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Analece had gone back inside after a walk in the garden when she found her husband’s letter sitting there on the table. “Honestly.” She put her hands on her old hips and scowled. “That mailman should know better than to just sneak a letter in here without me knowing about it; why, I haven’t had the chance to ask him about the wife and kids in ages, and all that tea just simply isn’t going to drink itself.” She shook her head. Really, the last time when he’d insisted that he had more letters to deliver on his route and he couldn’t stay another minute, as though the next person down the line wouldn’t want to hear the anecdotes from that she was going to share about her husband Zilva and the adventures he was on. “Hmm, I wonder if he’ll have another story about that Aldo boy.” It had only been a short time ago that his letters started featuring tales about the boy adventurer, wandering this way and that around the Migleina continent. The last she heard, they were going to that old, old, old battlefield where the Thunder King and the ogres had fought to the last man standing. It was so old, it was too old to have been the battlefield where she and Zilva had met. It was a happy time because of that, and nothing else.
Analece sat down in her chair, slow and careful, mindful of the creak in her bones and the stiffness of her joints. She opened the letter with her penknife and felt the paper crinkle in her bony fingers. She took a sniff and was sure that the oil in his gloves had made it on there. “Now let’s see...” She read the first line of the letter, wondering if it would be different this time. “My dear beloved wife,” he wrote to her as though they were still courting, an impressive feat as he called her wife and everything. But it was Zilva’s way, he was formal to a fault, and truth be told that fault was what had drawn her to him. “It seems that this old soldier must return to the battlefield once more.” Analece narrowed her eyes as though willing the words to change into different words that would not break the promise that he had made her, the promise that kept them apart in love and togetherness. “Rest assured my beloved, I shall not break my word to you.” Now how did that old fool know what she was going to rant about? “The tale is long in the telling and not yet complete, but for now it is sufficient to say that my young friend Aldo has caught himself up in a truly remarkable circumstance; it seems his blade is of greater meaning than I had suspected and through means most mystifying to me, the ogres of ages past now walk the battlefield again.”
Analece remembered her grandmother’s stories of the ogres, and their vicious cruelty that defied sense and tactics and logic, they would go out of their way to kill the helpless over facing the enemies who brought death to them. Analece shivered and read on. “Aldo has gone on a journey to obtain a great power that will aid him in seeing the ogres defeated once again as they had been before. But while he is gone, I will be staying with the army and helping to make sure that as many of them are able to return to their loved ones as they can. It is strange to to be back in this setting once again, and yet if my years can be used to extend theirs and the ones after them, then I shall give my all in this cause. And knowing that at the end of this, I shall be that much closer to seeing you again, these old bones will have their spark and emerge from this alive and debonair.”
“Your beloved, Zilva.”
Analece put down the letter. She supposed that this time she could write him back. He was going to be in the same place and he was going to be there for a long time yet by the sounds of it.
But no. They had made their promise, he and she. She had insisted on this to him, and so she would not break his resolve now. She would choose to believe in his inevitable return, and believe that the strange boy Aldo would save them all.