by Cherny » Sun Sep 15, 2019 12:37 pm
The letter had arrived in the darkest days of Winter, and though years had passed the boy - more a youth now, perhaps even a young man - recognised the hand that had addressed it, and hesitated. It would contain a great many words, he guessed, in long strings tied in difficult knots. Reading them by candlelight be all the more taxing, he reasoned, so he tucked it onto the mantel shelf to read in the daylight.
The next day was cloudy and dull but had chores which seemed more pressing than untangling difficult words into difficult thoughts, and it was dusk again by the time they were done.
Days followed days, growing shorter and darker and colder before, finally, by increments, it seemed that Winter began to loosen its grip. Early crocuses sprouted below the still-bare trees, the first stirring of the woods from a months-long slumber, a cautious promise of better days to come.
The sun deigned to shine upon Myrken for a time, enough to open windows, to breathe out the winter's staleness and replace it with scents of pale green growth. Spring warmed into summer, a stretch of heat and light filling the woods with the chatter of new families hastily raised while the bountiful times lasted.
The days waxed their fullest and began to wane once more, the rich greens burnished to copper and gold at the nights grew cooler, the dawn hedgerows festooned with dew-jewelled webs of spiders fattening up for the winter to come.
It was on such a morning that the squire encountered the letter once again, fingertips brushing it from the mantel while reaching for flint and steel to light the hearth. To find it still sealed and unread after so many months brought a reflexive pang of shame at the discourtesy, tempered with a note of old spite not entirely forgotten and a flash of temptation to put it to use as kindling.
The work of an impulsive moment finally cracked the seal, brows lowering over dark eyes as he unfolded the letter to find every bit as many words as suspected; the work of considerably longer moments to carry it to a seat by the window, to laboriously pick his way through the letter by the grey morning light, to glean the once-Governor's meaning from his meandering.
Through the first reading his frown was that of a student set a particularly taxing challenge, a mix of concentration and resentment. By the third it was more a scowl, a word picked out here and there to be muttered out loud, turned over in his mouth as one might chew at a scrap of unexpected gristle.
At some point this brought a crow clattering down to the windowsill, bead-bright and curious, and the squire was glad to have a second opinion on the meaning of this sentence or that. Before long he was reading the whole thing aloud to a small but attentive audience of rats and crows alike, affecting a not entirely charitable imitation of the author's voice as if delivering a speech in the town square.
Perhaps surprisingly, there followed some debate between those gathered, with the squire opining with some force on his correspondent's (apparently extensive) flaws of character and judgement amid the croaking and chittering of the rest. With time, however, the conversation grew less heated as it turned from the author of the letter to its actual content, more thoughtful, with suggestions and speculations as if untangling an obtuse and cryptic riddle.
The discussion continued even after the squire rose to light a fire in the neglected hearth and prepare a breakfast for himself and the rest, though he listened more than he spoke, prodding irritably at berry-sweetened porridge. Once the meal was finished and cleared away he rummaged paper and writing tools from his room and sat himself down at the kitchen table with the air of one resigned to a task rather than enthused by it.
Ser Glenn Burnie
You are a man of Letters but you are uncommon bad at Learning.
It is enough to be alive. If you are alive in Myrken you have spited all the things here that would have you dead and that makes you the match of any outsider. If you are alive in Myrken you are doing better than all the souls who are dead and gone to Judgement. If you are alive in Myrken and can find joy in the things you said then why is that not plenty?
Your Lady made people walk towards Something and took away theyr troubles and I watched them dance and laugh and drink and eat and wear fine clothes all through her Summer and I never saw such misery in any Myrkentown gutter.
You have lived in Myrken for years but you still look at people here like things that crawl in a bottel. You think them wretched and suffering but it shows what you do not know. It is enough to be alive. It is enough to wake and eat and work and drink and dance and talk and love and sleep again. It is important to do all those things because if you are alive in Myrken there is a day you will be dead and gone and can do none of those things no more.
You think all Myrken folk have is misery and joy is an escape. You do not see they have joy and fight each day to keep it from getting stolen. You do not see that each soul in Myrken already has a purpose and already strives. A Baker who sets himself to make the day's bread has a purpose as good as any Knights or Heroes or Governors and will likely do less harm or Sacrifice for it. It seems to me a fine and grand purpose.
It seems to me as well that you are looking for a purpose for your self and can find none or you would not have wrote to me. My honest opinion that you asked for is that you should set to mending what you have made wrong before seeking purpose for others. I reckon that purpose will keep you for a life time or more.
Cherny