Rian

Part 16

Dearest Agnes,

What a fine sun you find yourself under. Beaten by greatest age, but still burning. You stand within the Queen's Vortex now, its clarity a beacon resting on your crown. I speak to you in riddles and while I know you understand why, it pains my fingers not to write in absolute truth. Look up, my love. The spinning remnants of this old moon stir as rainbows, cascading in the same spot for a cosmic era or more. While all is destroyed it is so beautifully done.

This is the only place in the entire universe where you can read these words I've left for you. I am a bit of a romantic, so I'll make your travels worth it. I am an old fool, too set in my future and I know only after I'm gone will I be able to see the grief I've handed to you so readily. Between us a lair of secrets with crocodile mouths holding it all together. I made the wrong move and crushed everything as a result. Beyond you and I were more secrets we kept from each other. I never told you how much those hand holds meant to me. I don't mean the ones of our adulthood, but of our childhood. You always reached for me, those fingers of yours brave and unforgiving for loving me. Despite what you may think that part of you never changed.

It was the same when you held what belonged to us, the sheer adoration blinding like a final sunset.

I never spoke of these things near as often as I should have. My lips with my voice and thoughts attached to them never confessed of your failures because I was afraid you had none. Imagine living within my life wholly aware I would never measure up to you. At first it was a challenge in wait. Could I find something worth honest revile in you? I never did. Could I become more like you? I never did that either, instead I stuck to a false distaste for you I'd bleed a moon over in sworn truth.

Do you remember what they told us in school about Stilte? The king and his arrogance never truly seeing the loyalty of the feral wife and by the time he did, by the time he fell for her it was too late. This is where I tell you of your only failure, the only one I am aware of. In exchange we live as the Queen and King. You, Agnes, are refined and practiced, cunning and brave as the king. I am wild to my core, hostile in tongue, but dare a grimace be dusted in your direction and my savage will takes hold. Just as they found a middle ground we too were presented with a war's end, but by then the soil was too saturated in blood and battle cries too piercing with our secrets becoming known.

It was then we had the chance to love one another, but it was too late for you. Those chances you kissed on me were rolled up and tucked away, left in a stitched pocket of some attire you no longer wear. Your only failure was never giving me a final chance. I did not take up duties as the Queen did, unlike her I shrugged my responsibilities and left them to a barren battle ground. You picked them up and marched forward. Twice a royal, you are. With two crowns and the finest Jewel to show for it. Your only failure bloomed tenfold with success, but without me by your side I know you feel alone.

If by chance you are reading this letter with empty hands and a return to Rian on the horizon then be mindful. Go to the Whispering Halls and sit beneath the oculus on The Day of Five Moons. The next part of my letter will reveal itself there. Until that brilliant light caresses this page I remind you of one more story. The last day we visited Stilte.

It was for our own privacy. I remember the day before you slipped me a letter, the kind written in slow oil designed to fill the gaps between the written words making the correspondence disappear entirely when the time was right. Your urgency to meet on Stilte struck me as we'd only just tossed harsh cries across an assembly. You'd always been so against me when I brought up Catus Runn. On Stilte I found you beneath the Queen's Vortex and my every thought abandoned me with endeavor. I only wanted to be at your side. Agnodice, this wily moon and its angered dust, its location so far from any home will forever be a treasure to me. On that hidden day, pressed between a moment of scorning each other and succumbing to our greatest destiny you transformed me. I might as well have been a spineless, single celled dotter before that conversation. Your words at my ear was all it took to evolve me.

I am sorry Agnodice that we could not move from this point. That the dust was not a blessing surge meant to rite us into our new life. Stand in this place with me and recite those words one more time.

Yours Forever, Julius