Gerard,

 

            As I alluded to in my last letter, my father finally sent me to infiltrate Lady Gahgah’s carnival.  He must have grown weary of all the complaints his office has been receiving, since last year’s Carver’s day.  He wanted me to find out if he would have any legitimate grounds to detain her the next time she sets foot in Melinir.  I was able to track them down on the road south of Telar, deep in the Gauntlin Forest.  As a happy coincidence, I found that my old friend Aarun, the harper and his wife, Mithann, a former priestess of Pelor were already traveling with them.

 

We made camp on the Northern outskirts of Torlynn and by the time I woke the next morning, the Carnival was in full swing in the town square.  When we pulled up stakes three days later, a grumpy dwarf by the name of Baerick had joined the caravan, but he was not the only new addition to camp.  I was surprised to see Gemi darting among the jostling wagons as I understood he was supposed to be in Valet’s care at the Temple. 

 

As it  turns out, Gemi is the son of Lady Gahgah’s  daughter-in-law, Hedrun, one of the carnival’s infamous dancing girls, and yes, that also makes him Lady Gahgah’s grandson!  

 

 

When Hedrun found out that her son was training to be a Paladin of Kord , she was furious and, as she put it, dragged the boy away from those ruffians’ clutches (as you may have guessed there’s a lot more to the story but I will fill you in when I can see you in person).   

 

As I suspected she might, Gahgah decided to give Melinir a wide berth and so we didn’t stop again until we reached the town of Tybalt in the Bone Hills.

 

A few days later Gemi turned up missing.

 

I will leave it up to you whether or not to tell Pax (I know how she feels about Gemi) and the others other’s about this.  If you can get them to come with you, so much the better.  Hopefully the boy will turn up alive and we will feel foolish for worrying, but I have a bad feeling about this.

 

I will be leaving the caravan today and heading home to Melinir.  Please meet me there if you can.

 

                                                            Love

                                                                        Menolly

Wixerand Sapherage

 

I was born in the sapphire mines outside of Torlynn.  My mother died giving birth to me, so I have been obsessed with death all my life.  My father resented me for taking the only woman he ever loved from him, and when I was 10, he sold me as a slave to the Lord Gunrink.  Gunrink put me to work on his ship under his personal Captain, Yasar Falkin.

 

Captain Falkin, who took me under his wing and taught me the art of ship building, had a daughter the same age as me named Yesha, and I fell in love with her.  The captain however had many rich suitors for her hand and though I was eventually able to buy my freedom using my ship building skills, I had little to offer as dowry for Yesha.

 

One day I found myself in the city of Melinir and I came upon a goblin who said he was a fortune teller.  His name was Numbilung and he gave me the runt of a liter of pigs.  He told me to take the pig up into the mountains above the city and have it drink from a certain spring there.

 

“Everyday the pig will get bigger and when it is grown you will take it back to Yesha’s father and claim her hand.  If this comes to pass you must come back and pay me a fee for helping you.  If you fail to do so I shall put a curse on your marriage.”

 

I did as the goblin told me and took the pig up the mountain everyday and sure enough it began to grow.  Every morning I could not help but marvel at the majestic Temple of Kord that stood out on the mountainside, but something else had caught my eye as well.  Not far from the spring where I took the pig to drink was a place the monks of the Temple called the Whispering Cave.  On the day the pig had reached its full adult girth, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to explore the cave.

 

With the pig following dutifully behind me, I went deeper into the cave until I came to a chamber with a barren tree standing at its center.  A man who I would soon realize was a monk stood under the tree beckoning me.

 

“You have found the entrance to the Temple of Olu.”  He said.  “You have carried the burden of your mother’s death from the moment of your birth.  You hate yourself perhaps even more than your father ever could.  Olu can help you ease these burdens if you follow his ways.”

 

For some reason any urgency I felt about taking the pig back to claim Yesha had evaporated and I took the monk’s offer.  For the next ten years I studied to become a Paladin of Olu.

 

After my Paladin initiation ceremony I returned to the mountains above Melinir with the pig I had come to call Saphire by my side and realized that time had passed differently outside the Whispering Cave.  Only five years had passed here. 

 

I returned to Numbilung’s shop and the goblin told me that Yesha had never married.  Brutus Colran, a drow was Captain Falkin’s First Mate, and he had mutinied and killed the Captain after he was refused Yesha’s hand.  Far from punishing him, Lord Gunrink had promoted Colran to Captain.  Yesha had fled the city and I later found out she had tried to follow me into the Whispering Cave.  She was looking for me but instead she had found a desolate land dominated by Vampire named Gulthius she also end up thousands of years in the past.

 

With the help of Olu I entered the Wispering Cave and was able to find her location but discovered that she had been trapped in a huge spire, a victim of Gulthius.  I rallied the villager’s around the spire in the name of Olu and we entered the spire and defaced all of Gulthius’ sigils with symbol of Olu.

 

Later a band of adventurer’s calling themselves Thrusting Justice appeared and ultimately vanquish Gulthius and rescued Yesha; but she soon succumbed to her vampire side and was killed as well. 

 

I returned to Torlynn and discovered that the Lord Gunrick had been rescued by those very same adventurers’s.  Gunrink had been usurped for ten years by a man   named Redsith.

 

I have recently discovered that Redsith has fled to the Western Continent.  I have pursued him there and find myself in a city dominated by elves.  I shall track down Redsith and kill him for Yesha! 

 

 

I have very little to say about Mad Love,
except to say that I enjoyed it and so did Roger Ebert. Here’s a link to

what he had to say about the film.

More Tomorrow

To protect my backlog my Movie Journey will continue tomorrow.

Sorry guys, I took a long weekend

In the bonus materials of ET the Extra
Terrestrial I learned that the story is semi autobiographical. No Stephen
Spielberg never found a little alien in his back yard but when his parents
divorced when he was a boy he wished he had to help him through the situation.

More Tomorrow

Grand Canyon
was Jeremy Sisto’s first feature. In Suicide Kings he plays a medical student
who helps his friends kidnap a mobster in the hopes that he will help find the
sister of one of the group, who has also been kidnapped. Christopher Walken
plays the mobster and as usual, he steals the movie. It would be interesting to
see this as a stage play, since most of the movie takes place in one location.

More Tomorrow

I enjoyed
Grand Canyon
but it has a graphic operating room scene that is not for the squeamish. The
movie asks some interesting questions about modern life but sometimes goes
overboard in proving its theme.

More Tomorrow