![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forrestertailorThe box found her in a jumble of other mail, surrounded by academic journals and reports, the newspaper and a few letters from the saps Lady Kaivodulin kept clinging to the spider silk threads of her affections. It was wrapped in canvas and brown parcel paper under that, unremarkable and unmagical in every sense but for the smell of lavender emanating from it.
Once unwrapped it was a beautiful object, rosewood set with shiny silver fastenings, but Eligre had seen better. It was large enough to hold something good and the lavender smell was even more powerful once unwrapped. Throwing the neatly fit latch, she found a dark round shape inside tucked up to its ears in a sea of purple.
The head had belonged to Archibald Archibaldovich, a sometime pirate and restauranteur who had been a ceaseless pain to Eligre. When last they met the old pirate had vowed to to skin her alive after pouring molten iron down her son's throat. And for all that half the threat was meaningless, Archibaldovich's track record suggested he was not only serious but well equipped to make it all happen.
But not well enough, evidently.
The wound absenting his head from his body was severe and ragged, misshapen enough that the head had to lay back on a pillow of lavender rather than sitting straight up in the box. This left Archibaldovich's mouth hanging open, with his grey tongue lulled back in a stretching slide towards the back of his throat. Between the bloodless lips and teeth was a neatly rolled piece of parchment tied with a leather throng, almost as wide across as the box itself.
In a tall, sharp hand it read:
My ' Lady Kaivodulin,
Do not destroy this letter err you have read it. It was through serious work and not inconsiderable pain that it came to be written, and though I am assured you should like nothing more than to warm your little hands over its flame the information inside will be of value to you.
Please find enclosed the head of one Capt. Archibald Archibaldovich, who I have been told had an outstanding account with you. The late captain enjoyed a brief acquaintance with myself and in that time he made his disposition towards you known to me. For all that I can well confirm the veracity of his account of you and your foibles, I found the captain a low and unctuous person and thought best that we end our association. He has his uses, as you see. I did not take these steps purely for your good name, nor would I ever do so, but I felt it a better use of him to assist in sending this letter than just sunning him on a pike. Not the least because my days of lining the perimeter of a war camp are, for the time being, behind me.
I have never known you to enjoy olives, nor nature for that matter, so let what remains of the captain be our olive branch. Those events that transpired to end our marriage are as water into the sea. I can assure you the intervening time without you has been some of the most peaceful of my long life, spotted with frivolities that would bedevil you for reasons I cannot now nor have ever fathomed. That said, we would fracture our social life to insist we never be in the same room together, not to set eye or hand upon one another.
Because it has never been my ambition to rid the world of you, as has animated so many others. They are, we know, fools who waste their lives on a futile pursuit. A modus operandi I know you share with them, though for far different reasons. But there is no need for their wish to be mine, and so it is not. I only hope that I might have still more peace knowing I will not expect the same violence that befell our captain visited upon myself for such crimes as being within miles of you. That fate alone ought be sorry enough.
I will be in attendance at the winter ball held this season by the Madani family and I have heard you are also to attend. Of course I cannot assign an end of hostilities to both of us, given your hard-headedness, but for my own account I will not be there for anything more than those things I typically enough at ball where you are not.
It is my great hope that our worlds will meet such that we may move forward with both our lives, removed from the viciousness that has colored our time together. I assure you I do not cherish having my memories of you so scarred by our separation that the woman I married must in fact be dead and gone, honoring the hopes of her rivals. I imagine you do not enjoy it either. So let it end.
I suppose I will see you,
And signed in the same angular black strokes, with enough looping filigree to assure her it was his genuine signature:
Luka Forrester
It paled in comparison to the letters he used to write her. Here and there on the page were dry and wavered places, as if it had been written in a rain that didn't smudge the ink. The rambling lines were neatly arranged but without rhythm, as if they had been started and stopped ceaselessly until they stumbled into the next period. Where he flowed his anger was clearly holding the pen but where he meant to say anything else he might as well have been dictating things over the noise of his old war camp.
To know he must have written it alone made it a sad and stupid rag next to the works he used to send her. When, in brighter days, he had sent pages of poems about her eyes and the shine of beads of sweat on her scales. When he used to tell her more than his small mind could possibly contain, and would pledge a love for her that was as deathless as he himself. Back when he was General Luka Forrester, and proud to head an army without a cause, and carried her on his arm as an empress he put even above himself.
It was, despite all that, certainly the vampire's work. Eligre could see, in its awkward mishmash of phrases, some of the not inconsiderable pain that went into making it. And although his final result did not give him away too badly, there was one stroke out of place. In addressing it, where he used to write in every name of love he had ever had for her, illuminating some and turning others into a first flash of a burning desire for her, he had slipped. His pen had started to write in one such name, unknowable now, but still there as a soft sigh of the pen as it realized that work was long finished.
Just one mark of what had been.
