Just beyond the docks, where the water laps against rocks smoothed by storm and sea, a small shadow sits, a larger one protects. The light is failing, as the sun stains the western sky in all the shades of fire, sending ripple dancing across the bay. Eastwards the horizon is a deep azure, and the bravest stars, low to that line dare peek out, heralding the oncoming night.

Beside her, a crystal flask.

And upon a parchment she scratches, blocky letters of black ink upon faded yellow. Her brow is furrowed, each on painstakingly and slowly scribbled.

Echoes of schooling never gotten.

Trying not to let soft droplets stain and smear the drying ink.

Dear ...

I never knew your name. And I suspect I never shall, for the bindings of What-Must-Be and How-Things-Are seem to be chains of steel, a new link added with the closing of each day. And yet I cannot help but to think back to that evening, upon the stones deep beneath Blackrock Spire, when I found you within those dangerous halls.

A raft of stone upon a sea of fire.

Are we all adrift upon such rafts, be they of our own making or defined by others for us?

Are we all alone upon these rafts, our path to the true akin to those cloistered within a monastery and that one's grace a solitary study? That it is a personal matter, an inward turned gaze, and one's integrity to ones self, one's cloister ... and against fire and shadow, against that sea of darkness, it is alone there that one can stand against the storms?

Or are we all upon one sea, do we all share one larger raft, in which our path to the true and kind is not just a matter of monastic retreat, but only possible ... only meaningful ... as we share that path with those about us - and that we cannot be rightly weathering the storms fate sends against us unless we bring with us those who share this common experience.

Be they dwarf or human ... paladin or mage ...

... Alliance or Horde ...

Or maybe, even a warlock.

How can I teach my best friend about compassion,

When I can't remember what it feels like anymore myself?

The young warlock looks down upon her writing, considering her words, and it is dark before she swallows once, swallows once and carefully rolls it up, tight. Into the flask it is carefully slipped.

And then corked so tight.

Standing she tries, and with all her little strength, she tosses the flask into the dark sea's currents.

A message in a bottle.

I have always found the Mahayana teachings very meaningful.

And why, perhaps, there are some things I may never be able to understand.

And why it was not any In-Character conflicts that cut so deep, that brought silence to the conversations between a voidwalker and his warlock. It was the harassment, and vehnement condemnations Out-of-Character.

I have seen my thoughts and beliefs batted about, misrepresented, accusations made, confused and broad statements declared that do not seem to match the actual, in-character beliefs muddled with that of out-of-character. To have one's entire investigations of a character's place discounted as simply a "hackneyed background" ... to be called by those high in the clique of Earthen Ring roleplay, well, something that Nellisynthia would ever say to anyone. And against such an environment, how does one speak up without simply feeding the cycle of anger and bitter batterings upon positions set firm behind a redoubt of rhetoric?

I don't want that.

How can I now believe that any relflection about the conditions of the world in which Nellisynthia lives, which is the core of what Conversations with Mezzy is all about, will not simply be answered with the same disdain and vehemence.

And that I want even less.