#letters to...

From day one I had the suspicion of many things that would detonate as time went by, I was not wrong, more things happened than I expected, from seeing as the pieces of a "family" that after the death of the Great Mother, he was separating more and more, only the Elder remains, but his attitude corrodes any will No one wants to deal with someone who just lives disparaging you.

348 days are said so easy, so fast, so meaningless... But do you really have any idea how much weight those words have? probably not, deep down we all have ignorance, which makes them doubt by ignoring something, well they are said to fear because they do not know and hate what they fear... To be honest, by now I feel tired, depressed, disappointed, frustrated, not because I can't get out, but because every day that passes, I feel more oblivious to this world, to this place, I hardly recognize things, I locked myself not out of fear, but for avoiding shedding blood in vain, in opening more the wound, wound that since 2013 continues to bleed , a wound that heals but reopens and is getting worse, I use a "mask" so that no one knows my burden, so that they can not see that it hurts to deal, well they say that you have to suffer in silence, every day is more monotonous, even video games are no longer full as before, everything is doubts and books that accumulate, inclusive I have lost the ability to take a pencil and draw something on the paper, domir is no longer an option, fall asleep at 3 in the morning and wake up before 9 because you have to be in the boring class... I don't even want to continue studying, after all, I'll leave this world soon, the day is coming and for a long time I thought things over, I feel like it's the only way out of all this, who wants to be in a world where you don't feel comfortable anymore? Why stay in a place I don't belong? from a young age I had my doubts about it, now if I am very sure, as well as many before I did, others after that I will, perhaps because of the weak, because I have no choice or because like me, they do not belong to this world, you cannot force a flower to grow on a stone...

For you who wonder what has become of me, I leave you these words, if you have time and you read this, I thank you, I want you to know that if I knew you I had a good time and we live good things, we laugh a lot and we travel in many ways, to you that we do not, but if we agree in letters, thank you for being, for thinking about me and making a space in your life , but for now I will no longer write, my lyrics will not fly and you will only see my ephemeral notes of how the days pass and as the last sigh comes to me...I don't do this for tormenting or blaming, it's just that sometimes it's better to leave something written, in case someone wonders, the 31 or they won't come and at last, there will be no more birthdays... I just hope that things don't fail and I can finally go back to my world, to the place where I belong, or at least a place where I can see my grandmother again, listen to the wind and her voice, time runs because that's how we force it, this crazy chapter of a killer virus will end, I know, but that's something I won't see, live well, don't hate and remember, today is what counts, tomorrow it still doesn't come and yesterday, it's gone.

Sincerely

Master Daidh,

In the instance you might find this, I must apologize over the abandonment of the suite you left me. In my exile from Silvermoon, I was forced to give up properties in the city that were put in my name. Much has changed, you can say.

I have fortunately left the care of it in the hands of a lovely Shaldorei woman and her young niece, named Serenith. I helped both to escape the perils of their former lives to find refuge in Silvermoon. I am glad that I could at least make this arrangement before the situation demanded I leave. They have agreed to of course sign it completely back into your name should you need  to reclaim it, and the life you left behind.

If my memory still keeps you grounded in whatever way it does, Daidh, I hope it is a memory that brings your home again, to a sense of normalcy. I hope it brings you back well.

Don’t let your demons hold you back forever.

~Safrona

Dear Best Friend,

I love you so much! I hope you realize that. Thank you so much for being so amazing and for always being there for me!

Dear Past Me,

On the 18th of July, 1988, Professor Minerva McGonagall decided that she had finally had enough. The owls bearing one Zoro Roronoa Isshin's start-of-term letters had been returning them to her for the last four days as they found themselves unable to deliver them, and with increasingly ridiculous addresses noted on them, to boot.

Now, if those ones had been accompanied by other students' letters, she would probably have suspected a malfunction in the charms that noted down the students' current addresses the first day, but as it was, it was only Roronoa's letters which seemed to be led astray.

She had no idea how that was possible, quite frankly. It would be one thing if the charms had simply been worn down and lost power due to old age, but for one student to somehow confuse them like this while they were still in full working order... it was ridiculous! The charms were ancient magic backed up by runic arrays which seemed unnecessarily large, considering their fairly simple purpose. Ravenclaw and Slytherin had written them personally, for Merlin's sake! It had failsafes for its failsafes, and probably accounted for every single possibility conceivable!

Still, here she was, glowering at the array with Bathsheda and Albus next to her. Albus had conjured a table which was swiftly filling up with notes as they tried to figure out why it was producing ludicrous addresses such as “Big Rock in Forest Glade”, “Dirt Road Going Up” and, the one that had finally made her storm into Albus' office: “Patch of Grass”.

As far as they were able to tell, the charm should be noting down the student's home address. Should such a thing, for some reason, not exist, it should reroute the letter to their current place of residence, no matter if they considered it a home or not. Should that fail, the letter would be sent to their current location by way of longitude-latitude coordinates so that the owl could track their magical signature from there. And if that for some reason didn't work, copies of the letter would be sent to the child's guardian(s) and/or close friends in the hopes that they knew how to get a hold of the elusive student.

For some reason, Roronoa had managed to get all of those methods to fail, and it seemed like the array in desperation had turned to scribbling out nonsense.

Needless to say, Bathsheda was having a field day with this, and Albus wasn't much better.

“Now, now, Minerva, I'm sure we'll be able to figure something out.”

“You don't understand, Minerva! This is so well crafted! It combines both the elder and younger futharks – do you have any idea of how much skill that takes? And not only have they made them coexist in the same array, but they've managed to intertwine the elder script with the younger script to create a self-propagating effect! That shouldn't be possible. It should by all rights destabilize and collapse, especially in a work of this scale, unless... ooh, that is genius! Absolutely genius!”

Minerva was wondering if she perhaps had spent too much time in her cat form lately, because surely it couldn't be normal to want to hiss at people? She took off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, suppressing the urge. She had never invested a great deal of time in the study of runes, tending more towards arithmancy in order to support and analyze more complex transfigurations, and she had to admit that she was a bit out of her depth here. Still, shouldn't they be focusing on finding a solution instead of simply admiring the Founders' work?

“Couldn't we force the array to write out his coordinates instead of this nonsense,” she suggested, gesturing to the latest address they had had it write in order to observe it at work and see where things went wrong (“Field, Eurasian Continent”), “and then send it with an owl familiar with his magical signature?”

That immediately brought the two up short, and though they looked fairly disappointed (Bathsheda especially, and honestly, they could study this thing at any time, so couldn't it wait until the student had gotten his letter?), they both agreed that it was doable and likely to work.

Minerva immediately took the chance to walk off to the owlery to find an owl fitting their criteria, happy to let the two of them work it out on their own.

She had had quite enough of runes for the next long, long, while.

The 17th of July, 1985, dawned bright and early, at least for a small, black-haired eleven-year-old who was out in his guardian's backyard, running through sword forms.

For the barn owl who had flown down from Scotland, however, it certainly seemed as if the 17th dawned way too goddamn bright and way to fuckin' late.

Or it would have, you know, if owls could swear.

As it is, however, owls cannot swear, so it'll have to suffice to say that the owl was not happy about the fact that the sun was blinding her and that humans were diurnal creatures.

Still, she was a well-bred and well-trained postal owl in the employ of one of the United Kingdom's oldest institutions, and as such, she refused to take out her bad temper on the recipient of the letter she was carrying.

Even if the recipient was an ungrateful little shit who neither thanked her nor gave her any water.

She resolved to make her return journey as slow as possible and do a pit-stop or three in some of the more plentiful forests along the way – her brother would be even more infuriating than usual if she returned in a temper, after all.

To most, the 16th of March, 1982, was a completely ordinary day. To some, however, it was a very special day, and a small, eight-year-old boy was one of them.

Even if he was about to fall asleep out of sheer and utter boredom.

Really, he didn't know how good he had it. If he'd been the one currently winging his way across the English Channel in pouring rain, he certainly wouldn't have complained about having to wait around in an office in order to sign some papers.

But as it was, he was, in fact, not a raven flying across the English Channel in pouring rain, and so he did not properly appreciate his boredom; no, he was just happy that it would end soon.

For you see, today was the day Zoro Roronoa would become Zoro Roronoa Isshin and officially move out of the orphanage he had been living in for the last two years and move in with his new official guardian, Koshiro Isshin.

Note the “officially”s; Zoro had already been acting as a son in the Isshin house anyway, so the papers were mostly just a formality as far as the two (and Koshiro's daughter, Kuina, who one should never forget on pain of... pain) were concerned.

Considering that, perhaps it is understandable that the boy was quite a bit less excited than most young children would be in the same situation.

Still, he should have spared a thought for the poor raven, especially considering how he was just about to make things worse for the black-feathered fowl.

But it is seldom fair to blame a person for things that they could not possibly have been aware of, and as such we cannot think ill of the boy as he put his pen to paper, and, with seventeen letters in three words put to paper, completely severed the tenuous magical thread that the raven had followed all of the way from Japan in order to find the recipient of the letter clutched in his talons.

Confused, wet, cold, miserable and more than a little peeved, the raven resolutely dropped the now useless letter into the turbulent waters of the Channel and turned around to start making his way back to Japan.

He resolved to have words with whatever idiot had addressed the letter.

For those curious: no, the principal of Mahoutokoro did not appreciate the painful pecks to her hands and the repeatedly crowed “Inaaai, inai! Inai, baaaaaka!” in her ear.

Inai means “does not exist” and baka means “idiot” in Japanese.