68 - No Longer Cursed

Dear son,

You are not going to believe what is going on here at home.  Father Radiance must be spinning like a drop-spindle in his grave mountain, with what his son is bringing to the city.

The Mandery school is re-growing on the stump of rock where it used to be.  The blighted cursed stump is cursed no longer.  There is a fragile, lacey and elegant building growing there. It sprang up in a few days, the skeleton of the school glowing at night like sun-flies were in the stone.  No one ever said that the old school was so beautiful, if it looked like that.

The New Releasers are proclaiming from every street that mandery, version two point one, is once more beloved of the Light and the Dark.

Some people are speculating that this is happening because his Radiance has ceased exposing self-lovers.  It is no longer a crime.  Quite a few other people have been waiting for the Great Hive to be struck by lightning and flung into the canyon for going against the natural order.

Their so-called natural order.  There are spike mice who live in threes, and waxer dogs who are both male and female in one, and... oh you know that the binary reproductive strategy is far from ‘natural’. I am so relieved that things are changing for the better.  It feels better.  It feels new.  It makes it easier to fight off my nightmares where something wants to turn my mind off.

The proclamations from the Sunrise Loggia are being recited and read out all over the city.  The Light and the Dark have reconciled and all Mandery is not only wanted, it is desperately wanted.  There are new nomarcs... astonishingly attractive young people, if you ask me, who will be testing everyone for any kind of mandery, even as little as changing the colour of a scrap of paper.

The hospices are going to be getting more people and more help all of a sudden and even crashed and burned old ladies like me are going to be talking to these new nomarcs.  The nasty old man down the hall who burned himself on... oh, I can’t say it, though Yasna has helped me understand that there are people interested in war birds in... in... an... abusive way, shall I say.  He was making and selling such images when he got burned.... anyway, he is certain that the new Hive lords are former zardukar.  Pretty, empty-headed sex workers who slept their way to his Radiance.

Yasna and I agree.  His former work seems to have tainted his mind. Yasna thinks that I might be able to help these lordly children.  He says it was my potential in mandery that caused my trouble to begin with.  I might have a true calling if I can just fix enough of myself.

I am seeing less and less of the random now, my son.  I woke from a nap the other day, hearing an enormous report and was afraid at first that the rocks had cracked or something like that.  I see something however.  Something that disturbs me.  The monster who first clawed open my mind, cracked it like a shell to pick me out of myself, wiggling like a borrower crab.  I still see it.  It tears at the foundations of the Sunrise Loggia, struggling to pick out and devour all the mirrors and gemstones and swallow them.  But it has no back so everything it eats is ruined and tumbles out its rear to fall into the canyon.

No matter what Yasna and I do... I dream of it still. It is like a skull or a skeleton, trying to eat. Day dream, night dream.  It leaps out code at random intervals.  It is the remnants of some kind of ill wish on me.  Yasna says that if it had been correctly done, I would have just died... So no wonder I keep dreaming of it clawing me open over and over again, eating what bits of me it wants.  Sorry, my son.  I shall... I will... clean that out of my head eventually.

I will write more tomorrow.

Your loving mother,