II

High above the clouds, where the wind dared not howl too loud, the city of Highcast sprawled and stretched like a suspended dream. It clung to gravity by force of magic alone, an immense cluster of towers, bridges, and curling wooden spires grown through sorcery and design, floating in the sky like a kingdom ripped from the earth and held aloft by will.

The great plaza stretched like a stone lily pad, a web of brass-veined marble and glittering glass. Waterfalls slid off the edge into the void below, never-ending, cleverly cast into a portal off to the open seas far past. A kaleidoscope of magical hues pulsed from beneath the cobblestones—ley lines harnessed by the founders to keep the city airborne. Highcast was the capital of mortal magic, a collaboration between races who had once warred: elven vision, human ambition. Later, the Gaien precision of humans, dwarves and half-folk, — the Fae adaptability of orcs, trolls and goblins, and even the tenacity of those Afflicted that could be…returned to themselves.

One’s like Anoras, other’s would say.

A beautiful web, but the strings were straining.

The war had ended only a year ago, its aftermath still haunting the quiet corners of streets. Though laughter returned to the markets and spells danced once more in public squares, grief clung like mist in alleyways. The civil strife, a brief but brutal war, had split the city into halves before it was bound again by the heat of dragon fire. Preparations were made for the memorial walk in the evening. And as the world below was torn, so had they been, up high. It was difficult to remain independent, a neutral beacon of study and learning, when it was your cousin slaughtered at a human front. Your brother, lost and washed up at orcish shores. The celebration today was meant to mark the city's gentle rebirth by letting go of the lost. A tentative song.

Anoras has not left his private study in weeks.

In one of the highest towers, far from the jubilant murmurs below, a single study curled into the clouds among the fine walls of Highcast Academy, higher — plunged into cold darkness. Books lie scattered in a constellation of chaos, their spines cracked and pages yellowed with age—some torn, others shredded by his clawed hands, betrayed by promises they no longer kept. The stone floor, once immaculate, is carved with an intricate lattice of interlocking circles—fifty or more, precision-born, etched for all manner of magic and ritual. They glimmer faintly now, waning and uncertain, a sickly pink pulse rising from the runes like the heartbeat of something dying. Flickering. Faltering. Failing.

At the center of it all, a softly humming crystal hovers midair—nestled between copper rings and tangled veins of silver filament. Suspended, delicate.

Cracked. Again.

Anoras slams his hand down on the desk. The obsidian shudders. An inkpot skitters sideways, topples, black liquid blooming across papers and furred skin alike. He barely registers it. His breath comes sharp and shallow. The time-dilation core—the latest attempt, another artifact of desperate brilliance—glows dimly at the edge of collapse. The key to everything. To undoing, undone. To going back.

“Not enough. Need more.”

His voice is little more than breath against parchment. He drags a clawed finger over the failed matrix, redrawing what has already refused him countless times. The runes tremble, destabilize. Refuse. Reality, once again, denies its reversal.

A snarl coils behind his teeth.

His thoughts spiral, tightening—old memories unfurling like poisoned silk.

The wars come first, marching backward. Dragonfire streaking the sky in brilliant arcs. Then the blood, earlier still, painting the council chambers in grotesque art. Screams echo—faculty, comrades, strangers—all of them splitting, surrendering. Sentenced. Purged. 

He clutches his head and shakes it hard, trying to tear the noise away, claws. A flicker of unstable magic snaps from his palm, singeing the edge of a nearby scroll. He curses under his breath, running sharp fingers through tangled fur. Breathless. Burning.

Below, the city sings—alive with light and celebration. He hears music. Laughter.

But none of it touches him. It was his fault. All of it. The worst kept secret and loudest truth.

His greatest failure. Judgement. The fracturing of a world, plunged into the next— uglier. Darker. Because of him.

The hum of the artifact called him deeper into memory.

He stumbled back from the desk, the pads of his changed hands catching on discarded tomes. The study spun. Runes flared. And for a moment, the air split—not in time, but in memory.

A thousand years gone, and still it haunts him—bright as the moment reality broke. As if it happened yesterday.

He sees himself.

Not the thing he is now: cloaked in dusk-colored fur, cursed with daggered teeth and a beast of anger forever coiled in his chest. But the elf he had once been. Tall. Proud. Skin like starlight, hair falling in cascading strands of soft lavender. Eyes—golden, burning suns—alight with the kind of hope that has never known despair.

He stands in the robes of a student, immaculate and reverent, head bowed before the great gates of the old academy—its architecture older than empires, carved into stone that sang with magic. A time before Highcast was a word. Before it meant anything at all.

Then her face.

Elane.

She laughs—soft and tired—wiping flour from her brow as she waves him off with a crumpled letter in her hand. That moment shines, suspended in light. Her joy a lantern to his boyhood shyness. Her pride, his greatest fuel. He worked for her. For her comfort. To build the home she had never known—a sanctuary in the upper houses, where her weary bones might finally rest. Free of ridicule, hunger, pain.

 But the vision twists. Her laughter fades. And she coughs.

Bedridden. Pale. Her glow dimming by degrees. The spark in her eyes, once golden, now flickering like a guttered flame. He returns to her, proud, back tall with news of his graduation, and the words shatter on the floor before her unmoving hands.

So begins the search. Desperate and endless. Every tome, every scroll, every whispered rumor and forbidden question. He steals from the empire’s vaults, academy grounds, royal library. He bargains with things that have no name outside of threats and warning. He performs rituals regulated and forbidden from outsider hands, stumbling through the dark.

He has only one friend. Ever just one: Fin’danael.

Quiet. Steady and beautiful. A warm, kindly shadow to something as ghostly as Anoras. Where others pass by, growing, maturing, Fin’danael remains at his side. Their friendship blooms into something softer, stronger — comradery that hums beneath the skin.

A memory: Fin’danael’s maturing ceremony. The young hunter, bowed before the elders of his people, another Swiftbow marked and sworn into the service of the Wild Hunt. A bright day full of pride and joy, his families arms strong and secure around him. Anoras stands there, at a distance yet by his side, caught in the wonder of it all. A little out of his element — but Fin’danael’s smile delivers him well beyond any fears.

They do not speak of what grows between them later. But it is there, in the comfortable silence and strained stillness. A constant, unspoken thing.

It frays. Maybe inevitably so. Anoras mind was always one driven and occupied, but with the desperation that set in his bones now, always home, at his mother's bedside, casting a shadow over her resting from like a revenant — it withers in his hands. The pale skinned elf withdraws, further, from the twin suns — and Fin'danael. Decends into his own Hunt. A cure, costs unimportant. An afterthought in the face of what he stands to loose.

Fin’danael pleads, over and over. Roars.

“You’re wasting her last days chasing figments!”

They argue. Loud and aching. And it always ends the same.

“I refuse to watch her die!”

Their fights grow tired— both dancers and captive audience, drawing on the rehearsed nature like breath. The walls of Anoras’ hidden abode echo with their voices, their fury, their fear. No light of morning ever brings them peace, just parts them like the toll of a bell. They always part in disquiet. Then one evening, Fin’danael returns—not with anger, but with a hope. A ring. A torn smile. A final plea.

The other man—tired, trembling—accepts.

Anoras' hands snapped the useless feather within his grip, ink splattering where his racing mind tried to amend the runes on his notes— but it’s just Fin’danael, Fin’danael, Fin’danael.

Two weeks. That’s all they have. Golden days, fleeting like summer rain. He feels his heart beat, actually beating, for the first time in years.

But Elane declines. Again. It always returns. Like the ebb and flow of bad waters. Hard days, worse days.

Anoras leaves that very night.

More rituals. Darker. Older. Blood-magic not even the heartless, high covenants indulge in. Mainly because of the cost. There was only so much one can achieve by bleeding with essence of others. It's a momentary transfer, a flawed one—so much energy and potential lost in the cracks in-between. Runes etched into his flesh, the dagger trembling in his grip as he carves away. Sacrilege— maybe, but he held no love for the words of those that would scorn him so. Always from the powers above. Always the ones threatened by control they were not the keepers of.

The magic twists not his body, but his soul— first critters, then animals proper. Later bodies. Sacrifice. And they all fail. He becomes the very vessel through which to channel the transformations, to cure the sickness of time. It costs and costs, and when he looks in the mirror, he no longer sees her eyes in his own. Only the pulsing magenta thrum of raw arcane fire.

He is not at her side when she dies.

Only Fin’danael.

The man tells him of it two days after the fact. Voice muffled through the shut door of Anoras' study. It is quiet. Bloodless. Like vultures had long since picked his voice clean. The words on his tongue nothing more than a decleration.

Anoras does not answer. He leans against the door, wood biting into his shoulder where he pressed against it—afraid, so afraid— that the lock would not be enough. Would not hold. Somehow magically slip open and reveal all he had dissloved into, lay it bare before the hunter.

Nothing but silence and stagnant, choking breath. "She’s gone,” he said. And then—he leaves. Forever.

Something slipped from his fingers in the present—a glass of—something. Ink or potion, he couldn’t say. His eyes were unfocused, his glasses gone. But he heard the shattering like distant thunder as it slipped—down. Hit the floor.

The queen’s face flashes beneath the pale crackle of lightning. And he is there again—in the opulent halls of her palace, lined with stained glass saints and curtains heavy as the shame on his head. A storm rages outside. He stands: trial. It could not truly be called that. An execution.

Royal theft. Crimes of forbidden magic. Transgressions of station—of touching relics with dirty hands, of sullying what was worth more than his weight in gold with the arcs of his diluted blood. Not accusation, but fact: of pulling truths from places he was never meant to reach.

Each charge, punishable by death.

The magisters drone on like insects, voices chittering with silk and venom. His body stands there, form clad in ceremonial bindings, chains both pretty and paralyzing. Nothing but baggage to him now, as his soul is drifting by purgatory. Running after the ghost of a gown that once swayed in a kitchen’s warmth.

The queen watches him. Her head tilts—curious, amused. Cold eyes, violet and cruel, peeling back the layers of who he is—spinning the thread of what he might become. And she smiles.

A decree.

He is not dead. He is reborn, made—noble. A contradiction. A title handed down like a tool. Skygrace, ascended. Elevated, admired, whispered about in hushed, hungry corners. The ashes of his mother still caught beneath his fingernails. He had scattered them across her favorite spot, quiet pond she once loved, not days before.

He should die.

She should kill him. Instead, she gives him power. Not redemption. Not forgiveness.

Opportunity. Access.

A key.

A seat at discovery’s table, where oceans of impossibility drown the witless. And for the first time in years, he dares to think, dares still, to believe: perhaps it isn’t too late. Perhaps he could fix it.

Perhaps he wasn't out of time, yet.

A project of imperial magnitude. An expedition below the world. Vaults—temples, carved into the underbelly of their great elven empire, deep beneath. Laten magic. Late gods. Their visages silent and vast in polished obsidian. Magic that lay sleeping in every seam of stonework. Forgotten divinity that pulses in the dark. Shifting ever so slightly, just out of the corner of your eyes. Like it could waken.

He descends with his master, the queen's most trusted: her second. An ancient elf whose pride could crack mirrors. His voice, a precise blade, permitting no questions. Not from Anoras. Not from anyone—but her majesty.

They speak of summoning—of a return to perfection. Runes drawn large as the manor halls that bore them. Sacrifices lined up in a bitter choreography. A ritual beneath the palace so old, so final, it defies naming. Months pass in fevered preparation, and Anoras—Anoras serves a most pivotal spot. The vessal. The affix. The variable that might bend, break, or deliver them all.

Whispers about whispers, within the halls above— the queen, driven mad. Secrecy swallowing names and bleeding throats dry. A place where the light never reached anymore, covered in shades and layers of sickness and blood. Separating from the outside world.

Doubts. So many doubts. But still he moves. Still he obeys, his master’s commands like ice in his veins. Until the very moment the circle opens— when all snaps into place, and slowly, the world begins to unravel.

The stone splits. From the perfect geometry spills the imperfect truth. A darkness that writhes and tastes and laughs. Limbs slither where none should be. Candles die in discordant harmony. Heat drains from his skin. Something old, countless eyes in the dark all trained on him—watching him. Approaching him.

So his dagger finds his master’s back. It does not stop it. Nothing can at this point. But it cuts—a black choir, interrupted. A hymn, incomplete.

The breach fractures. Only some pass through — still too many— shadows against the walls of reality, straining, tearing. And their laughter fills the hollow of his skull.

He runs. The palace catacombs, the great carved below — breaking. The palace, perhaps the whole world — Descending. His body stumbling to the study, desperate hands grasping for a scroll. A spell. A prayer to guide him home.

Words weave, and when he blinks once more — he is falling through the cool evening air. In the distant horizon: the palace is folding into itself, a grand crown devoured by the very pit it tried to control. Below him: his hometown. His roots. His childhood cradled in trembling earth, falling—falling with him, to the vast tendrils carved in the earth deep below. The last lullaby of his mother’s kitchen window swallowed into black.

He casts without thought—a preservation ward. Ice. Cold and hard and absolute. A last ditch effort. His body locks in its shell of frost as the empire screams beneath him, breaking open like a wound.

His elbow struck something. Knees caught on tomes, the floor rushing at him as up felt like down. His claws splayed across the desk, large, trembling with coiled muscle. Eyes unfocused. Beneath his hand: the Academy’s seal, impressed upon younger parchment—newer than the rest of the ancient fragments scattered around. Edges nibbed, not torn. Younger than him.

A blink. A breath. A lifetime and a millennium.

A wandering mage finds him, washed up in the rubble of a bygone age. The world is new. The stranger is of a kin, a make, he has never seen—no dragon. No elf.

No elves. His people aren’t gone, but lost, split in dichotomy. No longer perfect as the constellations above, whole as the cosmos, they are severed—Sun and Moon, divided down an axis. They were mortal and fleeting, now. Die within decades, nothing but brief flickers, where they once they had been as the stars.

Magic, too, has changed. Its essence is warped, touched by a sixth sense—one of rot and quiet decay. Not of endings, but unmaking. Corruption. Of things slipping, slow and adrift, twisting beyond recognition.

The stranger that finds him— he wears an academy’s sigil. Embroidered into the purple of his robes, not stamped. And aimless, Anoras finds its home.

Finds Highcast. He joins the Academy. Magic is all he knows—all that remains. He was as a relic, among the present. First, the overqualified apprentice.

Then, the aloof, reluctant magister.

The humans distrust him the moment he set food. A strange elf even among their kind, and the warm skinned people's ire grows, day by day.

Elven tradition clashes with human urgency, a conflict that brew since long before he arrived. Though, perhaps not that long, considering—everything.

It crescendos with one called Hamiyr—fifth of the council, betrayer, bathor of the Concilium chamber running in blood. The Purge. Humans, on the hunt, like days of old. But their prey not dragons, this time. Streets: cast in violet filth. Mages and innocents—executed, vanished, named heretic. It doesn’t matter who they are, only what they are. What they stand for, by merely standing. And his friend—only ever one.

Taoleth Wildblood.

A sun elf with a smile like summer—bold, golden, proud. Beloved by his peers, respected by the council. All, except of Hamiyr.

They flee, elves together, with a few others. Through the sewers—fingers slick with filth as they prepare the portal in the twisting canals below the high waterfalls. One chance. One breath.

His fingers slipped — blood. Dark violet, staining the sharp edges of the crystal in his hand. His own. The wild man wiped against his chest, leaving a smear of black over white. Pain sat deep in his gut, not howling but humming — an old promise, rearing, baring its teeth. The beast within stirred, stretched, unfurled with hunger. Drawn in by the scent of fresh blood.

They part.

Survivors scattering in every direction of the wind. Like mice beneath burning rafters. Highcast looms overhead—heavy with disease, rotting from the inside out. Its shadow stretches across the forest below like an infection.

Taoleth’s hand reaches for his, leading west. Anoras recoils, eastward.

He runs. With magic enough to crack the sky, with knowledge older than dirt. He carves himself a hole in the wilderness, just past the skyline of memory. Far enough. A hut, empty, abandoned, now his home. Rotting floorboards, mildew in the walls. Pines tall and quiet as judges outside shattered windows. Never swaying in tune to the groaning hinges nearby, and the snapping branches outside. One among many in a city graveyard—forgotten labors of love. Alone, with no company but the ghost of a populace that is long ago. Only, he isn’t alone.

Something else has burrowed there, made itself a nest in that dark forest. It attacks him there, in the quiet. Not beast, not man—something between. It bites deep, tears at his throat.

He kills it. Barely in time—but out of it, blood gushing from his gored throat.

He should die. There, in that house, where the maggots crawl too eagerly over his hands. Where the world smells of decay and loss.

Instead, he wakes. Again. Changed.

Bones crack. Organs shred. Blood spills from eyes and mouth as his form is broken and molded into something wrong. Not man. Not animal. Worse. Hands become claws. His voice breaks—returns—chased by a shadow, something bestial, prowling in the undertones like a drowned snarl.

He ground his teeth now, snarling through the memories. His claws ached around the broken crystal, still embedded in its cage of brass and silver, embedded in him, too. Magic sparked under his skin, sharp as teeth, as the artifact repaired itself—slowly, painstakingly, under his direction. His body spun in circles, stalking the perimeter of the study as he watched it. Pink runes flickered from his body, from the scars carved within. He returned the catalyst to its place as it was made whole. And again, the artifact thrumms, lifts.

White-hot.

The runes's glare stings his eyes. Rose. Sang. Then cracked. Magic bled. And finally: broke.

Exploded.

Red light engulfed him. Heat seared his sleeves, singed the fur of his arms. The impact was nothing compared to the fire. A tiny star born in the middle of his study.

Dragonfire. Said to be the hottest thing in existence. And Anoras believes. He has seen it before. Tastes it, once—ash like fire itself, burning in his mouth, never quite flickering out. Not until the speaker of it meets their end.

Word of the impending attack reaches even him—deep in the frozen wastes, watching over the bones of his hometown like a mournful sentinel as he had tracked across half the continent to return home. Even he hears. And he heeds the call. Not for the council. Not for Highcast.

But for Taoleth.

Only Taoleth could find him. Would try to. And for a second time, Anoras freezes—petrified solid, as the magical missive plays in his head, again and again. A plea.

That time, he answers. Returns home. Foolishly, maybe. He is a different monster now. Highcast would not know him as he was. Different, and yet just as abhorrent as before. A man consumed by obsession—a beast walking on hind legs. No more illusions, no more smoke and mirrors to guard his true self. Fin’danael—Taoleth—they can’t forgive such a thing, can’t look past such a grievance. It is impossible to dream.

But times change. They do so quickly now, spinning around his aching head in a prism of yesterday and tomorrow. Dragons were returning, arisen from the grave history made for them. Come to reclaim the gift of magic they bestowed—long before elves dared teach humanity. Long before elves dared learn it from dragons. And first was its mortal seat: Highcast.

Anoras comes. He fights. He kills. He stands beside mortals—the living, but not just them. Side by side with the strangest convergence. Undead, the Cursed and Afflicted—the changed. Cold as machines or ravenous as beasts. A monster among monsters and men.

Highcast called for any willing to defend their home from a threat that would see it erased, arms open, knees bend. And all who ever called it home, come. And they win. A battle, if not a war.

In the quiet after, Anoras stands in a familiar council chamber full of strangers’ faces, replacing the dead and murdered with a speed he never does grow used to, never dares acknowledge.

Strangers—save one. Taoleth. Only ever one. "The city will have you," he says, gentle and graced by a smile that bowed Anoras' head with the weight of a shame too old to name aloud. "If you are willing."

The fire was gone now. There was only the cold of his empty study and the deafening sound of his own, fraudulent heart. Anoras slumped against the far wall, glass glittering in his fur, blood dried on his cheek. The crystal lay shattered again in the center of the room, smoke curling from its core. Angry. Done. Like him.

Then—blue. A flicker of light. Small. Weightless.

It hopped into his lap with the solemnity of a star falling to earth. The constellation took the shape of a rabbit—small, familiar. Fleeting. A memory sculpted in soft luminescence.

His claws framed the family pet, large enough to crush it. He didn’t.

His hand came down gently, resting against its starlit head—a single, awkward finger smoothing the cool chill of magic at the top of its head. The cold of absence.

“Tanuin…” the wolf whispered, voice low, raw. “You are upset.”

The rabbit stomped in his lap. The protest a pulse of light.

And for a moment—just a moment—he eased.

A knock tore the man from the innocence in his lap. Firm and rhythmic.

"Anoras?"

He didn’t answer. Body still, breathing flat and thin like an afterthought.

"Professor? I bring sweet wine. And something dangerously close to pie."

A pause. Confusion stirred behind tired eyes—and then, intrigue.

Celine’s voice returned, gentle now, but edged with exasperation.

"It’s time. You’ve spun enough circles for one day."

The door creaked open, light pooling over notes and tomes like a reprimand. Celine stood, a hand on her hip, curly hair tied in a scholar’s braid, eyebrows lifted in idle disapproval. A silver spell-stitched vest over her robe of muted lilac. She was warm in a way neither fire nor magic could be. Tangible, present, infuriatingly real. The kind of comfort that asked but never demanded.

"You’re scaring your betters again, Mister Strudel," she chided, tone honeyed and even, striding with precise steps through the chaos of parchment and ruined sigils.

Anoras’ gaze shifted, slowly, toward Tanuin. The star-forged creature stirred, and from it came a sound like distant bells—soft and crystalline.

His eyes lifted, slow and uncertain, watching as his apprentice set down the sweet offerings—carefully nudging aside scattered notes and abandoned trinkets to make space.

"The celebration. I—"

"You forgot," she murmured diplomatically, a smile beneath her voice."Come downstairs. Just for a little while."

He sat slouched against the curved wall of his study, the low blue glow of failed magic pulsing at his feet like the heartbeat of a dying star. The warm oak wood around bathed in light colder than him.

The air still shimmered faintly with spent runes, their once-complex shapes half-burned into the floor. Scorch marks licked along the edges of the summoning ring, curling the wood in delicate, blackened waves. The hulking man—a silhouette of sinew, scars, and age-old grief—narrowed his eyes. A sneer flickered across his lips, half-formed and already fading.

"There’s still work to be done," he muttered. The words were brittle and craven. The warm grain of oak walls stood cold in the pale, flickering light—a cradle turned coffin, holding the weight of a thousand yesterdays he could not undo.

“It will be here tomorrow. Today will not.”

The common hall of Highcast’s academy shimmered with warm candlelight and gentle illusions. Enchanted flames flickered in hovering lanterns, casting soft shadows that danced across the vaulted ceiling. Rich vines—thick-leaved and deep green—spilled from ceramic pots suspended between imposing marble pillars, held aloft by old and reliable spells.

A long banquet table dominated the slightly lowered center of the room, perfectly aligned with the maroon carpet. It stretched the length of the maroon-carpeted floor, polished surface heavy with platters of honeyed figs, spiced breads, cinnamon cider and conjured sweets. The scent drifted through the air—rich, golden, comforting—mingling with laughter and quiet conversation.

At its head, the open arches bordered the grand terrace beneath a starry night sky. The fountain murmured just outside, its soft lilt folding into the room like part of the music—a lazy, enchanted melody threading between gentle murmurs and clinking glasses.

Wizards, scholars, and apprentices lounged on velvet cushions arranged in quiet alcoves, their robes pooling like ink around them, voices hushed but bright with the peace of the hour. The entire hall held its breath in a kind of living warmth. A brief, blessed pause in a place usually buzzing with study, students and teachers flitting from one end to the other.

Anoras stopped just past the threshold. Still in his old robes, still towering and strange in the way grief made men bigger and rooms smaller.

And then—a silence, subtle but real. Heads turned. The soft lull of talk shifted as eyes flicked discreetly toward the arched entrance. Senior Professor Anoras, known more by the echo of his footsteps than the sound of his voice.

He did not flinch beneath the sudden eyes, but he felt them—catalogued them—remembered, as they ate into his skin like ticks on a stray dog. His gaze slipped aside, to Celine beside him, who simply smiled as though none of this was highly unusual. He didn’t speak. Just stood, hands loosely folded before him like a visitor at someone else’s wake.

The hall returned to itself by degrees. Music once more mingled, drowning to resumed conversation. But here and there, glances lingered—not out of rudeness, but something softer. Curiosity, perhaps. Or quiet awe.

And for now—just for tonight—he was here.

Someone called his name—a warm voice, familiar—and he offered a small nod in return, but nothing more. To his horror, the voice drew closer—sounded again, clearer, right before him now. A few students approached—hesitant at first, then bolder as the moment stretched without shattering. They smiled, not with the forced courtesy of those greeting a superior, but with the quiet gladness of ones who had long wished someone well and never quite known how to say it.

“Professor…” came a voice—soft and tentative. Maeythill. Maeythill Lysandir.

One of the more promising students—known less for boldness and more for the kind of careful diligence that made flowers bloom in harsh winter. She spoke with a quiet grace, pale, turquoise hands clasped tightly before her, as if unsure whether to bow or retreat.

Her cheeks were dusted, eyes a little wide with surprise, wonder—searching for the right words. The same wonder she carried into every old fable and love-touched tale she devoured in the library’s dustiest corners. Anoras had seen the short elf there before, late in the night, sneaking as though she had anything to hide—unlike him. Her visits were a quiet secret, kept close to his chest. He had not meant to startle the girl by approaching, risk shattering her little piece of heaven. So he never did.

“I… I’m glad you could join us,” she managed, barely above the music. Fingers combing wavy, disorderly strands from her eyes—rich wine against bright aquamarine.

“I—We saved you a seat.”

She didn’t gesture dramatically. Just a small motion—a slight turn of the shoulder, a folded napkin set carefully atop the cushion beside her, waiting.

Anoras blinked—as if the words took a moment to find their meaning.

His eyes found Celine’s—questioning, but the human fixed him with a carefree smile, admitting to nothing.

Then he nodded, the motion almost imperceptible. And sat.

The velvet cushion sank beneath his weight, strange and too soft. A small, mournful pang resounded in his chest, longing for the cold wood up in his study. Its stern safety, able to bear the weight he carried silently. But the cushions held.

Celine settled beside him, folding herself into the gathering with all the casual confidence of someone who belonged—who always had.

She took a goblet, handed him a second, and didn’t bother asking before passing him a plate laden with things warm and sweet and chocolatey. He didn’t eat. Not yet. But his clawed hands didn’t shake when he grasped the minuscule treats.

Around him, the circle breathed wider. Another student joined, then another. Small questions began to unfurl—delicate, conversational, nothing pressing. Mentions of a paper due, a theory debated, a joke dissected. A book they thought he might like. Then Maeythill—still rose-cheeked, hands folded in her lap—cleared her throat politely.

“It’s silly,” she said, without being asked. “But… there’s a story I always think about this time of year. It’s—from one of my father’s old storybooks.”

A few students leaned closer, more out of kindness than expectation.

Celine glanced over, curious.

“It’s about a sorcerer,” Maeythill went on, words small but steady now, “who lived in a tower built of mirrors. All his spells came from the reflections about him—everything he did, he learned by watching the world through glass.”

Her hands fisted in the purple of her robes, resonating with a small smile. Not meeting Anoras’ eyes. Lips forming around the words with a fluidity, a grace, giving away that she understood them for more.

“But over time, the mirrors began to warp. They showed him only pieces. And one day, he forgot what real things looked like—trees, rivers, people. He only knew their reflections. Old echoes. So… he stopped going outside. He stayed in the tower and watched instead.”

The air felt a little quieter. Even the enchanted music seemed to hush, ever so slightly. “But then,” she continued, fiddling with the hem of her sleeve, “a traveler came. Not a hero, or a prince. Just someone who sang to herself when she walked. And when she passed the tower, she sang a song the sorcerer didn’t recognize. Not from any book or old spell.” Maeythill’s voice was very gentle now.

“And it was the first thing in years that didn’t echo.

”She shrugged—a small, shy motion. The spotlight catching up with her. “So the sorcerer came down. Just once. To hear it properly.”There was a pause.

Celine let out a low breath, like something unwinding in her chest.

“Did he stay?” one of the other students asked, chin propped in their palm over a steaming flute of apple cider.

Maeythill gave a small, uncertain smile. “I don’t know. That—that part didn’t make it.”

She looked almost apologetic now, shrinking in the small crowd around her. “Some stuff got lost when my parents traveled to— the Chasm. Most of it was burned.”

Celine sipped her wine, and Anoras let the warmth of the cup rest in his hands. He simply nodded. Just once. A slow, grave thing—as though acknowledging not just a story, but the girl, the city he called home, and the stars above, bearing silent witness.

The drink in his hand tasted of apple and longing—sweet and sharp, with a whisper of something bruised beneath the surface. Anoras let it sit on his tongue a moment too long, as if hoping it might resolve into something simpler. It didn’t. Some things fermented that way.

He watched Celine from where he sat, his broad frame curled into the velvet cushions like a relic misplaced in time. Across the hall, she knelt beside a small cluster of children. Staff offspring, judging by their tunics and quicksilver curiosity—her hands moving with a careful grace.

A minor illusion drifted from her fingertips, quiet and deliberate: star-sparks bloomed in the air, soft and slow, scattering like snowflakes made of breath and memory. They floated between the children’s fingers, each light a perfect point—glowing and pulsing. Familiar.

Anoras watched them lift their hands to the spectacle, giggling—their awe effortless. The stars shimmered above them, slowly revolving, a ribbon of light stretching and curling in the high golden air. And for the briefest moment, it struck him: the illusion mirrored the constellations outside, the very same ones that had hung above him when he had outstretched his hand. Long, long ago.

Just the same.

Eternity, wrapped in constancy. The world had shifted—turned cold in places he once called warm, carved deep lines into his face and deeper ones into his soul—but the stars remained. Watching. Unchanged.

Celine hummed something under her breath as the illusion grew more intricate. A lattice of starlight wound through the air, draping like silken thread. Fading in and out like something that had always been there—only now remembered, touched by a hand so much younger than the image it cradled.

The children gasped. One clapped. Another simply stared.

And Anoras, silent, watched too.

He should have been elsewhere—buried beneath runes and scripture and regrets, caught in the cruel arithmetic of time. But here, in this brief, quiet little fold of the world, the pain in his chest shifted—not gone, never that—but lighter. Displaced. Momentarily forgotten.

He didn’t smile. But his grip on the cup loosened.

And for a flicker of time, under the same stars that had watched over him long ago, the taste of apple was enough.