Letter to Belas

Belas,

I don't know how to get this to you. I cannot go back to Almalexia, and there are no couriers I could trust.

I am sorry. The words are too small. I am sorry.

Daela is gone. I know you loved her.

It should have been so easy. Bersa would call it to this plane, Fathas would bind it in the mirror, I would shape its violence. Daela volunteered to look through, to make sure the spell was complete. But she fell through. The frame went dark, then quiet, the way a well goes quiet after the stone has reached the bottom. A minute passed and she re-entered the frame. We pulled her back through. We covered the mirror.

She would not say what she had seen. She was shaken, but we thought no more of it, until a few days later when we came upon her with Salas' body. Daela would never have done that to him. No mer would have done those things to his body.

But she looked at me, and her red hair turned black, and her lips and her gums sloughed off and mine were underneath. It walked out the door with my eyes. My face. My voice. But not my hands. The fingers aren't right.

We had to leave. I don't know where it is. I don't know whose face it took after mine.

If you see me again, ask me these questions. If the woman in front of you cannot answer all four, she is not me.

The scar above the left collarbone -- the nix-hound north of Menaan.

The third Cantata of Vivec. I do not know it.

The name my mother called me when I was small. Not Vel. The other one. She only said it once where you could hear.

What we scratched into the cell wall on the second night in Old Ebonheart, and what we scratched out on the third.

Please, burn this letter. Do not be found. If you doubt, doubt me first.