Page 150

She pulled her shawl tighter against the wind, the same one she had worn the night the stone fell, the night everything began. It was fraying at one corner. She hadn’t repaired it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She took out a letter. She had been writing it for weeks, in pieces, in the margins of other work, on separate sheets she kept folded in her satchel. She had written and crossed out and started again more times than she could count. The reason she hadn’t been home. The reason for her silence. But today felt like the right moment to say it all properly.

She smoothed the pages against her knee and began to read what she had written, quietly, to herself and to the cliff and to the closed line of the Fracture and to whoever might be listening on the other side of it.

Dearest Father,

I owe you a great many letters. This is the one I should have written months ago, and couldn’t, and am writing now because I have finally run out of reasons to wait.

I am well. I want you to know that first, because I know it is the first thing you would ask. I am well in the way that people are well after something has changed them so thoroughly that well becomes a different word than it used to be. But I am here. I am working. The Archive is standing, which I understand surprised a number of people who expected otherwise.

I want to tell you what happened. Not the official account, which exists now and is accurate as far as it goes, but the true account. The one I have been carrying because I know that is the one you will want to hear.

I came to Eryssan to understand the Fracture. I believed, like you taught me to believe, that knowledge was its own kind of weapon, that understanding a thing was the first step toward not being destroyed by it. I was right about that, in the end. I just did not understand what the understanding would cost.

I met someone.

I know what you are thinking, and I know how that sentence sounds, and I want you to know it is both more and less than you are imagining. He was Umbralyn, and so you will know he is gone.

He had spent centuries building toward something terrible, and in the end he chose not to finish it. I won’t try to explain all of why, not in a letter - some of it I am still learning to hold myself. But the choosing cost him everything he had, and he made it anyway.

Including me.

I think about what you always said, that people are not the worst thing that happened to them, that grief can make a person into something monstrous and the most extraordinary thing a person can do is refuse to let it. You said it about the families in the outer villages, after the bad winter. You said it about your father. I did not understand it then the way I understand it now. He understood it too, in the end. I think that is the truest thing I can tell you about him.

They called him a monster for what he was. They never once called themselves one for what they did.

I miss him every day. I want to be honest with you about that, because you have always deserved my honesty and I have not always given it. I miss him the way you miss something that was only briefly yours but changed the shape of everything, so that the space it left behind is not the same size as the time it occupied. It is larger. It is much larger.

I am staying in Eryssan because he told me he would come back for me. I do not know if that is possible, or what exists on the other side of what he walked through. But he believed it and said he would try, and I am choosing to believe it too. You taught me that you do not have to be certain of a thing to hold onto it. You only have to decide it is worth holding.

So I am holding.

The rest of me is here. Working. Learning. Writing things down so they are not forgotten or flattened or made easier than they were. Eryssan is changed, and the world is changed, and there are people here trying to understand what it means to live in a city that was shaped for centuries by a presence that is now gone. Some of them are grieving. Some are relieved. Most are both, which is the most human thing I have ever witnessed.

I am teaching, a little. There are new apprentices, very young and very earnest, and they ask the kinds of questions that make me remember arriving here myself and the absolute conviction that understanding was possible if you looked hard enough.

I still believe that. I believe it more than I did.

Write to me, Father. Tell me about the village. Tell me about the morning light on the water, and whether the nets have been good this season, and what my name means to the people who say it there now.

I will come home and see you soon. I promise.

Your daughter,

Maia

She folded the letter carefully.

The wind lifted the corner of it as she did, but she held it firmly until it settled.

She sat for a while longer after that. The flowers moved in the breeze, violet heads dipping and rising, the glass beneath them catching the morning light in fragments and throwing it back in all directions. Somewhere below, Eryssan was waking, the bells beginning their patient count of the hours.

She should go down.

She would go down.

In a moment.