“For saying you were nothing.” A tear slid down his temple. “You were… everything.”

He smiled—a boy’s smile, buried under eighty years of war and love and loss. “Will you remember me?”

Maquia didn’t understand loneliness. Not yet.

Ariel stared at her. His beard was white. His eyes were tired. “You… you’re still…”

She picked him up. “You are my Ariel ,” she said, the name coming from nowhere and everywhere. “You are my morning star.” Years bled like dye in water. Ariel grew. Maquia did not.

At five, he grabbed her finger and called her “Mama.” At ten, he learned to chop wood while she wove cloth to sell in the human towns. The villagers whispered. “That girl—she never ages. Must be a witch.”

“I’m still your mama,” she said, smiling through the smoke. The war ended. Ariel grew older. His daughter, now a young woman, married. His grandchildren ran through the fields. And Maquia remained—a ghost in a girl’s body, always watching from the edge of the family’s laughter.

At fifteen, Ariel began to pull his hand away when she reached for him.

A baby. Wrapped in a bloodied cloth, his tiny fists clenched against a world that had already abandoned him.

Maquia stayed until his hand grew cold. Then she walked out into the meadow where the dandelions bloomed—the promised flowers that carried wishes to the sky. She blew on a seed head, watching the white fluff scatter.

The word cut deeper than any Mezarte blade. Maquia said nothing. She simply went back to her loom, weaving a blue scarf—the color of the sky on the day she found him.

Maquia fled. She didn’t remember running. She only remembered falling—tumbling through a roaring river, emerging in a forest thick with the smell of pine and mud. And there, in the hollow of a dead tree, she found him.

The sky above the Iorph village was a tapestry of endless, lazy clouds. Maquia, though seventy years old, still had the face of a girl. She sat by the loom, her fingers tracing the ancient threads of the Hibiol , the fabric that recorded the passage of human hearts. But her own cloth was empty. “You must not fall in love,” Elder Raline had warned, her voice as soft as falling snow. “It is the loneliness that will destroy you.”

She knelt beside him, taking his wrinkled hand in her smooth one. “For what?”

One winter, a new threat rose. The last Renato, feral and grieving, descended on the city. Ariel—now a gray-haired general—led the charge. Maquia watched from the battlements, her ageless heart pounding.