letter

Dear Dyrk­ius,

I hope things are well with you. I sup­pose in that back­wa­ter prov­ince you have to eat tru­ly dread­ful things. But your dear moth­er made you a lit­tle some­thing so you don’t with­er away to noth­ing. Hon­est­ly, Dyrk, I don’t un­der­stand why you could­n’t stay in Am­phipo­lis. What could pos­si­bly be in Scu­pi that you can’t get in the cap­i­tal? And that hor­rid place is far more dan­ger­ous than you let on. Yes, I did my own re­search. Many of the town­s, if you can call two shacks and a hole in the ground a town, don’t even have cit­i­zen pa­trol­s. Re­al­ly, Dyrk! You must be more re­spon­si­ble. You are the heir to the Rhe­sus fam­i­ly. Vara cer­tain­ly can’t lead the fam­i­ly and I’ll stare down Ryl­lan be­fore I let your un­cle take over.

Talk­ing about Vara, she com­plains you nev­er write. She still re­fus­es to talk with Fa­ther. But she’s reach­ing out to you, Dyrk don’t shut her out. What she’s done it is­n’t the end of the world, well it is the end of the world but she’s still fam­i­ly. She’ll be at Tem­ple of De­los un­til Ny­nano, 1st Pen­tad. Write her. Please. Maybe your words will pre­vent her from do­ing some­thing fool­ish on that dread­ful day.

I passed that tire­some gnome in­struc­tor of yours. I just can nev­er re­mem­ber those names of theirs, so strange. Why don’t they just take prop­er Pelosian names? He asked af­ter you, was very ea­ger to re­ceive your first re­port. Hon­est­ly Dyrk, I don’t un­der­stand your fas­ci­na­tion with dirt and rock­s. Why could­n’t you have stud­ied es­sense? I’d been able to pro­vide you with all the ma­te­ri­als and lab space re­quired. No, I don’t sup­pose you’d have ac­cept­ed that ei­ther. You’d have to do it all on your own. My lit­tle Dyrk, so stub­born and in­de­pen­den­t. Just like Fa­ther, and Vara, sigh.

The An­dokides are again push­ing their ridicu­lous claims on the low­er vine­yard­s. I don’t un­der­stand what they hope to ac­com­plish. They’ve been ruled against twice in the courts al­ready. It wastes so much of Fa­ther’s time deal­ing with their an­noy­ances. It’s ru­mored they will even call me to the court. They will rue the day. I’ll tell the court ex­act­ly what I think about the whole out­rage. That Fa­ther’s po­lit­i­cal ri­vals are pay­ing the An­dokides to ha­rass and em­bar­rass a re­spect­ed fam­i­ly of The Re­pub­lic.

Oh, that’s right we havn’t told you. Well we havn’t told any­one yet, it’s not of­fi­cial. Fa­ther claims he has­n’t de­cid­ed yet. But, re­al­ly how can he say no? The Re­pub­lic needs peo­ple of his tal­ents, his breed­ing. Too many weak blood­ed bu­reau­crats are run­ning free mak­ing a mess. Oh, I still haven’t told you what. It’s too ex­cit­ing. You mus­tent di­vulge this, not that there is any­one of con­se­quence in that wretch­ed prov­ince. Well sev­er­al fam­i­lies, im­por­tant fam­i­lies, have ap­proached Fa­ther and sug­gest­ed that if he ran for Rep­re­sen­ta­tive he would have their back­ing!

Fa­ther sends his love and re­grets he does­n’t have time to write, curse those An­dokides.

Love, Moth­er