I hope you can forgive me, my sweet daughter. Especially because I know you dream of leaving us, even if you don’t understand why. I see it in your eyes sometimes.
But I can’t let you go. I can’t let you vanish. So tomorrow, or next week, or maybe the week or month after that, I’ll go to the goddess myself. You see, there was one part of our bargain I didn’t write about here, in case your father ever went snooping. I didn’t want him to know, because I didn’t want him to stop me if I decided to exercise the option.
Zephyrine gave me a choice, all those years ago. When you came of age, I could return you to her, or offer myself instead, thus buying you an entire lifetime out here in the world. It comes at the cost of my blood—all of it, this time—but I can’t think of anything I’d rather spend it on.
Still, it’s hard to say goodbye. I keep falling prey to the lure of one more day, one more laugh, one more hug. The nourishment of hearing you call me Mother one more time.
It will never be enough, but I doom Oceansgate by staying. I know that.
Soon. I’ll go, I promise.
I have to.
And I’ll hide this in a place your father will never think to look. I only hope it finds its way into your hands someday. I want you to read this and understand why I’m gone, that it’s not because I didn’t love you enough, but because I loved you too much, enough that I couldn’t bear for you to miss out on all the moments that have brought me such joy.
I want you to fall in love someday.
I want you to forge friendships that remake your idea of the world.
I want you to laugh, and cry sometimes so the moments of laughter shine even brighter, and I want you to travel, and have children of your own, and see a thousand sunrises and maybe, when you’re old and wrinkled and exhausted, return to the swamp smiling. When you’re ready. When you’ve seen and done it all.
Or maybe you won’t want any of that. You’re a goddess, or borne of one—I still don’t understand exactly how that works—so maybe your desires will be different than mine. That’s all right, too.
Most of all, I just want you to have a choice.
So this is my gift to you, my beloved girl, blood of my blood.
A choice. It’s yours. Do with it what you will, and know that I gave it freely.
I love you, forever and ever, through life and death and everything in between.
Your adoring mother,
Coraline Marche
When I finished reading, quiet tears drenched my cheeks. Amryssa wept, too. She pressed one hand to her mouth, her fingers trembling against white lips.
“That’s... Wow,” I whispered. “Are you okay?”
“She died for me?” she warbled. “Thiswas why she went into the swamp that day?”
A sob escaped her, one that sounded like it had cracked her chest open, and I caught her in my arms. She cried against my shoulder. All the while, the letter ran on a loop in my mind.
Goddess, but that was love. Real and true. Amryssa was lucky...and cursed, for having lost her mother that way, but so unbelievably lucky to have experienced love like that in the first place.
I smoothed her hair. She eventually pulled back, leaving a gluey mess of tears and mucus along my neckline.
“This explains so much.” Her voice fractured into quiet pieces.
“It does? Like what?”
“Like why I’ve always felt so...apart. Why I’ve never truly fit, why I’m not shaped like other people inside. Why I sometimes feel like a shadow of something greater, or like there’s this hole in me where something more should be. Why the swamp calls and calls and calls to me and never stops.”
I stiffened. “That’show you’ve felt? Always?”
She trained tear-bright eyes on me.
I felt like I was choking. “Why haven’t you ever said so?”
