Letter 7: Magnar The Great

Poppy,

I'm so glad I took that dagger. I know I shouldn't have, but today we had a pixie bring in a very unusual bottle.

It looked like it was filled with multicoloured sand, like the type we saw on the shore front of Lake Nessam when picking Pickerelweed for Greenhouse 2.

Only this wasn't sand, it was ash.

It was a spirit bound bottle with a powerful demon inside. It had been dug up from the forest near Kherzeen and it could be thousands of years old. If the bottle is opened or damaged, the demon will be able to reform from its own ashes. That's one Hel of a thought. So guess who needs to file this tomorrow?

As if the boot wasn't bad enough, this one needs to be on sublevel 19, which I'm sure will be even worse.

I'm scared, Poppy.

On the plus side, I now know why the Herbalist is so kind to me.

After my morning shift I went out to the gardens to encourage the gorble to fly. We managed to avoid the cultivation area, and stuck to the lawn between the library and Thurlfen Forest, but on the way back, we bumped into Nella, singing to a patch of lavender. I smiled, reminded of you.

She invited me to her office, and she wouldn't take no for an answer.

Her office was more like a plant sanctuary. I shuffled between towering ferns to the timber desk and plush upholstered seats, feeling numb.

Water spurted from her fingertips as she cooed over a sprout. Its single leaf reached up to meet the spray. Again, I was reminded of you.

After she poured us a drink, she told me about how she ended up here.

While making a new irrigation system for easy plant watering, she flooded her entire village.

She said she understands the importance of second chances, and she gave me a small pot of earth. Some seeds of a type of carnivorous plant are in there and she thought I might like to have it.

I'm grateful, honestly. But I don't deserve it. I'm here for punishment after all.

And while it was nice to have a real conversation, I couldn't shake the creeping dread about tomorrow's excursion to sublevel 19.

I'm rereading through everything I can find out about wraiths. I feel like I should be prepared for the worst tomorrow. I also need to figure out how to make sure that the spirit bound bottle doesn't get broken, you know, if I need to run away.

Wish me luck.

Your dearest friend

Willow