Love is a powerful thing to behold, Mira. The only true land in an ever-shifting sea. It can change everything. You don't need an old sorcerer to tell you that. Meaning and joy is precious amid life's roiling chaos. Love lifts the wings of angels and bends the arc of dreaming towards deep and genuine gratitude. We've both felt it. With lovers, family and friends. We hear about its power all the time, don't we? Sometimes, in our darker moments, we view it as little more than a cliché. An empty sentiment. But it really is powerful. Its beauty is extraordinary. Not only can love change the way we live, but also the way we die. Dear one, I want you to know that as eternal spirits of divine provenance each of us is a constellation of stories and living legends. Dreams, poems and songs. We are bright with treasure and depth. All of us. It’s cold and dark without those stories, Mira. Without love or a legacy. Believe me. I know the difference now between what it means to plead or prosper. In life and in magic. However, I didn't always think like this. As a boy I didn't yet understand these things. You see, I carried a great psychic burden within me when I was young. Many of us do, but mine was a terrible and very particular kind of knowledge. I knew exactly how I was going to die. I had foreseen it in several visions, over many years, and it disturbed me in ways I can’t convey here. It was a terrible thing to behold. I knew that I was going to drown one day. Accidentally, of course. But still a relatively young man with little in the way of art, romance or legacy left in his wake. I knew it would be a tragic way to go. Drowning just off a foreign coast with so much life left to live, unknown and unloved. But even as a boy I forced myself to see a kind of vicious poetry in it. I was a wounded soul even at that age, and I did love the water with all my heart. So, I tried to tell myself that perhaps it would be fitting if those visions came to pass. Hear me, Apprentice. As a mortal I've always felt deeply connected to the water. I feel at peace near rivers and the sea. In the rain. As a fledgling sorcerer I tried to tell myself that maybe it wouldn't be so bad – to perish in that way, at the mercy of the thing I loved. But that was a lonely child’s awful madness. I fought against it, Mira. With all the strength I had. I didn’t want my sadness to be the author of that future accident. And so I rejected that awful fatalism. Clairsentience is such a strange, multifaceted thing. A blessing and a curse. Knowing certain things before they happen can greatly disturb the psyche if you’re not careful. On the one hand it can create a sense of bewildered powerlessness at watching events unfold just as you saw them, but on the other it can burden you with a sense of crushing responsibility for every unpleasant thing foreseen. Luckily, I was able to alter that trajectory. Through acts of love and service I have outlived what could have been a tragic end. I was willing to take a long, hard look at myself. I survived my late twenties, and that foreign coast. I did this by attempting to really know myself. To understand my fears and motivations. I gave myself to my art and my relationships. I made sure that my intentions were genuine, Mira. Despite my flaws. I tried to care as deeply as possible about the finer points of living, and dreaming. Avoiding that potential destruction wasn't really a matter of luck though. I think it was a combination of courage and grace. I had to meet my Father half way, across an ocean of doubt. It’s how both sons and daughters prosper in the end. I had to believe in a future, and myself. I had to give my very best to the world and the people I loved. And then, finally, I had to have faith that a higher intelligence would carry me the rest of the way. Through storms and over raging seas. And it did. He did. Through the grace of God I was able to change what would have been, and my soul is all the better for it. I have a life worth living now. I’m deeply and truly grateful for that. I still love the water, of course. I always will. But it’s no longer my tomb. Rather, it's my meditation. An ever-shifting sea. I'm no longer lost. Now I know what it means to leave a legacy. To truly invest in friendships and family. Even at a distance. Now I can always find you, and the others, and the shore. Mira, I want to thank you for everything you and the girls have done for me. Inspiration and hope of which you know little. Yet you gifted me with treasure. Depths, and light. I want you to know that you are so much more than a sorcerer’s first incantation. You were never just named for mere progeny in some playwright’s final folio. No, your real name means something far grander in the shining tongue. In those days before the Fall. Anda, Mira - "Behold, a Miracle." A miracle beheld.
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