My Dear Octavia—After so eventful an expedition as was my first, I have kept these past many days to the safety of Sophia’s Rest and have made myself acquainted with its sights. There are the usual conveniences one expects: an inn where I have spent the last several nights, a bakery that has fed me little of note. Around me are little houses newly-built, stables mostly bare, farms sparsely worked, shrines and temples in infinite supply.
To the far North are mountains; to the not-as-far-North, where I have been, a wode. I was told of a witch’s cottage in its midst, now dispossessed of a witch (so just a cottage, then, but calling it so would take away the mystique). A river runs South and beyond it are more farms and the decayed walls of what once was—and might one day be again—a keep. There are mountains again to the East and an ocean to the West. The latter is yet unsailed, but the former was recently braved—it sheltered a circle of standing stones, the epicentre of a tempest that lasted for weeks before its discovery. Such are the strange things I find myself in the midst of.
Every day there are expeditions such as I once embarked on, small groups four- or five-large willing to scout our yet unbraved surroundings; every day we learn more of this mystery limbo we inhabit. The sea is next, as I hear, and after that the mountains to the far North. I had half a mind to join one of these enterprises but either would require a sort of heroic effort I am not suited to. You know well my lack of heroism. Keep the swelling waves and mountaintops and give me a slumbering vault under lock and key, or an archive of forgotten tomes. Give me any place that hides a secret and I will make myself into shadow and meld with its darkness.
I am curious of your surroundings, wherever it was you emerged. Have you stayed always in one place, or have you travelled? Have you company and bustle, or solitude and peace? Have you a sky to admire? Here I have seen for the first time a sky unmarred by clouds and a sun shining unimpeded. Tell me, if you would be so kind, of all the odd things which you have seen so I know better what to imagine when I visit you in my thoughts. Consider me
your most devoted listener and brother,
Tristan
