Ode to Psyche

In which Wren makes his first address to his reader, the Emperor of Reffen, and describes the fortress of his confinement. The indignity of being waked. Of being waked by someone who does not know your name, for no other purpose than simply because he would have you awake. Waked before the sun rose, in the colorless cold. His boots bring in the mud you must wash away. He says, “rise,” in that language of his which you only ever hear as an order. He carries a musket slack under his arm, and he’ll use it too, as a club, if you do not rise. You rise, every limb retaining every ache of the day before. You curse the unyielding cot, the thin, cobweb blanket. But before all else, you feel the indignity of being waked. Speaking now only of myself, the guard moves on, for I have established myself in Rosmer’s Keep as a reliably compliant prisoner. I will often hear insults hurled from one of the adjacent cells, in Limnish, Olinique, or Shalven, followed by a labored sigh and then the muffled thump thump thump of the musket’s rough trade. On the morning which I have decided to begin this account, I was the first to reach the door at the end of the corridor. The guard, still waking himself, opens it, and all of my comrades who can still walk stagger past the tapestries and sconces of the furnished wing of the old fortress. A deer, woven in wool darkened by age and soot from its opposing torch, will be the one glimpse of art most of us see all day. She stands over her jaundiced fawn, defiant before a panorama of mountains, forests, and waterfalls that could exist nowhere but in the mind of the most sentimental huntsman. For the landscape which greets us beyond the next door, that which once had been the domain of the Rosmers, was broad, flat, hard, and sparsely forested with humble alders. One steps into the open air and, descending the wooden stair to the outer ward, wonders whether this miserable patch of our continent had lain waiting, since long before the medieval lords who built this fortress—perhaps even as far back as the first fires of a distant geological age—to become a camp for prisoners of war. Just as there are darling young boys who nevertheless grow up to become thuggish prison guards, there may also be earth cursed in just such a way. And rather than the forgettable, tattered edge of your empire, as this land is often regarded, I might, in fact, be witnessing its one true purpose finally realized. The ward below lay in a grassy field beaten in crisscross ways, webbing together the regimented tents of those prisoners whose rank did not privilege them with cells such as mine. Many of them took issue with this, as my face could not make it plainer that I was in the military. I had grown by that point a feeble beard, but it resembled more the hairy mold that grows out of old fruit and had clearly not merged with the mustaches one always found on an officer’s lip. Though even this trait notwithstanding, it was obvious that I was not a fighting man of any rank whatsoever. However obvious this fact was to all of my fellow prisoners, none of them could articulate the foundation of the certainty. They simply needed to look into my eyes and know. “So what are you here for?” I am asked in many languages before one is finally hit upon that I can answer. “Art thief.” “What is an art thief doing in a prisoner of war camp?” What is an art thief doing in a prisoner of war camp? That, your majesty, is a question that you now find yourself sharing with the very lowest of the low.