My dear Lessa,
By now you have found this letter and know that I am gone. I write this to you to explain why I cannot stay with you as your husband. What can I say, so that you may understand? Some things are not meant to be, and I, a wanderer, am not meant for the happiness of home and hearth.
You see, I have my dark eyes and hair from my mother, a woman of the low marshes. But my ears and hands and health I have from my father, who was a gold-elf. I know nothing of how they met, and my childhood was as lost and lonely as had I been a half-orc, for all who learned my nature saw me as alien and withdrew their trust.
Oh, I was never treated as a monster like a Peshite might have been, but neither was I invited to schools or councils, or placed in positions of trust. From birth I knew myself an outsider among humans and among elves. Elves love me not for my brashness and short life, and humans love me not for my elven thoughts and feelings, and my ‘unnatural’ health.
We have no orders, my kind; nor any settlements. Sadly, we are incapable of fathering children, and cannot share a lineage. We shall never become a people, nor have a people who will claim us.
You, my dear Lessa, are a bit slower than many, but surely must have seen something, did you not? How my skin gleamed like copper in sunlight? How my gaze was over far horizons, how I heard and interpreted birdsong? How I never dropped so much as a grain of sugar? The deep weariness in my eyes?
I have lived for sixty years, though you think me twenty. I shall live for eighty more, most likely. In all that time, even if you loved me, others will not. I will never give you children, but instead, isolation, for you can never truly know me, nor I you. I would not curse you.
Instead, I shall keep looking for a cause—a reason to live another day. Something to stand for and believe in. Perhaps I shall find it. Perhaps not. Weep for me, my beloved, for I am lost to you forever, and will never return. Know that it was for the best and that in doing so I have spared you. Pray for me.