The Second Writing
Chapter 10 of 7 Gifts & 7 Letters
The rooms at the Architect's Quarter Inn were modest by Varlind standards, but luxurious compared to Elias's cottage in Alden. He entered his chamber as evening fell, still shaken by the encounter with Darian at the Guild. The look of recognition, surprise, and something like guilt that had flashed across his former friend's face haunted him. They had arranged to meet properly the following day—Darian had meetings he couldn't postpone—but the brief exchange had been enough to unsettle years of carefully constructed resentment.
"Elias of Alden," Darian had said, his voice carrying the refined accent of Varlind's elite quarters now. "I never thought to see you here." There had been an awkward moment when neither knew whether to embrace as old friends or shake hands as polite acquaintances. They had settled for the latter, the brief contact between their palms like a spark jumping across a long-disconnected circuit.
"Tomorrow," Darian had promised, glancing at the apprentices gathering for his morning instruction. "The southern tower site, midday. We have much to discuss." The unspoken decade hung between them like an invisible wall, too substantial to ignore, too delicate to acknowledge directly.
Now, Elias moved to the window, watching as lamplighters moved through the streets below, their long poles touching wicks that bloomed into islands of warm light. The buildings of Varlind transformed as darkness fell, windows glowing like constellations against the stone. Above, the sky showed its strange division—the familiar gray fading into a circle of deepening blue that had followed him from Lucinda's lighthouse, expanding slowly but steadily.
"What do I say to someone I've blamed for succeeding where I surrendered?" he asked the empty room, the wooden box a reassuring weight against his side.
The inn provided a simple meal, delivered to his door by a quiet servant who didn't question why a stonecutter from a distant village would stay in a district usually reserved for visiting guild members. Elias ate mechanically, his attention focused inward on the task that awaited him.
When the last crumb was gone, he could delay no longer. Elias cleared the table and placed the wooden box at its center, opening the brass latch with deliberate care. Inside, the golden feather pen gleamed with expectation. The second parchment had begun to transform, faint architectural lines appearing across its surface like a watermark—towers and arches that echoed Darian's distinctive style. The six remaining parchments lay blank and patient, the six empty pouches waiting to receive gifts not yet conceived.
Elias lifted the golden pen, feeling its now-familiar warmth against his fingers, and placed the transforming parchment before him.
"Dear Darian," he began in his mind, but the pen remained stubbornly dry against the parchment.
Three hours later, Elias paced the perimeter of his room, frustration rising like a tide. The parchment remained unmarked despite countless attempts. The golden pen refused to transcribe politeness or formality, waiting for something deeper, more genuine.
"I should be grateful for your success," he had tried. Nothing.
"Thank you for showing what ambition can achieve." Still nothing.
"I appreciate your dedication to your craft." Not a mark.
The pen grew cold in his hand, rejecting each carefully constructed sentence that concealed more than it revealed. Outside, the sounds of the city had quieted to the occasional footsteps of night watchmen and distant laughter from taverns where architects and apprentices gathered to debate design principles over spiced wine. The contrast with Alden's complete silence after sunset struck Elias deeply—this was a city that never fully slept, where ideas continued to flow even in darkness.
With each failed attempt, memories surfaced—sharp-edged and bright as newly cut stone. Two boys arguing over whose miniature aqueduct would carry water farther. Teenagers competing for Mestra Lucinda's rare praise, each project more ambitious than the last. The bitter words exchanged when Darian announced his acceptance to the Guild—Elias's accusations of abandonment, Darian's cutting response about "comfortable mediocrity."
But other memories emerged too, previously buried beneath resentment. The way Darian had stayed up all night helping Elias rebuild a model destroyed by careless village boys. How he had shared books acquired from traveling merchants, insisting they study architectural principles together. The honesty that could be brutal but always pushed Elias toward excellence.
One particular memory surfaced with unexpected clarity: the day Elias had proudly revealed his design for improving the village water distribution system. While others had offered vague praise, Darian had studied it in silence before pointing out a fundamental flaw in the elevation calculations. "It won't work," he'd said simply. "Water doesn't flow uphill because we wish it to." The criticism had stung, but Elias had recalculated, redesigned, and created something genuinely functional rather than merely impressive-looking.
"It's not that I can't find gratitude," Elias realized, speaking aloud to the wooden box. "It's that I don't want to acknowledge how much I owe him."
The admission hung in the air, more honest than anything he had attempted to write. Darian's success had been easier to resent than to recognize as the road Elias himself might have traveled had he not surrendered to the comfortable grayness of Alden.
What truly stung wasn't that Darian had left, but that he had been right to go.
Near midnight, exhausted from emotional excavation, Elias sat at the table once more. The lamp burned low, casting long shadows across the room. The wooden box glowed softly with internal light, the golden pen waiting in his hand.
This time, he closed his eyes and sought not the gratitude he thought he should feel, but the truth beneath years of defensive resentment. He thought of the Alden model in the Guild hall, the lovingly reimagined village that Darian had created as a personal project with no commission or recognition expected. He recalled the Well of Beginnings, carefully reproduced in Darian's tower design, a touch of home carried into his new world.
"I am grateful for your excellence," he began, and felt the pen respond immediately, gliding across the parchment with a liquid ease that surprised him. Golden ink flowed as he continued:
"You never settled for 'good enough' when greatness remained possible. When my designs were functional, yours were transcendent. When I solved problems, you revealed possibilities. Your excellence was both challenge and invitation—a horizon that kept moving as I approached, ensuring I never stopped growing. Though I came to resent the standard you set, I now recognize it as the gift it was: a constant call to my better self."
The words surprised him, emerging not from calculation but from a truth he had long denied. Once begun, the letter flowed more easily, the golden ink forming precise lines that glowed with inner light. The resistance that had blocked him for hours dissolved, replaced by a current of recognition that carried his hand across the page.
"I am grateful for your honesty. Where others praised from kindness, you critiqued from respect. You saw flaws in my work not as failures but as opportunities, worthy of being named rather than politely ignored. Your honesty stung, yes, but only because it pierced illusions I cherished. You believed enough in my potential to risk my comfort, offering the rare gift of truth uncensored by fear or false courtesy."
The pattern on the parchment deepened as he wrote, architectural elements becoming more defined—towers, archways, and bridges interlacing around his words like a visual harmony to their meaning. A miniature version of Darian's tower took shape in the parchment's corner, complete with the Well of Beginnings at its heart.
"I am grateful for your determination. While I dreamed, you built. While I discussed, you created. Your relentless pursuit showed me that vision without action remains forever unrealized. When obstacles arose, you neither surrendered nor raged, but simply found another approach, demonstrating that persistence often matters more than initial brilliance. Even in your departure, which I once called abandonment, you showed the courage to align your life with your deepest purpose, regardless of others' expectations."
As Elias paused, considering the three aspects of gratitude now expressed, the pen tugged gently in his hand—the familiar signal that the fourth part remained, the recognition of these qualities within himself. This had emerged naturally with Lucinda, but with Darian, resistance rose once more.
Could he truly claim these qualities—excellence, honesty, determination—when his life in Alden had become defined by their absence?
The pen waited, patient but expectant, the golden ink still wet upon the page. Elias closed his eyes, searching for truth rather than self-judgment, and found to his surprise that the qualities he admired in Darian had never truly left him—they had simply been buried, like veins of precious metal within common stone, waiting to be rediscovered.
"In recognizing these gifts in you," he wrote, the pen moving with renewed purpose, "I begin to reclaim them within myself. My pursuit of excellence lies dormant, not dead. My honesty turned inward, revealing the cost of safe choices. My determination, redirected but not destroyed, has sustained me through gray years. These qualities shaped our rivalry into something that enlarged rather than diminished us both. In gratitude for who you became, I find the courage to recall who I am."
As the final words formed on the parchment, dawn's first light slipped through the window, catching the golden ink and setting it ablaze with brilliance. The pattern had fully emerged now—an intricate architectural drawing that framed his words, suggesting not just buildings but possibilities, connections, futures previously unimagined.
The letter to Darian was complete.
Elias carefully returned it to the wooden box, noticing that the silver compass now pointed with absolute precision toward the construction site where he would find his former rival later that morning. The small circle of blue above Varlind had deepened overnight, the transition between color and grayness less defined, as if the boundary itself recognized that some divisions exist more in perception than reality.
He gathered his few belongings, preparing for the day ahead. The letter was written, the gift remained to be created, and somewhere in this city of towers and ambition, a former friend awaited a conversation suspended for ten years.
For the first time since arriving in Varlind, Elias felt not intimidation but anticipation. The weight of the wooden box against his side had transformed from burden to promise—a reminder that bridges long collapsed could still be rebuilt, stone by patient stone. 🦉