Reichert had always known he was a handsome man. He had been, in every version of himself across every life his father had put him through — the kind of face and bearing that drew attention without asking for it, in some lives attracting women, in others men, in a few both simultaneously. He had ignored all of it with the complete indifference of someone whose attention is entirely occupied elsewhere. Monks had their vows; he had her. The distinction between devotion and obstinacy was one he had long since stopped making.
This was why the blush on her cheeks — visible even in the dim lamplight of the island house — produced in him something he had not prepared for: not certainty, but the particular vertigo of wanting very badly to believe something and being afraid to.
His father had told him, when he agreed to the terms and the thirteen lives, that he would plant something in her — the smallest possible beginning of feeling, a seed's worth of affection, something that could be worked with if he was patient and careful enough. A mustard seed, his father had said. No more than that, and nothing compared to what she carried for her mate.
He was not her mate. The bond that existed between her and the man in Selon was a thing of the cosmic law — woven into the structure of what they both were, not chosen but assigned, not earned but simply present. He could not replicate that. His father, who had made the cosmic law itself, had declined to simply reassign it, and Reichert had the experience of thirteen lives to understand why.
Nothing given easily was worth having.
So he would work for it. He had never done anything else.
---
The life where he had been an elf remained, across all thirteen, the strangest.
He had expected humans. His father had made him an elf, which he considered an odd choice until he remembered that odd choices were rather the foundation of his father's aesthetic. An Elf lived among humans, which had been the point, presumably — close enough to understand them from the inside without being entirely one of them.
His task had been the same as in every life: do something genuinely great for humanity. Something that would outlast him, that would be remembered, that would change the shape of what ordinary human lives could be.
He had invented engraving magic.
He had not done it alone, or at least he had not done the initial years of it alone. His adoptive parents had had a son — a biological child who had been his companion and near-brother for the entirety of the research, someone he had trusted with the completeness of someone who has never had reason not to. They had worked alongside each other for years, studying, failing, building, revising. He had assumed the closeness between them was mutual. He had been wrong in the way that people are wrong when they have never been given a reason to be suspicious of the person standing closest to them.
The hatred had been building for years. He learned this at the end, when it was too late to be useful information. The jealousy — of his achievements, of the way their shared parents' love had tilted toward him, of something that may simply have been what he was — had been accumulating quietly, invisibly, behind the face of a brother. The method used to kill him had been engraving magic, his own invention, which had a particular irony to it that he had spent some time, afterward, being unable to find funny.
What he had not expected was the grief. His brother had held him at the end, crying with a sincerity that had no performance in it, shouting everything he had never said — the love alongside the hatred, both of them real, both of them enormous, both of them apparently occupying the same space in the same person without either one cancelling the other. It had been, in its terrible way, instructive.
Humans were considerably more complicated than they appeared. He had understood this, theoretically, before. He had felt it for the first time at that moment.
---
The bracelet's channels caught the light and his attention in equal measure.
He looked at what remained in the stone — or rather, what didn't remain — and frowned before he could prevent it.
He had filled 'The Bliss' with a full year's worth of magic before the voyage began. He had been careful. He had been thorough. The enchantment was one of the finest things he had ever made, and he had made it with the specific intention of sustaining her through exactly this kind of extended, unrelenting grief.
It lasted one month.
He sat with that for a moment and let it mean what it meant.
Whatever she was carrying — whatever had broken in her and continued to press against the walls of what the bracelet could contain — was not the ordinary weight of an ordinary heartbreak. It was the specific, enormous grief of a dragon whose trust had been betrayed by the person the cosmic law had assigned as the keeper of her heart. The most fundamental vulnerability of what she was, activated by the one person positioned to do the most damage.
His finest enchantment had barely managed it. Had held for thirty days and then been emptied, like a vessel set against a tide.
He didn't know what would happen when the bracelet couldn't hold anymore — when the magic ran out faster than he could replenish it, or when one moment of inattention left her unprotected. He did not have a solution for that. Not yet.
He would find one. He would find one because there was no version of this that ended with him failing to find one. He had lived thirteen lives and waited a thousand years; the idea that he had brought her this far only to fail her on a technical problem was not one he was willing to hold for more than a moment before setting it aside.
Whatever it required — whatever he had to build, or sacrifice, or learn, or give up — was already on the table. It had always been on the table, without reservation. That had never changed and would not change.
"Can you please just hurry," she said, her voice muffled by the fact that she was looking resolutely away from him, the colour in her cheeks still firmly present.
Something in him eased.
He let out a small, quiet sound — not quite a laugh, but close — and returned his attention to the bracelet.
He worked slowly and with extreme care. The channels of 'The Bliss' were his own, made by his own hands, and he knew every line of them — which portions required more pressure and which needed barely a thread, where the magic tended to back up if directed too quickly, where the stone's reservoir needed to be approached from the side rather than the centre to fill evenly. He had done this thousands of times in imagination and preparation, and now, doing it for her in a lamplit room on a small island in the middle of the ocean, he gave it everything he had.
Sweat appeared at his temple. The headache that came with sustained sorcery — that specific pressure behind the eyes that meant he was converting natural energy at his limit — arrived and he ignored it. His sealed power would have made this effortless. He had learned to be grateful, in a specific and hard-earned way, that it wasn't effortless. Things done with difficulty meant something different from things done easily. He wanted to mean something.
The channels filled. The magic moved through them in the ordered, careful way of water finding its proper course, and reached the central reservoir of the stone. Slowly, the stone began to recover its light — the faint inner shimmer returning, deepening, steadying into the particular warm luminescence of something that is fully charged and ready to do what it was made to do.
A year's worth.
Done.
He sat back and took a breath and let the headache settle into its aftermath.