Echoes of Invasion: Whirlwind Tour of Weldyn | Scene 12

Lonfar wipes the remnants of dinner from her hands with a moist cloth and then, once her fingers are dry, retrieves the collection of paper ribbons that she brought downstairs with her. Osian begins quietly clearing up the meal as Lonfar unfurls one of the strips and says, “I want to know where things went wrong.”

“What went wrong with what?” Heppa asks.

Lonfar holds up the slip of paper. At one end it says Lonfar, and at the other is the name Damal. These are all the letters she has received from her brother in the past ten years. A research project on Alric and Damal?! Heppa can barely contain her excitement at the chance to sate some of her curiosity. There is a good deal of primary source material here to work with.

“You want a fresh set of eyes on these?” Tric asks Lonfar.

The flood gates open. “I want to know what Damal said and what Alric said and what you observed between the two of them. You met them both, how did that happen?”

Working backwards seems a good approach to Tric. “Can we see the last letter you have that mentions Alric? That will give us some context.”

Lonfar digs through the pile of letters and brings up strip after strip. Each one she scans through and then holds up the tiny print for the elves to see. I have no news for you of your son. Tric and Heppa look at letter after letter. I have no news of your son for you. Never does it say that Damal does not know anything about Alric. The message is always very carefully worded to include the qualification, “for you.”

“Damal never outright lies about having the information, he just withholds it,” Tric observes. “He wouldn’t want to break his professional code.” Although they do not have Lonfar’s side of the conversation, it is clear that in the last several years she stopped asking about Alric and Damal volunteered no updates on him.

Heppa looks over letters that must have been from around the time that Alric’s criminal activities cost him his hand. Lonfar shares that she wrote to Damal to ask if he was willing to take Alric because she and Osian needed help getting their son out of Weldyn. “Damal responded that of course he would aid his sister, that she need not trouble herself any further over her wayward son,” Heppa reports to Tric, holding the letter close to read the small print.

“Wow, he really meant it, I guess,” Tric comments.

Heppa quotes, “His irresponsibility need not be your undoing.” She drops her hands into her lap. “I don’t really know Damal that well, to know his motivations, but it sounds like he has a lot of feelings of obligation and responsibility to you, his sister,” she observes, trying to give the situation a positive spin. It also sounds like he viewed Alric as an irresponsible liability, though. “He doesn’t express any reservations about helping.” Further down in the pile, Heppa finds a letter that reports, “Alric has left,” without supplying any additional details.

“I don’t remember Alric ever mentioning that he just left,” Tric says.

“When Damal offered no further news, we assumed he meant Alric had left South Tower,” Osian says, now seated next to Lonfar with his arm supportively around her.

Heppa thinks back to what Alric told her. When I first came to South Tower, I was kind of at loose ends. I stayed with my uncle for a while, but I’d already failed at being an apprentice apothecary as a child, and that was not going to work a second time…. Damal was glad to have somebody else to deal with the falcons, but like I told you, that’s not really a full-time job. So I started working at the Parting Glass. Alric did not tell Heppa how much friction there was between him and Damal, but even if he had, Heppa would not want to betray his confidence. She wonders why Damal did not simply tell his sister that Alric got a job elsewhere. Maybe he was mad, and by the time he wasn’t anymore, it was too late, she thinks.

“My read on it is that Damal felt like he had fulfilled his obligation,” Tric says. “Things didn’t work out between the two of them, and he didn’t want to deal with Alric anymore. Continuing to give you two updates on Alric would mean he would have to keep dealing with that, so he just… didn’t.” Much like Mhaev never bothered to visit the forest a mere four days’ hike away, closer than that even by horse! Tric grumbles to himself. Is this just the Manu way? Writing people off? Tric’s mother indicated that she considers the Manu way of life over, but maybe she still has a lot in common with her kin. Tric sighs. It seems he and Alric have more in common than just being the product of two dissimilar cultures.

Damal removed the problem of Alric from Lonfar’s plate, though not necessarily in the way that she wanted it to happen. She was trying to get her son to a safer location, and Damal took that as license to make things “better” for her how he saw fit. She returns to her earlier questions. “How is it that you met both Alric and Damal? How is it that Damal still owns the falcons, but Alric runs the aviary? How can they possibly be working together, and Damal is telling me that…” She shakes a letter with “no news.”

“They appear to have a slightly distant but professional relationship,” Tric tells her. “That seems like what all of Damal’s relationships are, a branch-length away and perfunctory.” Heppa nods in agreement at that assessment. “And, well, Alric’s life isn’t super exciting…” Tric equivocates. No need to tell her about the Falcon or the banking activities. “He owns an inn. He brings in storytellers from wide and far to perform there. But I think that’s not a business that Damal’s very familiar with…. It does seem like Damal is doing the bare minimum of what he thinks he needs to, to fulfill his obligation.”

Heppa does not want to blame anyone, and she does not want to reveal anything that Alric would not want her to. And Alric wouldn’t want me to judge, she reflects. None of the letters detail how the falling out went, but Alric was not secretive about how alchemy did not work out. Heppa chooses her words carefully, suggesting, “Alric didn’t seem to take to alchemy so well. And Damal didn’t seem to like that. I think he wanted him to stay with it.”

“Go back to alchemy?” Lonfar mutters.

Heppa nods. She holds up the letter that says Alric left. “This may be when Alric stopped being an apprentice. I didn’t get the full story, but I don’t know that it went so well.” 

“I never intended him to resume alchemist training!” Lonfar says. “He tried it as a child, and it didn’t click with him.” She shakes her head in dismay. “I suppose I should not be surprised that Damal would attempt to get Alric back into that. It is his trade, but…” To ask Alric to take that back up again after what happened to him… Lonfar sighs. “If it went as well the second time as it went the first time, all right, that could have caused some friction. But why didn’t Damal tell me!? Why did he write my son out of my life?” She is shaking with agitation now, grinding out questions that no one here can answer. 

Tric takes a stab at it anyway. “The situation probably made him uncomfortable. But then it was too late and would cost him too much. And now it is too, too late. But the cost always comes due…” Tric trails off, mulling over how to turn this lapse in judgment to their advantage next time they are in South Tower and owe Damal for Heppa’s tutoring. There is this matter of messages not being properly delivered with full information… Maybe he can negotiate down the cost with a subtle reminder of such shady practices.

Heppa is not willing to condemn Damal over this. “And Alric was set up in an inn, so he had a job and he was safe,” she says, offering the alchemist some defense. “He wasn’t in danger.” Not that Heppa knows of, anyway. Not until she fell out of a tree, and he put his knives and falcon to work.

“When is the last time you saw Damal in person?” Tric asks Lonfar. 

She has not seen him since he left Weldyn, and that was close to twenty years ago. Damal and Lonfar had fled the war and ended up in Weldyn. “Once the war was over and things were being rebuilt, Damal really wasn’t happy here,” Lonfar tells the elves. “He wanted to go back, well, to go at least closer to home—Damal had no interest in actually attempting to cross the Sandy Wastes on his own. But I had met Osian, and I didn’t want to leave. Damal stayed around longer, probably out of a sense of responsibility. Alric was born, and when he grew up enough, we apprenticed him to Damal. It did not last very long.” Those last words are enunciated in a way that communicates they are a vast oversimplification. “At that point, Damal deemed that he had no further responsibilities here. That is when he moved up to South Tower. There has been no opportunity to make the long trek up to see him, as our trades do not lend themselves to that. Damal and I exchange letters several times a year, though, and more often than that when the falcons have other business in our respective towns. That’s more than most Wesnoth families are able to manage.”

Lonfar’s words make sense. The young elves have a degree of freedom that these business owners do not. After all, Alric had to find someone to cover for him just to spend an afternoon with Heppa, never mind taking a journey of a week or two. “Maybe Damal doesn’t realize that he didn’t say anything to you,” Heppa suggests, still trying to find explanations that do not require placing blame.

Lonfar snatches up a strip of paper. “I have no news for you?!” She grabs another. “I have no news for you?!”

“Or… that he hadn’t told you what happened. Or, or… how often do letters get lost? Is that a thing?”

“Aderyn’s pretty good,” Tric says. “I don’t think it’s that often.”

“Aderyn does not come here,” Lonfar says. If the falcon did, then she would have had some consolation over the years that Alric was all right. “Kilkk and Nar do.”

“Really? Oh, right, Aderyn flies eastward, toward our forest and the Estmark Hills…. Wait a minute… Who else is receiving messages to the east?” Tric wonders aloud. Kachen, presumably… maybe some moonshiners. There are scattered villages sprinkled in the Estmark Hills, but Tric does not think those are enough to provide much work to Aderyn. Maybe Alric gave her the cushier route so that she could spend more time in South Tower with him.

“Lonfar, you know Damal better than we do…” Heppa begins.

Alric’s mother shakes her fistful of ribbons. “I wonder how well I do know my own brother. Or how well he knows me, that he would think that this is what I wanted!”