Sael stood in front of the grave.
It was a simple thing. A rectangular stone marker, weathered by almost four centuries of wind and rain, with Eirlys's name carved across the top in letters that had softened at the edges but were still legible. Someone had maintained it over the years—the village, probably. The stone was clean. No moss. No weeds growing through cracks.
Flowers covered the ground around it.
Not his flowers. Those were still in his [Inventory]. These were offerings from villagers, piled in bunches and scattered in individual stems. Roses, mostly. Some lilies. A few wildflowers that looked like they'd been picked by children. The smell was overwhelming—sweet and cloying, thick enough that it almost felt physical.
And underneath that, faintly, the smell of chicken.
Someone nearby was cooking. Probably part of the festival. It was distracting, if he was being honest, but it was fine. Eirlys would have laughed about it. She'd always found it funny when solemn moments got undercut by mundane things. A funeral interrupted by someone's stomach growling. A marriage proposal delivered while standing in horse manure. Life being life, she'd say.
The wind picked up, scattering a few loose petals across the stone.
Sael raised his hand and wove a simple working. The spell matrix formed quickly—classification, selection, removal. The herbs and weeds growing at the base of the grave shriveled and pulled free, roots and all, drifting into a small pile at his feet. He did the same for a few stems that had wilted past saving, clearing space.
Then he opened his [Inventory] and pulled out the flowers he'd bought.
The lilies materialized in his hand, still fresh. He knelt and placed them carefully at the base of the stone, arranging them so they wouldn't block the name.
"I brought your favorites," he said quietly. "Starlight lilies."
He stood there for a moment, looking at the flowers.
Then at the grave.
Then at nothing in particular.
He still wasn't sure if she could hear him.
Logically, probably not.
The afterlife—assuming there was one, and he'd never gotten a definitive answer on that since there was no magical way to observe the soul—didn't seem like the sort of place where you could just lean over and eavesdrop on conversations happening near your grave. It would be a strange system. Inefficient. Why would the dead care about what people said to stones?
Then again, if there wasn't an afterlife, he was just standing here talking to dirt and decomposed remains, which would make him look like an idiot.
So he decided to believe it was real, because he wasn't an idiot.
And he'd like to think she could hear him regardless. Or maybe he just liked talking to her, even if it was one-sided.
"So," Sael said. "It's been ten years already."
The wind blew. The lilies shifted slightly.
"I slept for the first eight, actually. Which is... a record, I think. Given that I don't technically need to sleep anymore." He paused. "I discovered that after I woke up. Passed level 6000 while I was out, apparently. Because of my Primordial nature, my body doesn't run on normal processes anymore—it's sustained by mana now. Self-perpetuating. Which means I don't need to eat. Or drink. Or sleep. Which you'd probably say is boring, and you'd be right."
A thought crossed his mind that made him laugh.
"That also means I can no longer defecate, which is good, I suppose. Convenient, certainly." He exhaled slowly. "Though I do miss it sometimes. Not the act itself, obviously, but... there was this feeling, you know? The urge building up, almost painful if you waited too long, and then the relief when you finally let go." He stopped, realizing what he was saying. "Maybe even that's part of the human experience. The uncomfortable parts. The undignified parts."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Don't tell anyone I said that, though."
Sael chuckled, but it came out bitter.
He reached into his coat and pulled out his pipe. Didn't light it. Just held it, turning it over in his hands. It was the last gift from his wife, and It helped ground him.
"A dream woke me up. It was you." He cleared his throat. "Well, not exactly you. A dream of you. Which I was hoping would be you. Actually you, I mean. Visiting, or... something."
The pipe was already packed. He'd done it earlier without thinking.
"I don't know if you're happy where you are," he continued. "Or if you miss me. I miss you. In case that wasn't obvious." He huffed a quiet laugh. "Though I suppose standing at your grave talking to a stone probably makes it fairly obvious."
He lit the pipe with a small flame spell. Took a pull. Held it. Exhaled.
"I've been thinking about remarriage."
The words hung in the air for a moment.
"Not seriously," he added quickly, like she might get the wrong idea. "Just... thinking about it. The way you think about things you're not going to do but wonder about anyway."
He took another pull from the pipe.
"There was a woman in Thornhaven. A few decades ago. She ran an apothecary. Very knowledgeable. We talked about alchemical formulas for about three hours, and at the end of it she asked if I wanted to get dinner."
The smoke curled up and away, caught by the wind.
"I said no. Politely, I think. Though it's hard to tell with me." He paused. "She seemed disappointed. Or maybe just confused about why I'd spent three hours talking to her if I wasn't interested. Which is a fair question."
A bird landed on a nearby headstone, pecked at something, then flew off.
"The problem is I'm not sure what I'd even talk about. With someone new, I mean. You already knew all my stories. You were there for most of them." He tapped ash from the pipe. "And the ones you weren't there for, you made me tell you anyway. Sometimes multiple times, because you said I left out important details the first time."
He smiled slightly at that.
"You were usually right."
The wind picked up again. Stronger this time. It scattered more petals and made the trees around the cemetery creak.
"I think the real issue is that I'm not very good at people," Sael said. "Which you also knew. You used to say I needed to practice. Go to the market. Talk to the baker. Ask someone about the weather." He exhaled smoke. "I tried that once, actually. Asked a man about the weather. He looked at me like I was insane and said, 'It's raining.' Which it was. So I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of that conversation."
He stared at the grave for a long moment.
"I met a family today. On the road. Nice people. Invited me to join them at the festival." He paused. "I forgot to ask where."
Another pause.
"You'd say that was typical."
He finished the pipe and tapped it out against his palm, scattering the ash.
"There was also a boy," he said. "Named Sael."
The corner of his mouth twitched.
"Sael Junior, I suppose. Though I don't think his parents meant it that way. He was dressed like me. Or like the paintings of me. Big blue coat. Ridiculous hat. Stick for a staff." He tucked the pipe back into his coat. "A dragon showed up. Necro-dragon, actually. Someone's construct. And this boy—level zero, mind you—stood in the middle of the square with his stick and decided he was going to fight it."
The smell of chicken was stronger now. Someone had opened a window nearby, probably.
"Very brave," Sael continued. "Very stupid. But mostly brave." He was quiet for a moment. "I killed the dragon. Obviously. He didn't see me do it. Thought he'd done it himself with his stick and his made-up spell."
He could still see the boy's face. The shock. The dawning realization. The pure, unfiltered joy.
"I didn't correct him," Sael said. "Seemed... I don't know. Kinder, maybe. To let him have that." He frowned slightly. "Though his mother's probably going to have a harder time getting him to eat vegetables now."
The wind died down. The cemetery was quiet again, except for the distant sounds of the festival.
"I should probably go check on that dragon," Sael said. "The necromancer who animated it, I mean. Sending a construct into a populated area is..." He searched for the right word. "Irresponsible. At best. Actively malicious at worst."
He looked at the grave.
At the flowers.
At Eirlys's name, carved in stone.
"I'll come back," he said quietly. "In another ten years. Maybe sooner, if I'm in the area." He paused. "I'd say I'll try to be better at talking to people, but we both know that's not going to happen."
He stood there a moment longer.
Then he turned and started walking toward the cemetery gate.
Behind him, the wind picked up again, scattering petals across Eirlys's grave.
The starlight lilies stayed exactly where he'd placed them.
"[Invisibility]."
The spell settled over him like a second skin. Light bent around his form, redirecting itself in smooth curves that left no shadow, no outline, no hint that anyone stood there at all. It was a comfortable sensation—familiar, like pulling on a well-worn coat.
"[Float]."
The ground released him.
Gravity didn't disappear, exactly. It just... stopped mattering. Sael felt the familiar lightness in his chest, the slight vertigo that came with no longer being anchored to anything solid. He rose slowly at first, drifting upward like smoke.
Then faster.
The cemetery fell away beneath him. Headstones shrank to pebbles. The trees became patches of green. The village spread out in a patchwork of roofs and roads, and he kept rising.
Wind pulled at his coat. His hair. The air grew thinner, colder, but he barely noticed. His Constitution was high enough that atmospheric changes were more theoretical than practical.
He looked down.
There—near the village square. A man stood over a large grill, turning what looked like a whole chicken on a spit. The smoke rose in a thin column, carrying that smell Sael had noticed earlier.
He no longer needed to eat. Hadn't needed to in centuries. But he still appreciated doing so.
The chicken looked good.
People were coming back now. Cautiously at first, peering out of doorways and around corners. Then more confidently as they realized the dragon was gone and nothing was currently trying to kill them.
A few were already returning to the square. Children mostly, darting ahead of their parents to reclaim abandoned toys and festival prizes.
Sael watched for a moment longer, then looked away.
He'd come back for the chicken later.
Right now, he had to move before Lord Harrins sent his men to investigate. The village of Gatsby was under the lord's jurisdiction—part of his county—and a dragon attack, even a failed one, would warrant a response. Soldiers would come. Questions would be asked. Sael had no interest in answering them.
He turned his attention eastward.
The impact site was easy to spot. A column of black smoke rose from the forest, maybe two miles out. The trees around it looked scorched, and even from this height, Sael could see the faint shimmer of residual heat distorting the air.
Still fuming.
He needed to see where he was going to use [Teleport]. The spell required a clear visual reference, an anchor point his mind could latch onto. He'd tried teleporting blind once, early on, and ended up waist-deep in a pond.
Sael focused on the smoke. On the clearing beneath it. On the specific arrangement of burnt trees and scattered ash.
The spell matrix formed in his mind. Spatial coordinates. Distance calculation. Trajectory mapping. It was more complex than [Float], layers of compressed information that had to align perfectly or risk depositing him several feet underground or twenty feet in the air.
He double-checked the reference point.
Triple-checked it.
"[Teleport]."
The world folded.
It wasn't instantaneous, not quite. There was a moment, infinitesimally brief, where Sael existed in both places at once. High above the village and standing in the clearing. The sensation was disorienting, like being stretched across an impossible distance, but it passed before his mind could fully process it.
Reality snapped back into place.
He was in the middle of devastation.
The clearing looked like something catastrophic had fallen from the sky and decided to redecorate. Trees lay scattered in rough circles radiating outward from a central point, their trunks snapped clean or torn from the ground entirely with root systems still clinging to clumps of dirt. The earth itself had been scorched black in patches, and what grass remained was either ash or well on its way to becoming it. Smoke drifted lazily upward from half a dozen small fires still burning at the edges of the impact zone.
It was, in a word, a mess.
Sael looked at the nearest tree, a pine that had been caught by the edge of the blast. Half its branches were gone, the remaining ones charred and skeletal. The trunk had a crack running down its length that would probably kill it within the week.
"Sorry about that," he said to the tree.
The tree did not respond, which was typical of trees.
He walked over to it and raised his hand, channeling a simple extinguishing spell. The flames clinging to its branches sputtered and died, leaving behind trails of smoke that smelled like burned sap. He did the same for the other fires, moving through the clearing until the only smoke left was residual heat rising from blackened ground.
Then he reached into his [Inventory] and pulled out a small glass bottle. The liquid inside was a vibrant green, almost luminescent, and thick enough that it moved slowly when he tilted it.
He knelt beside the damaged pine and poured half the bottle over its roots.
[You have used: Verdant Renewal Elixir]
The effect was immediate. The roots began to shift, unfurling like waking fingers and burrowing back into the soil. The crack in the trunk sealed itself with fresh bark that grew over the damage in smooth, healthy layers. New branches sprouted from the crown, green needles pushing through in tight clusters that would take maybe an hour to reach full size.
Sael had used this potion before. Hundreds of times, actually, back when he'd traveled with his adventuring party and helped villages recover from droughts or monster attacks. It was S graded and farmers loved it. A few drops could turn a dying field into a harvest worth celebrating. He'd probably saved more lives with this potion than with any combat spell he'd ever cast, which was either profound or depressing depending on how you looked at it.
He moved to the next tree and repeated the process, then the next, working his way around the clearing until the bottle was empty and half a dozen trees were visibly regrowing.
That done, he turned his attention to the center of the impact site.
The dragon's body was gone. Completely gone, actually, which had been the point. He'd made sure the spear's detonation would destroy it thoroughly—reduce it to ash and scattered particles too small to be useful for reanimation. Necromancers could do alarming things with intact corpses, and dragon corpses in particular were valuable enough that leaving one lying around was just asking for trouble.
In the middle of the chaos, standing upright in a small crater, was the spear.
It looked perfectly fine. Not even scorched, despite having been at the center of an explosion that had vaporized a dragon. Such a good spear. Maybe it deserved more than what was paid for it.
Sael started walking toward it.
Then stopped.
He felt it. A presence. More precisely, the use of mana. Somewhere nearby, active and controlled in a way that suggested intent rather than residual magic from the explosion.
The necromancer?
No. The signature was wrong. Necromancy had a particular feel to it, cold and hollow, like touching something that had been dead for a long time. This was different. Warmer. Two distinct sources, actually, now that he was paying attention.
He turned his head slightly and looked directly at a cluster of bushes about twenty feet to his left.
There were two people hiding there. He could sense them both clearly now that he was focusing. Both were mana users, which explained why they'd caught his attention. One signature was stronger than the other, sharper, like the difference between a candle and a torch.
Sael waited.
They didn't move.
Maybe they hadn't noticed that he'd noticed them? It seemed unlikely, given that he was staring directly at their hiding spot, but people sometimes failed to pick up on obvious things.
Should he just tell them to come out and be done with this? They obviously weren't the necromancer, so what were they doing here?
He cleared his throat.
"Hey," he said.
No answer.
Sael frowned slightly.
"You there," he tried again, pointing at the bushes. "In the bushes. The ones fifteen feet to my left, slightly behind that fallen oak."
Still no answer.
"Hmm."
This was a hmm of frustration.
Then, out of nowhere, a blur exploded from the bushes.
It was fast. Absurdly fast, actually. Either augmentation magic or a high Agility skill, possibly both. The figure closed the distance in less than a second, weapon raised, trajectory aimed directly at his center mass.
Sael stepped aside and the attack missed by inches.
The figure shot past him, unable to correct mid-strike, and hit the ground in a controlled slide that threw up dirt and ash. Momentum carried them forward another ten feet before they managed to redirect, boots digging into the soil as they spun back toward him.
It was a girl.
Young, late teens or maybe early twenties. Dark hair cut short in a style that was practical rather than fashionable, and amber eyes that were currently locked onto him with the kind of focus usually reserved for things you very much wanted to stab. She wore light armor, leather mostly, with metal reinforcement at the joints and chest.
A short red cape hung from her shoulders, which seemed decorative more than functional. The pauldrons on her armor were slightly oversized and had decorative etchings that would catch on things in close combat, and her gauntlets had unnecessary spikes on the knuckles that served no purpose except looking intimidating.
Impractical design choices aside, her form was good. The way she held her sword—a slim blade designed for speed rather than power—showed proper training. Her stance was balanced. Her grip was correct.
She was also currently launching herself at him again.
Sael sensed mana being used directly behind him at the same moment.
There seemed to be a misunderstanding.