>>5784899>>5784783>>5784769>>5784710>>5784703>>5784679>>5784639>>5784611>>5784591>>5784575>>5784573>>5784570>>5784568The name on the letter was unfamiliar to you, but the wax seal which held it shut… You recognized that symbol. It took you a moment to remember from WHERE, though. In truth, your memories of your mother had become hazy with time—you WERE quite young when you lived with her—but you remembered the hanging penants with which she had decorated your room, and the symbol upon them. Through the eyes of adulthood (okay, well, NEAR-adulthood) you better recognized and understood the iconography to be distinctively non-elven: a black weasel, rampant, upon a field of gold, in the style of the local heraldry, encircled in a circular white pattern resembling the stylized and wavy rays of a sun. Simplified and monotone, cast in wax, you recognized it still.
Your hands trembled slightly before you opened it, your tremors drawing the attention of Muffins, who butted up against your hand. You petted the rumbling lion head as you broke the seal and unfolded the envelope to remove the letter. A part of you wondered—with mixed emotions—whether your mother had finally reached out to you after all this time…
But, in fact, it was your FATHER.
“No way,” you’d murmured aloud to yourself, as you began to read the contents of the missive.
‘I am sorry to have missed you these long years,’ the letter had read, ‘and all the milestones which they came with. You and your mother have ever been near and dear to my hart and, hearing that you were in Hawksong and a student of the most estemed Mage’s Tower, I could not but write you to congradulate you upon your sucess!’
You noted the spelling errors with raised eyebrow. What sort of man WAS your father? You faintly recalled you mother speaking of him when you were very young, but no real details: handsome, strong, smart, swift, brave, kind, loving? All things a woman might say of her child’s father, speaking to that same child. Aspirational things. Nothing specific. And then… Well, then you hardly spoke of anything, and she was gone from your life in every way that mattered, and no other elf was eager to speak of the somewhat-shameful origin of your accelerated aging and unusual clumsiness. Those who did so had the air of apology: ‘I’m sorry for what that man has done to you, making you this way.’
‘If you can find the time,’ the letter continued on, ‘I would rather like to meat with you, and to get to know you, now that you are grown.’
