Private if you must die, remember your life

the self is not so weightless / nor whole and unbroken / remember the pact of our youth

Mernatius,

I write this letter to you with my own hand, if you can believe it. Forgive the shaky calligraphy, the stains of dripping ink. Were this to anyone else but you I would not have allowed such unsightliness to bear my signature, but I know that these stains, unsightly to me, will be, to you, proof.

Proof that it is no imposter writing these words, but me.

I have heard from the servants that a few weeks after I'd fallen ill, you left on urgent business. They do not tell me why, only that you had seemed hurried.

I hope it is not your father. He is gaining in years, but the last time I saw him, he seemed in better spirits than I. And you have always told me, solemnly, that you think your father will outlive us both. So if it is him — do not worry. He will not be so easily taken, when death has shrunk back from even me.

But if it is not him, then I am certain that no business can be more urgent now than your return. When you receive this letter, make haste at once. I will have sent with it my fastest carriage to bring you back.

Adonai

- - - -

Mernatius —

You are wearying me. I am certain my letter was received, though the carriage returned empty.

You were still engaged in settling a matter, they told me. You would come soon after, they assured me. It has been three weeks. What delays you?

If it is money you need, I will send it. Do not dare turn it away. You have always distanced yourself from my family's riches — my riches, now, I should remind you — but now you are simply angering me.

The last time I saw you I was half a corpse. Now, I am better. I can write. I can walk. Yet I am far from fully recovered and it is with this that I threaten you.

I will be waiting at our gates in three days time, at sundown.

Know that if you do not show within the hour, I will likely not last to see midnight.

- - - -

I am no longer certain if you receive my letters at all, or that you do, and choose to leave them unanswered. Is an illness truly enough to drive you away forever?

If so — even a corpse leaves behind more notice than you.

cottage with walls of shellacked white sits like a cracked-open shell at the end of a garden path. Its windows like eyes are boarded shut, its door of carven oak sealed with three planks of driftwood, like crooked teeth. Spiderwebs drip from its eaves. Ivy crawls, black and grisly, over its pale, weathered face.

I go and look at it, sometimes. To rip away a vine of ivy. To kick apart a nest of red ants. To reach for the misshapen planks of driftwood, and run my wing along them.

I have done this so many times that the coarse wood is clean of splinters. My wing had taken them all, a thousand needle-points working their way into feather and air-hollowed bone. Methodically, with the sun painting my back gold and then red, I'd spend afternoons resting in the shade of a lone palm tree, picking splinters from my feathers as if I were plucking a lyre.

Yet not once do I wish for the planks to be removed. Not once do I look through the cracks in the boarded windows, searching for the curve of a whittled chair, the brick of a modest fireplace, that I know lies buried like bodies within. The cottage is preserved like a relic, and I will not be the one to disturb it.

Until it is, and not by him.

I hear the shouts as I walk loosely amongst the inner gardens, little more than hedges and tender branches in the bitterness of winter. I could not have missed them; the sounds carried over to me by a cold wind are like the ravings of a mad beast. My lyre had been cradled in my grasp, yet with one jerk on its strap it lies flat against my back, the white fur lining my cloak lashing my cheeks.

The shouts are coming from the cottage.

I turn my head to the wind, slit my eyes against its bite as I edge down the overgrown path leading to Mernatius' abandoned cottage. A flock of jackdaws takes into the sky like black arrows as a great creaking rips through the air, the sound of wood splitting apart under force. Then, a sharp clatter as something heavy is hurled to the frost-hardened dirt. I swallow my breath and round the corner.

There, in front of me, is a figure wrapped in a black cloak setting upon the wood sealed over the cottage's door in a depraved frenzy. "You will not!" I know not who he is speaking to; the voice is raw and hoarse, edged in pain, and I flinch from it.

Before a piece of wood is torn down and thrown at my hooves: grey driftwood with an edge smoothed of all its splinters.

When I reach for it, my buried-deep anger, it is already there and waiting. A live thing, called eagerly to attention. My grip closes on air; I am weaponless. It matters little.

"Halt, ya qalp!" My voice hisses out in a thin white stream, yet it is my shoulder that meets its target first. I am upon him before I even realise it, the fur of my cloak stark as bone against his hooded head. "What right do you have, to destroy something that is not yours?" My breath leaves me in sharp puffs, my strength already flagging, yet I reach for his hood anyway and rip it off.

I do not recognise him for a full breath.

Then another. Then —

I release him, stumbling back as hacking coughs rip past my lungs, my throat, my lips. It is not him. I cannot draw in enough air. I collapse to the ground; blood spots the dirt. It is not him.

It cannot be him.

{ @Mernatius | notes: ya qalp = 'you dog' c': }