There was a time when Eirlys had fiercely wanted children.

  Not Sael. He'd been ambivalent about the whole thing, the way he was ambivalent about most things that involved other people in an ongoing, legally binding capacity. But Eirlys had wanted them; wanted them with the sort of quiet, persistent longing that made her pause whenever they passed families in the market, or linger at shop windows that sold tiny shoes and wooden toys.

  So Sael had wanted them too.

  That was how marriage worked, he'd discovered. One person's deep desire became the other person's project.

  The problem revealed itself early. Three years into their marriage, after enough failed attempts that even Sael—who could be remarkably oblivious about certain things—noticed something was wrong. A healer in Gatsby confirmed it with a gentle professionalism that somehow made the news worse.

  Eirlys couldn't have children.

  Some structural issue. Congenital. The healer had used a lot of technical terms that Sael understood perfectly and Eirlys had nodded along to without really hearing. She'd smiled at the healer, thanked him for his time, paid the fee, and walked out of his chambers with her spine straight and her hands steady.

  She'd cried for three days after that.

  Sael had held her and felt utterly useless. It wasn't the first time. His mother and master had both died when he was nineteen. The same day, actually, which had been... a tough day, for lack of a better word. There weren't really adequate words for watching the two people who'd raised you bleed out from wounds your novice healing magic couldn't close fast enough. He hadn't even had time to say goodbye; one of the Corrupted One's generals had been chasing him, and staying meant dying alongside them.

  But this was different. By now he'd helped defeat the Corrupted One. Sealed the greatest threat the world had ever known. He'd fought dragons. Collapsed mountains. Sealed rifts in the fabric of space itself. He could reshape reality with sufficient preparation and intent. But he couldn't fix this.

  So he learned healing.

  He read every medical text he could find. Consulted with healing mages across the world. Took apart the theoretical frameworks of restoration magic and rebuilt them from first principles. He learned anatomy, proper anatomy, not just the "here's where to stab things" knowledge that adventuring provided. Studied the intricate systems that made bodies work, the delicate balances that kept them alive.

  It was this research, actually, that pushed him toward the [Archmage] class. The deeper he went into healing magic, the more he understood about the fundamental nature of magic itself. How it interacted with living tissue. How intent shaped reality. How the borders between schools of magic were more artificial than anyone admitted.

  He became one of the greatest healers the world had ever known.

  But, by the time he'd mastered it—by the time he understood the mortal body well enough to repair what nature had broken—Eirlys was forty-three years old.

  They never spoke about it again.

  This wasn't, Sael should clarify, a tragedy.

  It was sad. Certainly. But sadness and tragedy were different things, and he'd never liked it when people conflated the two. Tragedy implied something had been taken from them. That they'd been robbed of some fundamental happiness they were owed.

  But they hadn't been owed anything.

  They'd wanted children. They did not have them. So they'd adjusted and built a life anyway. A good life, by most reasonable metrics. They often traveled. Eirlys painted. Sael researched increasingly esoteric magical phenomena and helped rebuild civilizations who had lost so much in the last era. They argued about supper plans and whether the garden needed weeding and whose turn it was to deal with the merchant who kept trying to sell them "authentic" dragon scales that were obviously painted chicken bones.

  It had been enough.

  And besides, Sael had a godson.

  Jace. Son of Bran, who'd been Sael's closest friend since before either of them could properly grow a beard. Bran had asked him, casually over drinks one evening when Jace was barely a year old, if Sael would stand as godfather to his boy.

  "Of course," Sael had said, because what else was he supposed to say?

  He'd meant it as a formality. A ceremonial title. The type of thing that involved showing up to birthdays with age-appropriate gifts and nodding approvingly at the child's achievements from a comfortable distance.

  Bran had lived to be 102 years old and had spent some of those years making sure Sael couldn't treat the godfather role as ceremonial even if he'd wanted to. Which, after the first few years of little Jace following him around asking questions about magic, Sael hadn't particularly wanted to anyway.

  Eirlys had taken to the boy immediately. She'd taught Jace to read, to paint, to argue his point without being an ass about it. Sael had taught him magic. How to form a proper spell matrix. How to channel mana without burning himself out. How to think three steps ahead and always have an escape route.

  The boy had grown into a good man. Better than he had any right to be, considering his primary role models were a grumpy duke who solved most problems with a sword, a hermit mage, and a woman whose idea of conflict resolution was "talk it out until everyone's too exhausted to keep fighting."

  He'd married at twenty-three. A woman named Eleanor who'd looked at Sael exactly once and correctly identified him as someone who needed very specific instructions for social situations. She'd handed him a list of appropriate topics for small talk at the wedding and told him not to deviate from it.

  He'd appreciated that.

  They'd had a daughter. Margaret.

  He'd called her Little Margaret to distinguish her from Bran's mother, who'd been called Margaret and who'd died before Sael had ever met her. The name had stuck. Even after she'd grown taller than Eirlys, even after she'd insisted she was "not little anymore, Grandpa Sael," she'd still been Little Margaret to him.

  Jace had decided to become an adventurer.

  Sael had tried to talk him out of it. Bran had tried to talk him out of it. Even Eleanor had tried, though she'd known it was futile from the start. The boy had his father's stubbornness and Sael's curiosity, which was apparently a fatal combination when it came to staying safely at home.

  He'd died at thirty-seven. Struck in the chest by a monster boar in the eastern territories. Dead on the spot.

  Bran had outlived his own son by many years. Little Margaret had been fourteen when her father died.

  She'd wanted to be an adventurer too.

  Sael had tried to talk her out of it. Not because he disapproved—he'd been an adventurer himself, so that would have been hypocritical—but because he knew what it cost. What it had cost Jace and what it would cost her.

  She'd gone anyway.

  Twenty years old, bright-eyed and restless, off to the Fey realm with a party of similarly optimistic young people who thought preparation and enthusiasm were the same thing.

  He'd warned her it was dangerous and she'd laughed and told him not to worry so much. Six months later, news had reached him in the far north. Little Margaret was dead. The whole party, lost in the Fey realm. No bodies recovered.

  Sael had received the message while he was in the middle of researching ley line intersections. He'd read it three times, carefully, to make sure he understood.

  Then he'd gone to the Fey realm.

  He'd searched for three years. Turned that twisted, beautiful nightmare of a place inside out looking for any trace of her. Questioned every Fey he could find who wouldn't immediately try to kill him. Followed every lead, every rumor, every whispered hint of human captives or lost adventurers.

  Nothing.

  The High King of the Fey had been... less than cooperative. In fact, he'd been adamant about killing Sael. Something about his primordial blood being valuable.

  Sael had tried to avoid that fight. Really, he had. But the High King had made it clear there were only two ways out of the situation.

  So Sael had killed him instead.

  Which had resulted in a rather permanent ban from the Fey realm. The new High Queen had been very clear about that. Not that they could actually execute him if he crossed the border again—they both knew that—but she'd made it abundantly clear he was no longer welcome.

  He'd come home empty-handed and told Eirlys he couldn't find the child. And for three hundred and fifty-seven years, Sael had believed Margaret was indeed dead.

  Three centuries was a long time to be wrong about something. Long enough that the grief had settled into background noise, like the constant hum of mana in the air or the weight of his own heartbeat. He didn't think about her often anymore, couldn't afford to, really, when thinking about all the people he'd lost would take up more time than he had left in a day. She'd become a memory filed away in the vast catalogue of things that hurt if he examined them too closely.

  And now she was sitting next to him.

  Alive, wrinkled and laughing about something one of her great-great-grandchildren had done last week.

  The surprise of it hadn't really hit him yet. Or maybe it had hit him and just kept hitting him, wave after wave of "this isn't possible" followed immediately by "but she's right there" followed by his brain giving up entirely and just—

  Something white entered his field of vision.

  He blinked at it. It was a napkin, extended toward him by an age-spotted hand that trembled slightly with the palsy of advanced years.

  Margaret was holding it out to him.

  "I heard you sob," Margaret said gently.

  Sael looked at her for a moment. Then he chuckled and took the napkin.

  "Thank you."

  He wiped at his cheek. There was, in fact, moisture there. He stared at the dampness on the cloth realizing it had been a while since this happened.

  It... felt strange. An ability he was unsure he still had, if he was being honest. Crying required a certain amount of emotional processing he'd largely outsourced to "deal with it later" for the past two centuries. Later had apparently arrived without asking permission.

  For the most part of the past hour, he'd had to concentrate on keeping enough calm to not shake the ground. The mana responded to his emotional state whether he wanted it to or not, and "shocked relief bordering on hysteria" was enough to register seismically if he wasn't careful. And he had to be careful, for he had not felt this way since the day Eirlys died.

  He folded the napkin carefully and set it on his knee.

  "So," he said, "long time no see."

  Margaret laughed out loud in a full-throated cackle that shook her frail shoulders and made her double over slightly. The sound turned into coughing almost immediately; harsh, wheezing coughs that made her whole body tremble.

  Sael's hand was on her back before he'd consciously decided to move.

  "Easy," he said, patting her gently between the shoulder blades. His other hand moved in a subtle gesture, fingers tracing a pattern in the air that would have been invisible to anyone not watching closely.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  [Soothe].

  The spell settled over her like a warm blanket and soon, the spasms in her chest eased and her seized up muscles relaxed. The coughing subsided.

  Little Margaret took a shaky breath, then another. Her hand came up to her chest.

  It hurt Sael to see her like this. A lot.

  Her breathing steadied as she straightened up slowly, one hand still pressed to her chest.

  "Thank you," she said. "Did you say 'Long time no see?'" she repeated. "Is that all you have to say to me, Grandpa Sael?"

  She shook her head, still catching her breath but clearly enjoying herself despite the coughing fit.

  "It seems you've become even less sociable than before."

  Sael huffed softly. "I've lost a lot of practice. The last few centuries have been... a lot to take."

  Margaret's expression softened. The amusement was still there, but now there was understanding beneath it.

  "Yes," she said quietly. "They have been."

  They sat in silence for a moment as Sael looked out in front of him.

  They were sitting on a hill; a good hill, with a gentle slope and ancient trees planted along its edges. The view stretched out before them, showing the entire sprawl of the city of Orlys below. Buildings spread out in all directions like a living thing, the river cutting through the eastern district, roads connecting everything like veins in a body. In the distance, he could see the academy's towers rising above the rest of the city.

  The late afternoon sun painted everything in warm gold.

  Behind them, rising up from the crown of the hill, was the Eryndor family cemetery.

  It was old. Ancient, really, by most standards. The headstones nearest the edge were weathered smooth by centuries of wind and rain, their inscriptions barely legible. Closer to the center, where the ground rose slightly, the graves were more elaborate. Monuments. Statues. Markers of marble and granite that had been thoroughly maintained.

  The Eryndor family took care of their dead.

  At the very top of the hill, dominating the cemetery like a crown jewel, stood the mausoleum.

  It was massive. White marble construction that gleamed even in the fading light. The entrance was framed by columns carved with intricate reliefs: battle scenes, mostly. Sael recognized a few of them. Cair Natel. The siege of Thornwatch. Yrsult. Events he'd been present for, rendered in stone by artists who definitely hadn't been there.

  Above the entrance, carved deep enough that wind and weather hadn't worn it down, was the inscription:

  Brandon Münso Eryndor

  The Brave, Prince of the Blood, Third Son of King Eric II

  Archduke and First Duke of Orlys

  Founder of House Eryndor

  Victor of the Ash Wars, Shield of the Realm,

  Loyal Servant of Crown and Kingdom of Albyon

  Here lies he whose courage ended an age, and whose bloodline yet strengthens the throne.

  Sael had just gotten his pipe lit—a small flame conjured at his fingertip, applied to the bowl—when a gust swept across the hilltop and tried to snuff it out.

  He cupped his hand around the bowl and drew harder, coaxing the embers back to life. The silverleaf caught properly this time, and he exhaled a thin stream of smoke that the wind immediately scattered across the hillside.

  The pipe helped. He took another draw, held it, then let the smoke drift out slowly as the tremor in his hands had stopped.

  Next to him, Margaret had started humming.

  It was soft at first, barely audible over the wind. But it made Sael freeze mid-draw. He knew that tune.

  He lowered the pipe slowly and turned to look at her.

  Margaret kept humming, her eyes—clouded and distant—fixed somewhere in the middle distance. A small smile played at the corners of her mouth.

  "You still remember that?" Sael asked quietly.

  Margaret's humming stopped. The smile widened.

  "Of course I do," she said. "It was my favorite lullaby as a child."

  She turned toward him, and even though her eyes couldn't focus properly, he could see the warmth in her expression.

  "I remember how you'd make a flute play itself around the fire," she continued. "The sound would just... float through the air, like it was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. And there'd be drums too, little phantom drums that kept the rhythm."

  Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing to an invisible campfire between them.

  "And you'd make these tiny people appear in the flames. Little figures made of fire and light, acting out the story while you told it."

  Sael felt something catch in his chest.

  "The Tellems," Little Margaret said. "The last of the High Elves. God, I loved that story. Must have asked you to tell it a hundred times."

  "Two hundred and thirty-seven," Sael corrected automatically, then caught himself. "I was counting."

  Margaret laughed; that same full-throated sound from earlier, though she managed to keep it from dissolving into coughing this time.

  "Of course you were."

  Sael took another draw from his pipe and let the smoke out slowly.

  Little Margaret had always cried at the ending of this story.

  He looked at her now and his gaze settled on her eyes. They were clouded. Milky white, like cataracts, but not quite. The iris was still visible beneath the fog, a pale blue that had once been bright and clear. But there was something else there too. Something that made the analytical part of his mind—the part that never really shut off—start cataloguing observations.

  The cloudiness wasn't uniform. It moved, very slightly, like smoke trapped behind glass. And the color was wrong. Not the yellowed white of natural cataracts, but something cleaner and purer.

  Magical.

  "Your eyes," Sael said quietly. "What happened to them?"

  Margaret's expression shifted. The warmth was still there, but now there was something else beneath it. Surprise, maybe. Or resignation.

  "You noticed, huh?"

  "It's not natural," Sael said. "Yes, I noticed."

  Margaret was quiet for a moment. Her hand came up to touch her face, fingers brushing just below her left eye.

  "It happened in the Fey realm," she said finally. "I saw something. Something I wasn't supposed to see, I think. I don't remember exactly what—that's part of the spell, probably—but I remember the moment it happened. Like someone had reached into my head and just..." She made a grasping motion. "Took it. The sight. The memory. Both at once."

  Her hand dropped back to her lap.

  "I woke up three days later and couldn't see. Hasn't changed since."

  Sael stared at her for a long moment.

  Then he set his pipe down carefully on the grass beside him and turned to face her fully.

  "Allow me," he said.

  Margaret blinked, or tried to; the movement was instinctive even if her eyes couldn't track properly anymore.

  "Oh, I tried to heal them when—"

  Sael reached out and placed his hand gently on her face.

  His palm cupped her cheek, thumb resting just below her eye. His hand was warm, always warm, because his body temperature ran higher than normal people's, a side effect of the sheer amount of mana that flowed through him constantly.

  Margaret went very still.

  "This might feel strange," Sael said quietly.

  He closed his eyes and looked.

  Not quite with his physical eyes—those were useless for this—but with his mana sense. The world shifted, colors bleeding away into patterns of energy and intent. Margaret's signature blazed in front of him, a complex weave of threads that made up everything she was.

  And there, wrapped around her eyes like chains: the spell.

  It was elegant work, he'd give the caster that much. Twelfth-circle power at minimum, woven with the particular cruel precision that the Fey specialized in. The spell didn't just block her vision, it consumed what she tried to see, fed on the act of perception itself and turned it into more binding.

  A punishment that got stronger the more you tried to fight it.

  Clever.

  Also completely reversible, if you knew what you were doing.

  "[Dispel]," Sael said.

  The spell fought back immediately. Of course it did. Twelfth-circle magic didn't give up easily. The threads of the binding tightened, trying to anchor themselves deeper, to spread the dispelling force across a wider area and dilute it to uselessness.

  Sael pushed harder.

  His mana flooded into the working, not attacking it directly—that would have risked damaging Margaret herself—but instead unraveling it. Thread by thread. Intent by intent. He followed the pattern backward, found the keystone that held the whole structure together, and applied pressure.

  The spell shattered.

  Light exploded outward from Margaret's face: brilliant white-gold that washed over the hilltop like a wave. The grass beneath them rippled as if touched by wind that wasn't there. The nearest headstones cast sharp shadows that wheeled and danced as the light pulsed.

  Sael didn't stop.

  "[Heal]," he said.

  This spell was different. A good word for it would be... gentler. Where the dispel had been a hammer breaking chains, this was a hand guiding broken pieces back into place.

  The light changed color, shifting from white-gold to a softer green-gold that wrapped around Margaret like a cocoon. Sael could feel her body through the connection: every ache, every weakness, every place where time had worn her down.

  Her knees were bad. A long-standing ache lived deep in the joints where cartilage had worn thin. The pain was constant, had probably been for years. He smoothed it away, encouraged the body to remember what it felt like when the joints fit together properly.

  Her back hurt. Years of sleeping on adventurer's bedrolls and inn mattresses of questionable quality had compressed her spine in ways that made standing upright an exercise in willpower. He eased the pressure, realigned what could be realigned, dulled the nerve signals that screamed with every movement.

  Her lungs were scarred. Old damage, probably from breathing in something she shouldn't have decades ago. The tissue was thick and inflexible, making every breath slightly harder than it should be. He couldn't fix the scarring—not without rejuvenating the tissue entirely, which would cause more problems than it solved—but he could reduce the inflammation, help the remaining healthy tissue work more efficiently.

  Her heart was tired. It had been beating for three hundred and seventy-seven years, pushing blood through vessels that had grown stiff and narrow. He couldn't make it young again, but he could strengthen it. Give it the support it needed to keep going.

  And underneath all of it, woven through her entire body like a second nervous system: another spell.

  This one wasn't cruel, it was protective.

  Someone—probably someone very powerful who loved her very much—had cast a longevity ward on her. Not the simple kind that adventurers bought from hedge mages, but a proper working. High-level magic that had slowed her aging to a crawl and kept her alive far longer than any human had a right to expect.

  Sael left it alone.

  Canceling it would be catastrophic. Her body had been living under that spell for centuries. It had become part of her baseline, the new normal that all her systems referenced. Remove it now, and the aging process would snap back like a released bowstring. Three hundred years of accumulated decay trying to catch up all at once.

  She'd be dead in minutes.

  Besides, there was nothing he could do about aging itself. Not really.

  He'd tried, of course. Spent decades researching rejuvenation magic, trying to find a way to actually reverse the process. Make old bodies young again. But the problem was fundamental: aging wasn't damage. It was a function.

  The body was supposed to age. It was built to age. Every cell knew its role in the slow march toward entropy, and they performed that role with the same dedication they performed everything else. Trying to reverse it—trying to force cells to become young again—meant fighting against every natural process the body relied on to stay alive.

  The body would fight back.

  And it would win.

  He'd seen it happen in his theoretical models and magical simulations. Bodies that turned against themselves when forced to reverse their natural course. Organs rejecting their own tissue. Growths that bloomed like poisonous flowers because cells, told to divide and renew as they had in youth, forgot how to stop.

  Healing was different. Healing helped the body do what it was already trying to do—repair damage, fight infection, maintain balance. Rejuvenation tried to make the body do something it fundamentally wasn't designed for.

  He'd stopped working on the spell after his third complete theoretical framework had predicted catastrophic failure in every scenario.

  The mathematics had been clear: you couldn't force time to run backward without consequences.

  But now... now Sael had a reason to start again.

  For now, though, all he could do was this: ease her pain. Give her comfort. Let her body rest in a way it probably hadn't in decades.

  And give her back her sight.

  The cloudiness in her eyes evaporated like morning mist. The fog that had trapped her in darkness for three centuries dissolved under the combined weight of his dispel and healing, leaving behind clear blue irises that hadn't seen the world in longer than some kingdoms had existed.

  The light faded gradually, sinking back into Sael's hand and then dispersing into the air like embers from a dying fire.

  Sael pulled his hand back carefully and opened his eyes.

  Little Margaret was staring at him with wide, blue and focused eyes, directly on his face.

  For a moment, she just sat there, perfectly still, as if moving might shatter whatever miracle had just occurred.

  Her gaze darted away from him: to the sky, to the grass, to the headstones scattered across the hilltop. Her head turned, taking it all in. The sunset. The clouds painted gold and pink. The way the light caught on the carved letters of the graves around them. The individual blades of grass swaying in the wind.

  Then she looked back at Sael, and her face crumpled.

  Sael understood her feelings, he'd felt the same way an hour ago. This was the full-body, ugly kind of crying that came from somewhere deep in the chest and didn't care about dignity or composure. Her hands shot out and grabbed his face, both sides, her age-spotted fingers gripping his cheeks with surprising strength as the sobs tore out of her.

  "Grandpa Sael—" she managed, then had to stop because her breath hitched. "You went white..."

  "You don't like it?" Sael asked, tilting his head slightly in her grip. "It's the only part of me that actually aged. I thought about leaving it that way, but if you don't like it, I could—"

  "No!" little Margaret cut him off. One hand left his face to touch his hair, his beard, her fingers trembling as they traced through the white strands. "No, it—it suits you—it suits you perfectly."

  She was half-laughing now, even through the crying. The sound came out strangled and messy.

  "Look at me, I'm ancient and falling apart and you... you just went distinguished, what kind of—" Another sob-laugh. "What kind of joke is that?"

  A snort escaped her, wet and undignified, which made her laugh harder even as she kept crying.

  Sael watched her with fascination. "I've always wondered how people do that," he said seriously. "Laugh and cry at the same time. I can only focus on one emotion at a time and express it. More than that and I feel overwhelmed most of the time."

  This somehow made Margaret snort-laugh even harder.

  "Was that funny?" Sael asked, genuinely curious.

  "Yes..." Margaret managed between sobs and giggles. "You're still the same as ever."

  Sael considered this for a moment. The same as ever. That meant he had not changed, did it not? But after centuries, one should change at least a little. There had been a song back in the old days—one of his favorites, actually—that claimed only fools remained unchanged by time.

  ...Was he a fool then?

  He supposed it was possible. He had once dedicated years to a single problem that might well be unsolvable. That did seem rather foolish when he thought about it.

  "I see," he said finally, patting her head.

  Her eyes kept darting around even as she held his face, looking at everything, drinking in the world she'd been locked away from.

  "You're snorting," Sael observed.

  "I don't care right now!" Margaret said, her voice pitching up as another wave hit her. Both hands were back on his face now, gripping like she was afraid he'd disappear. "I don't care! I can see you, Grandpa Sael, I can actually see you—I can see everything—"

  Her fingers traced his features like she was memorizing them. The line of his jaw. The corners of his eyes.

  "You look exactly—exactly like I remembered except—except the white and it's—the sky is so beautiful—and you're here—"

  She couldn't finish. The crying took over completely for a moment. Sael reached up slowly and covered her hands with his own.

  "I know," he said quietly. "I know."

  Movement at the edge of his vision made Sael glance down the hill, where he could see four figures making their way up the path toward them: the Duke, the Headmaster, and trailing behind, two other forms he recognized as Ilsa and Orion.

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