Thomelisa Taken, Pt XXIX

The following months were tedious beyond telling, so I will not try.  I will say only that it is exhausting to keep alternating between hope and despair constantly for hours, days, week, and months on end.  Speaking to creature after creature, with nothing to show for it except a growing appreciation for how terribly dull such creatures are.  I gradually began to move in an outward spiral, tracing and retracing the same terrain over and over again, the same conversations over and over again.  I began to wonder if I shouldn’t craft a spell that would ask the questions for me, and imbue various insects with it, let them fly about the countryside on my behalf… but even at my most desperate, I couldn’t deny the many, many ways that could go wrong.

The only upside to this time is that my power, while being steadily drained to fuel the spell of greater understanding, did manage to store up a bit of a reserve.  I would never again reach the level of power I’d enjoyed during my youth (not until and unless I ended the spell) but at least I could craft small spells without killing myself, if the time came.

It was almost exactly a year from the last time I’d seen my daughter that I at last heard a rumor of her- no more than a handful of days past the anniversary, certainly.  A small flock of swallows- the vanguard of their kind, if you will- chose an old, lightning blasted stump as their temporary nesting site, one stop of many during their leisurely migration.  I was not thrilled about talking to the birds- the small ones inevitably proved to be a strange mix of cunning and deeply stupid, and always flighty about speaking to a witch.  Ones that flocked in such large groups, as swallows do, also had a tendency to forget which one you were speaking to- they seemed to be of the opinion that to talk to one was to talk to all, and as long as someone answered you, it didn’t matter if it was the one one you had questioned.  It may have been less irritating if I hadn’t been asking about their individual experiences.

But irritating as it was, I was more stubborn than they, and in the end one of them said that while she had not, herself, seen anyone matching Elisa’s description, she’d overheard another flock-mate repeating the story of a tiny girl who had brought a fallen swallow back to life.