Letter to Damon
(Written the morning before leaving the Necropolis.)
My dear Damon,
Yesterday all I knew was your face; yet this morning, I have a memory of you that I don’t know how I could ever have forgotten.
My memories have been coming back in pieces. It has been 500 years.… yet these snippets of my past are as clear in my mind as if they happened today. Of course to you, I suppose, they will have happened many lifetimes ago.
I do not remember how our story ended, only a little of how it started; though I wonder if I can guess the rest? I may have no memories of Elefthe, but there is a distant sorrow that tugs at my heart when I hear its name (and, should I remember my flock, I am convinced it is a sorrow that will break me.) A sadness, perhaps, that is born from the same place as some of your regrets.
Looking at this Necropolis, I feel such guilt. Guilt for the awful things etched on these walls that, at worst, I was a part of and, at best, I let happen. Guilt for the centuries that I have spent hidden from the world and oblivious to its suffering.
Guilt that you have had to shoulder such a burden alone.
Why did you do this to yourself? It does not seem fair that anyone should spend so long in a cage such as this; even one constructed by their own hand, and their own mind. It is so quiet here, the silence breaks my heart. The thought of you trapped here in this silence, alone for so long, breaks it even more.
If my guesses are right about our past then, after disappearing, I know I have no right: but I hope you found happiness after the war ended. Before you came here and isolated yourself in this prison of memories and stone. It’s a selfish wish, I know. A hope to assuage my own regrets.
And now I do not know what to do, Damon. Or what to say to you. I’m torn between the present and the past, and I can’t even imagine what you think of me.
I suppose there is nothing but to leave you with one more selfish wish: I hope we meet again. You deserve closure that, with my broken memory, I cannot give you currently. But, hopefully, with time, I’ll remember more.
Until then,
Calliope