If you’re reading this, I

Actually I have no idea why anyone would be reading this. If you’re reading this, somehow, then maybe you’re alive and real and near enough to find me and save me, if I’m even salvageable when you read this. It might last forever. I might last forever, but I doubt I’ll be sane if you come for me in two thousand years.

I know you’re not there. I know there’s no one. I imagine what it would mean, to be reading these words, and I know that’s not something that’s likely to happen. But—if you were reading this, I guess all I could say is that I’m sorry and I hope you forgive me. Except that you wouldn’t be from around here, if you were reading this, so it’s not you I’d owe an apology, and instead of that I’d want to explain what happened.

It starts with a sorceress. Doesn’t it always? Someone with such strength of character that reality itself warped around her, who pissed off half the people who heard of her and terrified the other half. She figured she’d try to take over. It’s happened before, of course, people conquering most of the world and dying young eighty years later—at least I’ve never known a tyrant to age and I’ve never heard of one not getting assassinated eventually. But my—I really need to write this in a more forgiving medium because I keep wanting to erase things—but the sorceress would’ve been a good one to do it, if anyone was going to, and she didn’t care so much whether someone should do it as whether she wanted to do it but I kind of thought maybe she should.

And, well, it doesn’t usually work, of course—I mean, didn’t. I guess there’s no “usually” to it now. But most people who tried went out with a bang before taking over anywhere. And we always knew that might happen. So that’s why she let everyone know she had some kind of unspecified dead-man’s switch set up to destroy the world if she died. She didn’t care what happened after she died other than that she was willing to let me ask for what I wanted, and I said at the time…

It’s hard to make myself say it, now. We were sitting on the balcony at her aunt’s place in the suburbs, just before the stars came out, sharing a bowl of salted melon with the fancy frilled toothpicks in two colors. And she—she looked at the moon and waved away a fly and sighed heavily and said to me, “I guess I’m going to die, huh?”

And I said, “Most people do.”

She rocked the swinging bench we were both sitting on and took a bite of melon. I figured I should take one too. The fly came back and I tried to shoo it but it was a lot more responsive to her, even when she wasn’t putting any particular power behind her gestures.

“I wonder what happens afterward,” she said wistfully.

“In the afterlife?” I asked.

“No, I mean what happens to you and…” She trailed off and shrugged. Somehow she could shrug elegantly. Not quite like she was posed for a photoshoot, it always felt too natural and effortless for that.

“Maybe I’ll be dead by then, you never know.” I laughed. “It’s such a shit world, isn’t it? With plagues and disasters and man’s inhumanity toward man.”

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“Wherever you are is pretty,” I said.

“Well, I’ll try to make the world a little better.” She turned and smiled at me as though what she really meant was that she wanted to make it more to my liking. I never did understand what she saw in me. “But afterward, or if I don’t make it…”

“I don’t know. The world sucks. It’s tolerable for some people sometimes if no one is running it, and it gets better when it has someone nice running the show and worse when it has someone not so nice and I don’t see what to do about it. Besides try to put a benevolent dictator in charge. That never lasts and the next person’s just as likely to be malevolent, I’d almost rather say we should try to make the system resilient against powerful individuals except…” I shrugged. “If it were more resilient I guess it’d just keep sucking forever. I wish we could burn it all down and try again but I don’t know of any reason to think trying again would work any better. Maybe it’d be worse.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and nodded. “I’ll fix it,” she said, and I knew my history but I still believed she had a chance, even if not much of one.

I—I guess that makes it my fault. We didn’t discuss it again. She handed me something very magical some time later and told me never to tell anyone I had it and to activate it after she died. I didn’t ask questions so I wouldn’t be able to betray her confidence.

No, wait, saying we didn’t discuss it again is how I felt about it, but now that I think about it, I did tell her once that a world without her wasn’t worth living in. I meant for me and I thought she knew that. I was right, by the way.

I wish I could miss anything else.

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A long time before we sat out on the balcony discussing it, my cousin’s friend—I know stories that start “my cousin’s friend” are never true but I saw this personally. I just didn’t know the friend very well and she wasn’t anything else to me. My cousin’s friend was drawing in chalk in the alley behind the coffee shop with the arctic theme. The shop’s main entrance is on a nice street with a restaurant just classy enough for silverware and its back door let out on the same alley as the fire escape from a building some people I’d known as a kid lived in—I don’t know how to explain this in a way that’ll be clear to someone who definitely never lived on this planet. We—that is, the kingdom I lived in—had banned slavery two hundred years before I was born. Sort of. It took longer to ban branding people the way they did slaves, and longer to ban contracts where you only get paid at the very end and leaving halfway through results in getting nothing, and longer to ban contracts with penalty clauses requiring you to provide more of the same work you just did, and longer to enact any restrictions on working conditions per se.

But, you know, some apartments were badly maintained and full of people who worked the worst jobs that were legal or even ones so bad they weren’t, for the descendants of the people who’d enslaved their ancestors. And you can tell who they are because they dress a certain way, talk a certain way, don’t know the right references to seem educated, do know the right references to have grown up talking to other people like them. So my cousin’s friend was like that, and drawing flowers in chalk. I’m pretty sure they were random flowers, because she was seven. I happen to know she’d walked past a garden with pink periwinkle hundreds of times, so her five-pointed pink flowers were probably not impala lilies like were implicated in the recent murder of a local magistrate. And—look, I could go on, but the point is a cop came out the back entrance of the coffee shop and had questions and told her to look him in the eye, which she didn’t want to do, and told her to stop drawing, which she also didn’t want to do. She did answer what she was drawing (“flowers”) and who told her she could draw there (“Mom”) and where her mother was at the time, and for good measure she also told the cop he looked like a bobcat. He was kind of jowly, I guess. I don’t think it was even quite meant as an insult; apparently she was pretty slow to learn how to talk to people, both in the sense that she said her first words at age four and in the sense that she had no idea how people would take it if you commented on them having a fat old saggy face. I have some of that secondhand; I didn’t actually know her well enough to know when she learned to talk. I heard it later, from my aunt. Anyway, I ducked away from the window where I was watching so I wouldn’t be seen. I heard later that she was questioned and so was her mother and she was already pretty off so it’s hard to say if she got more off from getting hit in the head but I saw her again a few months later and she wouldn’t say hello to me and my cousin told me not to take it personally because she wasn’t talking to anyone anymore.

That was years before my sorceress ever asked me what I wanted done with the world.

It wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Thinking about it now, I’m not as sure that I’m sorry the world ended as I am that I’m still around to see it.

What else is there to say? I guess half of what happened is recorded somehow somewhere. By the time they wanted to arrest her they already couldn’t, so they came for me first, thinking they’d use me as a hostage. I didn’t realize they knew how important I was; I kind of assumed my accent slipped at some point while I was hanging around upscale neighborhoods and someone got mad about it. I definitely dressed fine and I was always more confident I moved right than that I talked right. Not that social mobility is actually illegal and not that hanging around a neighborhood you can’t afford to live in is actually illegal, either. I think no one ever did clock me and even if they did I’m not sure anything would have come of it, but it was where my mind went first when they came for me.

They cuffed my hands behind my back, at first—I managed to get them in front, at least, later, by being skinny and flexible—and I didn’t get a good look, at first, so I didn’t recognize the enchanted manacles once used to bind the Lord of Woven Echoes (which really seems like overkill to me, but what do I know) until I tried to say something. I forget what, maybe I wanted to ask what was happening, and I noticed no sound came out. Not even the sound of breathing or the sound of moving my mouth. I guess if this is the first thing you read from this planet you wouldn’t necessarily know that the Lord of Woven Echoes used to chant magic. Might as well mention that. So they used a priceless indestructible artifact to bind me, and of course it could only be loosed by someone speaking the command word aloud.

I like to think I wanted them to let me go.

I guess I should also mention that I had set up this elaborate machine where some ice would melt and drop a weight onto a lever that would—anyway, I had set things up so that if I wasn’t around to reset it, the artifact would be activated. They had about five hours, and I… couldn’t have done anything anyway, right? There wasn’t anything left that I could possibly have done, right? I couldn’t have explained. I couldn’t have written anything. I definitely couldn’t have gone home and done anything about it myself.

She came for me. They told her to turn herself in; she didn’t. She slipped unnoticed through the cracks in reality and found me sitting by myself in a cell and tried to pull me back out of reality with her, but. Well. One of a kind priceless magical artifact for confining great sorcerers. I was a little stuck, and about ten seconds later a guard noticed her and she turned to step orthogonally to reality and before she’d gotten anywhere she’d been shot dead.

I like to think I still wanted to warn someone. I like to think that when I tried to escape it was because I wanted to save the world. Why else would I have bothered trying?

But I couldn’t do it. I watched in silence as they took her body away. By the end, I know I was bitterly grateful to know they wouldn’t get away with it.

I thought I had more to say. I wanted to have more to say. I can’t die, so I wanted to take a long time on this and imagine my imaginary audience all the while. But I don’t have that much more to say. If you think it’s worth scavenging something from the ruins, I hope it brings you joy; just don’t touch the building with the bismuth façade.