Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

I never saw her again.

At first, it was sport – a way to spend my evenings that would endlessly vex my wealthy progenitors. But, as time passed, I started to see something more in it – an exciting means by which I was able to actually do something. I started to wonder where these poor wretched fools were going when I sent them away, what they were doing after they left the Upper City for their first and likely last visit the rich quarters of the city. It was in this way that I kept myself occupied and consistently busy each evening. During the days I began to grow lonelier as the young men and women with whom I had spent my childhood pretending to be the rich barons and baronesses of the city that many of us would one day be, had started to look at me as though I was carrying the same diseases and scratching at the same sores they did. 

Needless to say, I grew reclusive and rumors began to fly. My maids and servants would bring word of what the other nobles were saying about me – that I was swollen with child, that I had killed a suitor in a blind rage, that I had begun to come down with the vapors and hardly knew my own name. They amused me at first, but soon they began to get under my skin as my reputation that I had never quite cared about started to fade away. 

My parents begged of me to see a doctor, to visit the country, to leave the city, and to most of all stop spending my time seeing the rabble with their little trinkets. There was a man who claimed he could turn salt water into drinking water with a wire plugged into a small machine with multiple turning cogs. Another man came bearing the portrait of a woman he claimed had been the Queen of the Eastern reaches before the world had been formed. She looked like my mother. 

I saw what must have been two hundred of these men and women – at least five every evening for more than a month – before he arrived. The moment he walked into the room, I knew that he had something special in his hands, that he was what I had been waiting for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. 

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