Eleanor Willfrost, Queen Regent:
I did not expect tenderness in your letter. Nor was I surprised by the haughtiness. What pains me, however, is your insistence on twisting what we were and turning it into a politically convenient anecdote.
You say you should have burned it. You didn't. Because, despite everything, you still need my name to feel something. Even if it's rage. Even if it's scorn. Lacking love, I suppose that suffices.
Did you expect me to stay? To become an ornament of your court? To be that silent witness who applauds your strength, but sleeps in the shadow of your crown? I did not leave on a whim. I left because you, Eleanor, gave me a choice between nothing and your throne. And you chose it. You left no room for anything else.
Do not try to dress your coldness as dignity. Do not confuse "reigning" with not loving. Do not confuse your silence with strength. What you did was close doors and justify it with duty. What you are doing now is turning love into an annoyance, as if feeling were a weakness unworthy of a queen.
You did not lose me when I left. You lost me much earlier, when you began to measure every gesture as if it were a threat to your authority, when you turned our conversations into audiences, our silences into judgments.
Do you want to talk about betrayals? Then let's speak clearly: the true betrayal was the way you learned to do without me even when I still slept by your side. I was faithful. But I was never enough. Not for lack of love. But because you did not know—nor do you know yet—how to receive it without feeling that you lose power.
I do not need your titles. Your signature burdened with a crown does not impress me. You spoke to me as a queen, not as a woman. Well, I answer you as a man, not as a subject. The love I had for you will not be a memory I honor. It will be a wound that heals, not through forgetting, but through weariness.
Do what you must do. Rule with a firm hand, with noble silences, with letters full of pride. And don't worry, Eleanor: this time it truly will be my last letter. Not because I have nothing more to say to you, but because I finally understood that I am writing to someone who no longer exists.
Dyan Harvest