Dearest author of mine,
I miss you. Unbearably so. I do hope this letter finds you well, mama, for I know it has been inexcusably long since my last. This world of ours is so big, you see, so terribly bustling and busy and beautiful and I often cannot bear to take my leave and put ink to paper, not even for a moment. As any story ends, another is sure to begin, beckoning me from across the horizon – and who would I be if I did not heed that call? Who would we be, rather, for of course it is Rowan who sits beside me, nudging and chiding as I pause or falter, with a gentleness undeserved.
No, not undeserved. Unfamiliar, perhaps. Grace is not a kindness I have granted myself in many a year, but that does not mean I cannot choose to accept it now. Will you give the little ones my love, mama? They should not come to think that my distance from the family, neither past nor present, is of their making. Oh, how I wish I could wrench back the wretched hands of our grandfather clock, fall through time ‘til I can dance once again in the days of old. In the days of youth, before the manifestation emerged. How I wish I could take fledgling Maya by the hand, and whisper gentle truths. She was not a trickster, a changeling, an imposter fated only to deception and dissimulation. She may have lost the marks of the family Medea, a mother’s hazel eyes giving way to bramble green, a father’s rounded ears growing sharp and pointed, but blood is so much more than countenance. She was not wrong. Nothing about her could ever be wrong. She did not need to hide.
No matter futile wishes, those days are long since passed. I cannot take back my lies. But that does not mean I am bound by their weight. I am not a Narrator, mama. This you know. A small part of me thinks you may always have known. Words cannot quite reach how much love I hold for you, for tending to me nonetheless. But I hope my letters may begin to convey even a spark of that flame. Afterall, words have always been my gift. So, no, I am not a Narrator. I am a Storyteller.
That’s what we’re doing now, me and Rowan. We returned to her estate shortly after the Palace collapsed, the both of us desperately in need of respite, but it did not feel like home, for neither me nor her. So, we left. Without care of fate or fortune, we fled, with little more than the gold in our pockets and the clothes on our back. It was not easy, of course, to act with genuine agency for perhaps the first time in our lives. But it was beautiful. We travel, now, Rowan researching and myself, storytelling. I may not tell fates, but that does not mean my tales are pure fantasy or fiction. Folk come to me, those suffocated by the burden of their fates, and I listen. They tell of abstract manifestations, of money-hungry tellers, of familial assumption, and I listen. When they have uttered every curse and lament they wish to spill, every inch of resistance and dismay, I tell my tale. Of a manifestation, beautiful and bastardly in equal measure, and the web of lies that grew out from beneath it. How that spinning yarn began to form a noose that the trickster knew not how to escape from. Until the gentle hands, those of red robe and blue lips, those which showed a care somehow both foreign and familiar, reached forward to untie the knot. The two, so bound together in the brambles of fate, each grasped for the other in the darkness of those hallways and, in so doing, slipped away from the constraints they believed had held them inescapably. Each proved to the other that not all those who wander are lost. And, now, these fresh wanderers listen. And sometimes… sometimes, I swear I see the weight, whatever it is, lighten just slightly from their person as I spin this new yarn.
I don’t change things, mama. I don’t even predict them. But I don’t lie, either. I just tell stories. And, sometimes, those stories give wanderers hope.
I will return home one day, this is my promise. And when that day comes, I will tell you a story.
Yours, from cover to cover,
Maya
Written by Ace D.