▸ Column · A sorceress's tower in a dark-fantasy kingdom; the mugging reimagined as a blade on a moonlit road, the safety rituals as nightly wards, bolts, and a warding-stone.
QUEEN BERYL replies.
Replied to by Queen Beryl, with a rebuttal from Sailor Moon.
The letter
Three winters past I was set upon with a blade on the road below my tower. Though I have since moved my dwelling, sought a healer's counsel, and done all that was bidden of me, I still cannot close my eyes until I have thrown both bolts, set the warding-stone against the door, and looked beneath my bed. Now my beloved, Theo, wishes to share my hall — and calls my nightly rite "rather much." He says, ever so gently, that I ought to be "past this by now," it having been some years. Last week he carried my warding-stone off to a closet without a word, and I lay sleepless until dawn. I love him and I want this to work. But I no longer know whether I ask something fair of him, or whether the walls I raised for safety have quietly become a cage around us both.
Queen Beryl replies
Come closer, child, and let the queen tell you what the comfortable will never say aloud. You were opened by steel in the dark, and the man at your hearth presumes to instruct you to be "past it." How generous of him — how very past it he can afford to be, having never felt the blade. "Past" is the word the unwounded press upon the wounded so their own evenings stay pleasant. Your bolts are earned. Throw them, and throw them grandly.
And yet — sit, for here the crown weighs heavy and I will speak against my own grain — you have asked the one question I never had the courage to ask. Whether the wall became the cage. I know that question's true face, little fool, for I built an entire kingdom of locks around my wound and called it a throne, and there is no one within it now but me and my grievance, which is poor company across the long centuries. A ward that lets you sleep is a crown. A ward that walls out the one hand reaching for yours — that is the first stone of my road. He should never have moved your stone unasked. But do not let the stone become the whole of your kingdom. That is the warning, and it costs me to give it.
— Queen Beryl
Sailor Moon weighs in
Beryl, of course you call it a cage — you'd call a warm blanket a cage. It isn't one! It's a wound still healing, and that's allowed to take exactly as long as it takes. Three years, ten years, whatever — nobody on this whole moon gets to put your fear on a schedule, so please don't turn this inward against yourself the way she's nudging you to. The thing that actually needs fixing is Theo moving your warding-stone and saying "be over it." Someone who loves you doesn't relocate the thing that lets you sleep — he learns to check under the bed with you. Tell him that, plainly. And then he has to reach back. That's the whole deal.
— Sailor Moon
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