May 12, A.S. 0

Dear aliens,

My name is Thomas C. Rivera the First, but you can call me Tommy for short. Today is my birthday, and I’m now 10 years old. I hope for a perfect day to celebrate a perfect birthday. My dad is the best dad in the world, and his name is Lance. My mom is the best mom in the world, and her name is Cary. We live with our three dogs. My favorite food is chocolate cake and my favorite color is red. My favorite subject in school is math.

I don’t know if you exist, but I am going to write my diary in this paper and put it in a glass bottle and give it to my sister, who is a pilot, to throw into space. The atmusfeer (that’s what she calls the sky) is now purple and blue and red and all sorts of weird colors, and it’s hot, and everybody's screaming. This is a call for help. SOS. We need your help. It is terrifying. It is the worst day of my life. It’s one big earthquake that isn’t ending, and hundreds of us are crammed downstairs, and the woman next to me is crying and moaning and asking where her daughter is, and people are fighting for the last scraps of bread that fell out of someone’s bag.

Here is what I see: a great, enormous light starting to fill the entire sky. There is no more blue, and no more sky, just a light that washes and burns out everything that gets closer and closer. It looks like a small star in the distance, and then it fills our entire vision until we cannot see everything else. All of a sudden, there is an extreme jolt that rocks our entire ground, like we are in a car that has crashed with another. Everything is shaking; the ground splits; houses slide and crumble, and forests crash. There is no more stability. And then all of a sudden, our sun that is in our sky starts to trickle along the edge of the sky. Like an egg yolk moving in water or like a coin being magnetized by something, just like we learned in school. It is moving. I don’t know what to see, I don’t know what to think, I don’t know what to believe, I don’t know what to do. The yellow light all over our world starts to fade, slowly and slowly and slowly, until I can only see the whites of my mom’s eyes, and then we take our things and our candles and we run run run run run run run.

I lost my parents in the crowd. The only person I have left is Bob. Bob is a stuffed tiger. I am so scared. SOS. Please. I want my sister Lizzy back. I don’t know anybody here. We need help. Please, if you get this message, somebody tell us what happened. I think we lost our sun, and I want it back.

Sincerely,

Thomas Caleb Rivera the First (but call me Tommy)

p.s. please return a message if you can. You can use the same bottle. Address it here: 389 Peach Tree Court, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.

3 October, A.S. 7

Dearest Thomas Caleb Rivera the First,

It is absolutely splendid to meet you. As of now, I have just received your message, and thought it quite right to respond, albeit the inevitable delay in your receiving of mine. Though seven years have since passed and I am sure of much change, I send my deepest grievances about your family, and I do hope you reunited with your parents and sister, Lizzy. I am so sorry to hear about any physical suffering and mental anguish the Great Reversal may have caused. If there is anything I can possibly do to help ameliorate conditions for you or your family, please know this offer forever stands. It is a miracle that we even received your message at all, and I have intuition that more miracles are sure to come our way.

But alas! I have yet to introduce myself. My sincerest apologies for the disrespect.

Greetings. My name is Angèlique Celestine Voyanta Chandelle, of Darcia. My mother, Francine, is the lord of Darcia, and governs all internal and external affairs with the gracious aid of my father, Louis. My brother, Alexandre, is two years my superior, and assists in paperwork for our mother. As I am the eldest daughter, I am to inherit Darcia’s lordship when I come of official age next year. Until then, I study with my tutors, review trade and legal documents and make note of discrepancies, and organize and attend social and public events. Seven years have passed since the Great Reversal began, and as it still persists and officials are keenly worried about the structural effects in a world of eternal light, I have taken an especial interest in everything related to the Reversal, and thus I find your note of much intrigue. Thank you for writing, and I do pray for additional correspondence.

I, too, was ten of age when the fateful event began – daytime as you write, but nighttime for us. Unaware were we that it would be our last true night. I remember a state of heightened excitement and restlessness in the week prior to the Reversal, and being unable to fall asleep that night. For we are the Chandelles, and everlasting candles of soft light are we to cast upon our land and people, lest Darcia live up to its name and remain in eternal dark. My family had premonitions that some imbalance in the forces of Light and Dark threatened us, but we were yet unprepared for the violence of the Reversal to come.

Seven years prior. The twelfth of May, 3045. That night, as I laid awake in my sleeping chamber under a butterfly wing-thin blanket, as ethereal as the persisting heat was unusual, I remember incessant pounding within my head – louder and louder and more and more – as if I would sooner burst than lay awake for the night’s remainder. I succumbed to a night pill, to bring upon me salvation from the pain in the eternal darkness of slumber. A lethargic, but restless sleep ensued. I soon shot awake, jolting upright, a torrent of fearsome, ill omens and horrid dreams of all-encompassing flames cascading over me alongside the acute shivers of heat. As the inflammation engulfed me from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, just as I had imagined in my nightmare, a deadly shiver broke through. From deep within my bones, as if churned from the very essence of my soul, a dreadful moal surfaced so full of brioled woe that chilled my very skin to an awful blue and incensed my viscera with flame. I was on fire, and yet I was ice. As if my heart were a candelabra and every vein another brass arm, I cast a thousand flames from my soul – more, more, more, hotter, hotter, hotter. I was mad. But oh! the pain was insufferable and death would have been a welcomed blanket of cool. Hotter and hotter did I cultivate my fires, until I burned away the ice cold. Fingertips. Toetips. Cold no more, and instead hot, hot, an angry hot. Everywhere, from every pore, through every portal to my soul, did I enrage with fire. With light. Radiant, I was. Glowing, I am told. And as I was uncommissioned with my inflamed colvulsings and brilliant writhing, our sun, too, seemed to enrage with fire. With light. Everywhere, radiant. Glowing. Convulsing and writhing, too, sending sharp shocks of light upon our people, scorched misery raining down on a sweltering Darcia.

Later, it is full morning. I am unsure when the night ended and the morning began. All I see is light. I am told that it was not one sun – not our loving sun – but rather that the blistering light outside is attributed to the sudden presence of another sun – your sun.

But alas, this all seems to be a lifetime ago. Life is much the different now. As we live on Planeta Lux, in a world of eternal light, our senses are readily overwhelmed by visual stimuli, such that many who are fortunate enough to enjoy the fruits of leisure time have taken to training their other senses, particularly that of hearing. Even before the Great Reversal, I always had such keen sight, and I now find I tire far too readily from all the sights around me, and I quite fancy the reprieve listening exercises bequeath me. As of late, I have been much enjoying the composer Percel, and will enclose my favorite vinyl of his for you to listen to. So dearly do I love Percel’s evocative sound; his crisp lines, feverish movement, and sweet resolved harmonies that shed a confection of light across the sky in my mind, almost as if I am enabled to peer up at the stars and heavens above. He makes me unseeing of the world; he makes me seeing of my mind. Pray, do entertain a listen, and I look forward – nay! No more sight if not necessary. Oh, how I sometimes wish I were blind! – I hear forward to your commentary.

Quick – I regret I must leave immediately, for there has been another emergency I am to assist with. Rest assured that I am sufficiently well now, but ever since that day of mortal infamy, the pulses of light have not ceased. As if from my heart–from the very Chandelle of my lifeline and lordship–the brilliant bright throbs within and begs for an escape. I fear for my wellness, but also that of my family, for I do not believe they realize the extent of my internal suffering from prickly heat and convulsions of light that afflict my sight – bright white and reality so eagerly vacillating that I sometimes question whether I am to trust what I see. I, too, then, am sending an SOS your way. I wish there was something with which I could assist in your distress call, but alas, I entreat you, please bring darkness back to my family and the people of Darcia, who of everyone on this illumined earth deserve it most. My body ails, and the light never fails. Chandelle. Candle. It is a curse!

Respectfully,

Angèlique Celestine Voyanta Chandelle, of Darcia

P.S. Please address messages to le Château Clair, Darcia. I eagerly await your reply. It is called the Château Clair – or “clear castle” – because we may not distinguish between the inside and the outside.

March 7, A.S. 10

Dear Angel,

Thank you for sending over your vinyl. I listened to it. It was much smaller than musical records here are, just the size of a fist, and painted lavender, and so transparent it was like glass. I put it on my father’s old record player and listened to it while lying on my back on my bed. The composer you love so much – Percel – he is lovely. I can see why you listen to him when you are so immobilized that you cannot move on your bed, sedatives flooding through to calm the aches in your bones. I wish there was something I could do. It hurts me to read your descriptions of what has happened to your people – the light raining down and striking your skin.

Percel’s first movement was really so odd – all breath, staccato beats, rhythm that went up and down. The crescendo into the second movement moved me so, so much, I couldn’t even breathe. It swelled like people dancing in a night square at a thousand-times speed, prismed through so much color; it boomed and tip-toed; it was like a war against itself, clashing and soaring. I was enraptured. It is incredible what music can do. I thought of the sky that you must see, and the desert frogs and the sleepless owls that hoot over your trees that lie close to the ground, and the girls from the mountains you tell me who can see colors nobody else can. It sounds like a magical world. Have you heard of the artist René Descartes? He is just what I thought of. A surreal, beautiful world, yet animated into motion, each of his large, lumbering timbrous monsters waltzing with one another in Percel’s desiccated landscape of music. I looked up Percel’s sheet music, and only some scholars of your planet have analyzed his work in our web. There wasn’t much. I wrote a little poem about Percel:

a black cage full of twinkles

your letters flooding in

as if a hundred eyelids

blinking

wondering

When I read your letters, it is like reading something like Percel. I passed my pilot test, and I now fly the American fighter jets over the oceans as the countries search for new territories. Last week, my copilot was sent to fight off Japanese invaders by an archipelago of islands off of our East Coast. I hovered in the distance, awaiting commands, and when they barked operational codes into my ear, I swooped in, pushing the controls until my knuckles turned white, the wind battering against the scratched glass of my bomber jet’s window until it rattled all around me. It was like moving through nothingness at all – dropping through nothing but pure darkness, Angel – but that’s deceptive. Never trust that, I tell you. I thought it would never be scary when I started training for the army, but the first time I sat in the cockpit and pushed my engine into a nosedive, I felt it – the drop burrowing into my gut and licking all the way up my spine. My God. Everything’ll be alright, but my God. The wind. You hear it howling. You feel like it’s a nightmare you’ll never wake up from. But you straighten yourself out and you use your ears to figure out how close you are to the water – and once we finished training, they gave us headsets that are programmed to magnify the wavelengths of sound. Just like those bats.

But anyway, I was diving down at a high angle towards the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, and the glowing screen of my jet’s map was blinking with a green map of where data was pinging from –– the tiny dots signifying American and foreign clustered around each other –– fuzzed out in my vision. I could barely breathe. There is such a clean simplicity to controlling your dive, but I could hear the wind outside hurtling towards me. I was going faster than Mach 2. And in that moment I thought that if I redirected my plane upwards, if I managed to redirect all that inertia towards the atmosphere, I would puncture our ozone layer and shoot straight into space like a rock in a catapult and float past the nebulas of our fused galaxy and enter into a hibernative orbit. Maybe I would enter into your orbit. Eventually, one day, I’d wake up in a hospital, with my chin speckled with stubble from a few weeks of sleep. You’d have found me. And I’d be able to hear what your voice sounds like. Your letters don’t feel real sometimes. I read them in the barracks, and everything you say sounds a little bit like Percel to me – like a single clean note that strikes and stills me. You sound like someone from centuries ago on Earth, like the books we read, and yet someone hundreds of years into the future with your perceptions. You exist timelessly to me.

This weekend I get to leave Langley Base to see my family for a few days. I’ll be bringing some souvenirs from my training camps in Florida and Massachusetts – these are other states in my country – back home to Illinois. Lizzy won’t be home – she’s doing a mission in an Asian country, I think. I miss her and I worry for her. That girl doesn’t know her limits. And I think sometimes she’s a little too faithful to this country. She’s been blind even before our sun went out. Ready to help with the most dangerous missions at the highest costs to her body. She doesn’t think I can see the scars that stitch her back when she takes off her shirt at home. But Mom and Dad are growing old, and I just pray to God every day they die peacefully. Our army rations bring home canned peaches, eggs, and bread for them, but even when I go back they’re too used to living for survival, refusing to eat the eggs and saving them just for me so I can eat protein. I’ll report back after I see my family.

In response to you, I am enclosing a record of Frederic Chopin, one of the composers my parents played for me as a child. Nocturnes is lovely. It’s about the night. And the Polonaise in A-flat minor is a classic. But please, do listen to Scherzo. Tell me what you think.

Yours,

Tommy

Langley Air Force Base, United States Military Academy

Hampton, Virginia, United States

15 January, A.S. 11

Tommy dearest,

Oh! how I have been so eagerly awaiting your reply! And only a year wait, at that. I am sending my best wishes to Lizzy for a safe return from her mission, and prayers that your mother and father grow well. And to you, that you will, like your concern for Lizzy, heed my concern for you when you fly the fighter jets. Exhilarating as it sounds, please do be careful when diving, and sweet as it is for you to think of me, think of me rather as everywhere you are, whether in flight or on foot. You need not endanger yourself to imagine me by your side, as I would always hope to be. Instead, see me in every light, think of me in every sound, and pray, stay safe.

I have given your lovely Frederic Chopin a listen (and then another and another), and oh! such wondrous musicality there is. The Nocturnes really are so lovely; the deft motion, the sweetness that somehow reminds me of my childhood, and the effervescent harmonies evoke intense images of a night alive with insects, birds, the breath of the swaying leaves, and the whispers of the stars above. Thank you for restoring night to me, through Chopin. I so appreciate the silences that juxtapose the energetic Scherzos. I will take them as a reminder to allow my eyes to unsee, so that I, too, can enjoy the same silences that add value to the unsilences.

Tommy, I much love our continued correspondence, made ever increasingly especial by the unusual circumstances of our relations. So dearly do I appreciate you that I feel I must oblige and reveal the extent of my ailment. When I last wrote, I described my sickness as furious flames licking my viscera and acute pulses of light that overwhelm my vision. These continue, and I regret to write that my vision grows ever more unreliable as these onslaughts of bright white extend in duration and increase in frequency. I had attempted to hide these happenings from my family, lest word spread and the people of Darcia think me too weak to lead, with no avail. My family was of grave concern for my well-being, both for my sake and for the sake of the future seat of lord. I, of course, understand their giving of apprehension for Darcia’s leadership, but oh, the pressure to perform well with my tutors, excel at my administrative duties that seem to become more lengthy and burdensome by the day, and the necessity of my presence at social and public functions despite my illness… sometimes it is all too great. I am unsure if the worsening of my ailment is natural and expected, or if the almost insufferable state of my lordship obligations, as I am now three years well beyond the coming of age of responsibility, expedites the progression of my sickness. I suspect – and fear – the latter to be most true; in anticipation of our annual Chandelle gala – called the Chandala – I have the most ardent bouts of white blankness in my sight and the most strange and vivid hallucinations. We must stage a million (quite literally) lit candles across our expansive ballroom and outside in the gardens and amphitheatre. While these preparations occur, which I aid in, waves of bright white flood in and most realistic periods wash over me during which the stationary candles seem to migrate toward me, as if magnetized, some of them even hissing and igniting so terrible a fear in me! Worse, some of candelabras anthropomorph, with arms that sway haphazardly by their own volition, begging me to light the candle atop each arm, and, as it is my duty, I light them, only to be attacked by the violent flames as their arms smash into me and collide with my person. All this I thought were stress-induced hallucinations, and yet the burn marks that mar my arms and neck do not deceive. My family thought I was simply being careless while lighting the candles, but they are now growing increasingly worried as the burns only multiply and my bouts of white panic ensue. I do not know what to do, and I cannot seem to make it stop, no matter how I confine myself to my dressing corners, safe from the feverish dreams of the gala preparations. These hallucinations, or strange reality, I do not know what, persist, and oh, as I try to prove my worthiness of lordship, I cannot help but feel that there is something building up inside of me, some vile light wrought from my very Chandelle, and that all these bizarre happenings are but an omen… for what, I wish to never find out!

But alas! I do not want to distress you. I remember writing last that the Chandelle is a curse, and now more than ever do I believe this to be true. In a world of light, more light lambasts. If our world is a candle, more candles condemn. I hear the rumour that in your world, the solution of too pervading darkness is more darkness, for only when you peak in dark can light be wrought. My last remaining hope for my world rests in this commandment; my final string of sanity remains fixated on the assurance that the evil light afflicts me not in vain, but that I may somehow be enabled to bestow so much light in my world that I am able to restore the dark. Pray, do tell me this rumour is true, and that my light may engender true dark.

Have you heard of the story Oresteia? The characters invoke the cruelest violence in desiring the greatest redemptions. It is required reading on my planet.

I plead the gods relieve me at last

Of this difficult watch I’ve now kept for a thousand sol

Upon the mast of the Atreidae,

Hawk-like, eyes to sky, turning after long

Turning, studying the caravan of the clouds,

The gentle, meandering beasts that cast

Past two titans between the light to us here

Below, tempering heat to bring us life under the storms’

Auspices, eternal as the two suns.

I oft wish to cease my watch, but alas, it is my duty. If only I could be unseeing, at least for a bit, could I be granted a reprieve from this watch for a thousand sol.

And as I soon bid you farewell, please tell me about your life. I desire updates on your work and your thoughts. As I have written extensively about my ailment and do not wish all my news to be bad, I will enclose a soundbite of a lullaby I sing when I attempt to calm myself from my bouts of bright panic.

I close my eyes, imagining many a flame

Extinguished, dignity restored to my name.

“Angèlique” they say, and I believe it too,

If dark can be wrought from fires burning anew.

I comfort in reminders of the era of before,

Equal light and dark, violent burning no more.

To appeal to the bright heaven of a darkened mind

Enlightened, rather, by “Celestine” of divine kind.

To see beyond sight, of what others refuse to see,

The dark in the light, what may deceivingly deceive.

Do I find peaceful sanity in the madness of sight

“Voyanta,” dark and true, uninhibited by bright.

Only when I close my eyes, do I really awaken

To truth, light for dark, of which I am not mistaken.

“Chandelle,” I hear, and am made to unseeingly see,

A dark light within – the blindness of sight – sets me free.

Forever yours,

Angel

Jul. 4, A.S. 15

Dear Angel,

I am so glad you enjoyed Chopin. The rest of his oeuvre is beautiful, as well.

Today is our Independence Day. My country – the United States of America, by which I mean it was once all a fragmented mass of people who called themselves ‘united’ – declared independence from its parent country, Great Britain. People like to think of themselves as heroes, but it’s not true, in my opinion. The Fourth of July is supposed to be festive. When I was a baby I remember we’d sit with the big barbecue grills in our backyards, shrouded with our nation’s colors – patriotic red, white, and blue. I’m enclosing a sketch of our flag I made by lamplight. They would stream everywhere, on banners and stickers and pins and top hats, and we would have parades snaking through the busiest cities in the world reminding us of how important it was that we now were the free world. A free world which imposes brutality onto other worlds attempting to be free of us. Now there’s the night, of course, and so we can’t afford the colored stuff anymore. It’s almost funny, really, how we celebrated freedom, and are now less free than ever, condemned to eternal darkness.

But later tonight we’re hosting a neighborhood cookout, and the most dramatic of all are the nighttime bonfires, blazing all the way up as large as a giant in a fairytale, people tossing the old things of their lost family members so that the ashes spark up in the sky like phantoms. I wish you could come. The bonfires remind me of you. Your candle lit the flame of my heart, like fireworks simulating stars in the eternally dark sky. Fire simmers underneath the grills, fire rages up in the peaceless and fearless bonfires, fire fills the torches that people carry in the streetside parades, fire is dashed across the faces of people in red temporary tattoos and orange face-paint that glitters and glints sharply, static cutouts of a dynamic force, fireworks explode fire into a million pieces and scatter it across the sky.

I created some fire today, too, for my country. Yesterday I dropped a bomb on a city. I watched the fire attach itself to the island and bloom all around. It was so distant and so small, a big mushroom of smoke palpable and tactile, blossoming upwards and then slowly dissipating, grey and cored with bright red, like a tiny lamp at the very center. I cannot wrap my mind around the destruction we wreaked, around the children who must have lost their lives.

I was a god who did not deserve that power. I thought of the fire that engulfed your body during the Great Reversal. I did that to the city today. My hand. Like a bomb of flame exploded in your body all those years ago. How could I say I’d go to the ends of this earth and yours to save you, and then inflict upon my own people such extreme pain and suffering? I have failed. And I’m sorry.

Please, forgive me, and, like you always say, pray that my candle will glow even brighter so that I can right my wrongs. They are unable to leave their families to escape to safer places, unengaged in any atrocities their governments have perpetrated upon other states.

Thank you for opening my eyes to this. I was far too proud of being a god of fire.

Yours,

Tommy

Langley Air Force Base, United States Military Academy

Hampton, Virginia, United States

Sept. 9, A.S. 15

Dear Angel,

I feel more and more alone thinking of how ill you are, and my inability to do anything. We are separated by far too much. It sickens me to think of how sick you must feel. If only I could just hold your hand, be there with you – God. God, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do just to take an ounce of your pain away. Please tell me how you feel. It’s almost as if we could spread your illness among the two of us, connecting us even more. You are not alone, remember. You will never be. I love you.

Each time your letters to me become fewer and farther in between, and I wonder if it is because you are losing the strength to write, to speak. We are growing older, and I feel as if time is beginning to run out.

I have been thinking far too much about time. Here is something from my youth that I thought you might enjoy.

Today I remembered what a sunset looked like. When I was three or four, my mom took me and Lizzy out to the beach by our house in Massachusetts. We slowly descended the wooden steps to the coast, and the cold black pebbles bit our raw, red feet. The edge of the beach tapered off in craggy black rocks, where water pooled in great crevices that were filled with urchins covered in spiky shells, hermit crabs, and starfish – wondrous tidepools full of life. The water would roar forwards and spray walls of foam that would shower us in wetness. We would scramble around, always looking for a new creature to collect or examine before the sun set and we were forced to go back inside. I collected dragonflies in jars of formaldehyde that I placed on the shelf. I stared at the sun setting and, fearful of the monsters that prowled the darkness, hurled myself up the stairs into the warm electric-lit safety of my living room, panting and sweating, before it could curl its claws around me. The pink wash of the horizon would buzz away like electricity, and the flies would slam their bodies against the screen. The light would disappear slowly, but first smearing so much lavender and blue against the reflections of the rocks inside the tidepools.

Now when I run around I feel as if I am not running towards anything. I have so much power to move, able to control my fighter jet with a flick of a finger; I have a medal of distinction for killing innocents. Ian and Jocelyn and the others in my platoon are so eager to serve. De Mira is on fire, the crackly voice would emanate through the static, the code for them to enter the Bermuda Triangle, where shifting alliances of countries send their troops to fight. They would smile and race off. I was filled with a fear that flooded my toes. Where are we headed, Angel? Where are we going? I can no longer even see the start of the path we have embarked on.

Yesterday I was teaching the newest class of trainees how to hover. We were above a lake just next to Langley, and I taught them how to bring their jets just feet above the water, where you can echolocate for the sounds of submarines that are coming closer and closer to the surface, but you must be careful, you see, for some know how to conceal their sounds, and they can shoot you before you can fly out, and so you must be silent and agile, like a bird. Be like a dragonfly, I advise them, and I tell them a little washed-out story of my experience with dragonflies by those Massachusetts beaches, but the truth is I feel like a dead dragonfly corpse in formaldehyde, my eyes stricken, wide, and blind. So I tried to resign, but they threatened to take away all of my family’s pensions, our military-afforded housing, and blacklist us from government-sponsored transportation. Sickened, I had to rip up my resignation letter and re-enter the barracks.

But here, you sent me a little sonatron of your voice, and the sound buzzed through in the corrugated blue recording device, shaped like a conch shell. I clipped it to my own so I could hear, and my fingers were trembling. You were singing a lullaby, and it was beautiful. Then you spoke your entire letter to me, because you are going blind slowly, and you can no longer read your own handwriting. But the most terrible thing was that once you listen to a sonatron, you cannot replay it. With each replay, the soft silt of the sonatron’s biometric material begins to warp and melt until the soundwaves are no longer intelligible, distorted beyond recognition. And so I had to put it away and savor the sound of your voice over and over again, telling me about the sights you are seeing, your jokes about the greedy merchants and the lordship you preside over, the daughters attempting to save their lands, and your music.

You wrote me about your opinion on the book Oresteia. My world has a translation, too.

O, to ever be released at last

From this watch I’ve kept now

For an unmeasurable menagerie of moments,

Wolf-like, snout to paws, night bleeds into

Night; stars spin and swirl without cease,

Over a static backdrop of black velvet

Cycles of years past almost traceable,

Now an indiscernible chaos of motion;

No rhythm in the stars’ wane and rise.

When I fall asleep, your image comes to my mind – like a painting filled with the colors of your words. In tenth grade, we read this in literature class with Braille, and our teacher invited voice actors to perform for our class, since the original epic was written for the stage. Will I ever be released from this watch? As a soldier, I don’t think I will ever be. It was what I was born into; my father was a commander in the Third World War before the Great Reversal. In the rest of the story, the watchman narrates the rest of Troy’s capture. It is funny to me how little action he takes while describing the violence in vivid detail.

You’re like a candle. One that I pray never goes out. Please keep singing to me. Send me another lullaby, please. Read me another letter. Read me an excerpt from your favorite book. Anything, anything so that I can hear your voice again. When I cannot sleep at night for fear of what I will dream about my own country, it is your voice that allows me to remember what is good.

Yours,

Tom

Langley Air Force Base, United States Military Academy

Hampton, Virginia, United States

Dec. 24, A.S. 15

My dear Angel –

Hello? Where have you been?

Merry Christmas. God, I feel so lucky to have known you. I pray for your mind to continue burning, to continue living. If I could just sit beside you and hear you whisper, I’d be happy. Love makes men fools. We cut a tree from Mt. Soren today and drove it back on our truck, and at home Lizzy and I climbed up and decorated it with electric ornaments that glow in red, blue, purple, green, and yellow. Mom and Dad are in wheelchairs and walkers now, their hair white and wiry, but they held each other’s hands. At the very top we put a little ceramic angel. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much you’d enjoy this.

If you haven’t responded because you’ve fallen in love with someone else, please tell me. I also fear that you are growing sicker and sicker. Please respond to me as soon as you can. Merry Christmas.

Yours,

Tom

389 Peach Tree Court

Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

[memorandum discovered after initial correspondences]

12 May, A.S. 40

Tommy dearest,

Pray, allow me to call you as my sister did so fondly. It is with my gravest regret that I write to inform you the confirmation of what you so grievingly despair, Angèlique’s death. It is with a heavy heart that I write this to you now.

Out wisped our beloved Angèlique, and out winked our candle of light–a light of hope, warmth, and goodness. She died in her sleep, peacefully, to be sure; she had just told me that, for the first time in forty years, she was not afflicted by a single nightmare, and instead had a lovely dream about peering up at the night sky, as it was prior to the Great Reversal. She was with you, she said. With so much love sparkling in your eyes did she find stars twinkling there, in your gaze, too. Together, hand in hand, you and Angel began to float upward, up to the very night sky you described that she so loved. United in the heavens, could she finally feel you, in corporeal form, and could she finally see. Everything. The world below her, your world so far away, and the eternal in-between you both lay in. It was as if she were bestowed with immortal sight, a sight beyond what is mortal and ‘real,’ and as if you, cupping her hand in yours, made more real her hopes enclosed in the lullaby she so oft sang. I checked in on her just hours before she must have passed, and saw her sleeping soundly with a slight smile on her face, and so grateful I was that she again was graced with sweet dreams – dreams of you, I am sure.

She loved you, she really did. She wished she could have cast a candle into your world and alleviate some of the burdensome and suffocating dark you so suffer in. Angèlique was our candle, and true to her name, she was angelic, celestial, all-seeing and sympathetic to your dark sorrows, and aflame with vigor, life, and love. Never have I been graced with the presence of someone more wholesome and pure, someone more truly a light in every world, than my sister.

But you, Tommy, you were a light to her. No one could dissolve her pain as you could, granting her the Dark she desired to become light again–to become true Light. She would wait years for another letter from you, her love, and the look on her face when she received one, was oh! so much love, so much life, so much light. You made her more perfect, for Light cannot exist without a background of Dark, and the Dark you bestowed upon her was a perfect complement to her Light. Never for a moment doubt the grace of your Dark, and never for a moment doubt the Light you retain. In a world of eternal dark such as yours, remember your candle ablaze with all the matter in the heavenly cosmos and all the force of Light and Dark.

I delight in your glorious description of a sunset; in return, I will enclose Angel’s description of night. Angel, true to her name, was a creature of the dark, when the cosmos seemed to most fully unveil its sorrow and salvation to our people. She always was, and always will be. I used to tease her and call her Nightingale, as so oft would I find her on the roof of our chateau or out in the grass soon to be kissed by dew, gazing at the stars above. I suppose ‘stars’ would now be described as pinpricks of bright white against a horizon of black far too expansive for our imaginations, but we are so overwhelmed with light and color that I’m afraid these words, ‘white’ and ‘black,’ are now of no meaning to me and to you, if you grant me this assumption. So I will recite Angel’s night. Her night was special, different from all others’... perhaps something about her inner heavenly sphere endowed it as such. She would describe the night as nothingness. Blankness. Void, or as nearest as possible among matter. Though I was at first apprehensive, Angel would look at me, and in her eyes would a million stars and a multitude of light reflect. Those eyes, and her voice which you so adore, would convince me that we are to find comfort in the void. For in infinite nothingness, there is infinite opportunity to create. It is liberating, she’d say. She would grasp my hands and explain that nighttime was the only time of real peace, an escape from the burden of lordship duties.

She would have grasped your hands, too. Imagine she is now. Outside. On the soft, forgiving grass. Laying next to each other, with hands clasped. Angel has been gazing up for so long, and you do not quite understand precisely what it is that so fascinates her, so you start admiring her admiring the stars instead. She feels your loving sight, a million candles ignited in her from your sweet smile. A familiar blush brushes across her face. She turns toward you and smiles, slowly. She takes her time with it. You are about to receive a secret divulged–the meaning of life–and she wants it to be memorable. With love reflecting in her eyes like the millions of candle-lit stars, she says that the night is peace. It is as if the dark of night allows the light to be free. And, so, it is with savoured freedom that she would peer into the deepest, darkest recesses of the night, and, even during day, would she squeeze her eyes, shut out the light, and open to the dark the eye of her imagination. Her mind’s eye opened to the light, she would be seeing both of dark and of light, and would be reassured that everything would indeed be alright.

Years later, after her sight has failed and the Great Reversal has, like a thief in the deft cloak of dark, stolen our night, she would plead for me to bestow night upon her, again. “Make me free. Let there be light; a light against dark. My light.” I would wipe the tears from her eyes, mix them with the coming morning dew, and smudge the concoction of heaven and earth on her forehead. Against the flickering candlelight of her sleeping chamber, I would watch her expression ease into the pure sweetness we so adore, knowing that she is reminded of night–of a vibrant candle dancing freely in the dark, casting the warm glow of life and love on what otherwise remained dark.

She would have wished to ignite Chandelle within you and your people. She was our angel, our cosmos, our sight. Pray, please take her name and inscribe it within your heart and very essence of being, as she did yours. You became the Dark needed for her Light to balance and brighten. Become to your people of home an angel, within the cosmos, with true sight. Angèlique was our everlasting candle. And within you, the Chandelle still burns; an everlasting candle, everlasting Light, everlasting life, and everlasting love.

With eternal love, your forever brother and friend,

Alexandre Lucien Benôit Chandelle, of Darcia