Danil Lymeran
Probably the closest friend Mikhail had at home, of the Durwyn house that makes the lutes, and the only one of them still writing
Danil is a Peren of the Lymeran house of Durwyn, son of the artisan who kept its bench, where the work was wood-bodied instruments and lyres before anything else. He is a little older than Mikhail, he knew him at the university in that city, and he was probably the closest friend Mikhail had at home.
What he taught him was the other half of the place. Danil showed him the less savory parts of Durwyn and of the campus they studied on, and the two of them ran drugs together, Danil a great deal more at home in the work than Mikhail ever was. He also helped Mikhail through the stretch when things there were hardest. He is good with his hands, he has a better hand for writing than anyone Mikhail has since met, and he is the correspondent Mikhail still has out of that city.
What Mikhail asked of him once he had left was research. Aldo had taken midnight milk out of a woodland cache without knowing what it was, and Mikhail wrote east to find out what had been done to him. Danil’s answer came back a long letter. Midnight milk is a powerful hallucinogen, badly habit-forming, illegal in Peredhel, and taken by students to cram: a user may black out or may trip wide awake, and comes out of it drained, though a trip that goes well leaves the mind rested as a night’s sleep would. Falling into the habit of it takes a serious lapse of will rather than one bad evening. What Danil wanted Mikhail to understand was the other thing, the soured batch. Sour milk puts a man down for hours and is lived through inside as a whole lifetime, decades of it, and those who wake from it are changed. A rare few come out with a skill or a language they never learned. Most come out ruined. The letter was written to be reassuring about Aldo and read as though its author were making light of it, and the concern underneath was not well hidden.
The second thing came unasked, in a package: a masterwork lute off his own family’s bench, years of work, with a note apologizing for having missed a birthday by some months. Mikhail put a hand on his father’s old lute and told his mother it would get to retire soon. The pendant was in a hidden compartment of the case it traveled in, and whether Danil knew it was there was never established.