My wife, so taken with mundane devils, sleeps fitfully.
I am scorned by my lord, and denied audience with his host of clerics, priests, and channelers.  And in their eyes do I retain no less scorn, having urged my secular colleagues to publish their musings as well as my own—at my own peril, often, and to no substantial benefit of purse, or trade, or sense of well-being.  Thus, I am not of wealth or stature to take leave of the realm.
At the chapel, opposite it by the cobbles, is the building of seizures of the governor, and it is twice armed by the turn of each watch.  Edict calls for restfulness each morn, and there is a consequent hour where it then lies naked, save an old blind lock I enticed with straw.  There were many works of tradesmen abroad among the unmentionables, wed to the precious few of mine deemed improper enough for quarantine while not outstanding enough for destruction.
Of my contemporaries, there live several professed to the art of life and the trade of living; of the several, there works one to the particular advancement of the field.  His was the writing I seized, a treatise on botanical vivification—insofar, at least, as the subject's plausibility.  And it is not, in retrospect, with disdain for apparent desperation that I recount this choice.
His name artfully eludes pronunciation.  I struggled with the translated inscriptions in his treatise, keeping wary eye on the baying beast of frustration, while maintaining the studious, obsequious conventions of my caste.  To lord and squire, cleric and husband, I say yes.  I say a thousand times yes, and come eve I suture the open wounds with feverish flame.
Twice she called in her delirium, presumably to me, though with great hindrance and uncertainty.  Twice I descended onto my curling sapling, my emboldened infant, and twice both shrank back into oblivion.
It is such that I questioned my practice.  I see these ills in no other; even the poor health of lords and their kin does not match what I see in her.  I keep no hallowed volumes in my home, and in that abstinence am I not inviting evil?  But I am resolved, as I must be, and even in these recesses of doubt do my hands toil, and my eyes run dry from study.
In course of my divining, a murderer was birthed among the townsmen.  As screaming babe, he put out the fire in the eyes of seven wives and mothers, dropping false tears upon each, offering hindquarters to the husbands and children they predeceased.  It was during the wake of their communal proceedings that I saw among the mourning the author of my holiest of tomes, the craftsman of my chalice of life, and I went to him.
In discussion, he found my realm frugal of thought and fastidious of action, and did not condone our work in such confinement.  I brought him to my home, and it was at once that he dissolved into sympathetic sorrow.

The tone of her skin evokes a memory.  It calls to mind another wretched beauty I have seen, and brings with it the joy of her life and love and the sadness of her departure.
Mine was a beloved cousin by virtue of the brother of my father, a man skilled with his hands and known for his trade.  He cited to me a bitter dawn, upon which an errant, speaking of his skills, paid in advance for a weapon with which to usurp each sovereign at the edges of the realm.  My cousin exclaimed that no such weapon should be fashioned, and that it would be greater hands than his that should do so if the errant's fate were insistent.
Vowing to make slave of my cousin and whore of his wife, the man left.  Upon the cusp of the following moon, a humble man from the west came to call, and bade my cousin fashion a blade with which to vindicate his sovereign.  Fearful of the errant's promise, my cousin gave room to the wanderer while he smithed the sword, and his beautiful wife fed and kept him for the breadth of his stay.
It was on the moment of my arrival from the west that the weapon was finished, astonishing thing that it was without flaw.  This wanderer, upon accepting the immortal creation, took with it my cousin's hand, that he might make no finer weapon for any other, and left to join his brother at war.
During the following days, it was revealed that by this wanderer my cousin's wife would bear child, and while I had ventured into town, he took from her the right to do it.  I returned to his tears and her pale beauty, unmolested by death as it was in life, and though I saw fit to damn him, I was too taken with grief.  When the court imprisoned him and gave to me his property, I could not even bring myself to bury her.  As if by some miracle she lies still, ignorant of or immune to the unceremonious course of the dead.

His description of her was so close to my own wife that I wept, and in remembrance of her health I wept further, deeper, to recall her warmth, to recall her compassion and bravery, her being and all the desires it feverishly engendered.  I shared with him what he had shared with no other, and he took residence in my home to work with me.
In the hidden hours, we made much progress in the field.  There were findings that, could we have published them, would certainly have made kings of us both.  With each day I swelled, brightening, coming to love him as a brother and to respect him as one.  And in his eyes, I was the same.  But her condition did not improve while we plied our trade, and I would fear the approach of the worst fate with greater frequency as the days wore on.
My scripting was spirited, driven by my colleague and by my love.  Even what obligations I had to the populace were of pristine quality, and my pittance swelled with recognition.  It was after a series of successes that I purchased a night at the finest inn sanctioned by the lord, and in celebration of the anniversary of my colleague's birth sent him to it, that he might enjoy a night beyond the walls of my home.  We parted on congenial terms, and would resume study upon his return.
Prolific beyond this realm, he did not expect here to be recognized.  But it was on the third eve of the festivities that a cleric, come to bless the proceedings, identified him for what he was.  The lord's hand descended upon the inn with a swiftness, each person within a conspirator for housing so blatantly unlawful a man.  I am to understand that he personally destroyed the records of my purchase before being seized, granting my wife my livelihood before he and all else involved were strung by their wrists in the square and flesh-drawn.
The darkness what visited me upon that day never left.  Gnashing at the reins on my sanity was frustration, recurring at all divergences between his tongue and mine in our work, and between his influence and mine where he had thought to leave annotations.  What was uninhibited was now halting and rife with the obstacles of language and method.
I fought through the unending nights despite it.  Her infrequent breaths kept my pace, and I inscribed each of mine thanking her for it.  When exhaustion took me—on my doorstep too often, this exhaustion.  When it took me, I found myself curled as a babe next to her, careful to regulate my temperature and breathing as per what I could decipher of my work.  I lost count of how often the lent baths of the cycling moon playing upon her pallid breast followed me into my dreams, where they danced jovially and ebulliently.  They were my only lights, as I dared not open her eyes.
Some time after the execution, I sought the embrace of a professional.  The act was to take place at the dusk of the day of rest, when the house of profession would be mostly devoid of other clients.  Thus, my steps carried me to the hour of rendezvous, and as they did so, they took me past a particularly indignant pair of the lord's soldiers who, with all the ire one could invoke without requiring clerical remission, thrice damned the tradespeople within as panderers of what soldiers call 'homecoming disease'.  Without even a mind for canceling our engagement, I returned to my prison.
It is the night of wretched enmity, and these weights have made me weary.  I hear those pace-keeping breaths, and every day I hear them slow.  It is my intent upon the completion of this letter to wash verb and diction from my eyes, until all I can see is the eyes with which she saw me and the lips with which she married me.  And I will ensanguine her blanched skin, that there might be color in her cheeks once more, that her breast might rise, offering nipples dark with passion to my tongue.  I draw from this rigid chair to her bed, so soft, so welcoming it be, and I leave else behind me.
Hers is the embrace of life and love, and I'll waste not another moment beyond its grasp.