Chapter 11

This and the rest of the correspondence are to be published in the event of my demise.

Once upon a time, there were two neighboring countries, living side by side. They lived in a state of constant seething hate for each other, old wounds going back to when both of them were nothing more than warring clans.

Years went on and they prodded and kicked at each other, invading when they could, grabbing territory however they could, but never keeping it for too long.

As centuries passed, and as technology advanced, these wars became more and more damaging and took more people to fight. Regular people plucked from the breast of their mothers and sent out to do terrible harm to others just like them. Made to do violence onto others, but omitting the fact that violence is a disease that destroys both victim and attacker. After they were forever changed by what they had done, they were sent back to their houses and their lives, to mess up the next generation as best they could, while waiting for death to soothe their broken souls.

This brings us to the happy years of my life, perhaps the precious few that I had.

My father and I lived in a small hamlet, but it may not be the picturesque, charming greenery that you believe. The yard was fenced off and the grass was stomped and eaten by the fowl and the goats we kept. The small river we had had the refuse from the tannery flowing downstream, and the stench was bad enough that you would smell with fresh clothes on, since it all stuck to your skin. That was my father and that was his job, I could tell when he got home from the stench.

He was good, not just to me, but to everybody around him. You couldn't find a more decent person. Well, maybe Mother thought she could, and I don't really blame her for it. I was raised in it, and I could bear it, but to come and live in the muck while knowing it was a better life out there is just unbearable.

I watched the little gate on our farm for days after she left, waiting to hear the sound of the planks scraping the earth. It never came to be, so to write in stone my fate and the future I saw for myself, I painted a sign.

A sign that bore the name of my father and not the noble house of my mother's. It said Darby Farm in big bold letters. When in truth we weren't really a farm, we only had enough animals for milk and eggs and kill the odd limping chicken or duck on holidays. It was all more exaggeration than concrete reality, just as my mother's noble name was an upstart moneylender's legacy of dropping coin into the right pockets. But I suppose exaggeration becomes fact if enough people repeat it.

My dear mother gone, father began resuming his conscription-era projects. Things of an elder age, or so it seemed to me as a child, when he fought in the war over some river or another with the aforementioned neighboring country. He was barely in his 30s at the time. When he died he was younger than I am now. It's something that cuts at me even now, knowing how little he had lived.

In the mornings, I would drag my chair from the kitchen table and into the shed, to watch him work. Eyes heavy, face looking down into the worktable. I would change the oil for the lamps and bring him breakfast, and I would be rewarded with a nod.

Not long after that, came the patents. There was a little pile of letters sitting by the worktable. I would be responsible for writing the address and racing them to the post office, where they were sent to the Royal Conservatory.

I should mention, my father, a very kind and funny man, aside from obsession driven by spousal separation, also had other talents. Not many do in our world and it's only gotten worse out there. At least, it's what I gather while hidden here on my little hill. While I write this, the shock waves shake my writing desk. The mercs are working on clearing the corridor.

Magic is thinning but some can control and refine it, those like my father. After a while, long enough for him to be fired from the tannery and for me to slaughter our animals, but not long enough that we starved, a letter arrived.

It was important. Big red envelope, with the Royal Magic Guild seal on it. I can recall as if it just happened. The blue seal with a knight seated on a horse, waving his lance around. There were even little flames coming out of the horse's nostrils and the knight would occasionally salute. It was amazing.

Whatever that letter said, we packed up our meager things and left. I sat on the back of a cart and watched the little farm get smaller in the distance. All the village people watched us go, and I tried to make note of all my favorite spots so as to compare when I returned.

As it stands, I never went back, and I don't regret it. Just thinking about returning opens a void in my stomach and it creates vast discomfort and the sensation of nausea. I can just imagine how everything's changed, and how out of place I would be. How the old folks that were nice to me are in the ground and new people owning the businesses. How things have changed and I'm not safe in that new world.

I did not leave the hamlet empty-handed since I took my little sign. I've hung that upon any residence of mine since, farm or no. And we had many. The Conservatory thought my father's patented spells were quite the idea and they warranted testing out in all the different environments of the Kingdom.

We moved a lot, but lived a lot differently since now we had money. We went coast to coast, pasture to forest, mountain to the valley. They would load up the vials of the purple concoction and shoot them into the air, where they would turn into mist, ready to rain down on us.

And rain down it did, showering the area in my father's invention. Wherever we went, we left behind more green than we found, for that was the purpose. He thought we could regrow the old forests cut down to make ships. Some other obsession from long before Mother, hankering back to another war when all the trees in his little home island were cut down to make ships.

Sometimes I felt that the things that made my father were a collection of past wrongs and slights that were bubbling under the skin, ready to boil him over. I half-expected him to point the cannons at the sun for destroying our ancestor's wheat farming business.

I suppose those times were happy, for him at least, and I was glad to see him like that. Like all good things turns out in the end, the situation changed on us.

At Bacholla Beach he tried a new mix to get a non-native weed to grow, with the objective of it cannibalizing another plant that was hard to get rid of. Just a regular test.

Well, it did not go right. Everything shriveled and died. The rain fell black and burning, and I had grey spots on me, rotting and stinking, skin peeling off dead.

But the Kingdom loved it. In the backrooms of the Palace, I'm sure they excitedly lit up their pipes and shook their mustaches in glee, right before spending themselves in the whorehouses and crying about how hard life is for the powerful.

And after that, everywhere we went we had one of their little grey men following us around. A pasty bastard, part of their club, writing down in his little notebook all the effects of the potions, keep changing the mix, weave the spells, twist the magic just so it can kill that little itty bit more.

Goodbye growing back what was lost, goodbye feeding the populace. Back to the sword, back to what we do best.

And now, you see me write and whine about those that perhaps did less damage than I over my illustrious career. The Darby name is now synonymous with death-dealing and I'm the one who made it so. Because of course, they took his name even off the weapon and put their own on it. Not like he could fight much could he or even care?

No, Russell Darby was busy dying before this 40th, tended to by his son. A 15-year-old boy wiping the spit from his father's face and giving water, food, changing the soiled clothes of something that at that point resembled a dried pig corpse more than a person. Not enough muscle in him to talk or to open his eyes. He just laid there and groaned until he finally expired.

And now we reach the point where I realize by writing this that I invented all these things for the Kingdom to better wage war in some warped retribution, so I can put my father's name on something that he regretted creating, something that killed him just because they stole away his credit. I reach catharsis, I redeem my ways. I see how wrong I've behaved.

No.

It was what I was good at. What he taught me, inadvertently. Maybe there were other ways to power but this one seemed made for me. It felt like fate and trusting in that is what got me this far. I have to believe that the good will outdo all the bad that has sprung from this.

The key to all that is buried not far from my current position. They're unearthing it right as I write. It is far too powerful an opportunity to give away to kings and nobles that did nothing to earn their places in the world. I know what they will use it on, and I know what I will do with such power. And between the two of us, I choose myself. I aim to save this world.

Signed,

J. S. Darby.