For Every Letter

CHAPTER THREE

Envelope #34: letters damien wrote but never sent

Is this unhealthy? I think it is. My mother slaps my hand every time she finds it stained with ink or bruised after I type for hours on my father's laptop. My father looks at me with such disgust. He had read my last letter and given me a long lecture about how true reigns didn't want people to lead them or control them or rule them and how I couldn't possibly be in love when I am thirteen. I told him I wasn't in love, I just wanted to watch you become queen. He looked so disappointed.

Nanny is the only one who looks at me kindly now. She pats my head and trains me and I pretend I don't know she kills people who come to kill father. The servants are uncomfortable around me, too, because I have left that fury you saw in me behind. It is in your hands now. I wish you would return it. I wish you would never do that.

Today's morning, mother beckoned me to the library and placed a book in my hands. She said I couldn't leave until I read it, so I did. When I was finished, she took it and asked me questions. I answered. She teared up. She said that my brothers and cousins had taken three hours and I had needed one, that they answered half and I answered all, that I am wasting my talent and potential, all out of guilt when what happened wasn't my fault.

I wanted to tell her it was her fault that your father died. I wanted to tell her that if she wasn't always running after men's attention, I would never have turned to fire and nanny for warmth. I wouldn't have gone on that trip. I wouldn't have burned the house down.

Before you, I would have. After you, I smiled at mother, told her that the book was good, and went to my room.

#

One thousand years ago, the old culture truly came to an end with the end of what they had done to the earth. Our ozone layer was back, thicker and stronger than ever, trees and greenery were everywhere and it was proven by the complete disinterest in technology that when people were provided with the correct life opportunities and situations, they mellowed and formed ridiculously tight-knit communities.

Racism and sexism were well on their way to disappearance, and the discovery of animals able to consume plastic and petroleum and make organic compounds out of them turned the tide in the reign's favor harder.

If technicality was to be applied, the old culture was definitely overrun three thousand years ago, directly after the third war. The process that followed was not much different than picking at a bleeding wound or cutting at a gaping gash. The absurd need for metals were made to disappear, and brick and cobblestone had to take their place. Non-renewable resources were no longer used after the first Head of Zahir introduced the law of living creatures. Crime rates dropped after the third Head of Sentry implemented the law of the eye for the eye. The fisted clasp of the media let go of the people once the second Head of Knifedge applied the system of non-moneytarism, and the wide chasm between rich and poor disappeared in the blink of an eye.

In the middle of all of that, and despite how they were imprisoning and maiming anyone who got in the way of earth's slow, slow healing, my reigning family still found a way to spite the other families by starting the spring banquets, which were basically an excuse for them to drink and lose their minds in indulgence. The Sentries did not like that and neither did the Zahirs. Five centuries later and alcohol alongside cigarettes had completely disappeared.

That didn't stop my great-great-great-great grandfather from continuing the ritual of the banquets purely out of the ardent, stubborn need to spite that my family was quite well-known for. Now, I sat on a night-black cushion in a silver-steel carriage with Cilla and opposite to Illyria Luden, my mother's valet. It was a little bit of a prejudiced and misused tradition for the women of the Head to send their loyal servants to the children they favored. I was the only heir my mother had sired, the only result of the one time my father married, and I knew for a fact that Illyria was a spy for the Malices and that she was being fed false information by my eldest brother.