Another Letter Home

Mother,

As always, I strive to obey the Turning of the Wheel and honour our Clan and its ways.

Tomorrow, at the Place of Giving, I will leave for you a sword and this letter. The sword bears the totem we share in relief on the crosspiece and etched along the blade. Its weight is perfect. It's edge unfailingly sharp.

It is the sword I bore when I sought out Koth, the Wyrmlord, to gut him from Vraath Keep. It did not taste a single drop of his blood. Instead, when I leaped toward him to meet him in glorious battle, he invoked mystical energies to fly from me like overgrown poultry. He left me to face his underling, a minotaur, as, from on high, he rained down fire upon us.

I was not alone. Bree, the Lucky, Val the Hunter, Barakas, Master of the Arcane, and Ranger Jor fought with me to win the keep, a tactical stronghold in our efforts to hold back the goblin tide that brims to overflowing from the Wyrmsmoke mountains. These companions filled Koth with arrows as I traded gouging horns for slashing strikes against the vicious minotaur.

In the way of our people, as part of my preparation for that day, I had ventured on a dream quest where Ursa, the Great Mother herself, visited me. She told me The Wheel would turn in my favour that day. In another vision, I, a peregrine in flight, was shown the urgency of my action as the goblin forces at Wyrmsmoke swarmed beneath my wings.

At the keep, ablaze with the wondrous blessings of Ursa, I had only desire to end Koth, to fulfill my bloody ambition. That was taken from me before my eyes by flights of bolts and arrows. Mother, I should have been outraged to have my quarry, and the glory of my exacted conquest, stolen from me. But I did not feel rage nor grief nor even resentment at my loss.

Instead, when I saw my mark fall to fletching, just out of my hungry, bloody grasp, my heart soared. My exultation was not in the name of our clan, not in the anticipation of a trophy to tithe, nor to the glory of our ancestors. I revelled in glory shared with these outsiders, in the good we had done for Drellin's Ferry and for Tempered Vale and the people who make their homes there. I rejoiced in the hope our act signified for those people.

With this change within me, I fear the Wheel turns me away from you. My heart no longer yearns to prove my worth to my father, to my brothers, to our clan. I no longer hunt for a tithing. There is a different yearning within me, now.

I remain your son.

Peregrine.