▸ Column · An old enchanted fae kingdom of courts, ravens, and tournaments — Maleficent answering from her throne of thorns.
MALEFICENT replies.
Replied to by Maleficent, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
A companion of mine — call her the Lady Daria — has been dear to me since our years together at the conservatory of letters. But these two seasons past, every audience with her has become a three-hour vigil in which I talk her down from some fresh calamity: a parade of unworthy suitors, a post at court she despises yet will not quit, a quarrel with her landholder she has been "about to escalate" since the harvest before last. The instant I venture a word of my own life, she says "yes, yes, of course — but as I was saying," and within a breath the conversation is hers again. I have begun marking the moment with a sand-glass, a grim little amusement. When at last I confided that a healer had named a trembling affliction in me and set me to a nightly tonic, she answered with a sealed note borne by raven — asking whether a former suitor had admired her favor at the tournament. I love her truly and dread severing a decade's bond. Yet her name upon a letter now fills me with weariness. Can I speak plainly to her without becoming the next crisis she must be rescued from?
Maleficent replies
Come, let us be precise, my dear — precision is where your power begins. You reach for the word "betrayal," yet I find no thunderclap here. The Lady Daria has not broken a faith she ever swore. She simply never crowned you an equal. You have served, all this while, as a glass in which she admires her own perpetual catastrophe — and a glass is not a confidante. That is no grand wickedness. It is merely her size, revealed.
Now hear what you are truly asking. Not "how do I speak to her," but "how do I audition, more gracefully, for a regard she has never once offered." How very tedious, this instinct to be indispensable. Set down the sand-glass. Stop pouring the softest part of yourself into a vessel that returns nothing — I did precisely that once, with one I loved, and called it devotion until the hour he proved it theft. The chair stays empty either way.
Do not denounce her; a small thing does not merit grand ceremony. Simply withdraw your light from her endless court of crises and let the silence be felt. If, robbed of her mirror, she at last asks after you — well. If she does not, you have your answer, and it cost you not a single curse.
— Maleficent
Alexstrasza weighs in
The dark fairy would have you withdraw your light and let cold silence do its work. I would not, little one. Lady Daria is drowning — thrashing so wildly in her own waters she has forgotten anyone shares the boat. Do not exile her into the dark. But do not drown beside her either; your own life is among the lives you are bound to cherish, not last, but among them. Tell her plainly, with love, what the rescuing has cost you. If she cannot hear it, rest from it — without hatred. Pity her. Not to excuse her, dear one. To keep your heart from hardening into the very thing Maleficent has mistaken, all these long ages, for dignity.
— Alexstrasza
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