Correspondence

Chapter 92

I was totally out of excuses, distractions, and emergencies. It was past time I read Henry’s letter, so I finally took it out of my inventory. The paper was one of the nicer ones I'd refined but the seal was a surprise. I'd provided wax but not a seal stamp for it.

Henry must have made his own. It was a rose with a needle and a sword crossed behind it. It was well done and frankly rather cute in my opinion.

"Fuck…" I growled only to start laughing. No matter what I did, things were going to change between us once I was done reading. How and why were yet to be seen, but it was unavoidable. That was the part that kept putting me in a loop of hesitation. I wasn't scared, but I liked how things were and basic cowardice compelled me not to change them.

Summoning my resolve, I broke the seal. The penmanship, as usual, was impeccable. The letter was four sheets front and back with a fifth on the outside as a cover.

The contents were a rather interesting blend of a historical and personal account. I'd have enjoyed reading it if it had been about someone I didn’t know. As it was, I found out I couldn’t cry, because I sure as fuck should have been bawling by the end of it.

Just the first part was a harrowing read. Henry had grown up in an artisan family, and his father had sold him to the military as a slave when he was fourteen. They, in turn, had used him as an assassin, because why not?

His life had carried on like that for quite a while, his early twenties apparently. That was when the king of his country had started losing his mind. Being of “divine lineage,” none of the nobles were willing to do anything serious about him since it would put them on the wrong side of the church. They also weren’t suffering much, unlike the commoners.

As was often the case, nobody seemed to remember the army was primarily composed of commoners. So when things got bad and revolts started happening, the nobles tried to suppress them. That was when their own forces started turning on them. That led to the hiring of foreign mercenaries, and then things got properly nasty.

Henry joined in on the revolt and was quickly noticed by some of the organizers for killing high-profile targets. The rebellion leader put Henry to work, and his deeds became propaganda. He became The Grave Man.

Suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. The stories Chris had mentioned weren’t terribly similar to what Henry wrote about, but that made sense. They were a hundred or so years apart in terms of when they’d lived. The tales would have grown taller in the telling and had the rough edges worn down.

I couldn’t even imagine how frustrating it would be to hear stories turning your trauma into heroic tales. What Henry had lived through hadn’t ended cheerfully by any means.

The mad king was eventually slain. The nobles who’d hired mercenaries were hunted like animals. Those who hadn’t mostly fled or fell victim to pillaging. The church thought to step in and assume control, but they’d used up all goodwill when insisting the king's supposed origin was more important than what he was doing.

That left a power vacuum and lots of newly minted heroes of the people to fill it. True to form, the leaders who emerged during the revolt weren’t all idealists. Even the ones who were, didn’t necessarily have the kinds of skills needed to run a country. Corruption didn’t end, and without a coherent leadership body, the country collapsed into feuding city-states.

Henry got front row seats to everything he’d fought for going to hell in a handbasket. Adding insult to injury, some of the more competent former liberators turned into petty despots. They fought and squabbled over the carcass of the country instead of trying to sort things out.

Taking that none too well, Henry had turned to hunting former allies as he once had the nobles. Nothing in the letter indicated it improved matters any. Henry had been, unfortunately, self-aware on that point. He seemed to understand destabilizing things further wasn’t helping, but had been in a pretty severe downward spiral and on drugs at that point.

Initially, they had started as pain management and then took a rather predictable turn. Pain aside, he'd been in a bad place mentally for basically his entire life. I looked up some of the things he mentioned narcotics-wise. The names were all for essentially different preparations of opium rather than entirely separate drugs.

Things did not get better. Henry was in his early forties when he died. He’d been captured while high and misidentified as someone else. He’d sobered up just before being walked up to the gallows. He’d laughed and confessed to what he’d actually done.

How the crowd had taken it was unclear. Seeing his executioner had frozen in surprise, Henry had kicked the man’s knee out to force the lever to drop the platform. He hadn’t been interested in what anyone thought of him and just wanted it done with.

I was curled into a kind of knot by the time I finished reading. My internal anguish expressed itself in the only physical outlet for it that I apparently had. I stayed like that for a while, digesting everything.

Without knowing much about Henry going into the letter, I’d expected to feel differently on the other side of it. Not profoundly, really, but like I knew him better. Instead, I had a much-expanded shit list and a genuine wish I could cry like a human. I’d even take crying acid if it gave the same emotional relief. Unfortunately, turning into a sadness pretzel did not scratch the itch.

It occurred to me that I should probably pen a reply of some kind. Or atleast send him a text to let him know I’d read it.

[Henry,

I’ve read your letter and my feelings about you haven’t changed]

I discarded that draft immediately. It was a fairly transparent lie and one that wouldn’t be doing either of us any favors. It was right up there with saying I didn’t feel anything like pity. I didn’t, but wording it like that would just imply that I did but didn't want him to think I did.

Apparently I could not summon the needed braincells to construct simple sentiments that weren’t full of landmines. I needed something less complicated with lower stakes.

Alternative activities I could pursue included continuing to lay around, which wasn’t appealing, and getting to work. The second one was my usual go to, but I quickly found that like writing a reply, I wasn’t in the right headspace for it.

Rather than a new dungeon feature, I started on a standard of living upgrade to my chamber of machinations. I added an extra room with a door on the right hand side near the back side of the room, furthest from the entrance. It took me all of ten seconds to come to hate the arrangement.

I ignored the door issue for the moment and made a second room on the opposite side. I only had a vague idea of what the first space would be for. It was the one on the left I had real plans for.

The second room was where I moved all my drawings and dungeon related stuff. Playfully, I carved "Chamber of Machinations” on the door. I’d been thinking of the single room I’d been living out of as such before but it made more sense as a formal work office rather than the name of the whole space. Chamber being singular and what not.

That part wasn't important. The important part was I was officially no longer living in what amounted to a studio apartment.

For a moment I felt very much like an adult. That I could have done this at any point and just hadn’t thought of it didn’t bear consideration. I’d just been prioritizing more important things, not oblivious. The fact that Dawn wouldn’t have walked in on me and Henry so easily however, hit me like a cold bucket of “duh”.

The realization also reminded me I’d put my build lab on a different level, for reasons. Doing my best to ignore how I felt like an idiot, I moved it next to, and connected it with my new chamber of machinations. Now I registered the new issue that I needed a name for everything since I’d recategorized one piece exclusively as a workspace.

Names weren't a thing I was good at. My first instinct was DM Den. I felt like slapping myself for it. Anything involving the word apartment, pad, flat, or crib were also out on principle.

After a few minutes I gave up and went with Palace of Shadows. It was insanely pretentious for what amounted to a four room condo, but I liked it. Making the space fit the name was something I could do in time. Thinking of time, I realized my attempt to kill it had only eaten up about fifteen minutes.

Today was going to be a long day if I spent it fruitlessly trying to avoid something that should have been simple. I started new drafts, working through eight before hitting something sendable.

[Henry,

I just finished reading your letter. I’d like to talk about it when you feel up to it,

-42]

I wasn’t going to say it was a good reply. It certainly wasn’t, but at least it was sort of neutrally ominous rather than implying the wrong things. I sent it before I could second guess myself into not. If I let that impulse take hold for too long I was going to end up locking my door and just never facing anyone ever again.