Riloth 19th the 10th

Dear Spellbook,

As tired as I feel, I can’t sleep. I’m both restless over thinking about my parents, and excited for the possible cure in the morning. I think I need to put it down on paper. Writing has always helped me process things.

I don’t want to. Maybe I start early and work towards... that night.

I lived with my parents my whole life, well, until a few months back. Two years ago, we made our way to Lakeside and set up there. My parents had lived there when I was born, and we had occasionally returned there over the years. Aside from The Tower, Lakeside is the center of information for The Continent, being at its literal center.

My father was working as a clerk at a private library, continuing his research in his spare time. My mother continued training me in private by night and worked repairing nets for fishermen by day. I helped with that too, mostly untangling nets. My mother said it was training and the frustration would teach me to learn Knit, but when I got frustrated I tended to light the nets on fire. Hammers and nails. It never took, and she eventually taught me the wizard version. I suspect that she was experimenting on me with that one, and it was not a tried and true Stormcaller torture training method.

About a year back, my father became a little erratic. He began having meetings all across the town, and without giving specifics, kept talking about how “close” he was to his goal. The meetings continued for months, sometimes he’d return in a good mood, other times he returned in a panic. One night he returned with blood on his clothes and spoke to my mother in hushed tones when they believed me to be asleep. I hadn’t remembered that. Strange that I recall that now.

On our last day in Lakeside, my father came home from one of his meetings positively ecstatic. We packed up our belongings that very night, bought a new donkey, and struck out on the road towards a small town called Edgewater. He had arranged a meeting with a man named Teshive, whom he claimed would be the “key to his troubles.” In the months leading up to this my father seemed to be less a historian and more a man possessed. He’d always been excited by mysteries, but now he seemed to be on the verge of something big.

The journey from Lakeside to Edgewater by cart, takes about a month, by ship up river it would only take a week, but for obvious reasons that was out of the question. Well, obvious to anyone that isn’t a possibly-sentient book. Maybe I should explain. Most ships employ a Tower Apprentice to conjure wind to sail upriver. Since all rivers lead to the Great Lake and all winds naturally blow inland, it’s the only practical solution for getting up river at any reasonable speed. The Tower uses the opportunity to give their soon-to-be Journeyman Wizards some world experience after a decade of being cloistered. And I am sure this part is completely coincidental, but The Tower gets paid to place a spy on every major trade vessel on the rivers.

We travelled along the edge of the river and eventually joined up with a caravan for protection. It was then I started travelling under the guise of Stormcaller Apprentice, but under my own name, apprentice to my mother “Tamrien, Journeyman Stormcaller of clan Farvoyage”. The slight alterations that took over her face whenever anyone called her by that name made me suspect that Tamrien was not only a real person, but someone my mother would enjoy putting through some “training.”

The first three weeks of the journey were largely uneventful. Aside from the river drying up. The water level of the river started to go down in the middle of the third week, which is not an uncommon occurrence. But instead of leveling it out as is usual, it continued to drop until the river was nothing but a muddy trench filled with small pools. The caravan picked up the pace after that and started keeping extra watches at night.

I spent most of the trip wandering the caravan, it was here that I met up with Trish. When you have been living in hiding and on the run your whole life, it's easy to identify like-minded individuals. She was riding in the back of a tanner's wagon, but didn't appear to be helping with any of the work. No one rides in a tanner's wagon who isn't a tanner, everyone else on the caravan gave it a wide berth. To put it politely, tanners smell terrible.

The only time she ever left the wagon was when the hired guards would come by to chat up the tanner. It was clear the guards weren't looking for her but there was a hooded individual traveling through the caravan looking for somebody. The man was hunched and never seemed to speak to anyone but every night would find himself at a different campfire. Never speaking but examining every face. The night he chose to sit in on the tanner's I felt that it was my duty as a fellow outlaw to head her off and give her a warning as she headed back to camp from the dry riverbed. It was that act that saved both our lives. While we sat by the bank, talking about everything but our pasts and reasons for avoiding suspicious characters, the caravan was attacked.

If it had been day we would have seen the smoke, maybe with enough time to help, but I try not to let myself think I could have done anything at all. We reached the camp to find the wagons ablaze. The fires had clearly been started by magic, the telltale crater and debris pattern of Fireballs could be seen everywhere. At the tanner's site we found the man who I suspected was looking for Trish. Trish rummaged through his cloak and found a very accurate sketch of her.

Trying not to notice the dead, I ran through the camp towards my own fire.

My parents had been camped a way off from the rest of the groups. Where everywhere else it seemed people were taken by surprise when the campfire they huddled around had exploded, my parents camp was littered with bodies. Robed figures lay everywhere, my mother's handiwork visible upon many of them. The rest laid slain around my father, a sword I had never seen before in his dead hand. Not only had I never seen the man show any proficiency with a sword, I had never even seen him hold anything larger than his small eating knife.

Around him lay 10 slain robed figures, but more shocking than the sword wounds on my father's victims were the signs that half of them had been slain by bolts of ice, still protruding from their corpses, half melted. My mother could not manifest ice, and as far as I had known my father had possessed no magic. As I stood there in shock for what felt like hours, Trish jumped into action. She quickly stripped the robed figures of the few items of value they had, and then more respectfully did the same for my parents. Our wagon was ablaze and the only bag left was the satchel my father always carried. In a daze, I was handed my father's sword and satchel and ushered out into the night.

That was difficult to write, but oddly, I feel better having done it. As if it's not in my head anymore but instead on paper. Not magic, just... catharsis?