Every Day in May (grand prize winner) ✔

May 17th

You are trapped in a tower like a character out of some long ago fairy-tale. I may be able to come and go, but neither of us is free.

I'm no fortune teller.  I wish I could answer your question with a definitive "yes"—I want it to come true and I'm glad you seem to as well.  But what good does that do us?  Have you gotten everything you ever wished for?

Don't answer that.  Instead, think about what you really want.  Your father wields great power; the people he rules over submit to his will.  That same power could be yours, assuming that both your father really is mortal and that in the years before his demise he doesn't look at your youthful face and decide you are more Threat than Heir. 

You could be the Leader; you could choose a wife from among the most beautiful women in the Land; your Regime could be whatever you make it—granted, you wouldn't be free, exactly, especially not in the years in which your father is still alive.  Maybe you're willing to sacrifice freedom for power. 

You wouldn't be the first.

There is a choice to be made, Theo: carry on with the path you were born to take or strike out on your own into unknown lands.  I don't know if there will be an ocean voyage or a field of flowers waiting for you if you decide to throw off the mantle placed upon you. What I do know is that I'll be there waiting for you (if you still want me to be by that point).

I portion out the truth in one page increments instead of all at once—this is how I hope to avoid you hating me for having to process twenty years of the Land's wretched history in one sitting.  Still, there is so much to say. A month hardly seems adequate, does it?

It took a few months following the Riots for your father's re-education camps to swell beyond capacity. He must have thought he'd succeeded—unquestioning loyalty was his again. This appeared to be true for a while; no one dared create a disturbance or make any outward show of support for The Dissent. He had crushed them entirely—that was the theory he and his Loyalists swore to, at any rate.

In reality, for every rebel he managed to seize, three more sprung up to replace them, fueled by anger over their innocent uncle or cousin or mother being taken by the Regime. 

My brother Graden was one of them.

In the years of running and hiding, Graden eventually befriended a group of boys who, like him, had been separated from their parents during the Riots.  One of them invited Graden to a meeting taking place in an abandoned factory a few miles west of the city.  There my brother learned that the Dissent was far from the "decimated corpse" the Leader proclaimed it to be during public speeches.  The number of Dissenters grew every day, and Graden, who had lost so much at such a young age, was ripe for the message they were spreading. 

As it turned out, he had a mind for strategy and planning that far outshone the more senior members of the organization.  He started as a recruiter. Graden searched the Land for lost and desperate youth in order to give them a cause to rally behind.  To say he was competent at this is an understatement—Dissent ranks swelled with new recruits, convinced by my brother that the Land was worth fighting for.

Two years later, at eighteen, he was given charge of Dissent operations for half the city.

By twenty, he had masterminded a plan to destroy your father entirely.