Letter

Moonlight shone through the towering windows of the library, the small nook Ryth had made from himself hidden between the maze of shelves of the southern tower. There was no view on this side, other than the mass expanse of the starry sky above the snow-dusted glaciers drifting out to the endless ocean. A frozen wasteland. A silent sanctuary.
Ryth didn’t know what he loved about it so much, the very thing that had pulled him out of the haze of writing to wonder on why he was out here. Was it the silence? The tranquillity? There was nothing to distract him from the things he loved most: the music, the dancing, the poetry, the painting. But then again, was it the actual arts he loved, or the attention he got from them.
It was the very thing James had accused him of a mere moon ago. That somewhere along the way, Ryth had lost his love for dance and instead cultivate a love for attention. He only did it for the applause at the end, not the way it made his heart sing with every turn, every step, every flick of his gold-tipped fingers. The very thought of it made Ryth sick. Was that what people thought? That all of the hours he would pour into each practice and performance was for nothing but the polite clap of the higher classes who paid more than he was worth.
It sickened him, and James knew as much.
Perhaps that was why Ryth shut himself away. They’d planned to go to the theatre in two days’ time, nothing particularly astounding, a retelling of a play Ryth had seen a hundred times already. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go anymore, but more so that he couldn’t bring himself to look into the eyes of a man who thought he was nothing but an attention-seeking whore.
It wasn’t the first time someone had thought of him that way—it was a rite of passage for anyone on the stage.  But from James it was different. From the man who was supposed to be his advisor, his protector, his closest friend. Ryth didn’t know what to think of it.
Where had it all come from? One moment they were laughing together, the remnants of a rich red wine staining Ryth’s glass as James reached for a bottle of whatever would ensure another hour or two together. Just the two of them basked in moonlight, the music box chiming away in the background.
Ryth was talking about his last performance, it had been a smaller theatre, only those who knew someone could get a ticket. No more than twenty people in the audience, dancing across a stage where he had no control over the lighting. He had no control over the music; he almost didn’t have control over his outfit. That’s what he had been complaining about. It was no longer his performance, they’d believed he was nothing but a little puppet for their amusement. Too many breaks for refreshments, chatter when there should have been silence. All wrong.
But the only thing James had taken from his complaints was the size of the audience.
‘Why, was the applause not loud enough for you?’ James had asked, and Ryth felt the world spin beneath him, everything falling into too-sharp focus.
‘What?’ Ryth had asked in response when nothing else came to his tongue.
‘Well, I guess twenty people is a step down from the hundreds you’re used to,’ James said and poured himself a glass of whiskey. ‘But they paid a lot of money for you, that should mean more than the amount of people in the audience.’
‘You’re making me out to sound like a harlot.’ Ryth was far too sober for this compared to the amount of alcohol in James’ system.
‘Are you not?’
Ryth didn’t care for anything else James had to say to him, and he left without even a glance over his shoulder.
He’d detailed it all in a letter to his father, drafting and re-drafting until the ink bled through the pages to make the whole thing illegible. He didn’t even know what use it would be, sending the letter off into the night with nothing but a prayer to Vynus that he would receive it. She promised he would, even if Ryth would never get a response, never get to know if his father too thought that he was nothing but a low-class whore peddling his body to whoever had enough to coin to afford it.
A part of him believed that. A small nagging part that clawed inside his brain to make him nothing but a pretty doll up on the stage. A corset laced so tight that if he had organs, they’d be sure to burst, that if his bones weren’t made of stardust they’d splinter into a thousand pieces. And for what? To show off his body to whoever would look his way?
No, that wasn’t it.
Ryth didn’t care how many people were in the audience, he only cared for who it was. He needed to look out to the crowd and see the sheer look of astonishment, the wide-eyed excitement of those not versed in magic to see it be performed before their very eyes. But not for destruction, not for purpose, for nothing but the pure beauty of it.
Weaving the moonlight to his will, wrapping it around his body in delicately laced ribbons in time with whatever music he could conjure up to fit with the piece. It was a lost art already, the higher classes preferred the theatre or the opera, something with lots of faces and lots of time to drink and eat to their heart’s content.
It made them boring to perform for. But those small roadside inns felt like the height of luxury. Women and children watching the spectacle and begging for just one more song, payment of nothing but the smiles on their faces and a drink or two at the bar. His favourites were in the wilds. Out across the frozen lakes in the dead of night with no one to watch him but the stars. Stars that never dimmed.

Do you still watch me like you used to?