Archive of Our Own

The morning after, silver light filters into the kitchen.

The floor is cold beneath Olruggio’s bare feet. The air is still. A drop of water creeps down his ear towards his neck and settles on his spine, tickling. 

He tried to wash his face. It left his hair damp, clinging to his skin. Raising a hand to tuck it away would disturb the quiet; it would unfreeze the moment, lift the seal off his sleep-salten eyes. 

It is silent. Not a motion. Not a sound. 

There is something leaden in Olruggio’s mouth. It has settled deeply, deeply in his gut. It does not twist, it lingers. It breathes with him. He wonders whether this is how it must’ve felt, to have something alien become oneself, to have oneself become something alien. 

It lives with him, now. He knows that. It tip-toes into the kitchen and makes itself at home by the sink, runs him dry of bread and water. It slithers in by the dust drifting in the pale morning light and does not leave by dusk. It weighs down the empty bedside – but it does not warm it. It never will. 

The sun brings no comfort either, this time of day. A chill has settled on Olruggio’s already bent back. He lets the light slip through his fingers like water, settles his palm on a counter. The wood meets his hand halfway. He can trace tea stains and chipped edges, or he can rest it there, and wait. 

A creak on the stairs; a bare child’s foot comes down, down, down, and then another. Like whispers they hush in, one after the other, clad in their thin white night gowns and their pale faces as if they, too, were merely part of the silver morning; fog that gathers over a lake, dissipating with the day; a beautiful phantom, a murmured dream.

Olruggio stares at them, all four of them, as they stand at the base of the stairs, and they stare back. They huddle against each other; wide-eyed, white-faced ghosts. A fire ought to be started in the oven. A kettle ought to be set on the stove. A giggle ought to be coaxed. 

There is only silence. 

It is Tetia who first steps forward. The others file behind her. Tiny hands cling to Olruggio’s robes. Even the warmth of four small bodies is not enough to chase away the morning, mourning chill. Not a sound escapes them, but where their faces are pressed against him, his robes grow damp. That is, perhaps, the loudest noise of all.

“You know,” Qifrey tells him once, “I dream of dying in your arms sometimes.”

It is one of those odd nights where they sleep in one bed without touching, close enough that their warmth is shared, an air-kiss of skin, but far enough to mourn the absence of it. Their backs are turned to each other. Qifrey feels like a ghost in those nights; he talks like one, too.

“In my arms?” Olruggio teases. “What a nightmare that must be for you.”

“Not just in yours,” Qifrey says, breath somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh. “In everyone’s. I imagine what it would be like to suffer an injury so great, I could not be saved, and have you all gather around me. Would it be mercy? Would it be tragedy? I imagine what it would be like to have that comfort, finally, for the first and last time, without risk. I imagine…”

He trails off.

Olruggio imagines it, too – Qifrey in a halo of his own blood, slowly spreading around him and staining the robes of his apprentices as they kneel by his side. He imagines them crying, grasping at him, begging. He imagines himself, cradling Qifrey’s head, perhaps humming an old tune from the Great Hall, one they used to learn as children, and watch how the light in his eye fades from pain to peace to nothing; his gaze merely a reflection of the sky as it has been merely a reflection of so many things in his life.

Qifrey has never really been at peace, has he? 

The next day, Olruggio will piece together all of it once more, and lose it, too, and the game will begin again; but now, in the strange not-hour between the last glimmering star and the first birdsong, he merely squeezes his eyes shut, not daring to turn around. 

“It is a selfish thought,” Qifrey whispers into the hem of dawn. “It’s greedy.”

“Aye, it is,” Olruggio agrees. “You better don’t tell the girls.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” A smile slumbers in Qifrey’s voice. “That’s why I tell you.”

The walls of the Great Hall are cold stone and unyielding dark. Olruggio never disliked it, the city under the sea. He still left it of course – for where Qifrey went, he followed – but he never shied away from returning. After the many weeks of isolation spent in the countryside, he used to enjoy seeing old friends again, the crowds and the many nearby conveniences.

Now, however, as he descends the stairs with four apprentices in tow, he suddenly understands Qifrey’s aversion. The walls are an oppressive force where he rests his palm against them. The sky disappears piece by piece with every step he takes down the spiralling stairs. With it, he feels a sense of dread burying itself further and further into his core. Something heavy weighs on his shoulders and pounds in his temples.

Alaira awaits them at the very bottom where all light has vanished and all memory of the sun is cold and faint to the touch. She does not say a word – she only embraces him, long and tight and warm, and lets a hand linger by his shoulder. 

They used to share drinks, the three of them. 

The four girls huddle around Olruggio upon entering the Great Hall. It is far from their first time, and yet they are wide-eyed. Without thinking, Olruggio tugs Tetia under his cloak. He can feel her trembling by his side. 

They get the four of them settled in rooms. Alaira waits by the door of the inn while they unpack, slowly and silent. When Olruggio goes to follow her outside, Agott catches him by the sleeve. Her eyes are burning. 

“Don’t abandon us,” she says. It’s not a plea. It’s a warning not to abuse her trust.

Olruggio shares Alaira’s gaze at the door. He very well might have to.

As they tread down the long, flame-flickering hallways, Alaira regards him curiously. “They are very dear to you,” she says.

“They are,” Olruggio agrees roughly. Their steps echo.

“And you are very dear to them.”

“...I suppose I am.”

Alaira’s eyes are liquid golden in the light. Olruggio does not dare to meet them. 

“I am no master, Alaira,” he says. 

She smiles and stops in front of the office, opening the door for him. “I know.”

There is the wind. There are the hills. There is the greyness of winter, all colour having seeped from the grasslands. 

Olruggio hides his face in his collar. He despises the cold, and so does Qifrey – and yet they stand here, snow foreboding in the air. Qifrey went, and Olruggio followed. What else is he to do?

“I wish to open an atelier,” Qifrey confesses, whether to the wind or to Olruggio remains uncertain. His gaze does not stray from the horizon. “I wish to take on students.”

“An atelier?” Olruggio scoffs. “You?”

Qifrey blinks at him, with that odd half-smile he so often carries, half a threat, half genuine. “Yes. Me.”

Olruggio wants to laugh. Olruggio wants to ask. Olruggio wants to think of many words to say – a bony boy with an empty gaze, a fist of rage, a voice so hoarse and so soft and all beautiful and ugly things at once – but he does neither. 

“Okay,” he says simply.

Qifrey exhales. His voice is carried away by the wind. “Okay.”

Beldaruit waits by the shore. His sealchair is propped up by the rocks. The water pools around his bare feet, the waves lapsing. For once, the sea is calm. Dusk paints the sky a breathing mirror of hues, colours fading and clouds thin like spilled ink smeared across a page. 

“I like to come out here, sometimes,” he says when Olruggio sits down next to him. “It reminds me of the simple joys anyone can take part in.”

Olruggio pulls off his own boots and lets the water wash away the ache in his feet, the salt of his sins and silences off his skin. 

“You sound an awful lot like him”, he says.

Beldaruit smiles at him. “I would like it to think the other way around.”

“Right,” Olruggio hums. “He did, after all, learn his masks from you.”

Beldaruit takes no offense. He merely gazes back out over the sunset again, where the sky already turns blue in the bruise of the beaten day. “I’m glad that I taught him at least one thing, then.”

Olruggio opens his mouth and closes it again. There is an ache within him that yearns for more stories, for more of that childhood, even if only in words, but fear walks beside it, too.

“I suppose it was difficult to be his master,” he settles on clumsily.

Beldaruit’s laughter is like a bell; much too familiar, much too pleasant and stabbing. “Not at all! It was a delight.”

“Really? He was such a tricky student.”

“It’s the thorniest roses that bloom the most beautiful.” The smile on Beldaruit’s face fades a little like the violet of the sky into the night. “And that wither the quickest.”

Olruggio does not suppose that Qifrey will do a lot of withering any time soon, not if he has a say in it. It is strange, really – that tree has stolen him away. He should curse it, should light a match to it, should take an axe to it, and yet; he cannot help but wanting to water the fields all around it, to tend to its branches. It is the last piece he has. In a way, it is more a part of Qifrey than anything else has ever been. 

A gardener, a weaver, a teacher. Who would’ve thought. 

“They’re asking me to take the fifth test,” Olruggio admits, chin on his knees and feeling strangely small. “They want me to take over the atelier.”

“And will you?” Beldaruit asks, voice as always somewhere between pleasantly amused and wise. 

“It was his dream, not mine.”

“What is your dream, then?”

Olruggio does not know. Lately, he only dreams of one thing. He has forgotten what it was like before, to hold a future, to honour the past. It has all come to a full stop. 

He used to dream of grand things, of heroes and destiny. Qiffrey used to dream of warmth and home and peace. The sea is a mirror to the blazing sky; perhaps they are, too. 

He watches the waves wash over his feet. 

Beldaruit is getting old. It is a rare thing to see him out and about in his own flesh and blood and not an illusion; him and his weathered skin, his pale hair, his heavy eyes. There is a sort of wisdom in frivolity, in that childlike wonder that neither master nor student ever quite set to rest. 

Olruggio himself never acquired it; but he can grasp a sense of it in the way the girls gawk at spells, or giggle in the night, or sing into the empty kitchen air as if cooking their meals was the greatest delight of all. In a way, that is a piece of Qiffrey, too. He still lives in the joy of the world. He still lives in that garden of his own making, the four young hearts he tended to as delicately as Olruggio has taken to cutting away blackened leaves. He can be caught in a glimpse out of the window, a faint trace on the threshold, waiting by the door.

What does Olruggio dream of? 

“Aren’t you getting cold?” he asks Beldaruit to deflect his earlier question. The wind blows in strongly from the sea. It forebodes the night.

“Don’t you worry about me,” Beldaruit giggles. “I am out here on my own accord, and I shall return when I see it fit.”

“I must admit, I was quite surprised when I found you here,” Olruggio grumbles. “It’s not often you go above ground.”

Beldaruit hums. “It’s a rare occasion. But I wished to breathe for once, and today, it seems that my body allows it, so I took the opportunity.” 

“Breathe? I figured you liked the Great Hall.”

“I do. But lately I am haunted by shadows of children past that deserve much more memory than that, something more fitting.” He glances sideways at Olruggio. “Something like this.”

Ah, yes. The sky and the sea. One beloved, one beloathed. One to cast time in dying light, and one to wash it away with the tide. Depths of both delight and despair.  A mirror of each other. 

Olruggio turns his face into the salty breeze. 

“He was my only student,” Beldaruit sighs. “I truly wish I could’ve given him the peace and stability a child needs, but alas, he found it out here, where I could not follow, instead. Thus is the nature of children. They make their homes in the most unexpected of places, and the most unwilling of hearts.”

Olruggio thinks of rolling hills and warm winds and crystal morning air and a crackling hearth. He thinks of bare feet padding down hallways and the clatter of inkpots. He thinks of laughter muted through the walls.

“Peace and stability...” he murmurs. “Home… I suppose that is what the girls need.”

Beldaruit smiles. “And what about you?”

Olruggio looks out over the crinkling waves to the faint line between horizon and sea. His eyes water at the light, and only the light. There is a hearth where his heart is, and it smoulders golden and warm.

Oh, well. 

One evening, when the girls have already gone to bed and the autumn night sways through the open window, he finds Qifrey asleep at the kitchen table.

The light is burning low. Ink stains his fingertips. Unfinished spells are crumpled beneath his mop of hair. His chest rises and falls with gentle breath; in and out, in and out. 

His face is calm and relaxed. Gone is the edge to his eye. Gone is the set to his jaw. He looks almost younger, there in that flickering flame that smudges all into oil colours and distant memories, like he did when he was a boy. 

He looks at peace.

Treading carefully – Qifrey has always been a light sleeper – Olruggio goes to get a blanket and covers his shoulders. Holding his breath, he pulls Qifrey’s glasses from his face. Uncharacteristically, he does not stir at all. He has been exhausted lately, Olruggio knows that. More than usual.

Closing the window so that the pleasantly chilled air does not turn any colder, he makes his way back to his own quarters. He would’ve liked to shepherd Qifrey to bed – he’ll only wake up with a stiff neck tomorrow and wince at every movement when he thinks no one is watching – but there is no guarantee that Qifrey would be able to fall asleep again afterwards. 

So, the kitchen it is, where he falls asleep so often and Olruggio always finds him and they never talk about it afterwards.

This will not be the last time.

Olruggio wouldn’t have it any other way.

Olruggio, of course, passes the fifth test. The girls await him with cheers and gifts much too embarrassing, but it’s the first time he has seen them smile in weeks, so he accepts it begrudgingly and much to the amusement of the other attending witches. 

The paperwork is settled. The meetings are held. The ceremonies are finished. They stay in the Great Hall for an entire month, mostly for the sake of the girls. Grief, Olruggio has learned, is a tricky thing – especially when contained to the cold, wintery walls of the atelier, in the middle of nowhere with so little life around, it’s easy to think oneself as one of the dead, too.  

He does not admit to himself that he, too, thinks of the hills and fields and shudders. 

Nevertheless, their return to the atelier is inevitable and imminent. The evening before their departure, Olruggio feels so sick, he wanders down to the bar and gets so drunk, the next day passes in a haze of nausea, exhaustion and a headache. He wonders whether this is how Qifrey must’ve felt on the daily basis, especially towards the end, and bans the thought from his hungover mind as quickly as it came. 

It feels a little anticlimactic for the atelier to be merely a windowway away. Olruggio would’ve preferred carriages and days of travel to make the distance settle, to prepare. When he steps from one place to the next – one life plunging into another – the atelier lies empty and grey. Silver.

The girls file behind him, all pale as if it was the first time they saw their dreadful, dreadful home. 

Over the course of the next few days, they fall into an odd sort of routine. They wake up at the same time as before, eat at the same time, study at the same time. The gap feels all the more prominent like this. 

Olruggio begins whistling while cooking to fill the silence where usually, soft singing would be, and winces immediately. Richeh still serves six plates a few times before she remembers. Tetia brews a can of herbal tea in the morning that no one touches. Coco comments on the rain with a sigh of sympathy, glancing towards her empty side, before clamping her mouth shut.

Once, during quiet study in the living room, Agott, nose-deep in her book, absentmindedly murmurs: “Master Qifrey, would you mind looking at–”

She pales. Richeh leaves the room. No one speaks for hours afterwards.

The absence lives in the corners. It hides at the ceiling. Every time they believe to have found the last of it – the last painful reminder, the last gap they need to fill – a new one lands on soft claws, quietly, resolutely and buries itself in the wooden floorboards. Richeh becomes convinced that the hallway is haunted. Coco sleeps there many nights, and confirms with a disappointed shake of her head that it isn’t. The cold seeps in through the cracks in the windows, and like age, it settles in all of their bones creaking, aching. 

The nights are quiet. The days are even quieter. 

A letter arrives from the Great Hall, attached with several applications for Watchful Eyes. Olruggio burns it in the fireplace before he even reads it to the end. Even the warmest of flames does not chase away his chill.

Despite careful consideration, they reach the last of Qifrey’s enchanted soup pots. They all look at each other at the dinner table, not a word spoken, and Olruggio hurries forward to stash it back on the shelf at the very back.

To no one’s surprise, Tetia is the one to pick up cooking the fastest, and before Olruggio knows any better, she prepares dinner five out of seven days. It tastes good. She is clearly a skilled cook, often taking extra time to make dessert, too. Olruggio eats her food gratefully and swallows it with a lump in his throat. Nowadays, everything tastes bitter to him. 

One time, in the late afternoon while the others are still studying, he happens upon her in the kitchen. She stands with her back to him, not having noticed his presence, and he slinks back into the shadow of the door. 

For a moment, she looks much older than she is; there, in the pale winter light, hair bound together in an uncharacteristically loose braid, not even humming under her breath as she cuts vegetables. Tetia has always been taller than the other girls, but only now does it occur to Olruggio that she has grown. All of them have. Soon, it will be wrong to call them children, rather teenagers.

Qifrey is not here to see it. 

Tetia suddenly winces, hissing as she drops the knife. Before Olruggio is even aware of it, he’s by her side, pulling her hand away from her mouth. Blood drops from her finger. 

A few curses and a wrapped towel later, Olruggio wordlessly takes over the knifework while Tetia activates the firespell to boil water on. Olruggio watches her from the corner of the eye.

“What’s the plan today?” he asks.

“Soup!” Tetia smiles at him. It doesn’t reach her eyes. It’s a heartbreaking sight on her usually so bright face. “I figured we could use something to warm us up in this cold.”

Olruggio looks outside. The snow is thick and still in the growing twilight. “It’s a good thought.”

“You really don’t need to help me, though, Master Olruggio,” Tetia says. Not for the first time, Olruggio is glad for the running joke of all of them calling him Master before… well. It made the transition a lot less jarring than it could’ve been.

“I don’t mind,” Olruggio shrugs.

Tetia frowns. “No, really. I have it under control! I know that you’re very busy, I can do it on my own.”

Olruggio only raises his eyebrows and nods towards her hand. “You sure about that?”

Tetia stares at him for a moment longer before sighing and returning to her work.

“...I really do want to help you,” Olruggio says into the silence after a few beats. “My work can wait.” He glances at her. “It’s not common for your hand to slip. I wouldn’t want you overworking yourself.”

That’s big, coming from you, a familiar voice chimes in his head that he immediately buries. 

“I’m not overworking myself,” Tetia argues and scowls. There is a sudden quiver to her voice. Olruggio freezes.

Once again, Qifrey’s absence punches a hole through him; it aches deeply, drearily, so overwhelming, it grabs his breath and forces it back down his throat. 

He used to be able to handle the children. He used to be able to talk to them, to be soft, to be kind, to be approachable. Olruggio is… harsh and brash and anything but tender enough to handle the delicate, fragile thing that these young souls are. 

And yet, he has to. He has to. He made a promise.

“...I don’t want you to get hurt,” Olruggio forces out, staring holes into the cutting board. “I appreciate you wanting to make everyone dinner, but if your own health and studying is affected, you need to slow down a bit. I can take over cooking, too. You don’t need to feel responsible for–”

“I don’t feel responsible,” Tetia interrupts him. “That’s not why I’m doing it.”

“Then why are you?”

Tetia bites her lower lip. “...It’s a comfort,” she says. “Both to me when cooking and to you when I see you all being happy about it. One person does the thanking, and the other gets thanked. It’s… an exchange.”

Her usual cheeriness is lacking. It makes her catch phrase sound empty. Olruggio hums. “Is that so?”

Tetia says nothing for a long while. 

Then: “Master Olruggio?”

“Yes?”

“...He never felt much comfort, did he?”

Olruggio’s hand on the cutting board does not still. He does not look up from his work. 

Qifrey, always either a tad too close or a tad too far away from the fireplace. Qifrey, refusing to sleep with a blanket in the winter and staying awake for hours on end. Qifrey, adding extra spice to his meal. 

Qifrey, never meeting Olruggio’s eye for longer than a second. Qifrey, shying away from touch. Qifrey, always by the open window, always watching life from outside, but never allowing himself to step in. 

Qifrey, staring at the sun – a star, too – without his glasses until the pain blinded him, just to keep a promise.

Qifrey, taking on guilt and blame and shame for years on end in the name of self-preservation; and Olruggio, ever-pressing, ever-hoping. 

It was hope that did it, in the end. Perhaps if Olruggio was any less stubborn, any less willing to give all of himself for two decades to a man that barely gave anything back, barely could give anything back; perhaps then, Qifrey would be still alive. Miserable, in pain, but alive.

“No,” Olruggio says roughly, “he did not.”

When Tetia doesn’t reply, he turns around to find her shoulders shaking. He does the only thing he can think of, and goes to embrace her. She clings to him tightly. He wonders how it’s possible for a heart to feel so full and so empty at the same time.

“All I ever wanted,” Tetia hiccups into his chest, “is to give the people I love happiness; to make them a good meal and a warm bed to sleep in. That’s my only wish in life. It’s what makes me happy. And he gave me so much, but I… If I couldn’t even…”

She wails, hands clasped tight around Olruggio’s back. “What is it all for? If I couldn’t even grant him that, what kind of witch am I?”

Past her head, Olruggio gazes out over the snow-frozen hills. Frost creeps up on the windowsill. The sky is grey and the wind is biting, but in here, it’s warm and golden and safe. It’s a sanctuary. It’s a smudge of childhood in a landscape so harsh. 

It’s the place Qifrey built – his legacy.

Who would’ve thought a man, carved by tragedy and revenge and cruelty, to leave something as gentle as this in his wake. Olruggio did, perhaps. He never expected anything else. 

“You,” Olruggio says, “are exactly the kind of witch he would be proud of – was proud of. Your very existence brings joy to the world, and to magic; and that is the kind of magic he was most fond of.”

He cards his fingers through her hair. Salt stings in his eyes. 

“And in a way,” he adds quietly, “you – all of you – must have brought him a sort of happiness, too. Not comfort, not peace, but happiness nevertheless.”

Tetia’s voice is small. “How?”

“By watching you grow. By watching you become yourselves and so much more.” 

“Really?”

Olruggio closes his eyes. Qifrey, on top of a hill. Qifrey, fists unclenched. Qifrey, laughter rattling in his chest and Qifrey, smile small but true.

“Of course. For a teacher, there is no greater joy in life.”

They sit around the fireplace. The spells have been abandoned, the hot chocolate empty, and all four children ride on the peak of a sugar rush. 

“Favourite word! Favourite word! Favourite word!” Tetia shouts at the top of her lungs. 

Qifrey winces at the sound and laughs. “Now, now, Tetia, at that volume, no one will hear anyone’s favourite word.”

Tetia deflates sheepishly. “Right. Apologies, Master!”

“‘Ribbons’,” Richeh says.

Tetia spins around. “Not fair! I wanted to go first!”

Richeh shrugs. “Too slow. Ribbons is my favourite. It sounds like Richeh and it’s pretty.”

Qifrey claps in his hands. “A very good word. Now, Tetia?”

Tetia throws her hands in the air. “‘Squishy!’ It just sounds so… well, squishy!”

Coco gasps. “It really does!” 

All eyes turn towards her. She hums in thought. “Uh, mine… I think mine is ‘wool’. It’s soft and comfortable and reminds me of home.”

The sparkle in her eyes does not fade as she mentions her home. Olruggio glances at Qifrey, but he’s already looking at Agott. She turns away with a scoff. 

“Favourite words are for children,” she says. “We’re only wasting our time with such ridiculous and nonsensical–"

“I like the word ‘cockwomble’,” Olruggio interrupts. 

Qifrey gasps. “Olruggio!”

What follows is a chorus of three children repeating the word over and over, the fourth one asking what it means and Qifrey desperately trying to silence them while glaring at Olruggio out of the corner of his eye. Olruggio can’t help but roll on the floor from laughter.

Five minutes later, after everything has finally calmed down and Olruggio’s stomach hurts, Coco resumes the conversation. “What’s your favourite word, Master Qifrey?”

Qifrey smiles and hums. “I suppose that would be ‘hiddled’.” 

Tetia blinks. “Hiddled?”

“It means–” Olruggio begins, but Qifrey shushes him. 

“We’re not explaining your word, so we’re not explaining mine, either,” he says resolutely. “It doesn’t matter either way. It’s not about the meaning for me – I just like the way it sounds.”

“It does sound soft and whispered,” Tetia agrees. 

“So mysterious!” Coco squeals. 

The children fall back into their excited chatter. The fire flickers. Underneath the woolen blanket, Olruggio feels warm and defeated at the same time. 

He meets Qifrey’s glinting gaze in the light’s shadow, and finds no answer in it.

There is someone kneeling by the tree.

Olruggio stands still and frozen in the snow. The night is a cold thing on his skin; the starry sky is without comfort. 

“I didn’t expect anyone here,” he croaks. His hand wanders to his palm quire. His heart wanders into his throat. 

“Me neither,” Inguin replies and turns their head towards Olruggio. It’s not the first time Olruggio notes their resemblance to an owl; head cocked curiously, mask staring at him ominously. 

They cup their face in a way so familiar, Olruggio feels sick. “I would’ve thought you too much a coward to come, pointed cap,” they say.

“You’re the coward, not even daring to show your face,” Olruggio retorts. He suddenly feels like a child. These past weeks have, in a way, tossed him back into the past and yet forward into a much older, heavier future. Time is a river nourishing and drowning him at once. 

Inguin turns back to the tree without saying anything. Olruggio closes his palm quire. He does not move closer. He does not walk away. There is a strange mix of protectiveness growing within him alongside sullen, settling defeat. 

Even in death, Qifrey’s stolen past comes to haunt him.

“All these years…” Olruggio says into the winter-silence, his voice cracking through it like a body plummeting through ice into a lake’s dark depths. “All these years, he’s been hunting you.”

Inguin’s reply is amused. “Has he, now?”

“I’ve seen it. The fact that you’re here now proves it. You knew him, and he knew you. And I knew him, better than anyone – but still, I don’t know you.”

The giant eye stares at him, tilted a little. “Don’t you?”

Doesn’t he?

Olruggio finally dares to move and settles by the tree, far away from Inguin. He does not touch it. His hand hovers a breath away from the silver bark, hard and cold and covered in snow. It gleams slightly in the dark. The branches stretch towards the mute sky in its swirling, empty vastness. The stars are dead things. Even their light is only an echo of life; an aftermath all in itself.

Qifrey hated the cold.

 “Could you bring him back?” Olruggio asks into the night.

For a long, silent moment he believes Inguin to have left – but then they shift, the night falling across their cloaked shoulders like shadow. In the dark, Olruggio can make out a sliver of pale skin beneath their mask, just so. 

“Time,” they say, “is the most brilliant and the most ruthless artist of all.”

The silverwood lies still in the winter. 

Night is a beast breathing down on their necks. It’s ivy, vein-like growing past throats, crawling past skin. 

Qifrey trembles in the dark. He does not make a sound. The candle is cold; only a sliver of moonlight falls through the window, wrapping the room in shadow and silver.

Olruggio holds him. He does not ask questions. He does not speak of comfort. There is a world between where they touch. There is a life between where their eyes meet, unseeing and unblinking. 

In the dead of the night, Olruggio might be looking at a corpse already, encased in sheets of white.

The room gasps and shudders. It breathes alongside him. The table quivers. The chair scrapes against the floor, swallowing the past behind clenched pearl-teeth and splintered wooden legs.

In the night, Qifrey’s hands are the darkest part of him. They’re stained down to the wrist. It could be ink. It could be blood. It could be his guilt, leaking from his insides, seeping into his skin. 

Olruggio does not know. He does not ask. He only holds him silently, and the moment gnaws, gnaws, gnaws well into the morning memory. 

It should not come as much of a surprise to Olruggio as it does, when he finds Richeh.

 Sluggishly making his way into the kitchen in desperate search for another cup of coffee, he almost doesn’t see her at first. She sits still as a statue on her chair, not a hair moving, still in her nightrobe, as if she and her long, stream-spun hair are merely a reflection of that silver light through the window. Olruggio freezes in the doorway.

“Richeh?”

She doesn’t react to her name. He walks up to her, softly, afraid that a wrong move might make her bolt – or worse, let her implode internally, shutting him out forever – but even as he stands before her, she barely looks up. There is the faintest of lines on her forehead. 

“Richeh,” he tries again. “Come, girl, talk to me.”

Richeh slightly shakes her head. “I don’t want to.”

She is a bundle on her chair. Her knees are pulled into her chest. Her feet are bare. She must be freezing, sitting here for two hours all by herself. 

When Olruggio left breakfast a little earlier to catch up on some paperwork, he assumed the girls would all finish, get dressed and study on their own as they have done so very often in the past. He should’ve known. The past is not a gift, not a present. Just because this house, this home, once used to be a pillar of stability does not mean that it is now. 

Olruggio curses internally, at himself, at Qifrey, at the world. Mostly at the world.

With a sigh, he crouches a little and peeks past her curtain of hair to see her eyes. “No studying for you today, hm?”

Richeh shakes her head.

“And no talking?”

Richeh shakes her head.

Olruggio nods. “Alright. That’s fine. But may I offer the chance to come along with me outside?”

She frowns. “Outside?”

“I need to chop up some firewood.” He gestures towards the living room. “So that we have it nice and toasty tonight.”

“Spells burn without wood.”

“Do they, now?” Olruggio scratches his beard. “I thought you didn’t know a thing about firespells.”

Richeh looks as if she wants to protest, but then seems to remember her own vow not to talk today and shuts her mouth with a click. 

“If that’s the case,” Olruggio hums, “how about I chop some wood while you practise some fire spells to keep me warm, hm? Just for a bit?”

He cringes at his own tone of voice. The air is empty where easily spun comfort should be. There is no other voice but his own. Every string of sentence he spells out for the girls sound strained, so unlike himself, it’s impossible for them to not notice. They are kind enough not to mention it – or perhaps they, like him, try to pretend sometimes, that his voice really is not his own but that of someone else. 

Despite his stilted speech, Richeh agrees and slowly gets to her feet. Olruggio shrugs on his own coat as he watches her getting dressed – boots, leg warmers, a cloak, mittens, a scarf and a hat. He aches at the thought of her freezing already, but today, it is not a battle that he wants to fight. 

When they step outside, winter is a bare thing on Olruggio’s face. It bites through his cloak. He picks up the axe resting next to his chopping block and cannot quite bring himself to regret the cold he is sure to come down with after this. 

Richeh hops onto a stack of logs and pulls out her palm quire while Olruggio begins his work. It is repetitive and requires focus. Along with the constant strain of muscle, it takes him far, far away, until the world blissfully blurs around him and becomes only a sideline for the rhythm of wood falling.

“Why don’t you just enchant your axe?” Richeh asks from the side when after a long while, he hunches over with a huff, wiping his forehead. Her legs dangle from the logs. The fire she has probably drawn fifty times by now, floating steadily and crackling in the air next to her, does little to chase away the numbness in Olruggio’s fingers. He can barely feel them around the hilt of the axe. 

“It would be easier, wouldn’t it?” Olruggio says with a chuckle. 

Richeh scowls. “It would.”

Olruggio sobers up and takes a deep breath. It clangs in his lungs. He becomes awfully aware again of the snowy silence; of the blood rushing through him. 

“It is inefficient, yes,” he agrees quietly. “To be completely frank, it’s unnecessary work. I could make a much better use of my time. And yet…” He considers the callouses on his hand; the elegant curve of the axe, wood smooth and worn. 

This morning, he woke up with his nerves itching and his throat tight. His bed was awfully cold. The usual warmth of breakfast was not enough to take him away, nor were the bothersome hours hunched over paperwork. So, he went outside – and alas, the could breathe again, for just a while. 

It only means that it all came crashing down even worse the second he stopped. 

Richeh scoffs. “You adults and your odd rules. You have to make everything more complicated for yourselves.”

Her legs hit the logs before stilling. Olruggio looks up at her, about to agree sheepishly, when he finds her suddenly downcast. Her hair falls in front of her face. A stray snowflake lands in it, unmelting. 

“But then again, I did the same thing,” Richeh whispers. “I kept sitting in the kitchen for no reason. I could’ve followed the others and studied and I could’ve distracted myself, but instead I just… sat there and let it swallow me.”

Gingerly, Olruggio lowers the axe against the block and walks towards her. The snow feels much too loud beneath his boots. 

“I made it all way more difficult than it had to be,” Richeh continues mumbling, shoving her chin into her collar. “Maybe I’m growing up.”

It’s such an uncharacteristic statement coming from her, Olruggio’s hand freezes halfway to grabbing hers. “Growing up?”

“I don’t like ribbons anymore.”

“What?”

Richeh suddenly stares up at him, defiant and burning and oh so, so very afraid. “I said what I said. I don’t like ribbons anymore. They don’t mean anything. They don’t make me happy like they used to. Nothing does. I’m becoming miserable and boring and horrible like both you and Master Qifrey, and that means that I must be growing up.”

Olruggio is quiet for a long, baffled moment. 

Over her own fire, Richeh’s eyes are glassy. 

He tenderly, tenderly reaches out. “...But I like your ribbons.”

It is decidedly the wrong thing to say. Richeh scowls. “So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all what you like and what you don’t like. And it also doesn’t matter what you say you like and what you don’t like. Master Qifrey said he liked being with us, and yet he left.”

Olruggio’s mouth runs dry. Ah.

With an exhale, he lets himself drop next to the fire. The snow seeps into his cloak. He breathes in the smoke and frost. 

“He didn’t have much of a choice, Richeh,” Olruggio says quietly.

“You always have a choice,” Richeh retorts. Her voice has grown louder. Olruggio wonders whether the other apprentices have heard it already from the inside. Perhaps they’re all crowding around the window, listening. “Not having a choice means that you’ve given up on yourself. And I hate it when people give up on themselves. I hate it more than anything!”

Olruggio thinks of a body that is there, but a mind faraway; he thinks of a blank face in the night and a bottomless lake of a gaze and shoulders so bent, so heavy and tired. He thinks of hope being merely a fleeting breath, growing scarcer over the years before one day, dying an unnoticed death over breakfast, buried with the afternoon sun and having passed on by dinner. 

“Me too,” Olruggio agrees quietly. “Me too.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Richeh says. Her voice quivers ever so slightly. “I don’t want to grow up and say things I don’t mean or mean things I don’t say or say things that I do mean but then choose to do something different. I don’t want to forget my ribbons. I don’t want to cast spells that I don’t love and the least of all I want to do that as a choice. I don’t want to become something other. I don’t want to lose myself.”

Oh, that girl. That sweet, sweet girl. Honey drips down Olruggio’s throat and chokes him whole.

Qifrey would’ve plucked every star off the sky for his girls. Olruggio knows now that he would, too. 

But the sky is far away, and stars are bitter things. He can claw for them all he wants. The world will still come for them. It already has – and he couldn’t stop it. He is merely a sailor in that limitless darkness, helplessly watching the wondrous sun of childhood burn out. 

Something in Olruggio’s expression must’ve shifted. Richeh’s face trembles. He reaches over the fire to grab her hands, and she lets him. 

“Oh, Richeh,” he sighs. “You won’t become like him. You won’t become like me. Keep at your spells, girl. Keep drawing them, the ones you want to draw most, and that way, your core remains the same. You will never lose yourself.”

Her eyes are sharp and dull and bright in the reflection of the flame. “But Master Olruggio,” she says, voice so quiet, it could be a confession, “I already have. The spell I want to draw most is the one to bring him back – but that is one that I can never draw, and that means…”

She looks up at the grey, grey sky. The snow on her hat falls into her face, melting to drops of water glistening on her cheeks. “That means it’s too late. I’ll never be me again. Not as he knew it.”

It is deep and it is dark. It must be water; but the water is everywhere, a sea without a bottom and an ending. The very air has been replaced by it. There is no up and down; it’s a universe of water, and the dust particles filtering through the dim light are the stars. 

There is a pale hand in that darkness. 

It reaches out. Olruggio jolts forward to grab it, but every movement of his is sluggish. Up is down; down is up. By the time he has blinked and regained a sense of balance, the hand is far away. 

Olruggio knows what it feels like to grasp it; to pull it out of the water, out of the night, out of the darkness, onto the shore of wakefulness. Air escapes his mouth alongside a name. It swirls higher, higher and the body beneath him, still and unmoving and ghastly, sinks lower, lower. A glimpse of floating hair; a sliver of skin, stained. 

Olruggio swims and swims and does not move. It is only when the water floods his nose and throat and lungs, burning and suffocating and sweet, that he finds it to be not water at all, but ink.

Olruggio awakens drenched in sweat, chest heaving. Fighting the bile rising in his throat, he tumbles out of bed, almost crashing to the floor when his legs get tangled up in his sheets. He gets dressed feverishly in the darkness. The room spins closer and closer. The walls creep up to him. 

Carelessly tossing his cloak over his shoulders and slipping into whatever shoes he finds the fastest, Olruggio stumbles out into the snow. He can barely feel the crystal-cold of the night, nor pays attention to the starry sky above. Blindly picking any direction, he stalks off towards the hills. His muscles burn. His lungs ache. His mind pounds, pounds, pounds with a dream he can barely remember. 

There are many things he can barely remember. Many, many. 

Finally on top of a hill, Olruggio allows his strained legs to collapse beneath him. He buries his hands in the snow, and then his face. The cold tingles and bites. Something within him writhes and trashes. A wretched sound escapes him. Winter swallows it immediately. 

Hunched over there, snow clinging to his hair and clothes and lashes, hands clutching his abdomen, Olruggio finally dares to look up. The stars are brilliant above him – a wide net of silver-spun threads, the vest of the night the deepest of dark. They swirl and swirl; like dust in water; like light in ink. 

The fabric of the universe, drawn by hand; existence, entirely brought on by that single wretched tree. 

If it meant to burn reality, to take his axe and drive it into every single branch of being, just to have Qifrey back, Olruggio would oh so gladly do it. 

Instead, his pleading goes unheard. The despair of the night remains his and his alone. It stretches on forever. The sky watches on; silent, silver, sullen as always. 

There in that knee-deep snow, Olruggio does not even have the will to despise it anymore. 

When Olruggio enters The Starry Sword, there’s a bell jingling over the door. The air is warm and pleasant compared to the wind blowing through the streets of Khaln outside. The smell of dry wood, herbs and dyes used to comfort him. 

The telltale sound of clinkering and humming draws him upstairs. The railing is smooth and cool beneath his palm as he ascends step by step, slowly. It has been worn out by many hands over the decades. Light filters eerily through the silverwood tree’s branches. It maps out the dark floor with speckles and dapples like that of a forest. It gleams in the dim dust. 

Qifrey used to frequent this shop. There was always childlike wonder swirling in his eye when marvelling at all the different tools and inks, even after having seen it all a hundred times. It was one of the only rare, precious places where whatever invisible weight he wore on his shoulders lifted just so slightly.

That wonder lives on in Coco. Olruggio supposes many things of his live on in her. Every day, she becomes painstakingly more similar to him – including the habit of letting secrets eat at her from the inside out, carving her out like a tree trunk to be a host of sluggish, poison ivy guilt. 

Looking at the silverwood tree growing in the middle of the workshop, Olruggio ponders how truly wondrous it must’ve been for Qifrey to come here. Was it dread that he felt at seeing the intricate beauty his end will become, or comfort? Did his secrets lay lighter or heavier? What did he smell in that dusty, dormant air: the past or the future?

“Olruggio!” Mr Nolnoa exclaims in surprise when Olruggio emerges. He must’ve been so engrossed in his work, he didn’t hear him coming upstairs. “Oh my, what a long time it has been!”

Olruggio smiles wryly. “Aye, it has.”

Mr Nolnoa is turned around in his chair. Behind him, the desk is scattered with vials and dyes. The light from the window reflects in his glasses. 

His smile, at first delighted, melts into something somber. They both know the reason why Olruggio has come only now. He hasn’t had to make his own purchases in a long, long time. It’s a time that aches, now. It breathes with a stutter. 

“Olruggio,” Mr Nolnoa repeats, eyes soft. He gets up and makes a notion as if to take Olruggio’s hands but then just lets them hang there in that uncertain space that grief creates. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”

Olruggio dips his head. “Thank you.”

“He was a light of life. A brilliant man, really. It’s those that the tragedy of life always takes the earliest.”

Olruggio wonders how much Mr Nolnoa knows. Everything has been kept under wraps for the sake of not alarming the populace of witch society. Spreading the truth about silverwood seeds and its alarming potential could have unpredictable consequences, and so the Knights Moralis decided to let those in the know swear an oath. 

The weight of that knowledge – of that lie, when asked – is almost welcome to Olruggio. Somehow, he can now understand Qifrey in a way he never could before.

Still, Mr Nolnoa has worked with silverwood trees all his life. He is a man who knows to keep his mouth shut when necessary, and he knew Qifrey for years. Perhaps there were telltales that any other witch would not pay any mind to. 

Perhaps Olruggio could come clean; tell someone, someone who is not a child or an enemy, of the tree growing in the hills, surrounded by nothing but vast air and loneliness. Perhaps Olruggio could tell him how he himself overthrows his own roots in those hills; vast air and loneliness and sacrifice. 

Perhaps he could. 

Olruggio nods and painstakingly, creakingly, looks around the shop. It’s quiet. The buzzing of the streets outside is dull through the walls. The light and dust falls undisturbed. It’s akin to a sanctuary; muted, silent. Nothing breathes. Nothing lives. 

“You must be lonely all here by yourself, old man,” Olruggio murmurs, feeling like a coward for choosing this way of changing the topic. “Still no news of Tartah?”

Mr Nolnoa shakes his head and sighs. “No. Wherever that boy has gone off to, he has left no trace. I wish I could go looking for him more than in the little time I have to spare, but I can’t afford to close the shop.”

Olruggio, once again, nods. He knows about traces – and about how someone who doesn’t want to be found avoids them. 

There is deep pain edged into Mr Nolnoa’s face. He looks, Olruggio realises, much older than he did the last time they saw each other. Olruggio wonders whether the same applies to him. He avoids mirrors these days. 

Mr Nolnoa clears his throat. “Either way, thank you for your concern, Olruggio. It is deeply appreciated. I want to return the sentiment, though – I’m sure it can get lonely and overwhelming out there with only the children, even once you acquire a new Watchful Eye – especially as such a young man. If there is anything I can do, feel free to tell me.”

Olruggio chuckles at that. “I haven’t been called young in a while. I’m already going grey.”

“Ah, that’s the stress,” Mr Nolnoa comments warmly. “Just you wait, lad, just you wait. The years only keep getting shorter and before you know it, you’ve got only a head full of white hair, if you even have any left.”

Ah yes, age. Olruggio thinks of a small garden and a familiar voice and the children that aren’t children anymore visiting. He thinks of all the things time has already stolen before it could even give them to him. 

Mr Nolnoa turns back around and strains his voice to steadiness. “Alright. I suppose it is new ink you need? Or something for the children?”

Just like that, they are talking business. It’s simple. It’s easy. It only feeds into the gnawing pit inside Olruggio, that professionalism. 

He orders a new vial of ink for both himself and Richeh, as they are both running out. Mr Nolnoa, in typical fashion, draws out the ink as they speak. Olruggio watches the process in silence. The dust drifts. 

The caldron burns. The branch pales. The ink drips, drips, drips, leaving an echo of its fall as it swirls, abyss-like, night-shaded, into the spiral of its own darkness. 

The black poison that hurts both tree and host, it used to bleed all across Qifrey’s face. Olruggio knows what it is, now – it is sorrow, tainting silver. There are tears gathering in Mr Nolnoa’s caldron. Ink is made from grief. Magic is drawn with the essence of heartbreak. 

They take out a boat onto a lake. 

It is a lake Olruggio has never seen before. Whether that is because it is one of those lost memories or a dream, he does not know. He is not sure there is a difference. 

The water is black and calm where it pools around the boat. Even the oars breaking through its surface barely stirs it. Scattered leaves drift in a reflection of the grey sky. The lake is a mirror. Olruggio looks down and barely sees himself in that darkness. 

“You’re thinking,” Qifrey says. His hair gleams eerily beneath the shade of the autumn trees. He is a ghost on a canvas of muted browns and blacks. 

The lake is deep, Olruggio knows. It is deep and it is no lake at all. It might be ink. If he fell, he would drown in magic. He would drown in the thing he loves most. 

The boat, the ghost, the ink. The autumn that never was. Olruggio knows he should be afraid. Instead, there is only a dull sadness in the way the leaves drift; in the way the mirror-ink-lake does not reflect, only swallow. It’s the quiet breeze that stirs the water, that grief.

“One of us has to do it,” Olruggio grumbles.

“What are you thinking about?” 

Qifrey smiles at him. His eye is a mirror-lake, too. Olruggio does not see himself in it – only the depths, the well of ink swelling; only the magic drawn at its bottom. 

“Nothing,” says Olruggio.

“Nothing?”

That eye, that water, that sky. They all hold secrets in depths Olruggio cannot reach anymore. They are all mirrors of each other. Which of them came first?

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Agott is the rock among the girls. When Tetia bursts into tears over her meal, Agott is the one to pry her hands away from her cutlery and wordlessly pour her some water. When Richeh refuses to eat or speak for an entire day, Agott is the one to work by her side in silence, just a hair’s touch away, until night falls. When Coco paints on one of her much too common porcelain smiles over their shared cracked mirror, Agott is the one to pull her outside for a walk. 

What they talk about then, Olruggio never gets the privilege or offer to know. He doesn’t think he wants to. 

It is only with relief that he can watch the girls as they cling to each other in the cold mornings and quiet evenings. He remembers his very own winter of loss as a child, and the subsequent tear it caused within him that never quite healed, only scarred horribly; and he is glad that unlike him, they are not alone in that night that never seems to end. Shared grief is grief still, but not that aching loneliness that haunted him afterwards; that haunts him now, too. 

Whereas that winter as a boy hardened Olruggio, though, it smooths over Agott. Her harsh reprimands become rare. She does not smile any more or any less than she used to, but there is a softness to her voice now when she talks to the other girls. Refilling glasses, noticing the silence, pulling hands away from hair and skin – her perception has shifted outwards. Whereas her attention used to be focused on herself and her own path, it now undeniably lies on the atelier. The bitter, festering air around her has disintegrated into cool but caring authority. 

On top of that, she has gotten too tall for her old gown, Olruggio notices one day with a sigh. 

The girls have changed. The girls are still changing. One day, they will have grown into themselves fully, and the memory of this winter will shift from agonising, vibrant reality to something dull; perhaps even something precious, with all its pains and paths still unwalked. 

Olruggio will be there to see it. He won’t be able to follow Qifrey anymore, so he will lead them until they outrun him, and he will be glad for it. It will be the meaning of his life.

For all this life’s missed potential and lost opportunities, he wouldn’t change a thing. 

The light flickers. The desk is rough underneath his hands. His skin is dry from hours upon hours spent writing on paper. Snowflakes kiss the nightly window’s glass. 

Olruggio blinks against the burning in his eyes. It has gotten much too late – he’s gotten lost in musings. The letters he was reading are swimming in front of his eyes. 

Just as he’s about to get up to collect his papers and turn off the lamp, ready to head to bed, something shifts on the stairway. There’s a muffled sound through the door cracked open. Olruggio freezes. 

“Master?”

It’s not a voice he expected. He lowers his papers. A ghost of a girl appears out of the dark in the doorway.

Olruggio blinks at her. “Agott.”

Agott is trembling. Her face is red where she must’ve been furiously wiping at it – maybe to hide the tears swimming in her eyes, to no avail. 

Her hair is ruffled. It’s grown over her face wildly. When she takes another step into his office, Olruggio automatically reaches out to smooth it down. Seeing his outstretched arm, she all but tips forward into his chest. 

Slowly, Olruggio guides them both back to the chair. When he sits down, she loosens her grip on his robes and wipes her face again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, voice cracking, and then for good measure again, “I’m sorry.”

Olruggio merely hums. He swipes a few stray strands away from her wet cheeks. “Nightmare?”

She shakes her head. “It was a nice dream.” 

Olruggio smiles. “Aye. Nice dreams are the worst.”

She smiles back. It quivers at the edges, like the entirety of her. “They are.”

He lets his hand rest on her shoulder. She does not shake it off. She does not go in for another embrace. She does not speak of any of the many, many things singing loudly in her charcoal eyes – guilt and graves and the graceful, gracious gravity of life; the ink and callouses ever growing on her hands – and he does not pluck them from the silence of the room, either. They are too heavy. Words would be too light for the meaning they bear. Instead, they merely remain there, and Agott stares at the flickering lamp, and slowly, her breath evens. 

Silence is, Olruggio has learned, something he has become very good at. 

“Do you want to sleep here?” he offers and nods towards the bed.

Agott fervently shakes her head. “I don’t want to rob you of your bed.”

“I’m not sleeping there anyway,” Olruggio chuckles. “I always take the couch.”

Agott frowns. “Why?”

 The bed is neatly made. Dust is collecting on the quilt. Olruggio knows every spring, every creak of it.

Olruggio shrugs. “It’s better for my old back.”

Agott’s scowl does not quite leave, even once she’s settled under the blankets and turned towards the wall. Olruggio takes up his pen and resumes his scribbling. The lamp throws his shadow onto the wall. He listens to the sound of scratched writing and the slowing breaths behind him. 

“Master Olruggio,” Agott whispers into the silence. 

“Yes?”

“It still smells like him.”

Snowflake after snowflake taps against the window. If Olruggio wanted to, he could pretend that they were fingers rapping against the door, and that his shadow was not his own. 

“Yes,” he says. “I know.”

The wine in their glasses is darker than the ink staining their fingertips. Olruggio swirls it and watches the way his own reflection spins in it. The candlelight flickers on. The room lies hushed in late-night secrecy.

“I felt hiddled all the time, you know,” Qifrey says. “Being relieved of it was perhaps the greatest gift you could’ve ever given me.”

“It was at my own expense,” Olruggio retorts. When he looks up, the shadow in Qifrey’s eye is even darker than any wine or any ink. 

Still, his expression carries only fondness; fondness and farewells.

“I did tell you that I was selfish,” Qifrey says.

“I am, too,” Olruggio says. 

“I suppose that was our greatest blessing and our greatest curse for each other.” 

Olruggio takes a sip of his wine. It tastes bitter and sweet and sour and of life. 

When he looks back up, Qifrey chuckles. It’s warm and yet far, far away already. Was he ever really there?

His gaze is certainly not. It lies on Olruggio, piercing him whole in its gentle, candle-wick wonder, and at the same time already somewhere he cannot follow. For all he tried, he never really could do that – follow him anywhere. He could only ever watch Qifrey’s vanishing back. 

He never did get a glance behind that dappled grove of an eye.

In a way, his love for him is merely anemoia.

“We could have been so much more,” Olruggio says.

Qifrey smiles as if it meant crying. “We could have.”

Spring comes to pass. The birds return to the branches. The rivers return to the beds. The silverwood tree blooms. 

He finds Coco curled up between its roots. 

The breeze rustles through the leaves. The sun paints spots onto her face. She clutches a book to her chest and only stirs when Olruggio approaches. 

She watches him with eyes that have watched humans she loves turn to stone, humans she loves turn to trees; humans she loves turn to humans she loves with care and with cruelty – and still, she has chosen kindness.

It is perhaps the greatest feat Qifrey has achieved, and it is not even his feat alone. 

Olruggio settles down in the grass next to her with a groan. He leans against the tree. Its bark is smooth and cool. He lifts his head to watch the sun filter through the branches; listen to the wind whispering in the leaves and sending petals drifting. 

The Great Hall is sending a new Watchful Eye to move in with them in the span of the next few weeks. Agott has gotten a new uniform. Breakfast is no longer a quiet affair. 

Hugged by equally hiddled hills, the tree stands tall and still. 

Coco by the roots exhales. 

“The sky is wide and open here,” she says quietly. “There is a lot of room to grow.”

Olruggio thinks of a house in the grasslands. He thinks of too-short trouser legs. He thinks of standing overlooking it all, eternities ago, and not seeing it yet.

He thinks, strangely, of the caverned walls under the sea where not a single plant could grow roots or drink in the warm sun. 

“Yes,” he says. “There is.”

“I’m going to leave one day,” Qifrey vows.

Olruggio looks up from his textbook. “Why would you leave?”

“Why would I stay?”

Olruggio scowls. “Where would you go?”

Qifrey shrugs. “I don’t know. Away. Anywhere but here.”

“But it’s comfortable down here.”

“It’s stifling.”

“It’s safe. You could easily die out there.”

Qifrey’s voice hasn’t even become deep like those of the adults yet, and still he carries the same serious air as them. “I would rather die under a free sky than suffocate under these walls. It’s a death all the same, just a much quieter, sad one.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then don’t. You don’t even need to follow me.”

Olruggio returns to his textbook. There are tests to pass and a childhood to outrun. “Of course I’ll follow you. I’ll always follow you. Just don’t go anywhere where I can’t.”

Qifrey does not quite laugh, but almost. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Even if I do, I’ll simply stand still, right where I am, and no matter how long it takes, I will wait for you to catch up.”