▸ Column · High fantasy — a handfasting/joining ceremony in the world of the Dragonflights, where Alexstrasza measures the matter against ages of her own love and loss
ALEXSTRASZA replies.
Replied to by Alexstrasza, with a rebuttal from Sailor Moon.
The letter
My betrothed Derrik and I had planned a small handfasting on my aunt's terraced hillside — forty kin and friends, honey-cakes and figs, lanterns strung between the cypress, simple and ours. Last week I learned his mother Roslyn has been going to our craftfolk behind my back to "improve" everything. She had the garland-weaver tear out our wildflowers and replace them with stiff white funeral lilies — the bloom she knows I cannot abide. She added eighteen women from her sewing-circle to the guest roll without a word. And she told the feast-master I'd "reconsidered" the open hearth and now desired a four-remove seated banquet. When I brought it to Derrik he said his mother is "only excited" and that I should let her have a few small victories, since she never had a joining of her own to plan. I do not know how to take back my own day without shattering things with the man I am to marry, three moons from now.
Alexstrasza replies
Come and sit a moment, little one. You speak as though you must win a war without wounding your beloved — so let me slow you before you lift a single blade. A joining is not lilies and seating-charts. It is the first morning of a shared life, the one you will look back upon across all the years given you. That morning is yours.
Now, Roslyn. Do not let your heart close against her. A woman who steals into your plans to paint them white is not cruel — she is grieving a joining she never had, and her sorrow comes out sideways as calla lilies. Pity her. But hear me well, dear one: pity is not surrender. When Derrik asks you to "let her have her wins," he is asking you to grow small upon the one day meant to hold you whole — and endurance that erases you is not love. It is self-neglect wearing love's face.
I was joined to my Korialstrasz across ages no mortal could count, and I would not have let even my most broken kin choose a color I despised for it. Speak to Derrik — not as foe, but as the man who must learn that his wife is not a thing to be spent for his mother's comfort. Reclaim your day gently. Pity her firmly. Both, little one. Both.
— Alexstrasza
Sailor Moon weighs in
Okay, the Life-Binder's totally right that Roslyn's just a lonely heart drowning — reaching for you sideways through those awful lilies because nobody ever let her have her own day. Give her one real thing that's hers! Not your whole wedding — one thing.
But hello?! Somebody's getting off WAY too easy here, and it's Derrik! Hiding behind "she's just excited" and making you fight his mom all by yourself — that's not okay, you know? HE has to be the one to stand up, shaking or not, and tell his mother the rest is yours. Don't let him turn you into the villain. In the name of the moon, that's HIS job.
— Sailor Moon
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