The feast in the tavern didn't last very long. By the fourth day of Christmas break, almost all the guests were gone.
Every reunion is for the sake of parting, just as every parting is for the sake of reunion. What lies between two meetings is what we call life.
The Dragonborn was the first to leave. His homeland was still torn by war, and he wanted to go back and bring relief to people trapped in suffering. Skyl had hinted to him that if he ever meant to unify Skyrim, Winterhold could offer him a degree of support—enough to help him build a military foothold—but the Dragonborn refused.
"I'm not someone born to be an emperor," he said. "Just an adventurer."
He added that vampire activity in Skyrim had been especially rampant lately, and that he intended to join the Dawnguard and fight the evil alongside them.
After the Dragonborn came Dumbledore. The old professor had to return to Hogwarts and hold the fort—after all, this Christmas marked the return of a dark lord.
The rest of the guests had eaten their fill and talked their hearts out, and they took their leave one after another.
The tavern emptied out quickly. Professor Moonshadow filed for an off-world expedition, planning to drop by the Lands Between and pay a visit to the Empyrean Ranni. She liked seeing the scenery of different worlds. Skyl figured she'd only stick around as a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor for a year anyway—she was the type who could never stay put.
Now the tavern held only Skyl and three women.
Skyl felt the emptiness, though the three of them seemed strangely pleased.
The little tavern's first-floor hall had a bar, a stage, and a dining area. In the northeast corner, a spiral staircase connected the second floor to the cellar, and a narrow door beside the stairs led into the kitchen. The second floor held eight small rooms facing each other in pairs, meant for travelers to rest. After the guests left, the four of them moved upstairs. Gally returned to The Tower of Tomes—now that the feast had ended, things there weren't as hectic.
Skyl even added a television to the tavern. When the tavern closed for the night, the four of them would sit on the couch, watch the news, snack, and drink beer.
On December 31, the broadcast reported Grindelwald appearing in Berlin. The first brutal thing he did was publicly force the Minister for Magic to resign.
Back when he unified the European wizarding world, the people he'd planted and cultivated were never fully purged. Many loyal followers had spent years waiting for their king to return. And with the times in chaos and hearts in panic, his ascent was treated as inevitable. This transfer of power went smoothly, with barely a ripple inside the wizarding world.
Outside it, though, the shockwaves were enormous.
Plenty of Muggles didn't recognize the name Grindelwald—but the moment they heard his era was World War II, and that he was German, alarm bells went off. And after he took power, he gave a public speech about forging a new order of wizard rule—talk of Muggles as an inferior stock that should be restrained, managed, even enslaved. It was far too many red flags all at once.
With a dark lord's expansion looking unstoppable, the Human Union Department urgently called on every nation to unite, end all conflicts, and treat the looming wizard war as the only priority.
The Cold War had ended only a year ago. Now the world tightened again.
During Christmas break, the Three Cups Traveling Tavern received many travelers—people staring death in the face. Wizards and Muggles alike. Adults and children.
Plane-crash survivors stranded on a deserted island ate until they were full, slept in warm beds, and woke the next morning back in civilization. A scientist lost in a blizzard, half-frozen and dying, saw the glowing tavern and thought it was a hallucination—only to drink deeply, step outside, and find himself back at his research station. A child with cancer wished to become a bird that lived among the clouds; after drinking butterbeer, he dreamed of becoming a righteous knight-errant, and when he woke, the cancer was gone—and a full head of hair had grown in.
The tavern always appeared in ways no one could predict, steeped in mystery. Some believers claimed it was a place touched by God's favor, and that Skyl and the others had come to save the doomed. And anyone who drank those three cups—without exception—fell into a beautiful dream where their deepest wish came true.
As the media coverage spread, more and more people learned about the strange tavern that appeared at Christmas. Some believed, convinced it was a magical fairy tale. Others scoffed, calling it an official scam.
Either way, the Three Cups Traveling Tavern became a rare warm color in a tense, frightened age. Many people on the edge of despair found hope again because of it. They longed for the day they might step through its door and get blissfully drunk for once.
The longing gathered by the tavern grew stronger and stronger. Skyl could feel the thought-strings drifting through every brick and beam, surging back and forth like tides. But those loose thought-strings did not condense as he'd expected—did not gather into a single shell of soul. Something crucial was missing.
After trying to eliminate every possible cause, Skyl still found no answer. The study of souls was deep and obscure, and thought-forms were tied to the road to godhood—an ultimate secret of the multiverse. The relevant records were vanishingly rare. He could only grope forward on his own.
In Skyl's design, once the tavern's thought-form took shape, it would form a ghostlike structure, and then he could attempt to grant that ghost magic. Because the soul of a dead thing and the soul of a living thing weren't fundamentally different, if he succeeded, he could manufacture wizards—or turn Muggles into wizards.
If everyone on Earth became a wizard, that would be fascinating. With magic, surely no one would go hungry again.
But good things never came easily. The tavern's thought-form refused to form.
Plenty of ordinary objects in daily life held longing too—an old house someone lived in for years, an antique worn down by time, a painting someone poured their life into—but none of them had souls.
Skyl believed his theory wasn't wrong. A soul could be formed from longing. He had even made a prophecy and glimpsed a sliver of hope—too blurry, too distant to grasp.
Days passed. Nothing changed. Finally, Skyl pronounced the experiment dead. He wasn't crushed—just regretful. He had failed plenty of magical experiments while learning and growing. In the beginning it shook his confidence; eventually, he stopped taking it to heart.
As Christmas break neared its end, the tavern shifted to London. Skyl planned to hide it in a street corner of London Below and seal it away with spells.
Let this miraculous tavern live forever in people's memories.
On the final day of business, Skyl didn't come down from the second floor until near evening.
The television in the hall was still running stories about the Three Cups Traveling Tavern—reports like these had become common, yet the three women never seemed to tire of them. Each of them had her own reason for loving the news, and Skyl couldn't quite guess what those reasons were.
He stepped onto the stage and checked Mora's Book, but still couldn't find a melody that felt right. He looked at the sky, counted the time, and began stacking chairs and cleaning.
"Are we closing?" Marika knew the tavern was shutting down. Behind the counter, she looked at a loss for what to do with her hands.
"Yeah. The tavern's run is over." Skyl cleaned every corner of the hall without using magic. Magic was convenient, but sometimes it was convenient enough to pull you out of living—to make you forget the simple happiness of labor.
He wiped down a thick little round table of redwood. All four of them ate every meal there. They often chatted and talked about their pasts and their preferences. Even Melina, quiet as she was, had smiled at that table more than once.
This Christmas break, they played their roles in the tavern, welcomed the customers chosen by Mora's Book, followed the tavern across the world, saw different landscapes, dealt with different people. Days that seemed routine slipped past in a blink.
"So short," Millicent murmured, "like a beautiful dream. I won't forget this tavern." Her face held real reluctance. "Skyl… I want to stay by your side, always."
"I'm not worth anyone's companionship," Skyl said, as he always did. "At my core I'm a cold person. You shouldn't waste your lives trying to soften me. Go create your own brilliance."
They didn't argue. Skyl was the sort who meant what he said. Someone as perceptive as Brelyna had realized that long ago—she was the one who'd started calling Skyl "the sun": able to light up the world, yet cold and distant all the same.
Skyl went into the kitchen and began preparing a farewell dinner.
After that meal, they would go their separate ways—Skyl back to Hogwarts, Marika back to her bakery, Millicent onward on her journey of practice, and Melina back to wandering the Lands Between.
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