Letters From The Sea

[Carillon]

Each of these letters is written on fine parchment, carefully rolled tight, and wrapped in oilskin against the sea and salt before being placed in their watertight vessels of glass.

They are released from many different beaches and shores. There is little pattern to the sites of their release, and even less to the places they touch land again. Once they leave the land, they are at the mercy of the sea, caught between Shindaleria's currents and tides and the driving force of Mist's storms.

It is impossible to predict their path, once they are released, or how long it will take them to touch land again. Some float for a few weeks, coming to rest not far from where they were released. Others travel for years, passed off from one current to another like slim glass batons until they have all but circled the globe. One is even caught in a fisherman's simple net and tossed, unopened, back into the waters.

Not all of the messages survive. On some of the bottles, the gum arabic seal doesn't hold and the ocean seeps in, destroying the message and dissolving the parchment. Several are driven onto the rocks by storms and smashed to pieces. Many are simply never found, either hidden half-buried under the sand of some unknown beach or fated to float forever on the sea. A few make it to land, and into the hands of a curious reader.

What would they make of these messages, I wonder? Written in elven, each letter painstakingly scribed, as if the writer was more used to chisel and stone than ink, no date, no expectation of reply ... just words of grief, read by a few souls. A puzzle, scattered across the globe, of which only a few pieces are ever found.

These are those pieces.

[Carillon]

My beloved,

I reach out to you and call out your name, knowing you cannot reply. I set quill to parchment, painting my grief in long lines of ink, but there is no comfort in the act. What can I say to you, my darling, that you do not already know? You will know, wherever you are, how I grieve for you, and there are no words that can bring you back to me.

I cannot even name the time of your death anymore. Perhaps it would bring me some comfort to be able to say, in days and hours, how long it has been since my heart ceased to beat in time with yours. I cannot, though. Time lost all meaning for me when blood stopped flowing through your veins.

I am afraid, my darling, so afraid. You are so vivid in my mind now that I cannot help but see you every time I close my eyes. There may come a day, though, when your face no longer comes unbidden to me, when I have to fight to remember the way your hair flowed in the water and the way your skin felt under my hands. I pray this day will never come.

I am trying, my beloved. I try to serve Shindaleria, as I know you would have done. You would have been such a light in her depths, Aylana. Perhaps that is why she could not bear to be apart from you, and tore you from my side and this world so soon. I know you are with her now, more surrounded by the waters of her love than even the rest of us can be. I love our goddess and all she gives us, but my love, I do not speak falsely when I say that I hate her too, for allowing you to be taken from me.

Oh my sweet--I do not know what to do without you! I am like a strand of kelp pulled from its rocky hold and set adrift in the waves. I do not swim, or fight the currents. I fought so hard to keep you alive. I fight no longer. Now I let the sea take me where it will, and surrender to this tide of grief. It pushes me far from home and the places I loved you, but no matter how fast I swim I cannot outpace this agony. Every year when I see the waters redden with the spring tides I see your blood. The horror drives me from the water, up onto the land, but here more than anywhere I am a stranger and the void you left behind threatens to claim me.

I swim in their lakes, but the waters do not rock and lull me, or hold me up. I walk their roads, and my whole body feels heavy and cumbersome. My hair hangs lank down my back and my skin is dry, but my eyes are always wet with tears. I stand among these breathless strangers and look for your face, knowing I will never find it. I search the crowds until I can bear it no more, and then I sink to my knees and cry and cry and cry.

Come back to me, my love. I do not know how to live without you.

~Chiara

[Carillon]

My darling,

Do these letters reach you? Or, like me, are they unable to cross to where you dwell now? I have sent so many adrift. They float away with the tide like whispered prayers, to wash up on some foreign shore or to drift for all eternity. I seal a piece of my broken heart within each flask. This is how I will leave this world, dying one day at a time, drying and cracking, fracturing into a thousand pieces in the absence of your presence and your love.

I cling to what remains of you. The shells of the necklace you gave me are smooth from my worrying of them, all the ridges and faults worn away. I lie awake, dreaming of you, and touch them again and again like the beads of a prayer necklace. There is but one prayer from my lips, though, and even Mother Ocean cannot grant it.

I shall love you always.

~Chiara

[Carillon]

Sweet Aylana,

I am so lonely without you. I am a stranger in a foreign world, and what a terrible world it is. You should be at my side, my beloved. You would know better than I how to walk among these people. I cannot even properly speak their tongue. We thought we were so clever, learning from the sailors and our books, but I speak no better than their youngest child! I am tired, my love, so tired. I am tired of struggling with this clumsy tongue, tired of walking these strange streets, running from fire and the followers of Mist, who seem to be everywhere. I long to take revenge for you on them, but they are so strong, Aylana. I never knew how strong her following was above the waves.

I have a few friends. I think if it were not for them, I would surely die of missing you, and of loneliness. Gentle Marcus is as tormented by his past as I am, and poor Brian struggles with the love of a woman who does not seem able to love him back. I do what I can for them, and I swim and pray and think of you. I am always thinking of you.

I follow Brian to the north, where the seas grow cold and ice floats on the surface of the ocean. I am afraid of this place, where spring never seems to come. The ice covers the surface of the water in places, threatening to trap any beneath the waves without air. I would rather live without air than without you, though.

We descend deep into the caves and fight and fight and fight. We unleash all our rage on the kobolds and their blood stains the snow. The carnage is horrible, and my heart is as cold as the ice that surrounds us. It is like living in the heart of a crystal, glittering walls and ceiling all around. I see my pain refracted and reflected back at me, a hundred faces all twisted with the same pain and none the one I long for.

What have I become in your absence? I do not know how much longer I can go on like this.

~C

[Carillon]

Beloved,

You came to me last night, in my reverie. These are the nights I live for, when the dream is vivid enough to fool my heart and you live in memory for a short time again. These are the nights that keep me standing, stable, upright.

In the dream-memory I am returning home from gathering mussels from the rocks. The seas are warm, and my woven pouch bulges with shells: hard blue teardrops to be pried open and the treasure of flesh hidden within wrapped in sweet green sea lettuce. I pause in my journey to watch a school of herring dart by. I wonder how many sleek silver bodies make up this school, but they are too numerous and move by too quickly for any tally. So many tiny hearts beating in unison, so many tails thrashing as one. In the blink of an eye, they change direction and I look over to see what has startled them.

Even in this memory, I catch my breath to see you. The light filtering down from above glints off your skin. Your hair floats around you, a blue-green nimbus. You are smiling, and my heart becomes buoyant to know that this smile is for me and me alone.

The thought “You were so beautiful” floats through my mind, threatening to shatter the illusion. I fight against it, trying to hold you a few moments longer. It is like swimming up a fast flowing river, and as hard as I fight I know I cannot win. My panic at the thought of losing you again does not help, and you start to slip away. It is harder to see you, as if the water between us has become turbulent and muddied with my struggles. I know in a moment another world will claim me. I can already feel the tendrils of that world wrapping around me like the tentacles of the squid or the octopus, ready to pull me back down into the cold. Some part of me cries out that I love you, that I will always love you, but no words escape my lips because this is not part of the memory.

And then the miracle happens, and you are clear in my mind again. The waters become still, and I remember this day. I remember what happens next, and I see it in my mind's eye, feel it deep within my soul, at the very core of my being. Just as before, you swim towards me until you are so close there is nothing else but you. Your eyes are the dark blue of the depths, concealing their secrets and Shindaleria's mysteries alike, but there is no secret to be hidden in this gaze. You look upon me with love and the gentle push and pull of the waves drives us together, closing what distance remains between us.

You close your eyes when our lips touch but I do not. I do not want to miss one moment of this. I never want to be deprived of the sight of your beauty again, not for an instant. We float, borne up in the waters by our love, and we share breath. Air rushes between us in the kiss, commingling and becoming one, mirroring what heart and soul have already done. There is life in this kiss, as well as love.

I know there is not much time left. Already I hear you whispering your love for me. The stream of bubbles tickles my ear, and though I want to hold you close I know I have to let you go. All I can do is smile as you slip away. There is no need for words. You know what is in my heart, because you hold it in trust for me.

I wake to a strange world, and for a moment I am disoriented. There is sunshine, too bright for even shallowest waters, and birds singing in the trees. I remember where I am, then, and why, and the pain of losing you blossoms in my heart anew.

~Chiara

[Carillon]

My love,

It is spring in this land, and everything is becoming green again. I wish you could be here to see it. I know now why they say that new life quickens, for that is exactly what it does. At first, you do not see the change. The ground is still and cold, lifeless in a way the ocean never is. It is hard with frost, inhospitable and cruel, and one doubts that life can spring at all from this frigid land.

Slowly, though, the seasons change. Green pushes through the cold soil, and the tree branches become heavy with buds rather than snow. It is subtle, this changing, and gradual. What happens after, though, is startling both in its suddenness and its beauty. It feels like one wakes up one morning, and someone has parted a curtain and revealed what is behind, or that an artist has come in the night and painted radiant colour onto each tree and plant. There are flowers and new life everywhere, and they sing of hope and second chances. I am awed by this sight, but it makes me miss the sea.

I can no longer stay away from the ocean. I was foolish to think I could. The tide beats like a drum in our blood, and in each beat of my heart I hear a tiny crashing wave, like hearing the surf in a shell held to the ear. I think of our seasons: spring, with its colourful plants and sudden growth of plankton; summer, with its lazy seas, thick and sluggish with the ocean's bounty; fall, when life stills and those tiny plankton fall to the ocean floor like the leaves from land trees; winter, with its storms, driving the whales and our people alike to warmer waters.

I think of our seasons, and the seasons of the land, and one thing is clear to me: it will not matter how many seasons pass, not to me. You are gone, and though time may cleanse the wound like Shindaleria's tears, there can be no healing such a loss. The flesh may mend, but never the spirit or the heart, not when such an integral part has been torn from it.

I know you will not like to hear this. You will worry that I am lonely, and I confess that I am. But my beloved one, I know with certainty that I will never love again. Into my life only one great love was born, and that was you. To love again after such passion and gentle grace would sully our memories, and I will not taint such pure waters.

There was never another, Aylana. From the moment we met there was only you. My whole life has been a journey to you, and to Shindaleria, and now that you are at her side it shall be a longer and more solitary journey back to you and to her. We are all born of her waters, and to her waters we shall return in the end. Every day brings me closer to the day that we can be together again. Wait for me, my love, as I wait for you, and what has been shall be again.

You are the only song of my heart.

~Chiara

[Carillon]

//Please note: These five letters were originally posted in a private development thread but I have decided to move them to the public folder. I think one or two of you who have met my sea elf have been curious about her past and what lies beyond her broken Common and cheerful innocence.

Hence, this glimpse into Chiara's wounded heart. Enjoy, and please feel free to comment if you like. I am always happy to discuss my characters, roleplay or writing with the community.

~Carillon