Letters from the Sanguine Archive

Fiction

August 14 Dearest Julian, My hands shake today. It is not the tremor of age, but the weight of the Third Dynasty's agrarian tax codes. They sit in the marrow of my wrists, a cold, leaden pressure that makes it difficult to hold this pen. I can feel the ink on the page competing with the ink in my veins. To be a Singer is to be a vessel, but the vessel is made of meat and bone. I am tired, Julian. I am tired in a way that sleep cannot reach, because my mind is crowded with the memories of ten thousand dead bureaucrats who refused to be forgotten. September 2 The apprentice arrived yesterday. A girl named Elara, barely nineteen. She is too thin, her veins like pale threads beneath translucent skin. I looked at her and felt a sudden, sharp envy for her emptiness. She is a blank page, a clean vessel. We began the transfer of the Southern Marches' lineage this morning. It is not a song, despite the title of our caste. It is a slow, rhythmic draining. I tied the silver conduits to my left arm and her right. I watched my blood, thick and dark with the weight of three centuries of land tenure, migrate into her. As the fluid moved, I felt a physical lightness in my chest, a sudden void that felt like a bruise. Elara gasped, her eyes rolling back. She didn't see the ghosts, but she felt the sudden arrival of a thousand dead ancestors claiming space in her blood. She wept for an hour after we disconnected. The weight is a shock to the system. October 11 I am struggling to hold the peace treaties of the Border Wars. They are fighting with the memories of the subsequent conquests. When the blood remembers two contradictory truths, the body reacts with fever. I have spent three days in a delirium of sweating out the dates of old battles. My skin has taken on a metallic sheen. My breath smells of iron. The empire is fraying, Julian, and we are the only ones who can feel the seams ripping. Every time a city falls, a Singer somewhere feels a sudden, agonizing hemorrhage of knowledge. I can feel the archive thinning. I can feel the holes opening up in our history. I hope you stayed in the valley. I hope you never learned to read the blood. There is a terrible gravity to knowing exactly how we failed, and I am becoming too heavy to stand.