their lives with us, free from the oppressive yoke of guild membership, but also confined within our castle. Or they may leave the castle permanently, joining a guild and practicing their temporal magic among them. The latter means isolation from our family, but it also means freedom to travel the world in service to the poor and broken, to befriend Fifths outside our house, and to find happiness in the love of another's embrace.

When he turned seventeen, your father chose to leave. That is how we met. I was a young initiate in The Guild of Helios who imagined I could end all of humanity's suffering using my newfound power. But the more I learned about the organization, the more I grew disillusioned by the politics, by the choice to use our magic to prop up the already rich and powerful.

Your father was a dazzling young revolutionary. Like you, at age seventeen, he'd been given the family's heirloom, his great-grandfather's timepiece. He was even then hatching a scheme to overthrow the guild's corrupt monopoly on healing magic. We fell in love, and soon after we were initiated by the Guild of Helios, we eloped and were married in secret. Your father is a brilliant chronopath and was able to find his way back to the secret location of the House of Sterling. His family-now mine, too-welcomed me with open arms, and we have spent several happy years living hidden in this castle. It's where you were born and where, as I write this letter, you are currently sleeping peacefully in your crib.

Sterling children who choose to leave the house on their seventeenth birthday do so knowing they will be retromanced. Retromancy is a form of temporal healing whose time cost is memory loss. We do this for the protection of those living in the castle. The knowledge of its location is a closely guarded secret. Just knowing it would put a chronopath in danger because there are those who would stop at nothing to extract such knowledge, either by magic or torture. The retromanced seventeen-year-old is given only a letter to inform them of their name and identity, though the clever find other ways to sneak information past the guild.

So, while we know it must be frustrating for you not to remember anything about your first seventeen years, rest assured you made this choice of your own free will, just as your father did before you. And perhaps, like your father, you will one day choose to escape your guild and find your way home to the House of Sterling.

This being our final message, we should reveal the full extent of the horologe's power. It is the last known artifact capable of performing syncopathy. Unlike chronopathy, syncopathy extracts its cost not from the sleep cost of Fourths but from the healer themselves. As such, its power is limited only by the user's own lifetime. Unlike chronopathy, syncopathy is capable of healing both wounds and maladies alike.

It's even able to heal Chronopaths without cursing them-though do not be tempted to use it for this purpose, as the healer themselves bears the usual curse if they heal another chronopath with syncopathy.

Your father and I risk our lives each time we venture out of the castle, meeting with other hidden groups of Fifths, hoping to quietly stoke the winds of change that will allow us to live openly. We venture into armed conflicts, hospitals, and refugee camps, using the horologe to heal as many as we dare. I hope I will be able to watch you, our son, grow into the strong and brilliant young man we know you'll become.

If you are reading the letter, however, I was wrong.

If you are reading this letter, sometime between the day I wrote it when you were two years old and your seventeenth birthday, we disappeared, and on your seventeenth birthday, your uncle gave you this letter, and with the heirloom horologe that has allowed our family to heal at will, to guide you after your retromancy.

If you are reading this letter, yesterday was your seventeenth birthday, and we did not live to see it. For that, and more importantly, for our absence during your childhood, I am deeply sorry. More sorry than I can possibly express in this letter. And yet, as Albert Einstein, himself a Fifth, wrote concerning the death of a loved one: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Know that whatever fate befell your father and I, know that our final thoughts in our last moments were of you, our beloved son. And now that you have read this letter, our love and legacy will be with you wherever you go, living on inside your heart. You are, and always will be, our son, Nikolai of House Sterling.

Go with the gods.

All our love,
Your mother and father