Chapter 48: Letters to the Sky

“Did something wonderful happen today?”

Madame Anne asked, her tone light and curious as our afternoon tutoring session drew to a close. It seemed that despite my absolute best efforts, I had utterly failed to conceal the trace of giddy anticipation vibrating through my posture.

“Yes,” I murmured, my voice lowering slightly as I navigated the internal terminology. I hesitated for a fraction of a second, debating whether I should formally describe the Director as my mother or choose a more distant label, before settling on a compromise. “The person who…… who raised me is scheduled to make a brief visit this afternoon.”

“Oh, that truly is marvelous news,” she replied warmly.

The entire empire was intimately acquainted with the reality that I was an orphan. Within the public consciousness, that detail was treated as an absolute, unchangeable facet of my identity—no different from the deep black of my hair or the brutal fact that I was the Hero.

Madame Anne offered a small, immensely elegant smile, the movement causing the faint lines around her eyes to deepen into soft shadows. She stood among the very selective circle of people who knew exactly from whose hands I had first learned the basic mechanics of the alphabet.

“Why not take a moment to compose a short letter for them? I am entirely certain it would bring them immense joy.”

“Do you truly think she would be happy to receive it?”

“Without a doubt. My own son has already crossed his thirtieth year, yet even now, I frequently find myself retrieving the clumsy, crumpled letters he penned for me during his childhood, reading through them just to feel that warmth again.”

Summoning a nearby attendant with a quiet gesture, Madame Anne personally arranged for a selection of writing parchment to be placed upon my desk. Only then, noting my lingering silence, did she realize she had implicitly pressured me into a task I hadn’t explicitly agreed to. Her voice softened further, her features coloring with a gentle, motherly concern that I might feel unnecessarily burdened.

“Please, do not feel compelled to force it, Ian. In truth, simply allowing her to witness how beautifully your physical vessel has recovered will be more than enough to overwhelm her with joy. That is simply how the heart of a parent operates.”

I quietly searched through my recent memories, trying to recall if I had ever explicitly informed Madame Anne that I regarded Director Janet as my true parent. I was entirely certain I had never voiced such a sentiment, yet the tutor had seamlessly utilized the terminology as though it were an absolute, self-evident truth.

Sensing that I had drifted into the deep, insular corridors of my own mind, Madame Anne methodically organized her teaching materials and quietly vacated the room. I could barely reconstruct the precise words I had used to offer my parting respect; it was an incredibly wretched habit of mine. Whenever a complex knot of thoughts paralyzed my intellect, my awareness of the external world would systematically crater—or, more accurately, whenever I confronted a reality I desperately desired to evade, I would ruthlessly bolt the doors of my heart.

It was only long after the echo of her footsteps had completely dissolved that my gaze finally drifted toward the waiting parchment. Reaching into the drawer, I retrieved the fine inkwell and the pristine glass quill Zeimer had gifted me weeks ago; out of a desire to preserve them, I hadn’t permitted myself to employ them a single time until today. Though the stationery prepared by the staff on short notice was modest and entirely unadorned, its simplicity suited my temperament perfectly. The heavily gilded, ostentatious parchment Felix habitually utilized for state affairs always left me feeling suffocated by an immense weight of obligation.

Dipping the tip of the quill into the reservoir, I watched the rich, deep indigo ink cling beautifully to the grooves of the nib. A sudden wave of hesitation washed over me; it felt intensely wasteful to exhaust such a beautiful instrument on my clumsy script, and because I had absolutely no baseline concept of how to structure my final thoughts, I repeated the motion several times—dipping and lifting the quill in an empty, hypnotic rhythm.

‘To Director Janet.’

I finally brought the nib into physical contact with the paper, yet the subsequent sentences refused to manifest. I wrestled against the agonizing blankness for hours, my mind agonizing over every syllable until the shifting light outside indicated the approach of the luncheon hour. It was only then that I managed to scratch out the final, definitive sentence.

Unlike her previous arrival—which had required a grueling, multi-day carriage journey from the countryside—the Director was scheduled to travel via a localized spatial distortion anchored by Zeimer’s coordinates. After ensuring I was comfortably settled amidst the sofa cushions, Zeimer offered a quick, reassuring nod. The next instant, the space before my eyes warped into a violent blur, and his silhouette vanished entirely to retrieve her. I slowly lowered the hand I had raised to wave him forward.

“Ian!”

A mere breath after Zeimer’s departure, the heavy double doors swung wide, and the Director burst into the chamber, her voice instantly slicing through the silence. To my immense relief, her complexion remained exceptionally bright and clear, indicating she hadn’t suffered the violent spatial vertigo that typically accompanied high-tier teleportation. Her arms were heavily burdened with an array of bundled packages; she had clearly ransacked the orphanage’s stores to gather everything she could possibly pass to my hands. Zeimer lingered in the threshold just long enough to ensure her boots had safely crossed the carpet before quietly drawing the door shut from the corridor.

Suddenly, the vast, clinical space of the imperial suite shrunk until there were only two people left in the world: the Director and myself.

“My child, have you been eating well?”

Crossing the distance with large, aggressive strides, she threw her arms around my neck, pulling me into an embrace so fiercely tight it momentarily squeezed the oxygen from my lungs. The familiar, intoxicating scent of my childhood enveloped me instantly—the distinct, sun-baked aroma of her favorite woven shawl, underlaid by the crisp, comforting notes of coarse lye soap. I buried my face deep into her shoulder, locking my arms around her frame as I inhaled the scent with a desperate, lung-bursting intensity.

“Yes. Have you been taking care of yourself as well, Director?”

“Of course. I am always perfectly well. Now, let me look at you.”

Untangling herself from my grip, she firmly anchored her hands onto my shoulders, tilting my face from side to side as her sharp eyes systematically scanned every line of my features.

“You look infinitely better than you did during our last meeting. Ah, you are actually wearing the piece I knitted for you. Your weight had cratered so drastically that I spent every night worrying whether the dimensions would be entirely wrong, but it seems to fit passably well. Though, you still need to put on far more flesh than this.”

Satisfied with her preliminary medical inspection, she finally released my shoulders and settled into the armchair positioned directly across from me. I permitted my frame to sink back into the heavy cushions, the soft down feathers rising around me like a protective barrier. Because the external world had fully dissolved into the relentless, howling gales of deep winter, and the anticipation of her arrival had left me feeling intensely vulnerable to the cold, I had intentionally layered my clothing today. Unlike my usual routine—where I simply threw on whatever garment my fingers brushed against first—I had spent an hour meticulously selecting my absolute favorite piece: a heavy sweater spun from a deep, forest-green yarn.

“I have gained a great deal of weight,” I lied softly.

It was glaringly obvious that within the Director’s memory, the image of Ian was permanently frozen at the absolute apex of his physical maturity—the broad-shouldered, heavily muscled youth who had marched out of the orphanage gates to join the vanguard. In those days, the military had systematically stuffed me with rich, high-calorie rations to sustain my output, and the daily, merciless exhaustion of swinging a massive steel greatsword had naturally built my frame into a terrifying instrument of war. Now, after my soul had abandoned the vessel to drift through the void for a year, my physical frame was nothing more than a pathetic, hollow shell.

“Don’t speak nonsense. Gained weight? You were always entirely too lean to begin with, but your current state is a disaster compared to your prime. It will take a minor eternity before your baseline constitution is properly restored.”

The reality was entirely undeniable. The systematic atrophy of my muscles had caused my back to curve and my shoulders to narrow drastically; the green sweater, which she had originally patterned to be a snug fit, now slouched loosely against my frame, the oversized sleeves cascading completely over the backs of my hands.

“Look at this. I explicitly constructed this pattern to be tight, yet the fabric is practically swallowing you whole!”

Confronted by a physical reality I couldn’t mathematically refute, I offered no verbal defense, choosing instead to project a clumsy, placating smile. The Director let out a sharp, clicking sound against her teeth—though her eyes remained entirely devoid of genuine malice—and began to methodically unwrap the bundles she had hauled across the continent. My eyes widened in sheer disbelief as a mountain of meticulously wrapped packages emerged from the depths of her two massive satchels.

“What…… what is the meaning of all this?”

“They are holiday offerings from the children back home. The Terralun celebrations are nearly upon us, are they not? And naturally, my own contribution is tucked inside as well.”

I sat perfectly still, my eyes tracking the rhythmic movement of her worn hands as she stacked the presents neatly across the surface of the mahogany coffee table. During our initial reunion, the sheer, explosive joy of seeing her alive had completely blinded me to the subtle nuances of her appearance; now, however, the unmistakable architecture of old age stood out with brutal clarity. The rich, lustrous brown hair that used to carry a vibrant hint of auburn had systematically surrendered its color, the strands now dominated by a heavy, metallic silver. The lenses of her spectacles had grown significantly thicker, suggesting her vision had sharply deteriorated during my absence. Deep, permanent creases carved paths across the skin of her throat and hands, and the beautiful, crinkling eye-smile I had cherished since infancy had permanently set into a network of profound wrinkles.

A sudden, razor-sharp ache flared at the back of my nose, and I aggressively forced my gaze toward the carpet, scrunching my nostrils to suppress the impending tears. I was acutely aware that within the mathematical equation of her accelerated aging, my own catastrophic existence represented the largest, most punishing variable.

“Ian?”

Hearing her call my name in a distinctly puzzled register, I snapped my head upward. The Director had completely halted her frantic packing, her sharp gaze locked directly onto my face. My internal processors had stalled yet again—a pathetic consequence of the endless, spinning anxieties that had dominated my consciousness of late.

“Is there something weighing on your mind?”

I forced a mechanical alertness back into my features and shook my head with absolute emphasis. Though my soul was currently drowning in an ocean of unresolvable dilemmas, it would be an act of unmitigated cruelty to unburden those horrors onto an elderly woman who had just endured the agonizing strain of spatial teleportation solely to hold my hand. I met her narrow, intensely analytical gaze and offered a second, firmer denial.

“There is absolutely nothing wrong.”

But one could never truly deceive the woman who had engineered their entire childhood. Having observed the absolute baseline of my behavior for nearly two decades, the Director possessed an intuitive, near-supernatural awareness that I was actively withholding a massive piece of reality. She was intimately acquainted with my childhood mechanism of completely locking my jaw whenever my internal world became too chaotic to process—a habit that had caused her immense, sleepless anxiety in the old days. Unable to endure the absolute, piercing clarity of her gaze for another second, I averted my eyes, attempting to play the part of an ignorant invalid, before instantly casting a guilty, fleeting glance back at her features.

The Director remained perfectly silent, yet the unvoiced pressure of her worry left an incredibly heavy sensation in the corner of my chest. Desperate to violently wrench the trajectory of the conversation away from my internal state, I feigned an intense, sudden fascination with the mountain of packages on the table, reaching out to lift the specific object resting closest to my knees.

“This is……”

I allowed my consciousness to delve deep into the archives of my memory, actively searching for a specific name from my past.

“Laura constructed this, didn’t she?”

I held up a small, palm-sized worry doll. Laura, who stood exactly one year my senior, had possessed an extraordinary, near-magical talent for handicrafts since our earliest days in the nursery, frequently weaving intricate trinkets to sell at the local village markets. The doll had been explicitly customized to mirror my own likeness; its miniature head was crowned with coarse black yarn, and its tiny eyes had been carefully embroidered with deep, violet silk threads.

The object settled into my palm with a comforting, familiar weight. I turned it over slowly, inspecting the stitching; the final knots along the reverse side were executed with such clinical, master-level precision that the seam lines were completely invisible to the naked eye.

“Indeed,” the Director noted, a soft trace of pride coloring her tone. “Though I was the one who personally fabricated the miniature garments it’s wearing.”

A soft, genuine sound of admiration escaped my lips. The doll was clad in a tiny, remarkably intricate outfit constructed entirely from fine thread using an advanced finger-knitting technique.

“Because my departure for the capital was organized with such frantic haste, poor Laura had to stay awake through the entirety of last night just to finish stitching the hair onto the scalp. My original itinerary had me arriving next week, but given that the imperial court is scheduled to host its grand banquet then…… I feared the entire palace would descend into such a chaotic state that accessing your pavilion would be impossible. I chose to accelerate the timeline. Looking at the peace we have right now, it seems my calculus was entirely correct.”

The Director allowed her words to flow in a continuous, breathless torrent, driven by an obvious, desperate desire to bridge the massive gulf of our separation. She had never been a pathologically talkative woman by nature, but because the strict constraints of her return schedule dictated she vacate the palace before twilight, her internal clock was clearly running at a frantic pace.

Completely ignoring the fine tea and assorted pastries the servants had arranged between us, she and I engaged in a profound, sweeping dialogue that spanned hours. Yet, our communication was not restricted to the mechanics of language; there were extended windows where we simply locked eyes in absolute silence, or held each other’s hands, allowing the raw, physical warmth of our skin to communicate what words were fundamentally engineered to fail.

According to the ancient traditions of the Terralun holidays, loved ones were supposed to secretly deposit wrapped gifts at the foot of each other’s beds on the eve of the festival. The recipient was expected to endure the agonizing anticipation through the night, only unsealing the packages on the first morning of the holidays to discover the sentiments left by those they cherished. Realizing the timeline of the objects resting on the mahogany table, a sudden thought struck me.

“If I am systematically opening all of these presents today, what are we to do when the actual holiday arrives?” I questioned, a faint trace of worry coloring my tone.

“What does it matter?” she replied with a light, airy chuckle, dismissing the protocol entirely. “The singular purpose of a gift is to ensure the underlying sentiment is safely delivered to the recipient’s heart. Furthermore, if I forced you to wait another three weeks for the actual festival to commence, I would almost certainly lose track of which child sent which package entirely.”

She let out a soft, melodic laugh. Outside the high arched windows, the winter sun had already completed its rapid descent, painting the expansive horizon in a bleeding, deep shade of burnt orange. The hour of our separation had arrived. Sensing the shift in the atmosphere, the Director slid across the velvet sofa, closing the distance between us to pull me back into a fierce, protective embrace. Her body felt incredibly warm.

“Ian, look at me. Is there truly nothing transpiring within your world? Your eyes are completely saturated with an immense, unbroken sorrow. Your physical vessel may be exhibiting signs of recovery, but it feels as though your spirit is systematically rotting from the inside out. I have spent the entire afternoon suppressing my terror, but I cannot leave you without asking one final time.”

She had clearly spent the last several hours deliberately holding back the torrent of her anxieties, acutely aware of my aversion to scrutiny, only permitting the dam to break now that the final minutes were slipping away. Confronted by the raw, bleeding desperation in her voice, a violent, suffocating wave of emotion surged against the back of my throat.

“There is nothing,” I whispered into her shoulder.

“My goodness…… how is it that every single one of you manages to emulate that exact same, wretched habit the moment you cross into adulthood? The literal second you grow tall, you bolt your jaws shut and refuse to offer a single truth. Laura is exactly the same, and you…… well, you have been practicing that specific silence since you were a toddler.”

Though she grumbled the reprimand with a sharp edge, her arms only locked tighter around my frame, anchoring me against her chest. I raised my hands slowly, gripping the thin, trembling forearms that held me so fiercely. Beneath her thick woolen sleeves, I could feel her limbs vibrating with a faint, uncontrollable shudder.

A sharp, clinical knock resonated against the double doors. The timeline had run out; our separation was now an absolute reality.

Letting out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to carry the weight of her entire existence, the Director methodically smoothed down her skirts and rose from the sofa. Instinctively, I began to shift my weight forward to follow her up, but a sudden, sharp realization of my own physical boundaries halted the movement; I remained anchored to the cushions, tilting my head upward to track her silhouette.

“Stay exactly where you are. Do not dare force those legs onto the floor. I have explicitly stated I will not subject you to further cross-examination, and frankly, my pride has been thoroughly wounded by your stubbornness, so I forbid you from escorting me to the threshold.”

Though her phrasing carried a playful, theatrical edge, the underlying sorrow was entirely transparent. Overwhelmed by a sudden, acute wave of remorse, I offered a quiet, desperate apology.

“I am deeply sorry. But…… there truly is nothing wrong.”

Making absolutely no effort to conceal the profound disappointment breaking her features, she bent her frame downward one final time, pressing her lips firmly against my brow in a long, lingering kiss. Her final goodbye was saturated with an agonizing, unconditional tenderness.

I sat in absolute immobility, my eyes staring blankly at her retreating form as she walked toward the open threshold, her head turning back to look at me with every third step. I allowed the silence to stretch, my mind caught in a violent, paralyzing hesitation until the literal millisecond before the heavy wood was set to click shut.

“Director!” I cried out.

The closing mechanism halted instantly. The door swung wide once more, and she spun her entire body around, her boots executing a frantic, hurried sprint back toward the center of the room.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” her voice cracked with a sudden, terrified panic.

“This,” I murmured, reaching behind my spine to retrieve the parchment I had concealed beneath the sofa cushions. “I…… I completely forgot to hand this to you before our time expired.”

I extended the cream-colored, neatly folded envelope toward her hand. Within that clean, elegant exterior resided my clumsy, unrefined script—a harsh, aesthetic contradiction to the fine quality of the paper. Because I had spent the last several hours forcefully anchoring my weight against it to hide its existence from her sight, the pristine edges of the stationery were now heavily creased and marred by irregular wrinkles.

The Director reached out, her fingers closing around the parchment, yet her eyes remained wide and uncomprehending as she stared down at the object.

“Please wait until you have safely returned to the countryside before unsealing it. It’s…… it’s a letter.”

A deep, burning crimson rapidly flooded the tips of my ears, and watching the sudden, overwhelming sheen of tears well up within her eyes, she turned her face away and finally departed the pavilion.

The moment the door clicked shut, an immense, terrifying void expanded within my chest—a volatile mixture of profound, liberating relief and a suffocating, leaden sorrow. I had finally done it. For the first time in my entire, wretched existence, I had permitted my quill to physically trace the word ‘Mom’ onto the page. I had chosen to surrender the absolute sum of my unspoken, lifelong devotion to that paper, utilizing the only medium left to me to bridge a lifetime of silence.

It was a truth I would never again possess the luxury of voicing in this reality. As for the desperate, howling prayer that she might remain healthy long after I was gone—I chose to swallow that sentence whole, leaving it to burn silently within the dark spaces of my soul.

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