My most beloved Son,
If you are reading this, then the worst has come to pass. Do not let your heart shatter and do not despair, hold it together with the iron you have always carried within you, the strength I have seen in your eyes since you were a boy. This letter is my final embrace, my last words before i vanish from the forsaken lands I bore you in.
I have stumbled into a secret, and it is a beast with teeth.
I have served, faithfully and truthfully, as a scribe and herbalist in the house of Marquis Ralke these past ten years. I believed him a stern but honorable lord. I was wrong. In the eastern tower, in forgotten vaults, where I went seeking old roots for my potions requested to aid the healing of her grace the marquess, I found more than cobwebs and crumbling jars. I found a ledger, hidden behind a loose stone. It was not written in Common, but in the jagged script of the old tongue, which fatefully, your grandmother taught me. i have not cursed knowledge before, but I wish I did not know it now
It details not taxes or grain, but souls. A pact. The Marquis has not been trading ore and timber with the Mountain Clans, as all believe. He has been trading lives—our villagers, taken in the "plague quarantines"—for raw power with the Drakonspine shamans. He offers them in blood rites to something that sleeps under the mountains, and in return, they grant him things I know not. Longevity? Dominion? The pages spoke of a "whispering stone" that shows him paths to victory and weakness in his enemies. It is treason not just against the Crown, but against the very light of this world.
He must have found out about my discovery. The ledger was replaced, but too quickly. The wrong kind of dust settled upon it. Yesterday, I found wolfsbane in my own tea—a herb I know better than my own reflection, one that does not belong there. His steward, Gerrion, watches me with the cold, flat eyes of a pond waiting for a body to sink.
I am a threat to be removed, quietly. There is no justice to seek here. The magistrate dines at his table. The guards wear his livery. To speak is to die, and to die is to let his evil continue unchallenged.
So I run. Not to save myself, for I fear that chance has already slipped through the hourglass like sand. I run to send this warning to you. You must flee. Take your father's old hunting blade from the rafters. Go to your cousin in the distant town of Oakhaven. Tell no one of me, or of this. Do not seek vengeance. Do not whisper my name in connection to the Marquis. Forget your mother and weep not for me.
The love I have for you is a fierce and living thing. It is in the bread I baked for you, the stories I told by the fire, the mended knees and the quiet pride in watching you grow into a man of integrity. That love is my armor now. It is why I can write this through trembling hands, why I can face the coming dark if it means a shaft of light may yet reach you.
Do not look back. Do not mourn a traitor's victim. Remember instead the mother who taught you to read the stars and to listen to the truth in the wind. That truth is now your burden. Carry it lightly, and live.
If there is mercy in the heavens, or in the old stones of the earth, perhaps our paths will cross again in some sun-dappled clearing, in a story yet untold.
Until that possible dawn, my beloved boy, be safe. Be wise. Be gone.
With all the love that has ever been, and all that ever will be,
Your Mother