Big Brother,
I told you I used to fall asleep to the swing of your sword. Late into the night, I'd spy your silhouette in the castle lights, cutting down wooden enemies my imagination morphed into faceless monsters, their shadows surging with each guttural breath of torchlight. Swaddled safe in my tower, the slice of your sword sung me to sleep like a song—a rush of wind in my ear to drown out the quiet of night. You were my protector. I'm sorry I didn't know what it meant.
I didn't know it meant cold suppers with long, maddening silences. I didn't know it meant blood on your armor got polished off before you came home. I'm sorry, I didn't know it meant you knelt every night before the unmarked graves of siblings I never knew and strained to recall their faces, clawing desperately to hold one precious memory of each so you could carry the burden of their lives inside you. You know, I would have cried for you too, but I didn't know what it meant.
I watched every stroke of your sword as your shoulders heaved as if sobbing, but I was caught in the grace of your body flowing like water under the heavy embrace of steel—like the sea carries warships to their destructive ends. I didn't know what that meant either. I didn't know you rode your warhorse into battle with the whole army dogging your heels like hellhounds, and culled men like so many stalks of wheat. I didn't know that by the time you turned your golden head southward, the ends of your hair sticking to your face with blood, the enemy village had already been set to the torch. And by the time you rode your mount hard through the flames and circled round the village center—rearing and chuffing and stomping those black hooves, bearing your teeth like the lion hammered into your pauldron—all the villagers were already dead. You roared, "What fierce soldiers are these!" to a crowd of starving peasants in armor, who didn't need to hear their captains' orders to slaughter civilians. They kicked the corpses at their feet and said look at 'em, growing fat off the land they were gifted for living in a country that's more than ice and rock. And when they set to scavenge the charred homes for food, what were you to say then? Please, don't take the dead men's bread? No. You refused to eat for days, until the empty ache of hunger swallowed your heart and all the pain in it.
I'm sorry, I didn't know what it meant.