Regarding this letter, I sincerely hope it has been given to you by a living person, and no less than a decade after it was written—this assumes, of course, we are fortunate enough that it gets to you at all. Two months have passed—today, it is March 18, ‘95—since those I traveled with left. Two have returned to your world in the hope of saving it. You and history know whether they have succeeded—I, at the time of this writing, do not.

Very few people would believe me if I recounted the things I have seen, the places I have gone, and what I have done. One of them is someone close to both of us. I hope she would take it as a compliment. I mean it as one. Does she still draw? Does she still paint? Please tell me that she does.

She and I were so young! I remember the day we met. Her colored pencils were strewn across the library table and she was drawing a scene from the Tales of the Sixteen Winds, and she was so engrossed in her work that I knew it would be an imposition to interrupt her, but I also knew that I had to do so, as we were meant to be friends, and friends forever.

If she came to Lupinia, she would find so much inspiration here. The fruits are bright and delicious, the trees lush and immense, and the lizards and sunbirds have been painted with every hue a chemist could make or mix. The central valley is forever temperate, but the province’s fringe is enchanted with seasons that move; you can ride, any time, through a forest’s entire year—pink cherry blossoms, white winter snows, yellow-orange oak leaves—in a single day.

The Macski are so unlike us. Their magic gives them immense wealth, but their houses are small and tasteful, never offending the sensibilities of the woods. The women have full-bodied hair in all colors: black, blonde, and brown as in our world; but also silver, green, and violet. The men are strong but soft-featured, their muscles suggested but never articulated. It is clear that all of these people choose exactly how they look. I am told they can change sex, and that it is not uncommon to do so after a few centuries as one or the other, but no one has explained it in detail, and I have not asked.

My tutelage, under their most expert zrflarim, continues. I have set fires hotter than the sun. I have induced, at a distance of a hundred yards, electric currents sufficient to start motors. I can levitate—I would not yet call it flying—for about thirty seconds before I lose the blue. I used to teach; now I am taught. The Macski elders assure me, as I stretch my capabilities, that everything I am doing is safe. Still, after fourteen hours of practice every day, I go to bed exhausted in body and mind. There is hardly time for much else—I wake up, I eat, I train, and I go to sleep to do the same thing tomorrow.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Terazin and Saloma have been lovely, but often I feel alone here. The everyday folk of Lupinia receive me mostly by necessity; my presence reminds them of an impending northern war in which they would prefer to have no part. I am intrusive on their tranquil and very long lives. Thus, my social tendencies have reverted to my pattern in Tevalon, or in Cait Forest—I immerse myself in work and study, and time passes, but I never feel, at least, that it is doing so uselessly.

You may have seen a portrait of me, age seventeen, with a single eyebrow raised. I could never actually make that face. (I still can’t!) The woman who painted it was the first person, as far as I know, who ever considered me beautiful. I had so long thought of myself as a scared orphan girl who had turned somehow into an awkward teenager—a surplus gear, an extra wire—that I hardly recognized the woman with toned arms, intense eyes, and a scar on my shoulder. She put into me an artist’s sense of love—the lay of light on flesh tells a story; lines and shadows deepen understanding; the brushed aura of motion becomes the thing itself. My inclinations remain as they were. Whatever I am does not consume. If it dominates, it does so lightly. What it cannot do—what it will never do—is own. My fear, sometimes, is that this denies a sort of completion, as in a song where the chords stack beautifully but the tonic note that must resolve them never comes. Don’t all tales—romance, mystery, fantasy—have that issue, though? Words run out, so no ending is perfectly happy, because the reader demands more story. Who writes the end after the end? And once that has been written, who writes the end after that?

I remember mornings on the Mountain Road when, still aching from the previous day’s hiking and trail chores, I rose to face twenty or thirty more miles of rugged and, toward the end, unknown terrain. I did not feel dread; often, I felt not even tension, but instead hope—hope of a kind that is impossible to express to those who have only stayed where they have been told they belong. Is a sense like that becoming more common in your world? If I am alive when you read this, please find me and tell me that it is.

So much has happened in one year. My skin has tasted fire and equatorial sun. My bones have endured icy rivers and blizzard winds. My eyes have stung of my own sweat, and I have smelled a woman’s love on myself. I have seen more colors of blood than I can name. I am sure that, if I were painted today by our mutually beloved artist, I would look a decade older than I did this time last year. Still, when walking chance confronts me with my own reflection, I smile, because I wear myself proudly.

The canonized version of Sixteen Winds tells us that Rhazyladne, having exhausted her creativity and knowledge, confessed to Urmahn that she had no stories left to tell, putting herself at his mercy. What nonsense! What absurdity! She had stories inside herself, too wondrous to share, that she left untold in their unborn place. Of this I am sure.