When I first met Isha, I thought her an enigma to be studied: a pale-aelv severed from the dark machinery of her people, carrying mysteries she clearly had no wish to share. In time, I realized she was something far simpler and sadder: a tortured soul, which is to say, not so different from the rest of our group in the White Wing.
I should have recognized it sooner. Perhaps living so long beside my own grief has made me too practiced at overlooking it in others. Yet I did little for her.
I did not know how to approach someone who had built her entire life around distance, and my search for Sartrel kept drawing me away whenever I might have tried. Isha held everyone at arm’s length with almost admirable discipline. Until, at last, she found one person she could not keep there. In the end, it seemed that love and grief together would succeed where all gentler things had failed, binding her at last to a life she might yet cherish… or suffer all the more for having something left to lose.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
