Not Without Honour

The thing about Character Letters is that I don't usually intend to do them.  Ordinarily, my characters are all close and tight-knit, and they don't usually have occasion to write each other letters - why would you, when you can just jog on down to the breakfast table, or throw aside a partitioning curtain, or raise your voice a fraction, to be heard by your closest friend?  And yet I keep doing Character Letters.  It must be an obsession.  I trust they are not superfluous, however; many of these Character Letters (well, what few I have so far) really do happen.  The problem with Character Letters - or letters of any sort - is that they reveal the heart and the day-to-day work of the writer, which is in a fair way to being a spoiler of novels that have not been published yet.

a character letter from gingerune

My dear cousin,
            By the time you read this I will be gone—and you will not miss me!  Not until the day that I return, reckoning and to reckon, and you will rue those years that are gone, gone forever, those years in which I was silent and gone away from your midst.  So for a space, my dear, you have a little reprieve from the hammer of my prophetic anger.  I have no doubt in my mind that you will ill-use my silence has you have ill-used my cry.  Do not pity me, should familial ties stir you to a sense of pity: I have cried for years in the wilderness, so that the wilderness to which I go is not unfamiliar to me.  I go out now to overturn the ancient stones and to find the book which writes itself.  Oh yes, my dear—did you shiver?  I will come.  Of that have no doubt.  I will go and uproot what you sought to bury and find what we all had lost.  Heaven and Earth are set against you, my dear, and for that I am almost sorry.  Almost—but I find we buried my own pity more deeply than the earth-secrets, you and I.  My only regret now is that you do not know what you have brought down upon your own head and you have not sense to fear—to fear me and your own fiery god against whom I go out to war as our grandsires did in the Old Days.  But you will not fear, nor will you miss me! for, can anything good come out of the White Cyclamen?              That is for me to prove, and you to rue when I come.—M.