Rosalie came on Thirdday, as promised.
She brought iron-ite gravel in a cloth sack and a ceramic jar of something she called "root tonic" — a mixture of nutrients her grandmother blended for struggling plants. She set to work on the moonpetals without asking permission, kneeling in the soil with the focused efficiency of someone who'd done this a thousand times.
I helped. Or rather, I followed her instructions, because Rosalie in a garden was a general on a battlefield and I was a willing but underqualified recruit.
"Dig here. Not that deep. Deeper than that. No, that's too — here, let me."
She took the trowel from me with a sigh that was somehow both exasperated and patient.
"You're terrible at this," she said.
"I'm better at theoretical gardening."
"That's not a thing."
"It should be."
We worked through the morning. The iron-ite gravel went in a ring around each moonpetal cluster, and almost immediately I could see the difference — the curled leaves began to relax, unfolding like tiny hands opening. The root tonic darkened the soil and made the silverroot stand up straighter.
Elara showed up around midmorning.
She appeared at the garden gate carrying a basket of day-old bread rolls ("for the birds, or you, same thing") and stopped dead when she saw Rosalie.
"Who's that?"
"Rosalie Thorne. Greta's granddaughter. She's helping with the garden."
"Since when do you garden?"
"Since today."
"You hate dirt."
"I'm growing as a person."
Elara walked into the garden and examined Rosalie with the subtle warmth of a territorial cat encountering a new cat in its territory. Rosalie looked up from the soil, dirt on her nose, and examined Elara right back.
"Hi," Elara said. "I'm Elara. I'm Lucien's best friend."
"Hello," Rosalie said. "I'm Rosalie. I'm fixing his garden because it's sad."
"It IS kind of sad."
"Hey," I protested.
"The moonpetals were curling," Rosalie said.
"I noticed that last week!" Elara said. "I didn't know why though."
"Too much ambient mana from the ward stone. Iron-ite gravel fixes it."
Elara's eyes widened. "That's so smart. How do you know that?"
"My grandmother taught me. How do you know about moonpetals?"
"I don't, really. But I notice things about Lucien's house because I'm here a lot. For the bread." She held up the basket as evidence.
Rosalie looked at the basket. Looked at Elara. Looked at me.
"You have a friend who brings you bread," she said flatly.
"I have a friend who THROWS bread at me. The bringing is a recent development."
"I've matured," Elara said with dignity.
"It's been two months."
"Maturity doesn't have a timeline."
Rosalie's ghost-smile appeared. Slightly wider than before. "I like her," she told me.
"Everyone likes me," Elara said.
"That's statistically unlikely," Rosalie replied.
"See, Lucien? She's like you but dirtier."
I sat on the garden wall and watched them interact — Elara bright and warm like fresh bread, Rosalie quiet and precise like well-tended soil — and felt something I hadn't felt since before I died.
Community.
Not family — I had that, and it was everything. But this was different. This was people my own age (physically, at least) who I hadn't been born to, who I'd chosen and who'd chosen me. A baker's daughter who threw bread and dreamed of the best bakery in the kingdom. An herbalist's granddaughter who talked to plants and noticed things nobody else noticed.
Friends.
The word felt different in this life. Heavier. More real.
In my old life, I'd had colleagues. Acquaintances. People I'd nod to in the office kitchen while waiting for the microwave. I couldn't name five people who would've noticed if I disappeared.
It took two weeks for someone to find my body.
Two weeks.
I watched Elara demonstrate the "correct" way to knead bread dough (using a ball of clay from the garden as a stand-in, to Rosalie's visible horror at the waste of good soil) and Rosalie explain the root structures of silverroot with the intensity of a university lecturer, and I thought:
Not this time. This time, I'd build something that mattered. Not theories. Not ward diagrams. Not secret notebooks full of knowledge nobody could ever see.
People. Connections. A life that, if I disappeared, would leave a hole.
"LUCIEN. Are you listening?"
Elara was staring at me. Rosalie was staring at me. I'd apparently zoned out for a solid minute.
"Sorry. I was thinking."
"You're ALWAYS thinking. Come taste this." Elara produced a small bread roll from the bottom of her basket — warm, fresh, definitely not day-old. She'd brought it specifically for me. "New recipe. Dad let me experiment with the ratios."
I took a bite. Soft, with a slight sweetness from honey and a depth from what I suspected was a longer fermentation. It was really, genuinely good.
"This is excellent."
"REALLY?" Her face lit up like a mana crystal at full charge.
"The crumb structure is more open than your usual recipe. Did you increase hydration?"
"By ten percent! Dad said it wouldn't work but I—" She caught herself. "How do you know about crumb structure?"
"You told me. Three weeks ago. Twenty-minute lecture on bread density."
"You REMEMBERED?"
"I remember everything you tell me."
She went pink. Looked away. Shoved another roll at me. "Eat more. I need detailed feedback."
Rosalie watched this exchange with an expression that was hard to read. Not jealousy — Rosalie didn't seem to operate on that frequency. More like... observation. Cataloging. Adding data to whatever model she was building in her head.
"Your garden will be fine now," Rosalie said, standing and brushing off her knees. "I'll come next Thirdday to check the moonpetals."
"Thank you, Rosalie."
"You can pay me in access to your father's herbalism books."
"Deal."
She left through the garden gate, pausing at the ward stone — just briefly, her fingers brushing the whitestone — before continuing on.
Elara watched her go.
"She's quiet," Elara said.
"Yeah."
"But like... the good kind of quiet. The kind where you can tell there's a lot happening underneath."
"Yeah."
"Unlike YOU, where the quiet is just you overthinking everything and forgetting to eat."
"That's... fair."
Elara sat beside me on the wall. We ate bread in silence — comfortable silence, the kind you can only have with someone who doesn't need you to perform.
"Lucien?"
"Mm?"
"Do you ever feel like... you're older than you are?"
The question hit me in the sternum. I kept my face neutral. Took another bite of bread. Chewed. Swallowed.
"Sometimes," I said.
"Me too." She swung her legs against the wall. "Not like... OLD old. Just like sometimes I feel things that seem too big for being seven. Like wanting the bakery, and worrying about Dad's costs, and thinking about the future. Seven-year-olds aren't supposed to worry about the future."
"Says who?"
"I don't know. Everyone?"
"Everyone's wrong about most things."
She laughed. "There you go again."
"Where?"
"Being you. Saying things that make me feel like it's okay to be me."
I didn't have a response to that. Or rather, I had too many responses and none of them were appropriate for a seven-year-old boy to say to a seven-year-old girl on a garden wall on a sunny morning in a world where magic was real and toast was blessed and the biggest threat to happiness was a thin man with a ledger who'd already left.
So I said: "Your bread is really good, Elara."
And she said: "I know."
And we sat there, in the garden, in the sunlight, in the daily life of another world.
Later that night, I lay in bed and listened to the house.
The wards humming. Celestine snoring through the wall (she would deny this to her grave). Edric's light still on — reading, probably his merchant books, safe now that Greaves was gone. Mother and Father's murmured conversation, too low to hear, but the tone was warm. Relaxed. The tension of the past month finally bleeding away.
Outside, the moonpetals glowed. Stronger now, thanks to Rosalie's iron-ite gravel. The garden was healthier. The wards were stable. The house was whole.
Daily life.
In my old life, daily life was something to survive. Wake up, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. A treadmill with a screen at the end. The days blurred into each other until they blurred into nothing and then I was dead on a bathroom floor and nobody noticed for two weeks.
Here, daily life was something to savor.
The taste of blessed toast. The smell of Mother's wintermint tea. The sound of Celestine's laughter. The quiet solidarity of Edric's secret. The warmth of Father's study. The brightness of Elara's grin. The steadiness of Rosalie's hands in soil.
Small things. Daily things. The kind nobody wrote legends about.
But maybe legends weren't the point. Maybe the point was this — the accumulation of small moments, small miracles, small connections. A life built not on grand achievements but on the daily, deliberate choice to be present. To be kind. To pay attention. To love people and let them love you back.
I'd learned that lesson the hard way, by dying without it.
I wouldn't forget it again.
I pulled the notebook from under my mattress. Opened it to the last page. And wrote, in English, in handwriting that was slowly improving from "drunk spider" to "slightly sober spider":
Day 2,557 in another world. The moonpetals are healthy. The bread was excellent. I have two friends, a family that loves me, and a secret notebook full of things that could probably get me investigated by the church.
Daily life is good.
I'd like to keep it that way.
I closed the notebook, slid it back under the mattress, and fell asleep to the sound of wards humming and a house full of people who would notice if I was gone.