Dear Dina,

…

The quill froze. We tried this yesterday…and the day before– but what do we say to the person who saved our life?

By all rights, our warlord should have sent us back to Torchgutter– if not in the instant that she announced her retirement, then at least in the breath thereafter. She had no authority to excuse us from our contract of servitude (surely only Count Drake could do that), but Dina dismissed us just the same.

She gave us a place to go, far from the Dragon’s Maw and the symphony of screams the pyre swallows daily– out from the smoke, into streets unencumbered by the overflow of charred corpses and the suffocating blanket of fear and dread that they elicit. She must have hoped that, in Runeheim, we could finally escape the horrors we had both endured and committed in the past two decades under their authority.

She’ll had to have invented a cover story for our absence that House Drake would believe. Perhaps she reported back that O’shea died– gloriously on the Rogalian warfront…or unceremoniously, brought early to the Thicket by a particularly heinous batch of moldy berries.

Or perhaps she simply said that we ran away– violated the terms of our contract and fled in the night. We look so different now; perhaps she thought it a safe enough half-truth to tell. There was wisdom behind not lying to fire mages– much less to House Drake.

….Maybe they’ll come looking for us? Maybe they’ve forgotten that we exist. We’re only a number to them, surely, whether that number was a negligible solo casualty on the battlefield– or the identification number House Renett had assigned to us when we received our writ of permission to live (or, more accurately, to serve) outside of Dunland all those years ago…

Stop there– don’t dwell on it.

That train of thought is interrupted before the scant thought of House Renett buds from resentment to malice. We don’t stoke that fire; we strive to swallow it down.

Vengeance and cruelty was House Drake’s way. Anything gained under their rule is accomplished through fire and blood. Aggress, escalate, immolate your enemies. We have to leave it behind if we are to survive.

But we’d been on the warfront under their gruesome flag for so long…I don’t know how to live out from their shadow.

–We.

…

I meant we.

The quill rests, and the page remains empty. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find the words to thank her.