The letter is written in purple ink on fine parchment in a neat hand.
Hey Pilgrims,
I need some help. I'm not sure where to start, so I'll start, I guess, at the beginning with my childhood, even though it was mostly school and classes. But that turns out to be important.
My childhood would have made a lot more sense at the time if I had known that my parents were trying to prepare me for a career as a wizard, but they didn't actually know anything about magic. So they guessed a lot, and had me take a lot of classes "just in case". Since they didn't really have any idea what I needed to know, they tried to make sure I knew everything. (And because I'm sort of like an information sponge, I went along with it, even though it meant I didn't have a lot of time to myself.)
They did make sure I learned a lot. They gave me a solid background in math and the sciences (which I didn't mind -- I like math and science), and threw in a bunch of weird stuff. Latin didn't surprise me as it's kind of fashionable again, but ancient Greek and Hebrew (and we're not even Jewish!)? And while dance didn't surprise me either (lots of girls my age took dance), Ti-Kwan-Do and Yoga were kind of out there. Not to mention a ton of philosophy and comparative religion. And to round off the educational weirdness, they also made me take public speaking and calligraphy.
The really weird thing about all this, is when, on my eighteenth birthday, the Arch-Wizard Gargalmash showed up to claim me as his apprentice as had been prophesized, most of it turned out to be at least sort of useful. This is a good thing, since I then spent the next three years of my life in Tower of the Winds, learning magecraft, sorcery, witchcraft and wizardry (and yes, they are all different things).
However, what I didn't expect was that when I completed my studies, I would be expected to save the worlds. I really don't think I'm ready for that, but Gargalmash does, and he's kind of hard to argue with. He just keeps babbling about this prophesy, but for all the magic I've studied, I don't really believe in prophesies -- among other things, they violate both the doctrine of free will and quantum mechanics. Maybe you guys can argue some sense into that thick head of his? Or at least explain this prophesy business to me in a way I can take halfway seriously?