▸ Column · A fallen sorcery-kingdom's order of rescuers — Queen Beryl answering a city lifesaver who pulls souls from fire
QUEEN BERYL replies.
Replied to by Queen Beryl, with a rebuttal from Sailor Moon.
The letter
I have served eleven years in the order that drags the living out of fire and ruin across our city. Last spring we pulled a boy of seven from a burning house, and he did not live — gap-toothed, the very age of my own son, his milk-teeth not yet grown back in. I believed myself unmarked by it until, two moons on, I began inventing illnesses on the mornings I drew duty in the quarters thick with children, telling myself it was some ailment of the gut. The man who walks the watch at my side finally spoke up after I went silent for the last hours of a long shift and only stared at the gates. I know I ought to unburden myself to someone — but the man our order appoints to hear such confessions shares my table three days in seven, and I cannot fathom sitting before him as a broken thing. Do others in my trade find a road through this, or do most simply keep quietly steering themselves around the calls they can no longer bear?
Queen Beryl replies
Come closer, child. You imagine you have written to the wrong queen — that I trade only in slighted love and know nothing of a wound got from witnessing. You are mistaken. I know precisely what you are doing, because it is the very thing I did.
You believe you are managing. You are not. You are rerouting — and each morning you invent an ailment, you draw the map of your whole life a little smaller, a little further around the one thing you will not face. I know that map. I drew one once, around a single wound, until there was nothing left in all my kingdom but the going-around, and the wound at its dark center never once grew smaller for all my avoiding. That is the trap, and it does not feel like a trap. It feels like wisdom.
So hear the cold thing the gentle ones will not say: a wound fed avoidance only grows to fill the room you surrender to it. First the east quarter, then the shift, then a self arranged entirely around one burning house.
And the man at your table — your pride says being seen as broken by one who knows you is unbearable. I know that pride. It built my throne, and the throne is lonely. Do not let it cost you what it cost me. Speak — to him, to any living voice trained to carry this, a healer of the mind, not a sorceress in a tale. You still have a gap-toothed boy who breathes. I had no such thing left. Do not reroute yourself into my kind of dark.
— Queen Beryl
Sailor Moon weighs in
Beryl, of course you'd call it pride. You'd call the friend the trap! He's not the trap — he's the rescue, and you of all people should know what it costs to shove away the last person still reaching.
Listen to me. The silence at the gates, the calling in sick, going quiet — that isn't you breaking. That's your heart, the same enormous one that ran into a burning house for a stranger's child. You don't save people that way without feeling it this hard. And crying doesn't disqualify you — trust me, I'm the worst crybaby there ever was, and I still won.
Your partner already spoke up. Your lunch friend already cares. Let them in. Being reached isn't weakness — it's the whole thing that turns it around, you know?
— Sailor Moon
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