May thy mercy be painless and true.
We confess our claws sway even as we scratch this letter. Scores of dead loyalists behind us, long hours lost waiting in barest stealth risking fatal discovery, an escape won despite incurring the eyeless regard of a vesperbat… and yet writing our report at day’s end is what makes cowards of us.
Following this letter, borne on the back of a windswift dragonfly, three of us shall return. Three who, if it is not an insult to remind thy majesty, stand head and thorax above any other in thy command. Save one, granted.
Thou knowest us, and we have served thee well: Navra, thy calmest advice-giver, thine infallible memory and thy greatest vesperbane — save one. Gywere, thy keenest sleuth, thine agilest leaper and thy greatest percipient, save one. And Besihir, thy loyalest followafter, thy brightest companion, and thy greatest battle-queen. Save the one, of course.
Our accomplishments surely stand out before us. We hunted the elite of Kaos to a number fit to count with two leg’s claws. We tore the wings off the tyrant of Wentalel. We’re reason the last monastery of flowering oak remains undesecrated.
And we need not remind thee of what was left of old Ethice when thou gavest the order.
Thou must remember. We are thy most skilled, thy most reliable — thy best, surely. If any mission be required from thee, we will surely achieve it. If it be possible.
Thou sentest us into the heart of the dread empress Yufemia’s black citadel, atop the Greci mountains where her palace wounds the clouds, and thou gave us many objectives. By any reasonable measure, we were quite successful:
We easily acquired thy requested sum from the imperial treasury with none even scenting us. We, after some spilled ink and spilled blood, forged the desired documents undermining the enemy’s web of command. We near-invisibly slipped into the royal dungeons, albeit not altogether undetected (that would have been impossible), and we sought there to assassinate the old queen Ooghesta (only to find her already dead) and we freed dozens by your request. Lizaabet, Shakla, Mon; all the knowledge-hunters, all the vesperbanes, and all the so-called traitors, all thou had requested… save one. Again, by any reasonable measure, we were quite successful.
I suppose by now my dancing has revealed it for the avoidance it is, and my secret lies revealed the shape of what I have avoided. Yes, there is one goal of thine we’ve neglected to comment upon. Yes, by that same reasonable measure it could be called the most important.
(Please, I beg thy swift mercy, painless mercy.)
So it is with great regret and reluctance that we inform thy majesty, most exalted Coordinator of the Chiaro Defiance and dearest friend of us, that we have failed in our primary objective: to rescue from the empress’s raptorial grasp our Tlakida, peerless champion of the Chiaro and fiercest battle-queen.
She lies now in true death, beyond the vespers, and beyond the reach of all medical techniques. May the gods at least forgive us, if thou dost not.
Yet, if we may be so brazen, we dare to say thou canst not hold us alone to blame for this. Permit us to speak lightly in our defense: we were not told how deep the Greci winters reach; we were not told how the very air chokes with presence of the distant vesper bat horde, even quite far from the palace which they circle; and we were not told how tight, and how vast, the empress’s web had become, how it had seemed every face a falterless pawn of the empress.
Surely it’s a proof of our fitness that we nevertheless succeeded all goals save one.
Thou (or, morehaps, thine advisers’) had assured us there lay easily exploitable gaps in the empress’s security. Thou (or, thy priests) had assured that the gods themselves had prophesied Tlaki’s return to her place. Thy seers had assured us she was imprisoned deep within the dungeons.
And we breached the dungeon-gate! We freed every rebel prisoner we found! Tlakida Star-maiden was not anywhere in the dungeons!
(Forgive the blotted ink above. My writing was too forceful. I’ve taken a moment to force air through my spiracles.)
We do not mean to blame thy majesty for our failure. The loss of our beloved champion has drained us of much of our sense.
Our endeavor was not an entire failure, at least.
When double and triple checking of the dungeons revealed no scent, no echo even, of Tlakida, the three of us were reasonably split over the best course of action. Navra suggested fleeing back, consulting with thee, and revising our plans. Besihir wholly rejected this on pain of knocking Nav across the room and leaving her in a cell. But even if we remained, even if we continued searching, where else was there to look? And so, Navra and Besihir argued much like a game played with a small ball and two rackets; back and forth with scarcely time for thoughts to even land before being punted back. Gywere was little more than a score-keeper. Eventually the argument was forced to a draw when shout of the guards alerted us, and we overheard the empress had ordered all prisoners escorted to the coliseum for some execution. Thus, with certainty of discovery otherwise, it was either flee the citadel then or commit to some search elsewhere. And it was Gywere who had the key suggestion of searching the palace, sudden and perplexing like a whisper of fate.
And Gywere, with unparalleled courage and all his intelligence as a clue-finder, dared to scan the halls and rooms himself, alone. Surely a doomed mission, surely a death sentence — yet against those predicted odds, the champion was abed in one of the highest palace rooms, storm clouds pacing outside the window. Yet even with Gywere’s agility, before his arrival the champion was already beyond any saving.
(Yet our endeavor was not an entire failure!)
The room had all about it a blood-reek and a neural hum, pale and tuneless, that must have been the reverberations of a great, fading soul. Tlakida lay in her bed, the sheets mightily disturbed but not ripped or thrown aside — no evidence of a struggle. And the door had been locked before he picked it. So why the blood? Why stirs she not to any call? Gywere approached her with the slow dragging of six legs, like one both drawn to and repelled from some revelation. He reached the bedside and saw Tlakida lying there dead; you already know that. But beside her sat a pile of halfcrumbling pages.
Words won’t, can’t, convey the sight of this last ever work of Tlakida: cheap wasp-parch already discolored, and depressed or torn by the jerking of failing muscles, and all the markings the dark, necromantic green of hemolymph. Words can’t convey the smell, either: the puply halfdigested wood, the rotten metallic odor, and it all… it still smells like her.
(Forgive the wet splotches on the page here. Ironic, that we could save those pages from water yet not these.)
By some tide of luck or fate we escaped the city entirely without wind or water or worms eating a single page. Camped safe outside the mountain city, we were able to investigate.
Little surprise, they recount the champion’s life — a memoir, in that dreadfully dense script of the vespers.
After days’ labor, its contents have now been neatly unraveled and transcribed in the smoothest neshaa-tear inks on the cleanest roach-vellum, and have been shown to thee first of all, in advance of any editors. We have only proofread and attempted to disambiguate the contents, yet cannot ensure perfect accuracy even in this capacity. The work is a soaked through with perplexing details and secrets which may be best omitted. And in the final pages… No, thou shalt see when thou reachest them.
The champion’s intentions for the work are clear from the first page. Its ultimate fate, however, deserves thy judgment. No, it requires it.
While we send this intending for your eyes alone to seek the pages, thou mayst only find it within thy schedule for the task of reading to fall to narrators or even paraphrasers. Yet we must insist that you select readers carefully. Not only because the task requires keenness and quiet legs — it does — but because it will be a distress or even an insult to the sensitive: Tlakida was not always the admirable advocate for male equality, and even in her brief encounters with the empress (before she was an empress) there lurked in the villain a cunning that could pierce and poison even the strongest mind. Moreover, even after all these years the champion lacks the sense to carefully treat and abridge discussion of the abuse upon so many males inflicted — though at least she does not linger and delve. And of course, the wingless may find all the bigotry described upsetting — but does not the same thing await them outside the pages?
(And, lastly, there looms also the specter of the strangeness that waits in the final pages. But again we resist the urge to reveal it, lest it spoil your impression.)
Structure dictates some sort of conclusion or summary at this point, but none seems fitting. We are left with a mess of questions: why was Tlakida in the palace? Why did she see it necessary to write a memoir in her own blood? Given the contents, give that final chapter, was she of sound mind? Did she even write the memoir, or could this all be a cunning trap? What, O gods tell, does it all mean?
In all truth, this feels more like a beginning than an ending, this report more a kind of preface than an answer. Thy mind is deeper than ours, and in thy reading these labored-over pages, there lies already the hope of answers.
May thy judgment be swift and sure.
Yours in Ignominy,
Gywere et al.Next
Snuggly Serials 