Kristen,

I trust in my absence you have not been sitting by the radio listening to your dramas all day. Oh yes, I heard there were to be all-day Saturday reruns, and don’t think for a moment I will allow you to renege on your studies as my apprentice because I am away. But you’ve been away less than twelve hours, you might say. And? For the duration of my trip, you will receive a letter each day from me, and Fenaast will write to me of your progress on the curriculum I left behind for you. Yes, I left curriculum behind for you.

Now, before I left, you had several questions regarding my time as Spymaster that were worth answers. You have also developed an annoying habit of asking personal questions of me in public. You don’t realize the personal nature of your questions, but it nevertheless puts me in an awkward position of either answering you truthfully, as you have done this twice when Fenaast and Nicolas are present, or scolding you, thus revealing that your question is personal to me. You are going to work on this.

That said, I hope to answer some of those questions with these letters. First, you’ve asked several times about Maria, what she was like and how she was assassinated. I will speak of that in my own good time. For now, I will give you this much.

It was May 14th, 1052 when our apartment at the Dark Harbor was finished in its transformation. Her things were boxed and whatever personality was left in our rooms was concentrated in my bookshelf.

When we first moved in, Maria had called the interior design theatrical. On that count, I think you would agree considering your comments about my current home. While the Azeriean apartments are quite beautiful, it was as though they had told the designers, “theme it around their elements and it will do.” Maria had done much to soften the aggressive homage to Night. Even today, there is a painting hung over the mantel she did herself, of the moon rising with the sun.

Cordala and Nexen came to assist with the last of the transition effort, and when the last of the boxes were stored, Nexen came to where I stood in the middle of the living room. The impenetrable fog around his mind cleared enough to express his sympathy. I lowered my own defense and let him feel my emptiness.

He reached for my mind and said, Are you sure you want to be alone?

Yes, I replied. I need to grieve.

Nexen embraced me, and he and Cordala left me to my solitude. I forwent any dinner and retreated to the relative sanctuary of my room. After my wife’s death, I’d immediately asked for the room to be rearranged. The bed was switched out for a much smaller one. Her desk was removed and replaced with more bookshelves, and Cordala had removed Maria’s wardrobe and perfumes. Within a handful of days, I had a room more befitting my renewed bachelorhood.

The room is bisected by a stained glass partition of a wheeling starscape. I slid back the partition’s door and shut it behind me. The staff had turned down my bed for the evening, and beside it was a warmed cup of nectar. Hanging on the door of my wardrobe was my newly cleaned and pressed uniform with its adjusted rank insignias.

I knelt beside my bed and reached beyond the numbing cloud that encased my heart. For hours, I fixated on my losses and the sheer weight of helplessness. I wept long into the night, but those hours offered little in the way of relief. Finally, at around midnight, I fell into my bed exhausted and slept. There, encased in the usual dark warmth of my sleep, I took refuge. Why didn’t I just conjure Maria in a dream for myself, you might ask? I was experienced enough to do it by that point, though I had yet to receive my sash. Kristen, let me express this absolutely; there is nothing more dangerous for a Night Azerie than wrapping ourselves in dreams to cope with reality. Someday, you will understand why when you learn to venture into the Dream World yourself.

Instead, I reached for the presence deep within me, and Night answered my call. Every Azerie has a unique experience when communing with our Element. You’ve expressed to me before what it’s like for you. For me, Night is soft and warm as wool, but also liminal, like mist on the verge of turning into water droplets.

Simon, it said. He hears your cries.

I pleaded with Night to take my memories of Maria. At that moment, it would have been better to never know her love than to suffer the prospect of three hundred empty years alone. But Night refused me.

Turn your mind to the Heavens. He sees you, Simon. This pain will heal with time.

Like an ebbing tide, Night receded from my enclosure. I did not meditate on the Heavens nor its Master, as it suggested. I laid there in silence and eventually, my thoughts faded to a blank. My wife was dead, and her name joined the memorial wall with the others. The Azerie Order was reduced to fourteen, and for many years, I took refuge in the most difficult job I have ever experienced, that of Triumvirate Spymaster.

Now, when you hear the title Spymaster, you probably have grandiose notions of your dear master sitting behind a desk in a dim room ordering assassinations, seducing our enemies with elaborately disguised operatives, plotting the downfall of men like the Auctioneer, and on a light weekend, developing clever secret codes and tapping telephone wires. I certainly did some of those, but the stories you hear on your radio dramas are mostly fantastical.

My role as Spymaster came down to four words; interpreting the SI Charters. Yes, plural. They did not make it easy for me. If you are interested, go into my library and on the middle shelf behind my desk you will find a worn, bound document labeled The Sentinel Intelligence Charter of 1034 and 1041. You are welcome to read my annotations. The exact parameters of my job are listed on page three paragraph three, but to broadly define it, I was tasked with the gathering and analysis of intelligence and acting based on that intelligence to ensure the safety of the Triumvirate and her People. If you think that is a tall order, you should talk with Alexander just what being a Triumvir entails.

But no Spymaster has unlimited authority to pursue this goal, not even Epineo’s Intelligence Director, and that government is one of the most tyrannical you will encounter. All Spymasters must navigate the line between accomplishing our marching orders and remaining within our legal bounds. My first test here came four months after I took my oaths.

My Deputy Director of Organized Crime, Colonel Renervelt, spoke very little in any of our joint sessions, and when he did have something for me, it was delivered with the blunt dispassionate tone of a born and bred bureaucrat.

Upon my induction as the new Spymaster, his encouragement was delivered with his characteristic bluntness. “You are a thirty-four year old Night Azerie who has been in the field, provided flawless analysis, and had the grit to survive two assassination attempts. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not qualified to sit in that chair.”

He was my uncontested favorite among my staff, though I don’t believe he ever realized that fact. Nor cared. Shortly before our Monday joint staff briefing, Renervelt appeared in my office with as grim an expression as I’d seen from the Colonel.

“Your Honor, we have something. I just received a report from one of my operatives in Oras. They believe they have located the Auctioneer and are requesting permission to launch a raid against the premises.”

I sat forward at my desk and read through the prepared file. It was immediately clear we were in a conundrum. The target showed signs of leaving the location within the next several hours, and they were remarkably unprotected compared to what we had previously seen from Black Market elites.

“And we have PID?” (Positive Identification, if you have yet to hear this term)

“No. What you have there is everything the operative has gathered as evidence, but he is not willing to claim a PID. I believe we should take the risk and go in, but since I do not have a PID, I need your authorization.”

There was good evidence that day to say the man identified in that plantation estate was indeed the Auctioneer. Had I picked up my fountain pen, I could have signed off on the operation and ordered a unit of Sentinels to raid the property. If I was wrong, I would face the ramifications of raiding a Triumvirate civilian residence, likely resulting in injury or death of innocents, and doing so without a warrant. The public would have demanded answers and heads, and the first to go would have been Renervelt. If our operative was correct and our Sentinels captured or killed the Auctioneer, then, I need not explain that incalculable boon.

I considered the file and the evidence for some time, going back and forth with my Deputy Director before ultimately rendering my verdict. “Tell our operative to continue monitoring the suspect, but unless they can obtain a PID, we will not raid that plantation.”

Renervelt never pressed my decision and the SI never raided that plantation. To this day, I have no idea if that man had been the Auctioneer or not.

There is a saying in the SI, hindsight is the mistress of the moralizer. You have mentioned before how strict I am with your history lessons. There is a reason for that. Until you have been forced to decide the lesser of two evils with the weight of lives hanging over your head, then you have no business passing judgment on historical figures and their deeds. You are my apprentice, which unfortunately for you means that you will one day be that historical figure. This is why we study the philosophers and scriptures as much as we study history. There will be times when all you can do is pray that the Heavens see you as you are, a Night Azerie doing their very best in an age where we are numbered in the single digits.

Your dutiful master,

-S