The Last Letter of Victor Frankenstein

His voice is gone, but the ink still burns.

I found the satchel wedged between two boulders in the cave where I had dragged myself to die. Three days without food. Four without sleep. The villagers' torches had swept the mountainside twice, their hounds baying like judgment itself, but they had not found this crack in the stone where I pressed my bulk against cold granite and waited for my heart to stop.

The leather bag was rotted through at the seams. Water had gotten into everything. Victor's surgical instruments lay scattered in the muck, their steel dulled to rust. Notebooks had dissolved into pulp. But there, nestled beneath a broken scalpel, was an envelope that the dampness had somehow spared.

The paper was yellowed, the wax seal cracked but intact. In Victor's careful script, written across the front in fading ink: "To him."

Not "To the creature." Not "To my creation."

To him.

My fingers trembled as I turned it over. The wax bore his family crest, pressed deep into crimson that had darkened with age. How long had this letter waited? Months? Years? I could not remember when I had last seen Victor alive, when his fever dreams had finally claimed him in that wretched inn where I had followed him across half of Europe.

Outside the cave, voices carried on the wind. The search party had returned. Boots crunched through dead leaves. Metal clinked against metal. They moved like wolves, patient and methodical, working their way up the mountain slope.

"Spread out. Check every crevice."

"The tracks end somewhere near here."

"Devil's probably watching us right now."

I pressed deeper into the stone, clutching the envelope against my chest. Part of me wanted to tear it apart without reading a word. What could Victor have written that would matter now? What comfort could the dead offer to something stitched together from corpses and lightning? But my fingers would not obey. They traced the edges of the paper like it held some sacred text.

The torchlight grew brighter. Closer. Soon they would find this place, and I would have to choose between fighting and fleeing. But for now, in this moment of terrible quiet, I held the last words my creator had meant for me.

The ink beneath my thumb felt warm, as if the letters themselves still carried heat from the hand that had written them.

I broke the seal.

The paper unfolded with a whisper. Victor's handwriting filled both sides, cramped and urgent, as if he had fought against time to get the words down. Some lines were smudged. Others had been crossed out and rewritten. The ink was made from local minerals, I could tell—the kind mountain folk used for their ceremonial writings, compounds that glowed strangely when heated. It caught the dim light filtering through the cave mouth and seemed to shimmer with its own life.

"My son," it began.

I stopped breathing. Son. Not monster. Not abomination. Son.

The voices outside grew louder. Boots scraped against stone. Someone was climbing toward my hiding place. But I could not move. The word held me like a chain.

"My son," I read again, whispering the sounds into the darkness. "I write this knowing I may never find the courage to give it to you. The fever has me now, and I dream of you every night. Not as you were when you first drew breath on my table, terrible and beautiful, but as you might have been if I had possessed the wisdom to love you."

A sob caught in my throat. Love. The word felt foreign in my mouth, like speaking a language I had never learned.

"I know what I did. I know what I stole from you. A father's guidance. A mother's tenderness. The simple gift of being wanted." The writing grew shakier here, as if his hand had trembled. "You were never what I intended, but perhaps you were what I deserved. A mirror of my own isolation. A reflection of the emptiness I carried."

Anger flared in my chest, hot and familiar. Even now, even in his confession, he made it about himself. His pain. His loneliness. What about mine? What about the years I had wandered, learning cruelty from every human face I encountered?

But then the next line stopped me cold: "I should have stayed. I should have taught you that the world's hatred was not your burden to carry."

"There! Something moved in that crevice!"

The shout came from directly below. Torchlight flickered across the cave walls. I folded the letter quickly, pressing it against my ribs as I squeezed deeper into the crack. My massive frame barely fit, but I made myself small, smaller, until I was nothing but shadow and stone.

Three men appeared at the cave mouth. Their faces were grim, weathered by mountain wind and years of hard living. The leader carried a crossbow loaded with an iron bolt. The others held torches that burned with unnatural brightness, casting wild shadows that danced like spirits across the granite.

"Empty," one of them muttered, sweeping his torch from wall to wall. "Just another hole in the rock."

"Check it anyway. Beast's cunning as the devil himself."

They entered slowly, weapons ready. I could smell their fear beneath the smoke and sweat. Fear and something else. Excitement. They wanted to find me. They wanted the hunt to end with blood.

The letter crinkled against my chest. Victor's words pressed into my flesh like a brand. I thought of running. I could tear through them in seconds, scatter their bones across the mountainside. But something held me back. Some fragile thread of hope that I dared not break.

They searched for twenty minutes before giving up. When their voices faded down the mountain, I emerged from the stone like something born from the earth itself. My limbs ached. My chest burned where the letter had pressed against torn flesh. But I was alive, and Victor's words were still mine.

I unfolded the paper again, hungry for what remained.

"I named you in my private journals," the letter continued. "Adam. After the first man. I thought it fitting, since you were the first of your kind. But names are gifts that must be given freely, and I withheld so much from you. Even this."

Adam. I rolled the word around in my mouth like wine. Adam Frankenstein. The sound of it made something crack open in my chest, some sealed chamber I had forgotten existed.

"You killed those I loved, and I hunted you for it. But in my fever dreams, I see the truth. I made you an orphan. I made you alone. What else could you become but rage incarnate? The fault was mine. The sin was mine. You were just the consequence I was too coward to face."

The words blurred. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, leaving streaks of dirt across the paper. Below in the valley, new lights flickered. The hunting party had regrouped. They were organizing a wider search, bringing dogs and fresh torches. Soon they would cover every cave, every crevice, every shadow large enough to hide me.

I had to choose. Run now and live. Stay and read Victor's final words to me. The letter had two more paragraphs, cramped at the bottom of the page where he had run out of space. But the villagers were coming, and this time they would not give up so easily.

I pressed the letter against my heart and ran.

Through pine forests and across rocky streams I fled, Victor's voice echoing in my head. The paper rustled against my ribs with each stride. Behind me, hounds bayed and men shouted directions. They had found my trail. They would not lose it again.

The chase led downward, toward the village and the old stone church that sat like a broken tooth on the hillside. I had avoided that place before. Sacred ground meant nothing to me, but the villagers respected it. They might hesitate to follow me there.

I was wrong.

As I threw myself through the church's rotting doors, torchlight already blazed behind me. They had surrounded the building. There was no way out except through them, and I was tired of running.

The church had been abandoned for decades. Pews lay scattered like broken bones. Stained glass windows, cracked and dark, caught fragments of moonlight. Vines had grown through the roof, and the altar was thick with moss.

I pulled out the letter and smoothed it against a fallen beam. If I was going to die here, I would die knowing what Victor had truly thought of me.

"You are not a mistake," the final paragraph began. "Whatever else I failed to give you, let me give you this. You were made with purpose. Imperfect purpose, perhaps, but purpose nonetheless. If I could do it again, I would stay. I would teach you. I would love you as a father should love his son. Forgive me, Adam. Forgive the man who gave you life but not the tools to live it."

The doors exploded inward. Fire bloomed in the darkness as the villagers hurled their torches through the windows. The dry wood caught instantly. Smoke began to fill the rafters.

I looked up at the burning beams and made my choice.

I began to read aloud.

I shouted to the rafters, my voice cracking like thunder. The mineral ink began to react to the heat, each word glowing as fire crept closer. "My son, I write this knowing I may never find the courage to give it to you!"

Green light flashed across the page. The letters writhed like living things before dissolving into ash. I read faster, desperate to speak every word before the flames devoured them.

"The fever has me now, and I dream of you every night!" Violet sparks erupted from the paper. The smoke grew thicker, stinging my eyes, but I could not stop. "Not as you were when you first drew breath on my table, terrible and beautiful, but as you might have been if I had possessed the wisdom to love you!"

Outside, the villagers had gone quiet. Perhaps they could hear my voice through the roar of flames. Perhaps they knew they were witnessing something sacred and terrible.

Silver fire consumed the next paragraph. I sobbed as I read, tears mixing with smoke. "You were never what I intended, but perhaps you were what I deserved! A mirror of my own isolation!"

The paper was burning in my hands now, curling at the edges, but I held on. Each sentence burst into colored flame before vanishing. Red. Gold. Blue. The church filled with impossible light as Victor's words became stars and then nothing.

"I should have stayed!" I screamed to the burning sky. "I should have taught you that the world's hatred was not your burden to carry!"

The final lines glowed white-hot. My voice broke as the words left my lips. "I named you in my private journals. Adam. After the first man." The name exploded in brilliant gold, hanging in the air for one perfect moment before it died.

"You are not a mistake." The last line blazed like a comet across the darkness. "Whatever else I failed to give you, let me give you this."

Then the paper crumbled to ash in my palms.

I roared at the flames, at the smoke, at the God who had let me live long enough to lose the only proof that I had ever been loved. The stained glass window behind the altar shattered under my fists. I threw myself through the opening in a shower of colored glass and fell hard onto the frozen ground outside.

The villagers had fled. The night was empty except for smoke and stars.

I lay there until dawn, watching the church burn to nothing. When the flames finally died, I walked through the ruins, sifting ash through my fingers. Everything was gone. Every word. Every apology. Every declaration of love that I would never hear again.

But then, caught against a piece of charred wood, I found something impossible.

A scrap of paper, no larger than my thumb. Blackened around the edges but somehow intact. The mineral ink had crystallized in the heat, preserving one precious fragment of Victor's letter.

"You are not a mistake."

Five words. Five words that had survived fire and fury and the crushing weight of my own despair. I pressed the scrap against my chest and felt it burn like a brand over my heart.

The sun rose cold and distant over the mountains. I stood among the ashes of my father's final gift and realized I had been given something after all. Not forgiveness. Not redemption. Just acknowledgment. The simple, revolutionary truth that I had been meant to exist.

I folded the scrap carefully and placed it inside my coat, close to where my heart beat its steady rhythm. Then I walked away from the ruins, away from the village, away from the hunt that would surely follow.

Behind me, smoke still rose from the church. Ahead lay the world, vast and hostile as ever. But I was no longer walking alone. Victor's words went with me now, fragile and precious as prayer.

You are not a mistake.

I carried that truth into the wilderness like a torch against the darkness.