by Dax Murray
The Resignation Letter
Copyright © 2017 by Dax Murray
All Rights Reserved
Spring awakened slowly in this part of the world, bearing flooding rains and a mist that hung over the thaw from winter. When the gray lifted, the sun again cast warmth upon the land, and the flowers began to unfold themselves, the Empress would invite her closest friends to a picnic.
The miasma of pollen left a certain glow on the entire event, and Amalthea wasn’t sure entirely to what she should attribute the daze in which she found herself. She was, as she called herself, a scientist. The mages mocked her, yet a roll of scented parchment had found itself into her small dark hands. Did the Empress wish to get to know the most scandalous woman at court? The woman who took the vows of a mage just to break them? Who invented titles for herself, who cloaked herself in an air of scientific supremacy over the superstitions of sorcery? The woman from that far-off conquered land who never should have been allowed in the Academy of Mages to begin with, and yet, despite her braided hair, was here?
The picnic was not the last time Amalthea found herself with a scented scroll. Spring became summer, and still the Empress sought out her company. At first it was a procession of small gatherings, where the intimacy was subtle, and sometimes Amalthea swore she imagined it. But steadily the Empress sought her out more. Earls and duchexxes gave her confused looks, seeking to know why the places of honor they once occupied were now given to a wayward and obstinate mage. A mage who wasn’t a citizen by birth but by conquest. But, all else aside, she was a mage: mages were tools, weapons sometimes, but always resources, never friends.
The looks never turned into words. After all, who would critique the Empress’s choice of friends? The Empress was nothing like either of her fathers, her birthing-father a taciturn tyrant who oversaw the governing of the realm and her seed-father a hungry expansionist who oversaw their military conquests. She did not behead those who disagreed with her, reduced the size of military, and stopped the invasions. But she could turn cold, and those who were touched by her chill found themselves frozen out of her warm gatherings.
At one such gathering Amalthea found herself to suddenly be one of the last of the guests excusing herself, and in doing so, found the Empress asking her to stay. Another hour passed, and the Empress continued to be interested in soliciting her opinion. Soon it was just her, the Empress, and some rude but high ranking duke. The duke was clearly vying to be alone with the Empress, and Amalthea was convinced she was here now to prevent just that. Another quarter hour passed before he got up and indicated that he and Amalthea had overstayed their welcome, and he would be happy to escort her to her chambers.
“That won’t be necessary, I have a few more questions I would like to ask our scientist. Thank you for joining us this evening. Give my regards to your father.” A dismissal. There was no way he could tarry any longer.
A heartbeat passed after the soft click of the door shutting, and then the two women turned to fully face each other, and Amalthea knew there would be no turning back.
One night in each other's company became two, then three. A kiss goodnight became hungry mouths. The nights stopped being covert. The Empress - no, Eleanor - started showing her preference more boldly.
One day, Eleanor knocked on Amalthea’s door before the sun was up. Amalthea wasn’t even sure if Eleanor’s guards knew she was up. A warm hand found its way to Amalthea’s arm and excitedly pulled her into the hallway. Eleanor was skipping down the hall with Amalthea following behind. “I have a gift for you!”
“Ellie, it's early! I was up late last night!”
“I know, in that cramped closet you call a workspace!”
They raced down the hallway, and slowly Ellie’s excitement infected her. She no longer needed to be pulled, but skipped alongside her paramour. They got to the balcony above the grand entrance, where a single grand staircase spiraled downward.
“I’ve just realized,” Ellie turned to Amalthea, “I’ve never gone down these stairs but by them.” A grin spread across her face. She jumped a little, and then she was sliding down the bannister, laughing so loud that surely the guards would realize their charge was no longer in her room. Amalthea shrugged, then followed suit. She flew down. Below her, Ellie reached the floor and did a small turn on her toes, imitating a dancer. She held out her arms as if to catch Amalthea, and Amalthea fell into those arms. They both toppled to the ground, their laughing became a racket. Amalthea stopped caring about guards finding them, and the laughing turned briefly to kisses before Ellie sprang up, grabbed her hand again, and off they went.
Amalthea was being led down to one of the lower basements on the side of the hill facing the ocean. They took servants' stairs and passed the kitchens and laundries. Then, suddenly, Ellie stopped. “Your gift is inside this door!”
Amalthea was confused, but Ellie pressed a gilded key into her hand, and Amalthea reached to unlock the door.
It was the smell of old books that overwhelmed her first, but as that passed she looked around and saw it overlooked the ocean. The walls were lined with lanterns, every corner was stuffed with books, there was a telescope on the balcony outside, tables were full of more tools of alchemy and astronomy. It was a laboratory filled with items she could only ever dream of affording without some sort of Academy-blessed research funds.
“This is beautiful.”
“Good, because you are beautiful and beautiful women should have beautiful rooms all of their own.”
A few weeks later they formalized their relationship. Most of Amalthea’s possessions were brought to the Empress’s rooms, and she was given all the finery of a consort. The seat to the right of the Empress was reserved for her, at parties, at dinners, whether or not Amalthea was in attendance. Conspicuously, however, there remained but one throne in the receiving chamber, and while she had jewels equal in worth to Eleanor’s, she did not have a coronet of one partnered to a reagent.
Amalthea did not seek fortune, wealth, or status. She sought knowledge, the secrets the universe tried to keep. She sought the language she could whisper to the earth's bones. Nonetheless, the absence of the coronet began to feel like a slight. It was not the object itself, or even the legality of what it represented, but the legitimacy it would bestow upon the relationship.
She couldn’t figure out why that mattered. She knew the presence or absence of a court ceremony and a symbolic headdress she might only wear a handful of times did not change their love. Still, it stung. How much was because of her skin, her braids? How much because she was not noble? There was no way to be noble but to be born to it, and her family could not ever be noble, for they were conquered. If it was not her heritage, could it be because of her profession? A scientist, and an eccentric one at that?
How wide and how shallow the gulf between them felt simultaneously. She’d never been closer to another human, yet their differences highlighted how many miles lay between them.
Amalthea kept attempting to to find the courage to bring up her concerns, but she was feared sounding petty, crass, or greedy. As the months passed without a word, she felt more awful for thinking her lover would slight her over racial and class differences. And, as they are wont to do, more pressing issues came forth.
The Empress’s fathers had both believed that soldiers' lives were an acceptable price for an expanded territory. Amalthea thought Eleanor did not want to follow down that path. Eleanor wanted the prosperity that conquest brought but without the loss of her people’s lives. Eleanor ended the conquests, she stopped pressing further, and instead used her military to hold the line.
Amalthea saw the problem before Eleanor did. War - conquest – made the country wealthy. But they were not a cohesive
land, and there were no great works that could unite everyone, no public projects that could give people jobs since being a soldier was no longer a viable option.
Amalthea started looking into ways to create magic or science that could allow a person to travel from the capital to her parents' house in seconds. She thought she could study time, space, and so many other things and find a way to bend them so that one could naturally step from Eleanor’s bedroom to her parents' living room. The Academy forbade her study of these subjects, fearful of the possible destructive side effects. But Amalthea was no longer one of their own and, as the Empress’s lover, was even further beyond their edicts.
She imagined that she could create portals with set destinations. She envisioned travel hubs that people could build and maintain. With a connected continent, trade would be easier and so much more could be done to make sure that no one starved. People could integrate, and no longer would the nobles of the capital think of the people in the conquered lands as Other, as Savage.
But her research cut deep: an infection took root in Amalthea. One night she thought she had stabilized a tiny, fragile portal. She peered in, expecting to see her parents' house. Instead she saw a strange world, with people who looked nothing like her, nothing like any of the other people she had seen in her life. They had contraptions that she could not even begin to explain. Their language was too foreign to even be from another continent.
The portal closed suddenly, interrupting Amalthea’s musings. She tried to put it out of her mind. She was tired, she might have daydreamed it. She tried to recreate it a week later. This time the result was nearly identical and completely different. Again, a world that could not possibly be hers, and yet it was a world that could not possibly be the one she’d previously seen.
A tale her mother had told her, of strange hidden worlds where extraordinary creatures roamed. Were these real? Were there other dimensions out there? Could she reach them? Could she cross to them and come back? Amalthea had guessed that these worlds might exist, had mentioned it a few times to her fellows at the Academy. But like the research into these tiny particles, she’d been told to take her guessing no further. Amalthea had a bad habit of not letting things lie.
Amalthea sought these new dimensions with a persistence that led to neglect. She went days without taking more than some wine and cheese, weeks without speaking to anyone but Eleanor, waving off assistants and ignoring people making fresh deliveries of ink. But while she was being pulled down this untraveled path, Ellie was being led down a road of her own making.
Amalthea was too busy tearing particles apart, and colliding them with each other. She broke them down even further, to find a center full of energy. She didn’t know her home had launched a bid for independence. Though the rebels had been arming since Eleanor’s fathers first invaded, the short supplies of grain arriving late, and then not at all, galvanized the people. The crystallizing of a crisis into a cause. Amalthea knew nothing of her Ellie’s decision to ration grain supplies to her homeland, and her decision to suppress the rebellions that her decisions were inciting. Both women were drifting apart into separate worlds: the ascendant war commander and the preoccupied scientist-mage.
“What is it that you work on so late, love?”
A laugh came from Amalthea’s tight-set mouth, startled by Eleanor’s sudden presence. “I could ask the same of you,” she replied, turning back to see Eleanor’s silhouette, back-lit from the hallway. Eleanor took a tentative step inside of the laboratory, taking in the scattered papers and spilled ink stains, the disheveled arrangement of charts and diagrams.
“Being a ruler is so much harder than I thought it would be. You can probably guess at what troubles me. But you? You see the galaxy for what it is; you aren’t concerned with harvest numbers, road repairs, which duke is angry at which countexx. What occupies your mind?”
Amalthea noticed how tired Ellie looked, and that the lilt in her voice held weariness, brought on by the gravity of decisions that didn’t want to make. Yet she acquiesced to the request.
“Everything is made of these tiny, well, I don’t have a name for them, but they are small. And at the center of them is a huge source of energy, it’s incredibly powerful, and I can break it apart and open this rift, this window, and I can peer into another dimension. Some of them look so beautiful, and I want to hold it open long enough that I could walk through. These other dimensions are so strange, what if they have different magics? What could I learn there? What could I see and study! Oh this has been my dream, this is the dream that lead me to leaving the Academy. I could travel a new place every month, learning new things each day and -”
“You’d leave me?”
“Oh darling, no! Well, maybe for a little while, but I would come back. And besides, I think it will be some time before I can stabilize it. I contain it in a magical sphere, because when I get it wrong, it explodes, and incinerates everything in an instant. I was originally hoping to use the theories about this I developed at the Academy to make portals between the capital and outlying areas, to make travel easier -” Amalthea kept talking for some time, mainly about how she was doing her experiments, and her hopes for creating something useful for the people. She should have noticed the far away look in Eleanor’s eyes, the look that said she was thinking about something else, not listening to Amalthea. It was a look Amalthea was used to seeing when Ellie was listening to other people, not when she was listening to her.
“If you used more of these centers of particles, could you make bigger explosions?” Eleanor asked.
Amalthea assumed scientific interest, and began explaining a theoretical way to make an explosion so big it consumed a city.
Eleanor cut her off with “Is that something you could do?”
“Sweetie, I can do anything.”
“Then I need you to make that for me.”
“Wait, what? Why! No, it would kill so many people, it would destroy the houses, crops, animals, nothing would survive!”
“The northern territories are restless, they want a war; they want to leave the Empire. I don’t have the soldiers, the weapons, the ammunition to keep them in line. I disbanded my fathers’ legacies. I don’t know how to keep together what they built. But this, this could be a weapon to hold it together. This could solve our problem. Who would oppose us, my love? Who would dare try to break apart our Empire? I can’t have a war, I can’t have my people dying, fighting against people who don’t even respect our way of life.”
“So you want me to build a weapon that will wipe them out?”
“Of course not! Just enough to make a point, no more than necessary. To send a message that we won’t allow them to leave, to rebel.”
“I wish you could see that those people are your people, too. Your fathers made them citizens. And they are our people. They are my people.”
“I know! We need their labor, their skills, grains, timber. That’s what I’m saying. At first, just a small explosion, to scare them. Once they know how powerful we are, they won’t dare challenge us. They don’t have the mages, they don’t have a scientist. My love, my brilliant partner, they don’t have you.”
“Ellie, I...I can’t. I haven’t been trying to build a weapon! I have been trying to find ways to prevent a war. And the people in the northern territories are people. You want me to help you kill them. Ellie, please don’t make me do this.”
#
The trunk was hastily stuffed, gowns spilling out of it. So little fanfare for all the flying of silk, no trumpets blaring to accompany the glistening gold jewels being paraded from behind dressers and under chairs and hastily presented before Amalthea. The dissolution of the partnership was too abrupt. There were no simple goodbyes, no rules drawn up for these situations. It was not a partnership that had begun with rules, or ideas, or goals, or dreams.
The heavy oak doors parted and Amalthea's maids-in-waiting entered to gather her possessions. A sigh weighed on her throat, tugging at her, attempting to pull h
er to the ground. Surrender, she told herself. She could feel the eyes of the tapestry inhabitants taking in the mess she was leaving, noting the hesitation in her steps. She didn’t look back at the enormous bed covered in furs, the golden curtains covering the walls, the finely carved furniture. These fixtures were gone from her life, and one more longing backwards glance would not suffice to fill the hole left gaping there. She only flinched when she heard those doors click closed again as the reverberations echoed down the long hall.
Three steps ahead, she led her maids and the guards who carried her chest to the smaller chambers that were officially hers and yet had not seen her in many years. There is no undoing this now, she thought.
The laboratory became her home. The work she did to save them became work she used to escape. To escape her sorrow, but also to escape the world, this world. She still commanded more assistants and researchers than she ever thought she could need, warm bodies that flitted in and out of her line of sight, ceasing to exist when outside of it and irksome gnats when within it. What good were they if they could not anticipate her needs?
Eleanor - no, the Empress - for all her scarcity was a colossal presence. The air reeked of her, the walls held her coldness, the floor anticipated the sound of her footsteps. The instruments were all her property, her gifts, functioning for the purpose of leading Amalthea one step closer to a solution to the only problem Eleanor see. The specter of war taunting them over the horizon, shapeless, yet undeniably there and unfathomably terrifying. Everything, everyone, was a triviality in comparison to the rebel army that was assuredly supplying their sorcerers and sharpening their swords.
The words Amalthea heard over and over created a cacophony in her head: they don’t have you, they don’t have a scientist.
Numbers stopped adding up, and Amalthea knew it was time to stop fighting the battle with her various tools. The walk from the laboratory to her room was not inviting, not while the walk out the servants door and to the tavern seemed much more welcoming.
