imagine you are palamedes sextus. you spend twelve years exchanging letters with a woman who is seven years your senior. you become the heir to your house just to meet her as an equal. you love her to the point of invention. you both know that her time spent alive has an expiration date sooner than most, and so one day you decide to propose to her - even though you know that she can spend the rest of her life with you but you can’t with her, even though there are imperial rules forbidding interhouse marriages between necromancers, even though you’re here and she’s there and you’ve never even met in person - but you want her to spend her days with someone who cares about her. but you’re so young, only nineteen, and there are still all of those reasons listed above, and so she turns you down. but it isn’t because she doesn’t want to say yes. and then over the next year the letters come fewer and farther apart. and then you’re both invited to the emperor’s house - both of you, together, physically in the same place for the first time - and you show up and she’s here. and it’s like she doesn’t know you. she doesn’t spare you a glance. and you’re still so tender with her - you can’t help it, there’s care baked into you, and you can’t resist helping her, loving her, going so far as to kiss her knuckles in front of company - but still. she doesn’t acknowledge anything that happened between you. she’s moved on. she must have, because she’s spending all this time with the cavalier from the ninth - who is, by the way, two years younger than you, and that doesn’t escape your notice because nothing does - and what can you do? what are you supposed to do?
you tell your cavalier that you’re glad she’s spending time with someone who makes her laugh.
