Some nights my thoughts stray from tomes and chronicles back to the road: to the long years wandering with the exiled prince and princess, Etharon and Isoli K’far; with our friend Alreni; my wife Sartrel at my side; and with the rest of the original Company of the White Wing whose faces I can still summon more sharply than yesterday’s sunrise. Now word reaches me that the King of Westgate, Etharon’s own brother, has loosed assassins to finish what exile did not. I must reach him in time. I cannot lose another friend well before their natural hour.
Why do the gods insist on punishing me so with so long a life as to witness the deaths of so many friends?
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
