Written and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice
Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc.
© 2025 Voiceover Nerd Productions — All Rights Reserved.
Featuring Shelly Fear as Mareen
https://www.voiceoverslayer.com/
Letter from Mareen to Richard
I have visited you here every year on our anniversary. Gods… fourteen years.
Usually, Sara and I sit together by your headstone. I tell her about you — your curly red hair we could never tame, and that smile that never failed to tame me. I think of her as our child because I like to believe you made one of your crazy deals… this time with the universe… to bring her and me together. That would be you.
Caring for Sara is the only thing that lit my darkness and kept me from following you into the heavens.
Today I am here alone. And surprise — it isn’t even our anniversary. This week marks twelve years since she arrived. We’re calling it her eighteenth birthday.
I wanted to tell you more about her. I assume you already know, but what do you know, Richard?
You would have loved her. From the start, she was all quiet eyes and steady hands, watching everything. A week or so after she came to us, one of the chapel cats had a litter. We went to adopt one. There were only three left. She gathered all three against her chest and said they were family, and now they were her family too.
I let her keep them, of course. I remember thinking, even then, that she loved too much to separate them. And maybe she understood separation better than most, even if no one — not even her — could say who she had been taken from.
She eats like you did. Too much, too fast. I don’t know where she puts it. The baker still brings up the time she ate three honey twists before anyone else had even gotten theirs. She laughed so hard she sprayed the table with chewed-up pastry. You would have loved that… her laugh, I mean — the way she doesn’t hold anything back.
Lately it feels like she’s holding something back, and I can’t quite place it.
It was around that age that she started asking questions I couldn’t answer — about time, about space. About why we have no stars, but everyone Ilra meets seems to have their own. I swear on the Seven Children, Richard, everything she does seems to have its own kind of math built into it.
Sister Tephra is a math genius, and she seems to understand the things Sara asks about. So I brought her to the chapel, hoping someone who spoke her language could give her the answers I couldn’t. She did. Sara has been studying under Tephra ever since. I hope it was the right thing to do.
She has always been fascinated by how things are made, and how they become part of something new. When she was about nine, she told me once that the iron in a nail might hold pieces of a ship — and a sword — and another nail. She said it like she could see it happening right there in her hands. She was nine years old, Richard. Nine!
I’m worried about her. Our daughter. Sometimes I find her staring at a candle, a flower — anything, really. When she snaps to, sometimes she’s emotional… angry, sad, happy. But she says she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t remember anything at all.
She spends so much time training with Sister Tephra. And yes, she’s still odd. Like you said, she is preparing for something big. Whatever it is, let’s hope it never happens. But Sara has learned so much about things I can’t even imagine.
She asked me to keep this a secret, but I feel like you won’t tell anyone. She found a hidden library in the chapel. She said it looked like someone had tucked the door away and had forgotten to remember it — for decades, maybe more. She said the library is filled with books about mathemagic, old science. Richard, there are books about time travel.
Actual time travel.
Doesn’t it seem odd that she is so fascinated with these things? She is the only person The Moment has ever given us. She is smart and creative beyond anything you’ve seen.
And Tephra.
Sometimes I think it wasn’t really my idea for her to study with Tephra… and lately, I’m not sure if that should comfort or scare me.
