An open letter by Courtier Louis Écrivaine.
look back on my childhood very fondly. Times were treacherous and nature was unpredictable, but my family was wealthy and could afford the luxury of preciporegulators during the tempest seasons and hearthfeeders during the freezing periods. I would sit at the threshold of my family’s manor and watch the controlled climate of the property quickly fade into the whipping winds, rains, or stone-cracking frost of the outside. In my naiveté I considered the domehouses and earth-homes of other families silly, why would someone choose to live below where the weather could reach instead of purchasing a remedy.
It was still when I was very young when that basket of bundles appeared in the threshold’s stone steps. Someone’s infant daughter had been deserted on my family’s doorstep in the darkness of second night. I was ecstatic at the idea of a little sister, my father was terrified at the idea that someone had bypassed the hexed entryway onto our grounds. I remember interrupting his blubbering astonishment that someone had breached the threshold to beg him to keep the infant. My father was against the idea of diluting the family name; my mother was the same but was significantly more disgusted by the alternative of throwing a baby into the bladed rain. Her stern but quiet pressure eventually forced father to acquiesce.
Mother decided that I could name her, so I said that her name should be Estelle. Estelle Écrivaine, I was giddy with the alliteration; my parents not so much. Honeyguide, that was the family name my mother chose for her, overwriting my assertion that she was family. She would live in the home and be raised alongside me, but she would be no daughter of theirs. I accepted this, even happy that my parents did not notice the meaning of her name. Even at four, I had the workings of a secret code, a language of my own.
As I grew older and Estelle reached my prior age, I began to advance in my studies and she began to begin hers. The teacher father employed had difficulties showing me how to tap primal or alchemical strength, after months he found that I was much more interested in the metamechanical aspects of the world, not their physical characteristics. Father kept his employ for Estelle, but sent a messenger for a more abstractly aligned mentor; one was found after two months of no correspondence. I was not a fast learner, I took many repetitions of explanations and demonstrations to internalize actions. Practice was a constant necessity, I absorbed understanding of infinity and probability slowly and methodically, but once it was there I held my knowledge with an iron grip. When I opened my looking glass and stared out into the endless ocean, I understood exactly what I had done. I could take any possibility and see a place on the sea where that possibility was a reality, I created a window that passed infinite lengths to show me anything. Maybe someday I could open the window and travel through it. My curiosity was boundless.
hrough the looking glass, I examined the essence of the water around my boat. The ripples that crashed against my vessel had a memory to them, they used to be something. I wished to see the memory of that water, and so I did.
I stood, holding a black blade.
“Understand that I am the only one with the resolve to use this weapon the way it is intended. Only I have the will necessary to destroy myself as a means to an end. This is not a sword, it is a threat and a promise. A way to cull loose threads. You both know and understand that I am the only one with the resolve and ambition to use it. With one swing I can destroy this possibility. I can guarantee that the only worlds that survive are the ones that I curate and control. One thing doesn’t go exactly as I say, either of you step out of line, you and this entire mistake-ridden cloud is destroyed immediately. If I catch even a hint of dishonesty or foul play you both know deep within yourself that I will destroy you and I and everything anyone has ever loved with one slash of this weapon.
“In this endless ocean of endless possibility, I am the only man who can say for certain that every possible outcome is in his favor. With this sword, I can cut waves from the sea and knock clouds from the sky. I can stab any world that I wish to be gone and watch the blood drain from it. For every infinite possible cloud where I don’t rule there is an infinite possible storm that passes through and destroys it. I influence the nature of the great ocean. I can say with perfect certainty that opposition to my actions cannot be found in any of the waves’ infinite possibilities.”
At this she lunged at me, and I swung down the blade to my side, a single movement to eliminate her betrayal and the universe around it. When I felt the dark metal bury itself in meat and sinew, I froze. Silvane had leapt into the path of the blade in an act of desperate defiance and in turn had allowed it to cleave smoothly and savagely from his shoulder to his midsection. As his dark overcoat and arm peeled away from his gushing split torso, she brought me to the ground. The force of her tackle and the sparking at her fingertips knocked the wind from my lungs. Her tears splattered onto my face, mixing with and diluting the torrent of blood spewing from her protector. I was pinned to the ground, my slobbering crying backstabbing betrothed over me and my shuddering dying backstabbing closest friend beside me. She ripped the sword from my hands, easily overpowering me. Light reflecting from the tears flooding the creases in her face like rivers of stars, she raised the glinting blade into the air and brought it down onto me. Even in my breathless state, her lack of composure made it quite simple to raise my hand and redirect the blade to the side with the back of my hand as it fell. I grinned as the moonlight caught by her tears faded with the darkening of her eyes. I grinned as the black blade of the sword sunk into the earth inches from my blood-soaked throat. I grinned as the world around us tore itself apart and became water again, uncaring for circumstances and passions.
It was strange seeing that memory of mine that was not my own, this betrayal at the hands of my friends years ahead of where I am now. It was only then I searched more, finding that the waters felt like the sword and the earth and the people nearby as much as they did myself.
I have since come to believe this was once a universe near perfectly similar to my own, some alternate cloud that was both perfectly unlikely and absolutely guaranteed to exist because of the nature of this eternal ocean. Knowing what to search for, I used my looking glass to scour the seas for other destroyed clouds; there were many. I searched for every cloud with a version of that strange blade, then I projected myself into those to learn of its power. From what I understand following my extensive research, the blade seems to become constantly rarer as clouds that contain it destroy themselves because of it. The sword has very likely attained “quantum perfection.” Put simply, the sword is able to miss, but simply completely destroys any universe in which it does. I must research what this does to universes in which the sword is non-native.
I am incredibly interested and almost lustful to hold the cold material of that weapon. More than this, though, I fear for the future.