She leans in and blows a cool stream of air across the tinder — although she is possessed of neither lungs nor the need to breathe — and the sparks come to life, consuming the breakfast she made for them and beginning imminently on their lunch. She sits back, appraising the growth of the flames. For just a moment, she allows herself to relax in the warmth of the fire, though she needs it as much as she does breath.
She knows she could leave coals in the hearth in the evening, using their latent heat to begin the next morning’s flames, but her master preferred to allow the stone to grow cold overnight; besides, she takes great joy and pride in lighting the fire anew each day. At this task, as at all her others, she is excellent.
Each morning, she opens the curtains. They are held by a long rod running in a parallel contour above the glass and opened and closed by way of a pull string. Her lavender hands, each a perfect mirror-twin of the other, revolve one over the other, pulling down on the string and letting in the sunlight. The room warms beautifully as the heat from the hearth in the home and the hearth of the world, itself tilted against the horizon like a ladder against an old barn, mingle and mix among the aged furnishings and cold-hewn stone walls.
She peers out of the window at the gardens and vegetable patch outside the tower, nestled among hill valleys cloaked in their characteristic cascades of mist and fog. The plants are flourishing in the spring light. Even with the warming weather, there is always a chill in the tower without the hearth lit — her master’s climate magic affects the gardens more than the drafty old dwelling. The last time a visitor had walked up the lane through the garden to employ the mighty bronze knocker on the arched oak door had been so many years ago, she had almost lost count.
But only almost.
In the conservatory itself there resides a creature known as the Millennium Hen, though it lives far longer than its name suggests and similarly resembles it very little. When asleep, it looks like a stone. When awake, it is a lizardlike creature, no larger than a housecat, with slitted eyes and six legs and a tongue ending in a trident-fork, three points flicking out between its glass-shard teeth. The beast itself lives a very slow-paced life due to its glacial metabolism, eating once every eight to ten years and laying only four eggs, if its keeper is fortunate, in its lifetime. It is for these eggs that her master kept the Hen; they are alchemical catalysts of nearly unparalleled power for the employ of effects which stabilize and which demand longevity.
Each day it must be awakened; every time it is not, it gets progressively more difficult to do so, until at last the Hen enters an interminable dream lasting centuries and it finally ceases breathing. This Hen has grown accustomed to waking to the sound of a particular series of notes performed on the flute, which she plays:
The Hen rouses from its stone slumber, transforming from a hunk of earth lying insensate in its nest into the shape of a hexapodal reptile as it uncurls, skin pebbled and mottled, tongue flicking and tasting the air. It gazes at her with dim recognition, then stretches and trundles about its nest for a scant few moments before falling back to sleep, granted another day of reprieve from its dream-funeral.
What a life to lead, she thinks to herself. Bound by the same few steps each day, never knowing more than the confines of its nest.
She hangs up the flute. There is no more time for rumination.
Today there is something different. When she splits the second egg as neatly and precisely as a surgeon making an initial incision, out from its pockmarked and speckled shell emerge two perfect yolks, red as zinnias. They are twin sunset moons revolving slowly around one another in the pan. She cannot keep her eyes off of them as they dance.
There is something else that is different, too. Not the menu: it is always two fried eggs, yolks like custard, two thick slices of hot buttered toast for dipping, and a bitter cup of plain coffee black as pitch. No — it is that today, for the first time in her life, in so many years it might take a hundred hands to count them all, rather than discarding the meal, she takes a bite of it. Her first of any.
It is, of course, ambrosia.
Her master’s room is sparingly appointed. Despite demonstrating great skill with the arts and sciences of magic-craft, he was never prone to extravagance. His bed is simple — sized just for him, with plain cotton sheets and a down comforter to ward against the drafts in the upper levels of the tower. There is a wash-basin against the northern wall, adjacent to a modestly sized square oak table at which he took his tea, studied wizened texts, and played games with rare visitors or against himself in roughly equal measures. The remainder of the room is an extension of the library. Bookshelves overflowing with long-forgotten arcane tomes and sheafs of scrawled notes crawling with his arachnoid handwriting line the remainder of the walls. There are windows set into each face of the room, and by their presence his bedroom is always suffused with natural light and warmth during daytime hours.
With a deliberate, fluid manner, she lifts the comforter from the bed, pinches it between two fingers of each hand, and shakes it free of dust. After pulling back the flat sheet, which is neatly tucked at the foot of the bed, she smooths the fitted sheet underneath. Then, she straightens the flat sheet again before replacing the comforter. She takes a step back, carefully judging her handiwork. The bed is so unchanged from the time she entered the room that it could pass as a facsimile, a magical twin of itself.
She can almost imagine her master sitting in his chair at his table, contemplating the next move in his favorite game. This space was his favorite hideaway, tucked into a crook in the top-floor library, and because he enjoyed being here so often, so too did she — as she does, still.
The statue itself presents Oben Irilam, son of Oben Aguray, in a resigned posture, leaning against Reciprocity with an expression of a sigh wrinkling the features of his fair face, his brow furrowed as a field of wheat under his curled locks. This uncharacteristic pose is due to the statue actually being Oben Irilam himself, turned forever to unmoving stone by way of a hex imposed upon him uttered with the dying breath of some villainous warlock, whose name, despite his empty triumph over perhaps the greatest hero of an age, was lost forever to history. Her master had pored over hundreds or thousands of texts trying to unearth some secret method of restoring him to flesh, but to no avail.
Once a year, in early summer, it is her duty to give counsel to Oben, who has grown understandably despondent and depressed over the long centuries of his imprisonment in the stone. She is not a trained counselor, but she is an excellent listener, and before he left her master assured her that the majority of Oben’s needs could be fulfilled with a patient ear.
“Has it been another year already?” he asks resignedly as she approaches the fountain, his voice emanating, stagnant, from somewhere deep within the stone of his hunched form.
She struggles to employ her own voice. It has been months since she last said a word. “Yes sir, Master Oben,” she replies hesitantly. “A year to the day in fact.”
“You don’t need to call me that. We’ve known one another for centuries.” His voice is a sigh, worn and ragged from having expressed the same sentiment time after time after time. “Irilam is fine.”
“I would prefer Master Oben, my lord,” she says.
They speak for a time about the new events in the town in the adjacent valley, about how the gardens look more beautiful than ever, about how he feels to live an unchanging life, year after year, century after century. About everything else, and nothing at all. To an observer unfamiliar, they might have been twin statues of contrasting postures, one of weathered marble and one of translucent, iridescent lavender crystal, each rising from the morning mists of the valley.
“Why do you stay here?” Oben asks, finally. Each year he asks this question, and each year she replies in the same way.
“It is what I know and what I am made for, my lord,” she says.
They are silent, but the birds chirp merrily in the trees.
“I suppose, if you left, I would have nobody to talk to,” he says. “And this old tower would probably crumble away into ruin.”
“And the Hen would fall into eternal sleep, the observatory would fall out of alignment, and the grove would die. Everything my master had worked for would disappear.” She pauses for a moment. “Besides, I take joy in what I do. There is meaning in it for me.”
“I am grateful that you do, after all,” he says. “Yet the world has so many things to see and experience. I want all of that for you — I can’t have it any longer.”
She nods, slowly. “I know,” she says.
They are silent again, for much longer this time, until she collects herself and takes her leave. There is no more to be said.
She takes the last flight of stairs to the third floor, passing through the marble-walled distillery. The distillery is a fastidiously clean laboratory space. Her master possessed a wide variety of magical skills, but his most brilliant and devoted efforts were laid towards alchemy. To that end, his distillery is perhaps the most extensive, well-maintained, and cutting-edge in the world, even centuries after his departure. Dozens if not hundreds of alembics, retorts, flasks, beakers, and pans of every conceivable material and manufacture line the walls, hooked with glass stoppers to one another and to other devices of more mysterious import. The walls and desks twist with glass tubing resting on copper hooks jutting from the stone. His cabinets are still overflowing with tongs, forks, pipettes, and other implements of the manipulation of alchemical reagents, and the reagents themselves remain as well — those which did not spoil over hundreds of years, at least.
She still remembers a day when her master was hard at work at the apparatuses and he called her over and invited her to sit. He held up a chunk of crystal, off-white and glittering, and handed it to her. It was glassy, but warm, an almost perfect triangular prism.
“I created you from a crystal almost like this one,” he said with a smile.
She nodded, looking down and turning the crystal over in her hands. “From the Crystal Pond, my lord?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Though this crystal could never hope to rival that one in beauty. Of all my years tending the Crystal Pond I have only once ever seen one of that color, that lavender. I knew it had to become you.” He gently took the crystal back from her and dropped it into a steaming flask, which bubbled and hissed ferociously.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said.
“The pleasure has been mine, truly,” he replied. “Now, if you could hand me the acidwort pods?”
She snaps back to the present and shakes her head. Those sorts of memories are so distant but still so vivid, preserved for perhaps eternity in the magic of her mind. Her master had been so kind to her — and he had similarly devoted his alchemical efforts to life and creation. He had cured plagues, healed the wounded and dying in wars, cleansed polluted waters, and he never accepted payment.
She steps out of the distillery onto the third-floor terrace. Looping a rope around her midsection and hooking the other end through a pulley installed onto the tower wall for this express purpose, she leaps off the balcony. The wind whistles past her, and with grace she catches herself against the tower wall a dozen feet below. She unhooks the machete from her back.
She hacks and chops at the strangling ivy, which strains to reach her before its rippling ends, lopped off by the mighty blade, twist and undulate like split earthworms as they fall to the ground far below. She looks at the pattern of ivy against the wall of the tower. It is her master’s glass tubing in his distillery, cast in green lifesome glass. The leaves are its alembics, transmuting the curious elements of the soil into sustenance by way of its fiery catalyst in the sky. Just like her, it lives. Just like her, it remains here, growing. She does not need to breathe. Perhaps she will let it grow longer, one day.
“And, without being told, nobody knows exactly where to look for anything,” he once told her with his trademark grin, eyes aglimmer.
Unfortunately, the tower and its grounds are not entirely self-sustaining. By virtue of her master's long-lasting climate magic, the weather is largely perfect for growing all manner of fruits and vegetables in the garden, even with the everpresent mist, but the production of sundries such as bread, meat, and cheese requires too complex a chain of facilities and infrastructure for her to accomplish. To this end, once a month she twirls herself into her master’s semblance scarf and becomes an old woman. She stoops, she leans on a cane, she lends her hands just the right amount of tremor, and she walks up the sunlit hill to Caretaker’s Cottage, a small and modest home her master built up the road from the tower.
The people in town believe that the cottage is inhabited by a very eccentric family who spend much time traveling, and, in a manner of speaking, it is. As such, she has, over the centuries, developed relationships with the farming and merchant families who have long lived there. Generations are born and die in what feel to her like months. She comes to know the names of the families — the Juriols, the Ahagurs — and she thinks of them in aggregate as individuals in their own right. It is easier to consider them as lineages than to grow too fond of one courier or another.
It is a Juriol this time. They have lived in the village since before she was created, and they run an expansive patchwork quilt of farms and wineries, their plentiful and industrious offspring striking a balance between exploiting and tending the wild forest hills. This one is new, she thinks — although she is not completely sure — with just a smattering of facial hair and the characteristic Juriol eyes of shocking emerald. Currency is exchanged, and so are goods, loaded onto a rickety pullcart with a squeaking left rear wheel. Bags and satchels overflowing with grains and eggs and cheeses and fresh and cured meats are stacked almost to her chest on the pullcart. She sees the young courier off with a trembling wave, and then exits out the back, fairly skipping up the lane with her newfound bounty.
Since that wondrous, surreal morning when she had her first bite of food she has spent weeks and months experimenting with lunch. In the garden there grow squashes and tomatoes and crisp watercress and spinach and there are delicate wild mushrooms to forage in the nearby woods, and all of these she has now tried in various preparations atop the sandwiches, but her true revelation was in the onions.
Now she goes to the garden and with her spade she unearths a shining, glimmering onion each day, fist-sized and crinkling in its paper. She carries it as she might an infant, cradled in the crook of her arm, all the way to the kitchen, where she removes her razor-keen cleaver slowly from its hook on the wall. She brings the cleaver down in smooth, practiced strokes, shearing away slices of sweet onion so thin they could be read through. She has no tear ducts and her eyes do not sting. There is no pain in the slicing, only beauty.
The sandwich she makes now is as she prefers it: with mayonnaise, stuffed with spinach, with thick slices of tomato juicier than the ripest peach, with mushrooms which she sautees in butter and garlic until they swell and then wither and glisten with the fat, with the same two square cuts of regional aged yellow cheese, all crowned with a pile of those thinly sliced, ephemeral yet pungent onions.
She requires no sustenance, but she finds herself grateful, suddenly, that she was created with a sense of taste.
The unlived-in spaces of the tower have taken on a museum-like countenance. They are still lives, frozen in space and time awaiting the return of an element of the painting which has been permanently excised. At times she closes her eyes and as she unearths each piece of furniture or bookshelf from the veneer of dust under which it is perpetually reburied she can imagine her master using it for its intended purpose, granting it an immediate measure of validity in placement and function. Almost all the things in the tower no longer justify their existence in this manner.
For the first time, she wonders if she justifies hers any longer as well.
Her master worked for weeks and weeks with the glassmakers in the village to create suitable lenses and mirrors for the telescope in the observatory, which employs an ingenious combination of both. The telescope is swivel-mounted on an equatorial fixture which compensates for the rotation of the Earth, and the entire roof of the observatory rotates with the controls for the telescope.
Her job in the observatory is to collimate the telescope — to make sure the optics are aligned in the most efficient fashion for viewing — and to adjust the equatorial mount as discrepancies in the Earth’s rotation and the gravity pulling on the telescope cause the alignment to become perturbed with time. This task only demands her efforts once every half a century. Tonight is the night.
She lines the optics up to observe a bright star and then tweaks the mirror, adjusting its tension, its angle, until she can dial in and the diffraction rings form perfect, concentric circles for optimal viewing.
Normally, she would take her leave, but tonight something inside her persuades her to stay. She looks at her master’s star charts and finds something to observe — he has marked something on the chart as a star cluster. Even familiar as she is with the controls of the telescope, she takes more time than she expects to locate the object in the eyepiece.
Her bright blue-green eyes need time to adjust to the dim field, featureless and grey at first. And then: an orb. Tens, hundreds of thousands of glittering points like the fuzzed and delicate seeds of a past-season dandelion it is there in the sky in her eyepiece through the telescope from how many miles away she cannot guess two hundred thousand hanging suns brought together in space in an unearthly dance of light and fire solar winds colliding chaotically vortices unknowably large undoubtedly swirling so powerfully everything she knows or could love would be stripped from the Earth were it caught in the maelstrom and they all hang together closer some of them than the Moon to where she stands whether gathered or birthed together in orbits proximate and impending she did not know nor how could she and the notes on the star chart say nothing but “star cluster” which is laughably inadequate but words could never in all their wondrous power begin to describe a thing like this that exists or perhaps existed perhaps they had all been blown away by some cosmic shockwave just like those dandelion seeds after all and she would never know not until maybe even the magic in her heart finally winked out the light of that utter destruction might still be traveling its merry way with perhaps even a knocked-away star and nobody she knew or that knew her could ever be aware in the times they would live and that is how small she is here how tiny and how beautiful it is that she can open her eye and behold this thing in the eyepiece through the telescope and it is real and can be seen and she touches her cheeks because she feels warm and her eyes sting.
She was made without tear ducts but she is sure that if she had them, she would be crying.
Teapot and teacups on saucers arranged just so on a silver tray. Fragile sugar bowl like the egg of a porcelain bird. Tiny silver sugar tongs jutting from the the notch in the lid like a feather in a cap. Silver creamer filled to its brim with fresh milk, sides frosting with condensation. Jam, butter, lemons, scones.
She is running out the door with all these items through a warm late-summer breeze, not a drop out of place. “Master Oben!” she calls.
“Has it been another year already?” he asks.
“No, no, not this time,” she replies as she approaches the statue. “I have something I wanted to show you, if…” She pauses, pensively. “If that’s all right with you, my lord.”
“Of course it is,” Oben Irilam says, his voice echoing from within the stone, tinged with… something. An emotion she has never heard from him. Excitement, perhaps?
She is a ballet dancer in peak form. Smartly turning and gently lowering the tray to the edge of the fountain before him, she bows formally but without stiffness. Still arched against the breeze, she sweeps her hands under one cup and saucer and relocates them noiselessly to the bare fountainstone, the teacup turned at an ideal angle for the left-handed hero to reach down and grasp its handle. She measures the tea into the pot, elbows held wide from her body, and as it steeps she prepares a scone — a generous spread of the salted creamery butter, then a thick swipe of the ruby raspberry jam — which then occupies a plate adjacent to the teacup. A silver strainer materializes from amidst the precise placements of the tea tray and comes to roost with tenderness on the rim of the cup. In one motion she draws her arm back, and on the return trip the teapot is in her hand and her other hand presses its lid as she tilts it, slowly, painstakingly, until the stream of amber, steaming tea flows from its spout like a golden river, its delta the curving china bottom of the teacup. The solids are discarded — Oben Irilam is unsure where, her hands move so swiftly — and one sugar cube is coaxed into the cup along with a squeeze of lemon. He wonders how she knows his preferences.
When all is done, her bow transforms into a kneel, hands clasped before her and head down, gaze averted. “Enjoy, my lord,” she says, solemnly, almost reverently.
The only sound is the birds chirping. She realizes all at once what she has done.
“Oh… my lord,” she says, eyes wide, sitting back onto her heels. “I am so sorry. I beg your forgiveness — it was so callous of me to present all this to you, knowing you can’t enjoy any of it, I-“
“Please,” he says sternly. “I can’t eat any of it. I can’t drink the tea. But I haven’t enjoyed anything this much in five hundred years.”
Her lips quirk into a smile of relief, and she lets out a laugh. “Really?” she asks.
“Truly,” he says. “Thank you, my friend. Who taught you to do all of that?”
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she says. “Nobody did.”
“Somebody did. You taught yourself,” he says.
She nods, at first apprehensively, then with more confidence.
They sit together in the summer sun. After a time, she takes a bite of the scone and sips the tea.
“How is it?” Irilam asks.
“Delicious, my lord,” she replies.
“Please enjoy it in my stead,” he says.
And so she does.
In the study, as she spins piles of dust and fragments of leaves from thin air with the broom, she lets her thoughts turn to her master’s disappearance. He was not a particularly elderly man — only in his sixties — and when he left the tower, he was in good health. He estimated he would be gone six or eight weeks at the most.
It was five hundred forty six years ago.
She never received any suggestion of any intimation that anyone knew what had happened. There was no letter of condolence nor visitor inquiring after him. He had no next-of-kin but her. He had simply —
There is shattering of glass, a tinkling of shards. She has, in her reverie, her lost thoughts, unperched a precarious and valuable glass jar, handblown, from her master’s desk. He had been extremely fond of it, decorated with filigreed twisting white cane in dozens of patterns, the only one of its like in the world. Her hands fly to her face on instinct. “I beg your pardon, m…” she begins, but trails off. She knows he would not have been upset. She also knows she would never have made the mistake while he was alive.
She sweeps the fragments of the jar up and discards them. The jar is gone, splintered into ten thousand unrecoverable shards, forever unmade, and even her uncannily steady hand has no hope of reconstituting it. Once something so fragile is broken in this way, it cannot be mended. The only thing to do is to be grateful for the time you knew it and move along.
The crystals which sprout unbidden within the waters of the pond are highly potent magical reagents, which, depending on the color and clarity of the specimen, possess a wide variety of effects, from cleansing to toxicity to stasis to animation. Once every half-decade, the pond must be swept clear of as many impurities as possible so that the crystals growing within it remain unadulterated.
She steps into the water without trepidation. The pool is always pleasantly warm, heated from below by geothermal activity — although this, along with the perplexing facility with which humans drown, would not be of concern to her even if the water was icy. She is more dense than the water and it does little to impede her stride. Walking along the bottom of the pool, she sweeps through the water with a fine mesh net, collecting dust and soil, bits of leaves and pollen, and unfortunate wayward insects, six legs akimbo, suspended in the still water as if it were clear blue amber.
Her eyes are caught, suddenly.
On the floor of the pool, germinated from the bare stone like a succulent plant budding from a clutch of moss and sand, there is a lavender crystal of her exact hue and shade. She regards it for a moment. It is curious to see the infant version of herself, bereft of life and thought and spirit, with only potential and beauty and nothing more. She crouches down, forgetting the net, gazing at her reflection in its facets. It glimmers even this deep in the pool from the sunlight and it is stunning. She reaches her hand to grasp it, collect it.
She cannot bring herself to pluck it from the earth. Something tells her the time may be someday, and may be never, but is certainly not now. The crystal could grow and change — not as she has grown, not as she has changed, but nonetheless — and the next time she steps into the water, it will be different.
That is something she wants to experience.
Then she becomes improvisatory. Her soul shines violet; she is a blur of skipping feet, reaching arms, hands cradling the cleaver and the garlic and the shallots and the little jars of spices and the bottles of oil and vinegar. Every element here — in this fashion, the way she has read, been told — becomes something else there, where it was not before. She never steams the cauliflower; it is roasted or fried. The brussels sprouts too go in the oven, become at once charred and creamy. She grills the peaches to go in the yogurt pudding. The fennel, the rosemary, the prunes, the pepper, the pile of rosemary and sage and thyme piled higher than the top of the bottle of olive oil, massaged onto the roast, slow-cooked until the slightest suggestion could cause it to melt into a pile of shreds, dripping with its own juices from pot to tray to plate to fork to mouth.
She learns to bake. First it is loaves of bread, then scones, then pies and cakes. She takes two, three, four years to experiment with savory flatbreads, and on them she tries everything and anything she can find: olives and tomatoes and scallions and oregano and cheese and mushrooms and peppers and onions and sausages and chicken and chives and eggs and squash and fish and thinly-sliced beef and asparagus and- and- and- she makes the sauce red, then white, then pink, then she makes dipping sauces, sweet and spicy and savory and rich and bright and acidic, with lemon, with buttermilk, with honey, with jam, and she pairs them with wines from the wine cellar or with beer from the town or with ice-cold water beading over as it draws the moisture from the air close or cold itself along hot coffee for breakfast the next day, noting how somehow it has changed, become different, become something not altogether of itself because she created it and then let it be alone in the icebox overnight to consider what it is and what it could be on its own before reuniting with it in the glorious dawn, and she has never been hungry before but she is now, not because she needs to eat but because she needs to eat, she is starving for more, perfectly charred and crisp on the bottom and pull-apart tender inside because she has mastered the inferno in the oven and could there possibly be anything more wonderful in the entire universe, other than the ability to make these things? To know that she can reach into the beating heart of the Earth and exhume from its very breast flavor? Art? Joy?
What else could there be?
A stand of drab, gnarled trees, death-mimicking, casts unnerving shadows over the eastern portion of the grounds around the tower. For the overwhelming part of the year, they are bare, grey, silhouetted against the misty backdrop like a mockery of the lively forests blanketing the hills around them. Were there necromancers of flora, they would raise trees such as these: pale and vacant, dismal and lusterless.
In midwinter, she begins her vigil over the grove. It begins shortly after the new year. During this season she forsakes her other duties in the tower — her master once used to fend for himself during this time, making his own meals and doing his own chores — to commit herself fully to the responsibility of grovewatching, an endeavor of which only she is capable. It was a duty of utmost importance to her master, and it is now a duty of utmost importance to her.
She steps among the trees, in between their withered trunks, bark peeling and sloughing away like burnt skin. She crouches down onto the balls of her feet, and she waits.
She waits a day. A week. Snow falls, collects on her head, her shoulders. She hardly moves — the branches of the trees, lifeless as they seem, are far more animate than she, compelled at the least by breezes and the perching of the few birds which remain in the valley. The snow melts in a warm spell, then falls again, and again. A month, then two. Day by day by day by day, night by night by night by night. The world pulses with a common meter, a rhythm she feels in the soles of her feet on the bare earth. The trees feel her there, know her eyes bear witness to their abeyant energy, their impending rebirth. They need the cold; it tells them the warmth will come. They need to be seen; it tells them there is a soul who cares.
There she crouches, half-buried in the snow. Foxes white as eggshells frolic around her as if she is a statue, chasing mice in the powder. She is alive, she is living. She is thrumming with the heartbeat of the planet and in the frozen air she is a furnace and a lantern, violet and aglow with the very magic that suffuses all of creation.
Spring arrives just when it should. The weather begins its inexorable march toward incalescence. Birds return and begin to assemble nests from the twigs that are revealed by the retreat of the snow. All in one day, it happens.
The trees burst with foliage and their trunks warm, the grey bark shedding to reveal the copper wood beneath. Then they are replete with buds of every shade of maroon, azure, and violet. The birds pick the tender buds, hungrily devouring as many as their tiny stomachs can bear, but there are still more and more. So consumed are the trees by the very spirit of fecundity that even a flock of planetary proportion would not begin to disturb the mass of inflorescence. The aroma of even the unopened buds is beyond belief. Like citrus, like star jasmine, like roses, and entirely unlike any of these, it saturates the air from the tops of the trees down, a luxurious velvet curtain of scent descending on the final act of winter.
Then the blossoms open, and there is nowhere more wondrous on this planet or any other. Even the birds and foxes stop their scurrying and scratching. The blooms are the stars in the cluster painted among the branches in living oversaturated chroma. Their petals erupt outward and cascade swirling from the blossoms in the early evening and the luminosity of the flowers and the sunset are one and the same.
She is not bound here by shackles or magic. She could stay indoors or travel elsewhere, and the trees would live a year but never bloom without the vigil, but how could she miss it? What events, what world would need to conceive itself and be brought to existence that could cause her to relinquish this? For it is not this world, and not this person who she is. So long as the grove lives she knows she will be found here each year, spring’s sentinel, vernally reborn.
She does visit the distillery from time to time, and not just a means of transit to hack away at the strangling ivy. This was where her master spent the bulk of his waking moments, during his life, and so she, too, lived a great number of hours here. She recalls a time that she asked him about the nature of alchemy.
“Alchemy,” her master said, “is the twin sister of cooking. In both, things begin with the question of heat: how much, and how it is applied. And in both, it is your job to ensure that the unique nature of your ingredients cannot hide away. You must unearth it, tease out what makes every element inimitable and extraordinary. The only difference is that an alchemic reaction ends in some sort of charm or hex. Although the same could be said of a fine meal… or a very poor one.”
He chuckled, eyes twinkling, and so did she. She believed in that moment she truly understood what he meant, having cooked thousands of meals. She could never have guessed that it would take her more than five hundred years to grasp the full significance of her master’s words.
She skips now with her flute tilted vertically against her collarbone, skips in time to the motion of the world. Her instrument crosses her chest, a sash oblique over her heart of magic. The conservatory is too cramped an auditorium, and besides, all that lives there to hear her are mute plants and an unconscious hexapod. She needs to be heard by the world.
Oben Irilam is at its center. “Has it been another… no, it can’t be, yet,” he says.
“No, it hasn’t,” she says. “I beg your pardon. I have another thing to show you, and if I don’t do it now I might be consumed by self-consciousness.”
She puts the flute to her lips and plays:
She is lost to the melody, consumed and elevated by it. There are birds which form a chaotic, impromptu choir around her. She scarcely hears them at all.
When she finishes her tune she opens her eyes. She looks up at Irilam.
His eyes are damp.
She gasps; she takes a step toward him, reaching up. The statue cracks once, twice, and then the tears melt the stone away as the sun melts the snow. His earthen prison sheds, an eggshell split and discarded. The man inside as vibrant, hale, vital as the day his form was circumscribed by stone.
“Irilam,” she says, and he falls forward, his axe Reciprocity clattering into the fountain below him. He steps down and wraps his arms around her in an embrace.
She holds him there. She can feel the heat from his tears on her neck. She has never been held this way.
“There is no measure of gratitude that could ever be enough,” he says. “Not for this.”
They are close for a long time.
Finally they pull away from one another with a strange reluctance. They regard each other, truly seeing one another for the very first time.
“My legs feel so strange,” he says with a smile, wiping his tears away. “It has been a long time since they’ve seen any use.”
She smiles back at him. “Will you be all right, my lo— Irilam?” It sounds right to say his name now.
He pats his chest, his arms, his legs, his face. “I’m all still here. Just like old times. But my legs already ache to stretch and carry me somewhere else, somewhere free under the sun.”
She nods.
“Come with me,” he says. “Everyone I have ever known is long dead — and I made peace with that long ago — except for you. You are my only and truest friend. Come and see the world with me. Please.”
She is quiet. She looks at him. His face is handsome, his jaw strong. He reaches up to brush the curls of his hair aside and their eyes lock. His gaze is beseeching. Her heart aches.
“I can’t,” she replies.
“What do you mean?” he asks, his voice gaining an edge. “Your master died long ago. You aren't bound to remain here. There is so much to see and do — so much to experience out there! The world is huge, and you’ll have me by your side as long as I live.”
She shakes her head. “There was nothing holding me here when my master was alive, either,” she says, “except for my desire to stay. I was never shackled. And you’re wrong that there’s nothing tethering me here now. I am. I’m not done here yet.”
"I don't understand," he says.
"You don't need to," she replies. "You just have to accept it."
A cold spring breeze blows between them. They are quiet for a long time.
Finally, after the longest moment she has ever lived evaporates into the sky, the corners of Irilam’s mouth turn up in a smile. His eyes twinkle with a bittersweet glow, and for the second time in five hundred years they fill with tears.
“Accepting it,” he says, “is something I can do. Though it tears at my heart. Whenever you decide to see the world, come find me. I can’t wait to see you again. And if the breeze ever blows me nearby, I’ll be sure to drop in and say hello.”
They embrace again, even longer this time. He straps Reciprocity to his back and, whistling the tune she performed for him, he heads up the lane. For a moment, when he reaches the top of the hill, he looks back at her.
They wave at each other, and he disappears into the next valley.
She goes into the tower and shuts the door.
How it used to be was: she would gather the glowing coals, still full of heat and life, into a small pile, raking them together into a coalesced bundle of embers. Then, she would take the large metal lid she keeps next to the hearth and close it over the top of the coals. Before long, the coals, starved of air, would die completely, turning black and glossy yet impossibly dull compared to their former brilliance. Her master preferred it cold overnight, and besides, she always enjoyed making the fire fresh each morning.
Tonight, though, she decides to let them burn.
She sits by the hearth and stares into the glowing embers, each one a flickering expression of change. The vibrant patterns on the surface of each piece, each nearly-consumed log, each hunk of a hunk of a tree, undulate and twist uniquely. Fingerprints of fire. Some of the coals in the center burn bright, steadfast. Others on the sides burn out and crumble away.
It is warm by the hearth. The tower is quiet tonight. All she has are the heat and beauty of the glowing coals and her own thoughts.
She smiles. She needs nothing more.