There is a layer of dust upon the books, so long have they sat placidly on  the shelf. Undisturbed, untouched by the snow and ice which the Library of the all-Peasants’ Congress sits nestled, snug, and warm inside. 

These volumes have a proud history of neglect. Some of them had not felt the touch of mortal hands in centuries, before the building was anything but the Palace of the Formori Kings.

Take one volume, however. Break the traditional cycle of ignorance, now that the world is ended and only paper and warding magics remain. Brush the dust off. You might find that it sits less thick on this tome. Perhaps driven by curiosity, sniffing for crumbs of knowledge, you flip it open too eagerly. And furthermore, perhaps this causes a photograph to slip from between the pages, like an errant breath from between clenched lips.

You’d see a group of youths, rendered in black and white. They are filthy, dirty. Tired. Haggard, with sunken cheekbones, these teenagers and young adults. But there’s an element of relief in their bearing, triumph in their smiles, flickers of light and hope shining through pupils and ringed by sclera irritated and heavy with the dust of the bombed-out city surrounding them.

How full of inner life they look! A noted contrast with the blank, bugged out eyes and lolling tongue of the royalist general’s head one man has balanced like a shillelagh-ball beneath one foot.

Flip the picture over. On the back, in quickly-scrawled hand, is a missive that clearly never made its way out of the country. It reads, all cant and misspellings excised:

“To my Dearest Edith Mouse,

The lads and I struck a great victory for the cause. If my correspondence was lacking, my love, know it was no fault or desire of my own. I still intend to marry you, but the royal gaolers are hot upon my tail.  Wait for me. In warmer times and better weather, I will find you in my arms, and we will dance again once more, the evils of this world left long behind, this war-torn hell a lapse in time, like the dwindling memory of a nightmare. We will dwell in each-other forevermore, and this will be our heaven and solace.

Yours Faithfully,

Lorcan McClearn”

But in that great vault of knowledge, in the frozen-over city, there is no-one to see this and read it.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1009268068976971818/1144380944044802098/lorcan.png?ex=655687ce&is=654412ce&hm=1a0cfd2dc92bf83a85763a7b28af85db70ca9b954c6106c0d654ac629a78e88b&

author of the letter in the modern day