----------------------------------------------------------
My dear daughter Pinchblossom,
In response to your most recent letter, I share your sadness over so many losses to the Enemy in a single day. Most to the point, as you are too painfully aware, we lost almost the entire family of your subject, especially her brothers and younger sister. For the loss of her sister, it will go particularly hard with Leafwimple -- I shall see to that personally.
To lose almost a whole family, however, is not necessarily to lose it completely. This is where you come in. Your woman, Hell be praised, would have been safely delivered to us had she been on that train. This, of course, comes of her desire to be more than she is, to be older and to suppose herself wiser. She does this by remembering herself to have been a Queen, in a land ruled by the Enemy. Oh, my child. Amid the horrors of the Enemy's kingship, and of his victory in that world over Our Father Below -- or more accurately, Our Mother, according to her name there -- your woman and her sister were things of rare beauty. Princes of all stripes sought their hands in marriage, and minstrels made delicious fools of themselves to sing of her. And do you know? She lapped it up like the intoxicant it was, and so much the better to turn her focus toward herself and away from the Enemy.
Then came the day when the Enemy tipped his hand by telling your woman that she had become too old to remain in that place. "Tipped His hand," I say, because she was yet showing signs to lose sight of Him; for Him to send her into her own world, was the beginning of the closing of the deal, if you will. Her sole sustenance has been the memory of her time as a Queen, to her riches there, and to your most ignoble effort to capitalise on her still-bewitching looks.
These things are the most she has now -- work to keep her mind on those. She will also from time to time, grieve for her family. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep the blame for that railway accident on the Enemy. It is true, Our Father Below struck that train, caused the "honest mistake" of the engineer to, as they say in the world above, "zig when he should have zagged." But it is beyond perilous to permit your woman to see that. Do not let up from telling her that the Enemy could have stopped it, could have kept her family off the train, and so it goes. Let up, and the Enemy may well prove true to form and make a mile of that inch.
Can you not hear the iron screaming to be stricken in its heat?
Your affectionate mother,
Slumtrimpet