A Letter to Father

[hopey 364]

 

News of your excommunication flooded the streets of Alduun, passing my ears without respite. Priests amid my travel weaken with antipathy, pronouncing the throne severed from the eyes of Heaven. I wonder if that frightens you, or if alleviation is your new disposition. You ceaselessly acted as if God existed not, as if it were only the eyes of kin peering over your shoulder and not the judgement of an omnipresent being. I idolized that variant of you, the Emperor that bore God like a witness jutting his nose in business that wasn’t his own.    I should not be writing and I shan’t feign that I do not know my place. I am the daughter you relinquished, a name scored from ledgers. I do not ask to return. Exile has dutifully given me compassion boundless in comparison to your own. I have learnt the leniency of strangers, the weight of coin, and the strength of empathy. Banishment induced me with a liberation I had senselessly believed to possess prior. Now I know that sense of autonomy in my youth was just a mirage, a learned comfort that I can now discern as a falsity.   But above all else, even now I can recall the tender man you once were to me. The father who held his palm to my cheek and requested that I establish kindness. You told me it best to have some charity, and in my time amiss, I have learnt that benignity you preached amid my youth. There is no anger in me now, for I have learnt the burden of bitterness, and being apart from the capital taught me how unforgiving hate can be.    This is merely a trial of misfortune. A hardship the Imperium you’ve reinforced shall predominate. It can survive by vigor alone, through ruptured allies and heirs alike. Excommunication is not erasure, it is simply a word posing as a conclusion. If God no longer stands beside you, sustain without Him.     I do not write to reopen wounds, nor to reconcile what cannot be mended. I know what it’s like to be divided from something of importance, to languish apart from those who deliver significance to your life. If you should find the crown burdensome in the midst of desertion, know that I see you not as something forsaken. May haps not by law, nor in prayer, but by blood you are of my kin.    I hope that morning comes to you without burden and that amid this narrowing of the world you find the stability to withstand it all.