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Frieren’s letter, when it finally comes, arrives far earlier than expected.
It’s not much to write home about. Just a page or so of silly anecdotes and a few simple spells she’s looking forward to showing him soon. Heiter tucks it into the drawer besides the others with a rueful smile; and two letters over fifty years becomes three over fifty-seven.
No, he thinks, as he sketches out his own reply, though she left no return address, it’s still not much to write home about; but it’s something.
The next letter he receives comes exactly on time; but, then again, Eisen’s always been precise like that.
She wrote, says the dwarf; and, she’s trying, is what Heiter reads, though he doesn’t need the reminder. Because Frieren always tries, always loves, in her own way and in her own time; and no one knew that better than the bicentenarian, Eisen.
Besides Himmel, of course, but that man was a saint. Heiter’s got the Hero’s own elf-letters stashed in a box in the attic from when he’d settled his dear friend’s estate. She’d written him four times to Heiter’s two; and the old priest wasn’t surprised in the least.
The only one who couldn’t see what those two meant to each other had been Frieren, herself.
So when Eisen brings up the old legends, Heiter is quick to agree.
* * *
The archives of the Holy City are a bust.
Frieren had mentioned once, in her usual melancholic way, how the traces of Flamme, the woman, grew fainter every decade while her legend grew. Heiter had not quite understood then, but he thinks he gets it now after the countless dead ends he’s run into.
Eisen’s doing marginally better out in the towns and cities he still has strength enough to reach. But the dwarf is no scholar and human memory is short, so the improvement is barely noticeable.
It’s on a whim, really, that Heiter writes the letter. A last ditch effort for a ten-year search gone cold. Flamme was the founder of humanity’s magic, after all. If the rumors were true, the head of the Continental Magic Association was bound to know something.
Heiter doesn’t expect a reply. Not in what little was left of his lifetime, at least.
Much less in two years.
“So,” says the strange elf sitting in the middle of his yard picking idly at the grass, “you are Heiter of the Hero’s Party.”
“I am,” he agrees politely, as if elves suddenly appearing out of thin air was an everyday occurrence. “And you must be Serie, the Living Grimoire. Though,” he pauses, “I didn’t expect a visit.”
“I was bored,” comes the reply in the same bland tone Frieren had used when she’d shoved a bowl of shaved ice and syrup in each of their hands during their reunion. Heiter wonders if it’s an elven thing.
“Voll Basin,” she adds after a moment. “That girl was always stupidly sentimental, and that apprentice of hers is no different. Voll Basin is full of ghosts. If there’s anything left, it’d be there.”
Then she’s gone and all that’s left in her wake is a clump of three flowers that hadn’t been there before.
* * *
Fern finds the letters in a drawer in the study.
Well, a drawer and a couple boxes, really. There’s a lot; mostly from Eisen and also from Himmel. There’s only five from Frieren, though. It makes her kind of sad.
She finds the elf in the attic, staring into a small box, full of knickknacks and paper, with a quiet look on her face.
“I found these downstairs,” says Fern quietly. “I think he’d have wanted you to have them.”
“So he kept them,” says Frieren, as she tucks them carefully into the box. “That old fool.”
(Fern finds the box in the elf’s suitcase months later and smiles.)