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  1. Journals

Gabriel's Journal

Flesh and Blood

Commander Antealis of Unknown- my father - truly a man worthy of my disdain and a source of many of my fears and shame. When one is born into the world as a noble there are many burdens put onto your shoulder whether you appreciate them or not, and as a child I tended to neglect those burdens. I did so as it was my nature, as I was gifted in other ways and the moon would guide my path in a different direction then my family would like. As any Tarrenmore would know, we must not abide the frailties of nature and must instead pursue our ambitions with a clenched iron first, but this I could never do.

I longed for the embrace of the wild, to be at peace in a tranquil glade far away from the clutches of my family and especially my father's tyranny. He would attempt to set all of his children, including myself, to a secret war against the structures of the Elditian nobility and even though I was still a child I knew that this was not the path I wished to set foot down. Not all of my siblings were completely set about our father's way, not even my mother, although she was sequestered away when I was quite young. They told us she was exiled, but I dared not believe my father to be such a vile, wicked man - at least, not until the day he sent my sisters away.

Annie, Jen - I will never forget what he said he would do if you did not do as you were told. To threaten your own children with dismemberment and burning... if not for the stories my friend Cole in the kitchen would tell us of how his older brother had ridden alongside my father as his personal blacksmith's apprentice and executed four of his own men for retreating by hanging them by their own entrails I would not have believed him. I swore to you both that I would find you again, when I was strong enough, and that we would be together and fight for what was right. I will keep this promise.

And mother, though I long forget your face, if you are out there I hope we can meet again. I hope I will remember your voice or your laugh, for the memories we made still linger at the edges of my thoughts. Perhaps if - the rest of this section is blotched with what appears to be a trail of tears.

 

Moon Shimmer

I had just escaped home not four days before I started running out of ideas for how to thrive on my own. My gift with nature meant that I at least could survive and the time I had spent studying instead of tending to the gardens and animal pens had paid off in helping me to earn enough coin to eat and borrow a bed here and there. I was resigned to a life of vagrancy but hopeful that one day I could set about on an adventure to find my sisters again, after all I had at least listened in on some of the conversations my father had with that strange man... person... creature... whatever it was I would know it if I had seen it again.

On one day in particular, I had been helping a curious lady with a strange love of flowers take some food from the market back to her home and got myself turned around in a forested area not far from the village on the path to her hovel. That was when I ran across this very peculiar old man who was whistling a tune. He looked like he hadn't eaten in weeks, his bones nearly poking out of his skin, yet his smile did not seem to dim for a moment. I asked him if he was okay and needed any help and much to my regret at the time, he started rambling on about this herb and that tree and this magical effigy and that grove and on and on. If it weren't for my love of nature I would never have noticed his mention of a particular herb, one that I had only read about in a very ponderous tome that briefly mentioned it as a potential fairy tale - Moon Shimmer. 

This crazy old man had no right to get me so excited. It was this excitement that seemed to cause a shift in his behaviour, a somewhat more relaxed old man was now before me. He told me he was a Druid of the Circle of the Moon and that Moon Shimmer in fact was real at least in some respects. He told me his name was Ratiskan and that if I wished to learn more to go with him, but I told him I still had to deliver this food for an old lady. Suddenly a different voice, the old ladies, came forth from the old man. I was fascinated if not a bit confused but with that my journey to learning the ways of the Circle of the Moon had begun.