A wise man once told Urgbnuk that three things even the greatest wizards could never conjure from thin air, in their castles far away: Enough gold to soothe a guilty soul, enough time to do all one wants, and true love.

Urgbnuk saw the wise man rutting with a half-dozen of the girls who stride the docks, though, and the man seemed happy enough, all wide-eyed and beaming and lost to the fact that he wasn't doing a sorceress on a stuffed unicorn, but bending the dock lasses over a barrel. Perhaps, Urgbnuk reckons, that's a sort of magic all its own, the spell that lets you forget the words can't, or shouldn't, or oughtn't in the warm glow of another's eyes.

But however much Urgbnuk tries, Urgbnuk can never quite find that golden light in the gaze of someone else. Urgbnuk has tried poetry, fit to make the angels themselves weep and glide to earth on silver wings, bowing down to the wind that could carry such words to them. Verses of majesty and power, verse that sent the kings beneath the mountains to bended knee at the memory of sunlight they conjured. Verses of love and longing, too, Urgbnuk's deepest soul and innermost dreams coalesced around the pearl of Urgbnuk's odd cultural quirk of speech. Urgnuk fancies it as a mark of the depths of his visions, the power of his anguish, that even his words cannot help but turn outwards and deny him a pronoun of his own.

Never mind that Galchak the fishmonger's apprentice has the same quirk of speech. It may be a troll thing, but Urgbnuk believes in transcending the ugly power of stereotypes.

Yet when Urgbnuk goes courting, the instant elven maidens and winsome tavern girls turn an eye to his stony countenance, to the trollish bulk that cracks the legs of chairs beneath him like straw under a stone, even to the rakishly-styled moss atop his head, he only sees longing wither and crumble in their eyes. Urgbnuk has seen many things in his young centuries thus far - the halls of Khossos glowing in the night, pixies moving in great, glittering waves off the shoulder of the Candemar Pass. Yet all this beauty, beauty he sees reflected in the smile of a woman's eyes, crumbles and falls away, like dust in the wind.

Urgbnuk figures he is at, racial epithets not withstanding, rock bottom.

Urgbnuk has decided to let this missive sparkle briefly in the scrap of paper on a town notice board, in between short-sighted enticements to cull the kobold population and tales of wizards' prizes.

Urgbnuk can only hope.