This is the full text of the letter Eliath Drace wrote to his son Mathas Drace, which Mathas passed on to Luma in Session 14. The handout came with Eliath’s sketch of the grove, shared as an image.
Text
3rd of Dimming, 1654
Mathas, my son,
I pray the Light finds you well, though I write to you now from shadow. It is my hope that this letter reaches your hand at the Drawing of the Veil — though in these strange times, who can say whether such a passage still finds us as it did our forebears.
My memory is not what it once was, and I have found myself compelled to set certain things down before more of them slip away. There is a place I cannot stop returning to in trance: the grove we got lost in, when you were young. You may not remember it as I do. I have tried to draw it as best I can recall, and I send the sketch with this letter.
Look at it carefully. The towering elders ringing the canopy. The still, dark ponds where the streams divide. The deadwood — the hollow trunks that did not survive their season. It was a beautiful place once. There is a sickness in the soil now. I do not know if this will be of any help to you, but I enclose it all the same.
The great tree at the heart of the grove may still seem grand to anyone who passes it; the bark holds, and the crown is full. But the rot has reached the roots. Perhaps it was always there, and we simply did not think to look.
I am too far gone to tend to it myself. What I ask is that you take the sketch, walk the old paths, and find the rot before it spreads to the roots of everything left standing. I do not know that anything can be done. I only know that someone of our blood ought to look.
If my own road ends before yours brings you back to this work, I ask that you carry it on in my place. And if you cannot — if the years or the world have taken too much from you — then set this charge before your own children, that one of our line may find what we could not.
Be ever in the Light,
Eliath Drace