• In the royal palace, the king of Aurng was talking with his royal advisor in the affairs of his
    kingdom. They walked down one of the long halls as usual, guards at their backs and
    empty of anyone else when an explosion happened under their feet and sent them flying
    backwards.

    The guards were the only ones that stirred; the king and his advisor were dead. Blood
    streamed from their ragged carcasses and gathered into a pool once the carpet couldn’t
    absorb anymore of it. It looked like water against the original cherry red of the carpet.

    ***

    The bell rang from a brick school building in the middle of an open field for all the
    residents of the town to hear, hear that the children were coming home. It was about
    three in the afternoon and the children flooded out of the school to enjoy the last of the
    sunlight.

    But one boy was in a hurry to go home. Today was the day he got letters back from his
    family. After three weeks of waiting, he would finally hear more about his other brothers
    and sisters from far away and more about how his father’s work was going.

    His father was a very important man and as such, could afford such a large family. The
    reason they didn’t live all together was because most of his older siblings were trying to
    make their own way in life and those that weren’t were living in the house their mother
    had lived in before she died.

    He was the youngest child of the third wife, making him the youngest of all his siblings.
    His father had bad luck with women for the only reason he would remarry would be when
    his last wife died, after about ten years or so after marriage. The boy admired his father
    for this quality. He thought he was pretty faithful.

    The mail had come at noon so the boy ran past the mailbox and went straight into the
    house. There they were, on the table, all twenty-five of them. He picked them up and
    rushed to his room. He resisted opening them until he became comfortable on his bed
    and lighted a candle for when the light from his window faded.

    He opened the first one his hand found and opened it. From the handwriting, he could tell
    it was his older sister Leiant, the second oldest of the first wife. She was very beautiful,
    like her mother whom the boy had seen in pictures, but she was very strict. She had two
    sons older than him and always mentioned them in her letters. This time, the letter talked
    about Jerian, her eldest, and Tellar, her other son, going to archery practice and
    impressing their teacher with how well they could shoot on horseback. The boy didn’t
    mind as much that the letter was all about his nephews but when he had met them in
    person, he found them to be full of themselves and wondered if it was because their
    mother bragged about them constantly.

    A knock came at the doorway. The boy’s full-blood older brother was leaning on the
    doorframe.

    “Hey.”

    “Hi.” He handed the letter to him as he came in. “It’s from Leiant.”

    A look of distaste appeared on his brother’s face but he took it from him anyway.

    “I don’t like her very much,” he said.

    “Why not?” the boy asked, puzzled.

    “Well, she’s like all the other siblings: pompous because she’s older and her mother
    came before ours,” his brother responded with scorn.

    His brother was only three years older than him but their tastes seemed decades apart.
    The boy liked all of his older siblings to an extent and was polite to them but his brother
    was the exact opposite, only liking and confiding in his little brother.

    He continued. “I don’t know why you write to them. They don’t like us.”

    It was like they were in pods, imprisoned by the distance between them and their other
    siblings. The boy broke free from that pod with his open heart.

    But that wasn’t why his siblings wrote to him. They always said that in his letters he
    sounded energetic and out-going but in person he was shy and reserved, making him
    interesting. What they didn’t know was that in person, the boy feared them but in letters
    he could be himself.

    “They are not so bad,” he said, suddenly very shy.

    His brother shrugged, “If you say so,” and left the room. The boy plucked a new letter out
    of the pile.

    This one was from his father. The envelope was creamier than the others and it always
    had the smell of freshly baked piecrusts to it. His father always smelled like that every
    time he visited, even though he didn’t eat any. It was another thing the boy liked about his
    father.

    When he opened it, something fell out of the folds of the letter and fell to the floor. He
    picked it up and inspected it. It was an urgent letter from the palace, with the official wax
    on the folds of the envelope. Letters from the palace were never a good thing. He opened
    it in a panic and almost dropped it. While reading, he exchanged looks at his father’s
    letter, as if it was evidence against the letter in hands.

    Upon finishing the last word, he got up and ran to the kitchen.

    “MOM!”