#eskildit

All the while, her body was changing in other ways, too. Those changes they noticed and acknowledged. They loved nothing more than stripping her naked and putting her on a scale like a champion show cat, talking to one another about the visibility of her skeleton…just never to her. If she wanted to learn a single true thing about her own health or prognosis, she had to crouch near quite a lot of air vents and listen at a lot of keyholes. 

Somehow, that wasn’t as easy as it used to be. She could no longer deny that things were different now. 

Dulcie had a doll, and the doll had been her companion since she was very small. It was plush all over—not a fragile, hard-limbed model for display, but a soft and portable friend, hearty enough to join her for adventures. It had been hideous even when it was new, but she’d fallen in love with it anyway. 

That doll had been with her through a lot of truly awful bullshit. She’d been a bedfellow during stays in the infirmary and a confidant for her whispered late-night fears. There had been a long period when she couldn’t sleep without the thing, which meant she’d been to quite a few high-atmo sanatoria, too.

Frankly, a psychometrist would likely have had a field day with it, given all the tears and blood and snot that had been absorbed over the years. The bacterial thalergy saturating that hideous humanoid plaything told her entire life story to date. 

One day, Dulcie had looked over at the doll, sitting primly against the pillows on her made-up bed, and saw her. 

She hadn’t realized that the doll no longer had much of a face or how much of her yarn hair she’d shed over the years. She was lumpy, with entire segments of her body lacking any stuffing at all. Her skin was pilled and stained and showed signs of many tiny repairs over the years.

The doll’s dress was nice and new, at least, because some thoughtful soul had sewed her a new one in a kindly attempt to salvage her appearance, but she still looked a bit like a lost sock wearing a bespoke designer party dress. 

Fifteen years of life at Rhodes tended to do that to a girl. 

She wasn’t sure how she’d missed it happening. The poor dollie must’ve been disappearing for years, bit by bit, the changes so subtle she hadn’t noted them individually. Could she even call it a doll anymore? Would a young Dulcinea have fallen in love with her if she’d looked like this on their first acquaintance? 

She wasn’t sure. 

Now that Dulcinea had noticed her companion’s transformation, however, she couldn’t unsee it. She’d taken her doll, her forever friend, from her place of honor on the bed and shoved her deep inside of her pillowcase. It was a mercy. 

Dulcie wished someone would shove her inside of a pillowcase. Now that she’d hidden the doll away, she’d officially banished her only peer. Even her own reflection had turned into an emaciated, pock-marked stranger. 

At least, like the doll, they’d had the courtesy to stick her in a pretty dress. Luckily, nobody accused her of lying if she claimed she was cold and layered heaps of jumpers over the top. 

She was lonely, and she was bored, and she was ornery, and she didn’t feel well, and, most significant of all, she was fifteen, so she didn’t want to go looking for company. She wanted the company to come looking for her. 

Yet, when she heard the knock on her bedroom door, her instinct was to climb out the window and hide on the balcony until they went away. She didn’t want to take her medicine. She didn’t want to sit still for tests. She didn’t want to be a good girl and—well, fill in the blank. 

What she wanted was to emit an ear-shattering primal scream, and grow tits, and masturbate with a giant dildo, and smoke cigarettes next to an oxygen tank, and get 47 very cool tattoos, and have a slumber party, and make a face and groan when presented with an awful book about her changing body. 

Instead, she called back, “I’m naked!” - as if everyone at Rhodes hadn’t seen her in a far more vulnerable state than mere nudity. The illusion of privacy was insulting, but it was all that she had left. 

At least, this time, they’d knocked. 

“Do you need help with dressing, Duchess?” the voice asked. Dulcie looked down at her dress and her stockings and the two jumpers she was wearing on top of that. “I think I’ll be fine finishing up on my own!” she shouted back (which was exactly what she’d said before her blood pressure had plummeted and she’d fainted and hit her head on the side of the bathtub a few weeks back) “But if you come back later, I’ll be in a more presentable state, which might be for the best.” 

That was hot bullshit, and she knew it. Her body was so starving for thalergy that her hair had started falling out again. If anything, she was only going to get more naked, more hideous.

She just wanted—

Well, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. More time? 

“I’ll just slide this under the door, then,” the voice said as a slim envelope appeared on the ground. Unless they’d found a way to hide a cup of tea in a sheaf of flimsy, it was unexpected. What other silent torment could arrive in an envelope? 

The obstinate teenage part of her wanted to leave it there for people to walk over and crush beneath their feet… but, alack and alas, the curious part of her won out, as usual. 

And so, she fetched the flimsy and brought it back to her bed. Normally, when post came for “The Duchess,” it didn’t actually go to Dulcie. There were people who intercepted the invitations and political outreach and replied with her regrets. She only knew about them at all because she liked to snoop, but half the time, she just ended up bitter about missing the opportunity to get smashed at some ostentatious Third House shindig or dance the night away at a Fifth House ball. 

It was apt, she’d thought, that they’d called those replies regrets. 

When she turned this envelope over in her hands, the postage quickly revealed that it was from the Sixth, which was immediately curious. She didn’t know anyone on the Sixth. Well, she didn’t know anyone from anywhere. She permitted herself a single, brief fantasy about love letters and horny Sixth House cohort cavaliers coming to carry her off before slipping her short thumbnail under the seal. 

It was not a love letter. It was, she was fairly certain, a Sixth House homework assignment disguised as friendly correspondence. Of course, eight-year-olds on the Sixth were curing cancer for extra credit. It only served to remind Dulcinea that she hadn’t worked with her tutor in a while. 

She wasn’t sure if she hated school or if she missed it. Every time she expressed that she felt ready to start again, they said she should rest. Every time she expressed that she wasn’t sure she was up for it, they worried that she was depressed and sent her to the mountains. 

What if she wanted to cure cancer for extra credit? She didn’t, but it would have been nice to have the option. 

All in all, it was a very sweet letter, but could you blame her if she didn’t quite believe it was well-intentioned? Nobody in her life who asked her opinion had ever actually listened. Why should this missive be any different? 

She’d shoved it into her pillowcase with her doll, but as it crinkled beneath her weight that night, she found she couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

She knew the Sixth House motto, as everyone did: truth over solace in lies. Maybe, rather than squatting near vents (and, later, regretting it), she could let a nerdy eight-year-old boy do the squatting and the snooping. People easily forgave children for their candor. On the Sixth, they likely rewarded them for it. She’d certainly read enough mystery novels in which that was the case.

If she could just sneak him a few vials of her blood and her most recent data… well, she might learn something about herself that was true. The prospect was compelling. 

She couldn’t be shipping off her blood all willy-nilly, though. She needed to test this Palamedes Sextus. She needed to understand his intentions before she allowed him to root around in her insides like yet another visiting curative scientist. 

It was an evil plan, you see. It was a test! She’d write back, answer all of his questions at a slant, ask a few personal ones of her own, and see if he’d write back.   

King Undying, she did hope he’d write back. 

Maybe more time wasn’t the only thing she wanted after all. 

The next morning, as she got up, she removed both the letter and the doll from the innards of her pillowcase. She had a letter to write.  —

Part Two: The Last Letter // A Zealot For the Truth

Palamedes Sextus was not a quiet person, as a general rule. He could be quiet at times, but in the same way that a toddler could be quiet at times. The less noise he made, the more suspicious his cavalier became. Today it was unexpectedly silent, and she was half-convinced that she was about to walk in on some spectacular mess—his viscera smeared all over the walls, perhaps. And as his sworn cavalier, it would be her job to clean it up.

She wasn’t entirely wrong. 

The Warden was sat at his writing desk, stock still, flimsy before him, pen in hand. He looked like a twelve-year-old cramming for exams, a furrow in his brow. He was wearing his ‘make it make sense’  face - lost in his head somewhere, searching for some fact or footnote he’d filed away for just this moment. 

He was shaking his head, muttering to himself, one long, bent leg jiggling anxiously against the ground. When he squinted with his glasses on, as he was doing now, it meant he wasn’t looking at what was in front of him. He was zooming in on something inside of his head, or inside of his heart, or both. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her come in. 

“Warden,” she said softly, and the way he jumped confirmed it. When he turned his head to look at her, fluffy brows drawn downward just so, she knew something had happened. That look wasn’t mere curiosity. His eyes did not possess the frenetic passion of the scholar nor the dauntless focus of the hunt. It was agony. 

Obediently and automatically, she scanned his face for signs of blood sweat, pallor, fatigue. She looked for a clue that he might be ill or injured. When an inspection yielded nothing obvious, she closed the gap between them. Before she could reach him, he stood. He gestured at his vacated seat, at the letter atop the desk. 

Cam quirked a brow. 

“Don’t make me say it,” he pleaded. 

She sat. She read. 

All the while, the Warden was up and pacing behind her, a human fidget in perpetual motion. In contrast, Camilla was comparatively still, having merely taken up banging out his frantic, abandoned tattoo against the ground. When she turned to look at him, his fingers were threaded into his hair, his glasses crooked on his nose. He might have been trembling. 

The chair squeaked against the floor as Cam stood and pulled him toward her, holding him in a tight, lung-compressing hug. He seemed to melt into her arms, giving up all physical integrity - a non-newtonian Warden. Camilla easily bore the weight of his noodly limbs, though hers, too, felt a bit weak. 

They held one another for a long time. When Cam felt the convulsions in Palamedes’s chest that suggested he was crying, she only tightened her grip.

“All these years,” he spoke into her hair, “Was she only being kind?” 

“No. It’s about the logistics,” Cam replied, “If you read between the lines.” “I’ve read between the lines between the lines, and I still can’t make it make sense.” 

“She’s a head of state. It’s against the law. It’s more likely her hands were tied.” “This is Dulcinea,” Palamedes spat desperately, finally stepping back before sitting down hard at the foot of their bed. He set his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “I can’t believe something as incorporeal as the law would stop her from doing anything out of passion if it was something she wholeheartedly wanted to do. QED, I’ve utterly misapprehended the amount of passion on her end. It’s madness. I could tell you the precise number of leukocytes in her blood at this very moment, but after twelve years, I couldn’t accurately quantify her feelings? Was I that presumptuous?” 

Cam shook her head and wished fervently that she could go back in time and pay more attention to her instruction on pretty turns of phrase at the Spire. She was supposed to know what to say. She was always supposed to know what to do when it came to him, her flesh and her end. 

Instead, she sat down beside him on the bed, pressing her ample thigh into his slight one. With a profound sigh, he slumped over to collapse in her lap. 

“Maybe she’ll think it over. Change her mind,” Cam offered, hopeful despite herself. 

“Fuck, and maybe she’ll achieve spontaneous remission and travel here by boat to tell us in person,” Palamedes groaned. “Sorry. Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I’m not mad at you, I’m only—” he trailed off, scrubbing his face.

“Understood.” 

“The point is, Nobody makes a hasty decision in ink on their best stationery, Camilla. At the end of the day, I love and respect her too much to hang all my hopes on the naive belief that she somehow doesn’t know what she wants. She’s an adult. If I wasn’t willing to accept ‘no’ for an answer, I shouldn’t have asked the question.” 

“It’s more complicated than wanting it or not wanting it,” Cam reminded him, laying back on the bed, leaving him to writhe and squirm in her lap. 

“I know,” Pal admitted, “I do know. She loves the both of us. She said so. And if I know anything at all about Dulcinea Septimus, it’s that she doesn’t lie. Not to us and not to anyone. She’s a phenomenal woman. Absolutely unprecedented in the history of all of Dominicus. Damn. Damn,” he swore, removing his glasses and taking them in one hand, which dangled preciously near the ground. He pinched the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand. He felt a jostling beneath him.

When he opened his eyes, Camilla Hect was leaning back on her arms, looking down over him. Maybe, he thought, a man was only entitled to one unprecedented woman in a lifetime. 

He kept that thought to himself. 

“How many lifetimes is one man entitled to?” he asked instead.

“What?” Cam said.

“Nevermind.” 

They were quiet for a long moment, both lost in their own minds, grappling with the loss of the imagined future they’d shared. It wouldn’t have been a long future. Maybe they would have had a year together, maybe two. It wouldn’t have been an ending for anyone but Dulcinea, even if both of their lives had been leading up to this. She deserved to have the final say and to maintain her agency in the end. 

That didn’t mean it wouldn’t have mattered. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t ache and echo for years. 

“It would have been nice to see her,” Cam remarked, breaking the silence, and two pairs of gray eyes found the drawing tacked to their memo board - a fifteen-year-old Dulcinea, as rendered by a nine-year-old Cam. She’d seemed so old to them back then. Now, her twenty-six years felt paltry and insufficient. It absolutely was not fair—to her or to the world. 

“One day,” Palamedes sighed, “In the river, God willing.” He took in a deep breath through his nose. “Thanks, Cam.” “For what?” “You know.” 

—

Part Three: The Last, Last Letter // Epilogue 

At twenty-seven years old, Dulcie Septimus was slighter and more fragile-looking than she’d been at fifteen. When she caught her reflection in the mirror, however, she did not blanche or look away. The first thing she always saw in the mirror was her drain—a remarkable thing that made her life easier (and the proof that she’d once been loved to the point of invention). 

She didn’t get around as easily anymore, and her daily allotment of energy was extremely finite, but she no longer did anything she didn’t want to do. Likewise, she no longer skipped out on the things she did want to do. 

It had all started when she’d opted out of public life, relocating to Cypris with her cavalier to recover from her pneumonia. At first, she’d felt like an old dog being brought to a distant farm to die—but then she’d learned better. 

The dainty Duchess had become a spectacular hedonist in her advanced age. It was a dessert-first, reading-in-the-sunshine, fresh-bedsheets-every-night kind of life. She wore what she liked, and she did what she could when she could. Pro and Mia fussed, but they fussed over everyone at the farm, so she rarely felt singled out in that regard.

She didn’t have to perform there, not even for herself. It was a good life, if not her perfect ending—but she wasn’t entitled to that. Nobody was. She knew she didn’t have long, and she did have a few regrets (mostly about not extracting herself from her Rhodian purgatory sooner), but if this was where she was going to die, she could accept that. 

What she missed were the weekly missives from her precious nerds. There was a distance now, which she’d fully admit was her own doing, and she refused to feel badly about it. There would always be heartbreak anyway. At least, this way, they had one another. They would be fine. They had so much time. 

Still, when she did receive a letter, she always knew it would be a good day. She wasted no time tearing into them with ravenous abandon, relishing in the nostalgia and the knowledge that they still thought of her from time to time. 

It was why she’d automatically flooded with warmth and affection when Mia knocked on her bedroom door (a door with a lock, because sometimes she utilized her personal sex toy collection, and she was entitled to privacy here) and told her she had a letter. 

She was not expecting a letter written on real paper—let alone one printed with the imperial seal. 

She definitely wasn’t expecting a summons to the First House to study under the Emperor. She laughed to herself. It was yet another invitation she’d have to refuse, she thought. The timing could not have possibly been worse. 

But then she’d read it again. 

“Eight we hope will meditate and ascend to the Emperor in glory in the temple of the First House, eight new Lyctors joined with their cavaliers.” 

There were no ‘first fruits of the household’ on the Sixth, where one of her dearest (and, admittedly, only) friends, her love, Palamedes Sextus, had risen to the rank of Master Warden, with wonderful, silly, steadfast Cam beside him. Even if they’d admitted and acted upon their forbidden love over the past year, their progeny still wouldn’t be guaranteed a title. Which could only mean… 

Well, perhaps she’d die with one fewer regret on her list. 

Grinning like a fiend, all her teeth on display, Dulcie rolled herself up to her small, floral-painted writing desk by the window and began to pen a letter. 

“My dearest pals,” she wrote, practically by rote.

“I’m writing today to ask whether you plan to attend the little shindig on the House of the First. If I can manage to clear my very demanding schedule, I might deign to make a quick appearance… purely for the optics. 

I already anticipate that you will attempt to talk me out of it, so I will stop you at the pass. I do intend to be there, and I do intend to meet you both at last.” 

It was about then that Pro appeared in her doorway, knocking gently on the door. He was still removing his gloves, covered in fresh soil from his garden. 

“What are your thoughts on interplanetary tourism?” she asked, tipping her head cheekily to one side, her sugar-brown cropped curls shifting. Not even the Emperor himself could have said no to that dimple. 

‘No regrets,’ she thought to herself.