27 Uktar
Dear Caoimhe,
I hope this letter finds you well. I hope this letter finds you. I don’t know how long this might take to reach your eyes – Lucian said you’ve been in the Feywild some time by now, and finding a courier willing to bring a letter into the Feywild with no address or direction other than your name might take some time. (He also suggested I might simply leave the letter in a fairy ring and trust it reaches you, but – I don’t have that much trust that someone else might not simply pick it up first.)
So it might be worth clarifying: I’m writing a little more than one year after we all escaped Barovia.
I hope this letter finds you well, and I mean it. Long story short, I currently seem to be affected by some sort of curse, whose origins the clerics assure me are from an otherworldly source. The symptoms are a slow sapping of the body’s strength, withering of the limbs, white flaky patches spreading across the skin, and occasional difficulty and disorientation when attempting magic. Of course when I heard “otherworldly source” I leapt to the belief that it might be a lingering side effect from the mists we all escaped – but Lucian is seemingly just fine, and I’ve also received a long letter from Aerthrandir in the meantime wherein he doesn’t mention experiencing anything of the sort.
So now I am wondering whether this might be a poisoned fruit of the gifts that we – you and I – accepted in that temple in the mountains. I knew even at the time that we would need to pay the price. You seemed to have paid yours immediately, with what it did to your body. I thought – I hoped – that if I held off on fulfilling the conditions of my gift, then I could also delay paying whatever price that dark entity exacted.
But perhaps my assumptions were wrong, and we have always been plucking at things we did not understand, and there will be consequences we cannot foresee.
So tell me, have you experienced anything similar? If you can, please write back – well, given the likely delay due to travel time, please write to Tenerost Blackbough, in Port Nyanzaru, Chult. And if you cannot, well, I can only hope that this letter either sheds light on something you might otherwise be wondering about, or has provided you with some small amount of diversion.
I hope you will take it as a small token of my regard for you when I say that I hope very much that you are well, even if that means that I would have no remaining leads to investigate what is happening to me. And please say hello for me to Eabha, with whom I am certain you are reunited by now, and to Ezmerelda if you are still in contact with her.
Love,
Lilissen
Vitality: 3 ◦ Quickness: 3 ◦ Fortitude: 2
Auspicious Days: 7 ◦ Inauspicious Days: 5
Winterstar: One Year After is the epistolary epilogue of Lilissen Winterstar, written with Her Odyssey. Updates every Sunday.