The Letters to Caro Cuore are prose letters written by the paladin Benetton to his chestnut mare Caro Cuore. Two paragraphs survive, copied into Events of Antiterra (pp. 18-19), signed after the text as a colophon.
| Type | Work (letters) |
| Date | 1889 A.D.A. |
| Spanish entry | Cartas a Caro Cuore |
Text
“We deal with the damned with cold steel. Nothing, not even hell, is indispensable, but it will never fall while someone believes it is necessary. Let the souls of the dead go somewhere else; if we all believe that, so it will be, and someone will come to tell us where that new place is.
Slaves of their beliefs, lacking all faith. These regulators make pacts with demons at the first chance, trade their souls; that’s how it is.”
Dating
The compiler dates them “twelve years before” the 1901 block, that is, 1889 A.D.A.: the year Benetton came out of the gates of Helheim in the icy north of the Labrador, and the year of the crossing with the three hundred Atlanteans.
Doctrine
The first letter holds that hell persists only through others’ belief, and the fate of the dead is whatever the living agree to believe: the doctrine of belief sustaining the planes that rules Sigil, where a faction that stops believing its thesis loses its door, and that the Lady of Pain administers. The second paragraph opens with esclavos de sus creencias, faltos de toda fe (“slaves of their beliefs, lacking all faith”), setting belief apart from faith.
Conflicting accounts
In 1889 the Regulators were barely forming on the fall of the Deep Ones; their pact with Lucifer, a refuge world in exchange for the head of Barbatos, belongs to 1901.
- In one reading, the compiler placed an 1889 letter in the 1901 chronicle as a fulfilled prophecy; it does not prove pacts in 1889.
- In another, the Regulators of 1889 were already the same men, burdened by the Stone of the Apocalypse, and Benetton saw them make pacts before the chronicle did.
Open questions
- How many letters there were, whether Caro Cuore carried them, and whether anyone read them before the compiler are unknown.