[P] rebuild our cities, not dream of islands

[Marisol]




KING ORESTES OF SOLTERRA:

The sea tells me that she knows you. 

Here we are called kelpies. Here we are not entirely unrebuked. Here we come out teeth-first, or at least that’s what the children are told. Forgive me for my surprise that the prince of the desert might have once been a water-horse. The grace of the gods is one that comes with its teeth in irony, I’m finally beginning to realize. 

All this to say: if there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open.

Our last sovereign is presumed dead. The one before that lost her memory. The one before that has been missing for years. We have faced monsters, and magic, and untold disaster. My name is Marisol Ibarra, and I am the last of my people with mind and body enough to lead them. 

I think—I hope—you can see that now that, for all our differences, our homes have faced strifes as parallel as veins in a leaf. 

I will not grieve in advance your reply, tempting though it is: instead I wait in thrice-gorged hope that you seek the same thing I do—peace for our homes, at least a truce, perhaps an alliance. An understanding. There is war enough in our world already. I am not tempted to add to it. 

I speak ahead of myself; forgive it. But you must understand that from the youngest I have only been brave, never lucky, and the subtleties my people expect of me are behaviors I have not quite learned yet. I did not think this was my fate. If I had, I would have prepared my life differently. But fate goes ever as it must.

So, like you yourself, the shape of the offer is, I suppose, whatever you’d like it to be. Mere ceasefire. An entente. Anything that might put the world some more at peace, which I hope is not out of line for me to say I think we could both use.

King Orestes of Solterra, the sea tells me that she knows you, and she says good things.

—MARISOL OF TERRASTELLA