Letter 0

The following is a letter written by me, Estella Celestina, to Lady Julia’s mother, Alexandria: the Empress of Exetia from 380 YBCE to its fall in 331 YBCE. This letter, therefore, is not a record found to be dated around the time of Exetia—those will come later—rather, it is a letter based deeply in the legends, stories, and real accounts of Lady Alexandria’s life, composed into a single digestible tale that will connect to the future, proper letters written by a man named Tacitus.

- E. Celestina

No matter how great or commonplace, every person’s story begins with their mother.

It was 351 YBCE; 351 Years Before the Camelot Era; the Forever Kingdom. Though, you knew of this not at the time. You were the Empress of Exetia, and one of your major duties was to deliver, upon behalf of your husband Constantinus, an heir worthy of carrying on the name of “Augustin”. Yet for fifteen years, your efforts were not met with equal success.

On a winter’s night, you held your wet nurse’s hand as unbearable, shocking pain ran up and down your body, the bed you lay in tousled with the efforts of motherhood. You must have been familiar with the feeling, yet the pain was nevertheless ever so intolerable.

For hours, you pushed and cried and roared with the strength only a woman could ever possess. And in the end, as your wet nurse consoled you in your exhaustion, and her assistants began dressing the child…you heard no crying.

It was the most heartbreaking sound any new mother could hear—the lack of it.

“Your son, Lady Alexandria.”

You weakly took your son in your arms. His eyes were closed, and he was swaddled in light grey—which was the nurse’s shorthand for naming the health of the baby without needing to say it. White meant bright. Dark meant stark.

Thus, your son was somewhere in the middle. As you touched his face, you felt his gentle warmth, yet his unwillingness to sob must have filled you with so much dread.

“A name, Lady Alexandria?” your wet nurse asked.

You hesitated to speak. The dull pains of childbirth still wracked your body, but that was far from the reason why you could not eke out a name for him. It was also not because you didn’t have a name for him at all.

You simply feared attachment, and the severance of the bond you were far too familiar with.

You looked outside to the imperial courtyard. Somewhere beyond the horizon, your husband was leading his legions; absent not from apathy, but from emergency. Normally, the father always named the son, like the mother always named their daughters; but his absence left an exception.

This weather was cool, with the new year showers drenching the grasses and dead leaves. Thus, you decided to name your silent son after beginnings.

“Janus,” you spoke.

“Thus he shall be. Janus Augustin Alexandria. Allow me, my Lady.”

Your wet nurse took him back into her hands and carried him away. It was never a good sign, when the nurse only briefly allowed you to hold your newborn children.

You fell asleep to recover from your labor shortly after. When you awoke to the rainy morning, you heard the news: your son harbored an infant sickness from the moment he was born.

Despite their best efforts and medication, it was not even three weeks later that he would succumb to it.

When your wet nurse broke those words to you, you couldn’t find it in yourself to outwardly react anymore.

For you had already felt this heartbreak eight times before. This ninth loss was simply just another slap in the face from fate.

You refused to move from your bed. You refused to drink the fluids that your wet nurse offered you. No assistant or advisor came up to you that night; for they all knew the grief of a heartbroken mother outweighed any words, any otherwise mandatory reports they must give to the Empress.

They allowed you to grieve. Yet this distance only made the ninth hole in your heart even more glaring.

Three days after the announcement of the heir’s death, something changed inside of you. A will to move, despite nothing else in the world mattering, pushed you to get to your feet. It still ached to walk, but you dressed yourself in your most modest stola and exited the palace under a hooded guise. Your appearance must have been one of a vestal virgin, for none of the guards recognized you.

The night was at its darkest. The Silver Celestial had HER eyes closed, leaving the only light being the torches of Exeter as you passed by the silent streets and walked purposefully. No man ever stopped or acknowledged you, not even the vagrants; for touching a vestal virgin was cause for state execution. Women asked where you were headed, but you paid them no mind and kept walking.

Only when you exited the labyrinthine inner city, and found yourself upon a cliff at the edge of Lake Augustin, did you stop. Its normally crystal blue waters were black from the lack of moonlight, and the waves washed with gentle froth only a few dozen meters below you.

The chilled wind caused you to shiver underneath your stola, but you took one step closer to the cliff’s edge. With every movement of your body, you recalled the names of your sons.

Aeneas, the first. Julius, the third. Ulysses, the sixth, and Janus, your ninth. They were the only four of the nine you could name, as they were the only ones alive at presentation.

They, and five other of your unnamed boys, were your legacy.

A Mother who failed nine times. An Empress who couldn’t fulfill her duty. Yet, most importantly to you:

They were the souls you couldn’t ever love. Not with the separation that came with death. An impenetrable barrier separated you from them.

Thus, upon that moonless night, you sought to pass that barrier. All you wanted was to see them again. To tell them, in no uncertain terms, what you have wanted to tell them since they departed.

One more step. Then another. Your toe hung off the travertine.

Aeneas would have been twelve by now. You looked upon the lake, and imagined him doing mock naval battles with his brothers and friends, striking down riversnakes as if they were dragons, using sticks and branches as swords.

Julius would have been nine. You saw him and another brother sitting at the beachside, reading poetry that you gave him for his birthday.

Ulysses would have been four. You saw him and his father walking down the beach, laughing at Aeneas as he tried spearing a fish, pretending it was a monstrous megalos, only to stumble and fall from his makeshift boat into the waters.

And in your hands, you lifted them up as you felt the sensation of Janus upon your chest, silently suckling while you held him tightly.

The impulse then and there overwhelmed you. You had to see them again. Even in another life, you had to make what you saw upon that lake a reality.

You almost pushed off with your feet.

But it stopped you.

“Allow thyself one more chance. Bear one more child.”

You froze instead. You pivoted your head around but saw no one anywhere. You were alone, yet that voice spoke as if they were just in front of you, or perhaps inside of your very self.

You at first were too fearful to speak, but finally took in the words it said.

“Excuse me?” you stammered out, beneath tousled hair. “Why?”

The voice simply repeated.

“Allow thyself one more chance. Bear one more child.”

“What purpose is there?” you asked. “To see them perish? To not hear their life? I have not once, in fifteen years, ever heard my children cry. And you ask me to go through that again?”

You took a step back in indignant rage. A mother’s scorn echoed through the silent lake.

“Silence! I cannot…I cannot—!”

You collapsed to your knees, holding the stomach that was still slightly distended from lost motherhood.

“I cannot grant more life. It’s just going to be taken from me. It always has. It always has!”

Yet even as your cries resounded, the voice never hesitated in any of its words.

“Allow thyself one more chance. Bear one more child.”

You looked up at the moonless sky and the silent stars. “If suffering has an end, let it be the bottom of this cliff. Why should I listen to you, O merciless heavens?”

“You will suffer. Whether you fall or you remain, you will suffer.

Only one of these choices will deliver a tomorrow.

Allow thyself one more chance. Bear one more child.”

You, lost Empress, stared dully at the silent night. Its words washed over you. They filled your lungs and held them captive, slowly suffocating you as you struggled to keep your head above its waters.

“One more chance,” you repeated, as if in prayer.

You found yourself at your feet. The voice was gone, yet its words branded into your mind.

To fall, or to remain.

You, the Lady of Exetia, chose to turn away.

“If suffering has an end, then let it arrive tomorrow.”

The lake did not receive the Empress that night.

Instead, upon your husband’s return, you gave yourself that one final chance. The first few months held no success. Fear began to spread of you falling barren.

But when the summer solstice arrived, your wet nurses decreed your pregnancy. As the months came and went, your belly swelling with that familiar warmth, you never forgot the words of that voice on the cliff.

Nor did you forget it on the thirteenth day of the third month, when labor finally struck you once more.

For three days, the longest you have ever had to bear a new life, you struggled again and again.

“You will suffer.”

The three words repeated over and over as your body fought for you and your child’s life. They repeated as the sun fell and the moon shone thrice.

And on the fifteenth day, as the Princeps held your hand, you finally felt the pressure release.

And heard a sound you have never once heard after your heartbroken labors.

Wailing. Crying. At the top of their lungs, echoing throughout your palace.

At first, you could not believe it. You thought it was just the ringing in your ears, or delusion from hours upon hours of labor. Yet, as you slowly recovered and the wet nurse placed the pure white swaddle into your hands, you realized.

They were as healthy as a newborn flower.

“A girl, my Princeps and Lady,” the wet nurse said, with an exhausted, but finally full smile on her face, unlike the false ones she had to put on from the nine times before. “Lady Alexandria, a name?”

Mothers always named their daughters.

The newborn’s skin was peachy and unpale. You undid the swaddle just a little to feel their hand, which tightly grasped around your finger.

Healthier than any of her brothers. She continued to sob all throughout, a sign of strong lungs.

You wanted to smile, but your aching, exhausted body barely could stay awake at this point. Still, you knew. You knew she would be different.

“Julia.”

After the name of one of her brothers. After the brightest star in the sky.

“Julia Augusta Alexandria. So it shall be. You may hold her for longer, my lady.”

The wet nurse bowed, and exited the labor room. Before you handed your daughter off to her father, you whispered to her a promise.

This promise was one of defiance. That voice upon the cliff gave a warning: you would suffer.

You refused to let that define yourself and the baby in your arms. For now, you placed your forehead onto hers. For that brief, eternal moment, she ceased her newborn sobbing.

“I swear to you, my child. You will shine forever.”