[Content Warning: This section depicts a character recollecting having been the victim of child abuse.]
Our war is over now.
Your death was necessary to achieve peace, and that is why I killed you. I wonder if you realised that it was me? I wonder if you knew you deserved it? Would you have changed it if you could, or did those precious moments of playing happy families with the daughter of the son you abused make it worthwhile?
If you had listened, I wouldn’t have done it.
I’m glad you didn’t listen.
Stopping the war might have been my main motivation, but I know that everyone’s lives are improved without you in them. I wanted to give my child the best possible conditions I could to grow up in (something you clearly did not care about), and that meant removing you. You will never get the chance to corrupt her like you corrupted me.
Because I have been corrupted - this letter makes that clear. I am cold and ruthless and selfish just like you. For years, I moulded myself to impress you, and together we created a monster. Are you proud?
I want to be better. I don’t know if that matters. Did you want to be better? Is that why you were kind to Hestina?
I have done a lot of good now, but I do not know if any amount of good could be enough to outweigh the evil of the war I started for you. Still, I will continue to try to be good, since it is the least I can do. I want to teach Hestina to be better than me.
Did you trust me to raise her well? I don’t know if I do. I feel such a weight of responsibility when I hold her in my arms. She is so young and innocent - I worry that I could pass my darkness on to her just by touching her. But I push the fears aside and care for her the best I can, because I owe her that and so much more.
I don’t know what it means to be a good father, because I have never seen one for myself. I know that our relationship was wrong, but I don’t know what is right. I’m scared. I’m scared I will make mistakes and hurt the person I love most in the world.
I still do not understand how you could look at me and feel nothing. Perhaps you could foresee what I would become? But I do not believe that. I am what I am because you felt nothing. You treated me like nothing. You gave me nothing unless I fought for it.
And that gives me hope for raising Hestina. Because I love her so much - I care - and I will do everything I can to give her the best possible life. I am different from you in that way. I hope it is enough.
At least Hestina will have her mother and aunts to make up for whatever failings I have as a parent. After my mother died, I was completely alone. But you did not care. You did not even care about the creatures in the Labyrinth that wanted to tear our world apart. Did you care when your heart gave out? I was surprised you died that way - I did not realise you even had one.
If only I could hear you answer these questions, but unfortunately some bastard killed you.
Your loving son,
Apeiron Epios
— Written by Isla H.
Hestina Kalliani said her first words in the quiet of the command tent in the bustle of the unravelling camp, just a few short days after pen was put to paper on the peace between the Northern and Southern Courts. She was held in her mother's arms at the end of a long day, bought to see her father just as he had finished the paperwork and marching orders for the wind down of the southern expedition's camp. She saw her father by chance as her mother brushed past the tent-flaps, immediately reaching out her arms to him.
“Da-da!”
Leassia Amati, the Princess' mother and the wife of the Grand Duke, let her ever-cold expression thaw into a slight smile. She did not love Apeiron, and he did not love her. At this point, they had both more or less accepted that that would always be the case. They both loved their child, and had each in their own way begun to drift towards the conclusion that that would be enough. They would both do all that was within their power for the beautiful jewel that had by chance fallen into their lives.
Apeiron was not a perfect father. Leassia was not a perfect mother. For all that Apeiron had seen her as from afar, even the Supreme Duchess was far from a perfect aunt. There were feelings worn on sleeves, and arguments, and the ordinary stresses and strains of life. Apeiron did not know how to be a father, and not just in the way that no parent ever really knows how. All that he knew about fatherhood, really, was a fairly short list of what not to do that he had inherited from his own. Leassia struggled with attachment, treating her family and her daughter at times as colleagues rather than loved ones. Still, theirs was not a cruel home — it was founded upon love, and upon the hope that they might provide something to Hestina that they had never known themselves. Hestina was studious in all matters presented to her, both the rigid academia given by her mother and the more practical approaches taught by her father.
Hestina was created a Grand Duchess quite promptly when she turned twenty-five years of age. Apeiron must have cried for hours. Leassia, too, shed a single tear. Yes, she was brilliant — the two of them had ensured that much, and she had had every possible thing provided to her to ensure her brilliance — but she was more than brilliant. Her parents had managed, through thick and thin, through right and wrong, to instil within her kindness and compassion, a kindness and compassion that they in their own childhood had never been shown. The world was massive, far bigger than her, and far bigger than she could ever hope to shift upon her own weight.
But that would not stop her from trying.