Daily writing prompt

Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

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Letter to the Centenarian Mage

Archmage Elindra Nightshade sat at her writing desk, quill poised above parchment burnished gold by candlelight. Outside, wind carried whispers through ancient oaks that had watched her grow from apprentice to legend. The enchanted clock on her shelf, its mechanisms fused with time magic, counted seconds that had long since lost their tyranny over her days.

With ink distilled from moonflowers and memories, she began to write:

To the Vessel of Myself a Century Hence,

I write these words on the eve of my seventieth year, as autumn paints the Whispering Woods in flame and amber. The mirror shows me a face mapped with lines earned through decades of spell-casting—each crease around my eyes a testament to magic channeled, each silver strand in my midnight hair marking wisdom purchased at considerable cost.

Do you remember this night? The scent of beeswax candles and storm-promises on the wind? The weight of the Grand Grimoire pressing against your thoughts even from its locked chest across the room? Perhaps time has blurred these trivial moments into obscurity, or perhaps they remain as sharp as the obsidian dagger that never leaves your sleeve.

What marvels you must have witnessed in the intervening decades. Has the Prism Tower finally pierced the veil between realms? Did the Seventh Conjunction reshape magic as the ancient texts foretold? I wonder if you still carry our staff—if the crystal atop it still pulses with the same captured starlight, or if you’ve replaced it with something beyond my current comprehension.

I imagine your hands now—our hands—transformed by another thirty years of channeling elemental forces. Do they tremble with power barely contained, or have you mastered the perfect stillness that eluded me through seven decades of study? Are there new scars to accompany the burn mark across our left palm from that first, disastrous attempt at calling fire?

What of our companions? Does Thorne’s grandson still serve as your apprentice, or has he forged his own path in the Arcane Collegium? And Whisper, our familiar—has she outlived even the extended years granted to magical creatures, or did you find another shadow-cat to pad silently through your chambers?

There are questions I hesitate to commit to parchment. Questions about choices looming before me that will shape the woman you’ve become. The Council has offered the Seat of High Protection—a position that would bind us to the realm’s defense until death. The nomadic Fire Sages have extended invitation to join their wandering studies. And always, the pull of the Forgotten Library beneath the Crystalmere Mountains beckons with its dangerous knowledge.

By the time you unfold this letter, these monumental decisions will have crystallized into mere footnotes in your long history. The paths untaken will have faded to ghostly possibilities, known only through occasional dreams that visit on midwinter nights.

I wonder most about your heart. Has time tempered or hardened it? Do you still feel the weight of each failed protection ward as keenly as I do? Does the memory of the village we couldn’t save from the Crimson Plague still visit you in quiet moments? Or have you finally learned what our mentor tried to teach us about the limits of magical responsibility?

There’s comfort in knowing you exist—that somehow our body has weathered a century of magical exertion, political intrigue, and the constant drain of power that flows through mortal vessels. Whatever toll it extracted, whatever bargains you struck with time and fate, you persisted.

Perhaps that’s what I truly wish to know: Was it worth it? The sacrificed normalcy, the relationships abbreviated by our devotion to arcane mysteries, the nights spent unraveling magical conundrums while others celebrated simple joys? When you look back across a hundred years of mystical pursuit, does satisfaction outweigh regret?

I cast this letter forward through years yet unlived, a spell of words rather than magical formulae. May it find you surrounded by discoveries that justified every sacrifice, memories that outshine disappointments, and perhaps—though I scarcely dare hope—companions who understood the woman behind the magic.

With curiosity that spans decades,

Elindra Nightshade Archmage of the Western Realms (Your younger self, still becoming)

P.S. If you’ve finally deciphered the locked section of the Cobalt Scrolls, I’d appreciate you sending the solution back through time. Some paradoxes are worth risking for knowledge that elusive.

As the ink dried, Elindra sealed the letter with wax infused with her own blood—a simple time-anchoring spell that would preserve the parchment until the exact day of her centennial. Whether future-self would find amusement, wisdom, or melancholy in these musings remained for time to reveal.

Outside, the first drops of autumn rain began to tap against leaded windows, nature’s own message from present to future, delivered one moment at a time.

If you could write a letter to your future self, what question would you ask—and do you think you’d want to know the answer?

If you like this little story please consider subscribing to my blog so that you don’t miss any new ones. Also you can check out other stories that I have written and are currently writing like Forbidden Bond, a tale about a human falling in love with a Half goblin while being hunted down by fallen angels and evil nobles. Or you can check out Chronicles of the Giantess and follow Valorie the Giantess as she adventures across the land of Calladan. Please feel free to leave me a comment. I would love to know what you think about any of the stories.