Illyen awoke in the Scribe's Annex to the soft, even light filtering through the high skylight. Years had passed since the night in the observatory, years of careful healing, reflection, and the slow reclaiming of memories. He was no longer the boy who had trembled under fragmented recollections — the young man who stretched awake now carried the calm, steadiness, and quiet strength of one who had endured storms and emerged tempered. He felt the certainty of Cael nearby, an unbroken tether to his own heart.
And Cael was there. He sat in his velvet chair, not reading, but sharpening a quill with a small silver knife — a meditative ritual in the still morning. He looked up immediately, searching Illyen's face.
"Did you rest?" Cael asked, voice low but firm.
"Yes," Illyen replied, surprised by the honesty in his tone. "The memories feel... anchored now. Not ghosts. They feel like bricks in a wall, not shards on the floor."
Cael smiled, the rare curve of his lips chasing away some of the perpetual tension from his face. "Good. Today, we go deeper. I feel we are close to the core of it." He retrieved the Book of Hours from the shelf, its weight a solemn counterpoint to the lightness of the morning.
Settling across from him, Illyen reached for the book, turning past the two pages they had absorbed yesterday. His hand slowed at an entry written in frantic, hurried script, dated just weeks before the Great Veil incident.
Day 730. The final calculations are complete. The power required will be absolute; the cost, astronomical. I have packed my affairs. I know what they say: that a soul cannot be fractured by its own magic. They are wrong. I fear the fracture, not of my body, but of my sense of self. I fear what I will lose, and that I won't know how to grieve it. I fear leaving a burden. We went to the eastern garden. We made a small, terrible prayer beneath the young magnolia.
Illyen's breath caught. His fingers trembled as they traced the last line: a small, terrible prayer. The magnolia. That pull — it had been waiting quietly, dormant, all these months.
"This is it, isn't it?" Illyen whispered, looking at Cael. "The promise we made. The one that means you've been waiting for years."
Cael nodded slowly, rigid with anticipation and quiet dread. "The last time we were fully us. Before."
Illyen returned to the page, letting his mind inhabit the memory itself. He closed his eyes, and the Scribe's Annex faded, replaced by the damp, rich scent of earth.
He was in the eastern garden. The magnolia, though young, had grown sturdier in memory, yet still delicate enough for his hands to circle its trunk. He knelt, his tunic damp with soil. In his hands were two intricately carved jade tokens, ready to be buried.
Fear gripped him — not of failure, but of erasure.
If the Veil demands my memory, if it takes the very map of my mind, Past-Illyen whispered, then what returns to you won't be me. It will be a vessel — empty, functional, but cold.
Across from him, Cael knelt, his face marked with the quiet maturity of months of waiting and guarding. He pressed the jade tokens together until they clicked.
"Then I will teach the vessel how to be you again," Past-Cael vowed, voice deep and unshakable. "I don't love the history in your head, Illyen. I love the pulse in your wrist, the warmth of your hand, the pause before your smile. These things the magic cannot touch."
Present-day Cael reached across the table, taking Illyen's hand in a grounding squeeze.
"You see the map, I see the compass," Past-Cael continued. "The map can be lost, but the compass — your core soul, your true north — remains. I will teach the vessel where to point." He paused, gaze steady. "My memory is your shelter. Rest in it until you can build your own again."
They buried the tokens, hands pressed over the small mound of earth. That was the covenant: Cael would sacrifice his present happiness to be a living sanctuary for Illyen's lost past. He would not move on; he would simply wait.
The memory snapped back to the present. Illyen gasped, tears streaming silently, not from loss, but from understanding Cael's sacrifice.
He looked at Cael — at the subtle silver lines around his eyes, at the way his posture was permanently set in patient vigilance. He had not just waited. He had lived for this moment.
"You didn't just wait," Illyen choked, cupping Cael's cheek. "You chose to live ten years of silence just so I could return to this moment."
Cael leaned into the touch, eyes closing. "You weren't promising to remember me; you were promising to see me, even when I was invisible to yourself. There was never any other choice. The alternative was losing you entirely, and I could not survive that silence."
Illyen felt a searing ache. He leaned forward, pressing a kiss to the same spot Cael had kissed him in the Solarium Tower memory — gratitude, apology, and renewal all in one.
"The thread held," Illyen whispered. Cael clutched his hand like a lifeline.
The storm ebbed, leaving them drained yet profoundly connected. The Scribe's Annex was no longer just a room; it was the first fully shared space of their adulthood, their choices, and their love.
Illyen wiped his eyes and returned to the Book of Hours, seeking a distraction — a logical problem to soothe the storm in his heart.
"The Veil," he began, resting his chin on his hands, "the entry says I was attempting to repair it, and the magical rebound fractured me. To prevent this from repeating, we need to understand the source of the fracture itself."
Cael nodded. "The source is the Loom of Aether, stored in the oldest sub-crypts beneath the house. Elara knows more than anyone. We do not go alone."
Illyen's gaze hardened. Now, as adults, they would face the Loom together — no longer frightened boys, but the men they had grown to become.