The tale that follows is not from the time line we know—but it might have been, had the dice fallen differently...
Two Full Hendersons Ver0.2
2.0 Hendersons
The main story is irreparably busted. The campaign ends.
High society is a web reaching across classes and even factions. These “factions,” of course, are not the sorts of rigid cadres found within the College, nor are they official groups recognized by the Empire; more flexible and generalistic, they are closer to social cliques.
For example, take Baron A, a vassal of Count Whoever. If the count is a defender of the Emperor, he may follow his liege’s lead by publicly introducing himself as a resolute member of the monarch’s faction; however, his personal convictions can very well lead him to join Marquis B in a smaller circle dedicated to supporting the crown via economic policy. Further still, his responsibilities at home may give rise to connections with Baron C next door that morph into an alliance aiming to expedite progress in maritime trade.
Like the work of a sloppy engineer, the wires building up the Trialist Empire’s social web crisscross at every angle, and have long since calcified into permanent fixtures of the nation. Worse still, every coronation and every episode of familial drama adds to the confusion, mixing up the balance of power. They say even those on holiday must prepare a proxy to act in their stead, lest they be left hopelessly behind in three days’ time.
Seven centuries had passed since the Empire’s founding. The death of the sitting Emperor had put an Erstreich on the throne for the third time in recent years—though this was on a timescale of centuries—heralding in yet another major shift in political equilibrium. Yet amidst the chaos, one electorate marquis was hosting a grand ball.
The guards manning the stately double doors announced the entrance of a new pair of guests in sonorous baritone. At once, the elegant dance tunes and genteel smiles gave way to an air of excitement. But this wasn’t because the new arrivals were particularly notable—or at least, not wholly. It was that the great fortune and authority they commanded made their presence, in and of itself, a major political statement.
To grace an evening banquet was a display of interest, if not outright friendship; a connection between two factional leaders could turn a working alliance into a deep mutual bond. As such, the count’s presence tonight was a surprise to both their fellow guests and the host, who’d sent the invitation out of obligation and never expected it to be accepted.
But the count had no doubt come in search of exactly this commotion. Even the most hushed rumor could hold enough weight to tip the balance of power, after all. A set of splendiferous double doors fit to adorn a castle slowly cracked open, revealing the count—or rather, the count and countess.
“Goodness, they’re as beautiful as ever.”
“Indeed. Look at how positively in love they are!”
“You said you attended their wedding, didn’t you? Have they always been this way?”
“Oh, they haven’t changed a bit.”
Leisurely striding across the carpet, the couple made their way toward the depths of the room, where the host was sizing up his guests. Their mere presence—the mere act of walking—was enough to send murmurous waves throughout the room of aristocrats; this was what true influence looked like.
Gracefully linked at the arms, the pair’s smiles never faltered in the face of this torrential downpour of gossip. Their lips curled gently, as if to say the partner at their side was the only happiness they could possibly need. So vivid was their undying love that their name had become synonymous with intimacy; in inaudible tones, the couple whispered into each other’s ears.
“Hey, can’t we go home? I’m already sick of this.”
“Shut the fuck up. You were the one who said we had to come.”
Nestling together and exchanging sweet nothings, they were the spitting image of an affectionate husband and wife. The barbs in their conversation passed unseen, and they strolled along at a mellow, comely pace to offer their respects to the host.
“But I must say, the depths of their devotion shocked even me.” The fellow who’d been present for the couple’s wedding ceremony sipped on his wine and reminisced. “Summoning a wraith, personality intact, from a soul long since put to rest is a ludicrous achievement, and doing so fueled by love alone is just marvelous to see.”
Now then, let us tell the tale of the pair walking the red carpet.
This was a story of a husband and wife, of Erich and Agrippina. This perfectly normal couple were the two halves that made up Count and Countess Stahl, wed together in a perfectly normal marriage.
Alas, there was one difference between them: he was mortal, and she was not.
In a perfectly normal series of events, the mortal husband ran out of time and passed away. He was 106; a remarkable age for a mensch, to be sure, but yet too tragic for the wife to consider remarriage. Any and every suitor was turned away with a wistful smile and the words, “I’m sorry. There is only one person I belong beside.”
Yet she was a stubborn woman. She wanted to see her late husband once more; she did everything she could to bring her dearest dream to fruition, even throwing around her weight as the foremost professor in the Leizniz cadre of Daybreak to advance her research.
At long last, forty years after the death of her husband, the wife managed to resurrect him as a wraith. Finally, their difference had been overcome: they were both immortal, ready to foster a love everlasting.
And so, the tragic tale of lost love ended with a happily ever after. Those who heard the story were awestruck by the sheer passion that overcame technical impossibility, and many tears were shed: who knew that true love could flourish so deeply in the callous realm of nonfiction?
But what the world didn’t know were the husband’s last words: “It’s finally over...”
[Tips] Wraithification is the rare process by which a powerful mage with deep-seated regrets may cling to this world at the time of death. Not only is the phenomenon infrequent and highly unpredictable, but academia is unsure if its current understanding of its necessary conditions is fully correct. As such, it was long considered impossible to artificially reproduce.
However, a joint thesis by Countess Agrippina du Stahl and one research partner was published in which a deceased person can be revived as a wraith under extremely specific circumstances. Despite its limitations, the paper caused a terrific commotion in arcane journalism.
“Aughhh, I’m sooo tired!”
Groaning like an old man getting out of a bath, the root of all the world’s evil threw herself onto the couch. The graceful beauty she’d worn just a few minutes ago had disappeared without a trace.
Who could ever believe that this slob, lazily pulling over a pitcher of water with an Unseen Hand and drinking straight from it, was the blossoming flower at the heart of high society—that she was the Countess Agrippina du Stahl?
Well, I supposed what was more unbelievable—at least, I didn’t want to believe it—was that I had gone from simple Erich of Konigstuhl to Count Erich du Stahl. Not only that, but after wasting my entire life in this baffling position, I’d been dragged out of my eternal rest to be propped up as a wraith.
“Quit that. It’s improper and you’re going to wrinkle your clothes.”
“Don’t be so fussy. You’ve been a noble for over two centuries at this point—would it be so much to ask that you learn to treat clothing as disposable?”
If you were to ask me how this had happened, I honestly couldn’t say. Things had been pushed forward so quickly that my fate had been sealed in the blink of an eye. By the time I’d gotten my bearings, I was a noble. Even then, I’d tried to go home, but the folks of Konigstuhl respectfully kept me at arm’s length as “Count Stahl.”
Seriously, what went wrong?
Details aside, the root cause was clear as day. With her professorship in hand, the duke’s eyes on her, and her ennoblement set in stone, this scoundrel had seen visions of her future. Her position in one of the most notable College factions along with her ties to a foreign powerhouse were honey to a swarm of flies; in addition to the ceaseless proposals, Lady Leizniz would surely torment her with banquet invitations that she couldn’t turn down.
But this rotten bitch had one out.
All she had to do was find a partner who could keep the suitors away—and I was the pitiful sacrifice.
I didn’t know why she’d chosen me. By my estimate, she’d made a calculated move to avoid the inconvenient ties and responsibilities that she’d have to take on by marrying an active peer. Pulling out every sinister trick in the book—ancestral revision, blood money, and thinly veiled threats, to name a few—I’d been propped up as the descendant of a long-lost aristocratic lineage. The baffling windfall turned my entire family into nobility overnight.
The story went that my grandfather had vanished after an attempt on his life, and hidden away in the countryside, biding his time for an eventual return to glory. If that wasn’t bad enough, I’d nearly lost my mind when the crest carved into Schutzwolfe had been submitted as “evidence” of my heritage.
“More importantly, are you done yet?”
“I’m looking through the invitations now.”
Then again, I guess I was part of the problem: here I was, obediently back for a second round after a lifetime of acting as her husband.
Honestly, what was this, anyway? To this day, I still couldn’t sort out how I felt on the matter; perhaps the most peculiar part was that I didn’t dislike it. I didn’t know whether that was a product of our physical bond or the children that had come of it, or whether it was a simple affliction of the mind. This was the woman who’d crushed my dreams, deserving of hatred more enduring than time itself...
So why am I diligently working for her sake? I truly was sick. I made a mental note to schedule a visit to the doctor’s; a psychiatrist, of course—I’d long since graduated from the need to see a physician.
“There’s a summons for tea from Marquis Keffenbach. They sent us a present to celebrate our youngest’s induction the other day, so we’ll have to be there.”
“Whaaat? All the way to the North? What a bother...”
“I can go by myself if you want.”
But there was one thing that still confused me.
“You know that won’t do—I’ll join you. We’ll need to give our thanks together, so help me round up the children from the College, will you?”
Despite having propped me up to handle her busywork, my wife almost always came along when I went to give my salutations to others. At times, she even went out of her way to wrangle up the stringless kites—whom did they take after, I wondered—we called our daughters to join us.
I simply didn’t get it. This had to have been far removed from her original design, so why had she bothered resurrecting me just for this?
Of course, I wasn’t deluded enough to buy into fantasies of love. Ours was not so sugary a relationship; I’d realized as much when I’d started an affair in an attempt at petty vengeance, only to be casually forgiven. In fact, she’d nonchalantly offered to legitimize the child as our own.
I knew methuselah had a very different value set from mensch, but to not be affected at all had to be strange. If she did love me, I would’ve expected her to do something to either me or the person I’d cheated on her with—after all, I certainly would’ve.
Adultery is evil.
If I’d been in her shoes, both other parties involved could expect a swift beatdown. I wouldn’t be able to let things end in the same way as those soul-crushing sob stories littering otherworldly magazines like land mines; no matter whom I faced, revenge would be my only recourse. For a lifetime and a half, the quiet despair of those betrayed had confounded me. Although I couldn’t speak for my previous circumstances, in this world I had the power and money to put up a fight; if someone dared to wrong me without at least ending things in definite terms, any period of depression would give way to hellish retribution.
But she hadn’t, and so this wasn’t love. If nothing else, it wasn’t any kind of love I understood.
“Hey, why don’t you come sit? I can’t relax with you floating around like this.”
I’d been drifting about, thumbing through the invitations our retainer had deemed important enough to elicit a personal answer, when my wife sat up straight out of the blue. This was her way of telling me to sit next to her, so I obliged without a word; in the past century and change, I’d grown used to her roundabout solicitations.
Manifesting a physical shell for my ethereal body, I took a seat. Just as I settled into a comfortable position, my wife slumped onto my lap. Three hundred years old, her perfect methuselah form hadn’t withered in the slightest; the sensation of her skin on my legs was as bewitching as when I’d first felt it.
The years had seen me grow old and die, and when I returned, it was in youthful form; yet during all that time, she remained unchanging.
“Ahh... So comfy.”
“Hey, don’t fall asleep on me now. The baroness of Schafenberg has sent you, specifically, an invitation to the theater. Are you going?”
While the wifelike creature on my lap lazed about, I moved on to invitations that didn’t involve me. The author of the letter was a bit of a bothersome lady: she was a big fan of dramas, but found it too lonely to watch alone, and could always be found searching for people to keep her company. As someone who preferred to go to the theater—for both movies and plays—by myself, she was my polar opposite.
As an aside, Agrippina didn’t bother with going out at all. Had she been born on Earth, she would’ve been the sort to spare no expense, buying every disc release and subscribing to every streaming service in the name of kicking back in the comfort of her decked-out home theater. Of course, this wasn’t really a hypothetical: this world’s limitations didn’t stop her from hiring whole troupes to perform at our manor.
“A play? Where? Ah, I imagine it must be the Berylinian Magic Lanterns if it’s from Baroness Schafenberg. I haven’t enjoyed their work recently, with the new director and all.”
I felt bad for the poor guy. He’d taken the reins from the last director over twenty years ago, and yet my wife continued to treat him like a greenhorn. For a second, I felt like I’d slipped into a parallel version of Kyoto where centuries of residence still weren’t enough to legitimize someone as a local.
“Well, whatever,” she said. “And the showing?”
“They’re putting on... Ugh.”
One look at the title was enough to draw out an ignoble groan. I needed to be more careful; everyday habits were quick to slip in company, after all.
“What’s the matter? Tell me the title.”
“...Echoes of Everlasting Love, apparently.”
“Ew...”
Matching my groan, she whined in sheer disgust. Of course she did: we were the source material.
Having lost his beloved wife, a methuselah journeyed into the depths of the underworld—a tragedy waiting to happen by every right. Yet guided by a bell crafted from their everlasting love, he groped through the afterlife until the gods themselves were moved to mercy. Altogether, the events made for a love story so sweet that it skipped past sugar into the realm of purified saccharin.
While the standard script swapped our genders, this director had gone through the trouble of revising the tale to have the wife venture in search of her husband; would the good count and countess like to join her, the baroness had asked.
She was asking us to join her for a play that depicted us—what the hell was wrong with this lady? There had to be something wrong with her brain.
“Would you kindly refuse?” Agrippina asked.
“Of course.”
A Hand reached over to a nearby desk, joining its brethren to compose yet another response.
Eternal love, my ass. Isn’t that ridiculous?
I would never see it that way. The scoundrel was nuzzling into my legs, but this couldn’t be her way of hiding her embarrassment—it just couldn’t. No, surely, this refusal had to be another one of her dastardly schemes.
[Tips] Echoes of Everlasting Love is a tale in which the main character ventures to the other side in search of his deceased other half. His never-ending devotion is given physical form in the shape of a bell, and it guides him on an epic journey through the nether realm. Sweet and dramatic, it is a mainstay with viewers of all ages; such popularity has led to the creation of derivative works and spinoffs.
Most notably, the magic-lantern show in the imperial capital has produced a critically acclaimed version titled Echoes of Everlasting Love: The Tale of a Baron’s Daughter. Over a millennium from now, not only will it be well-known as an incredibly long-running classic, but it will go on to be adapted into the mediums of literature, film, and comics.
Though they have been questioned, those depicted have thus far declined to comment.
Laying her head on tough muscle radiating a faint yet surprisingly vivacious warmth, Countess Stahl took a moment to review her memories: of the days when this husband of hers had been a servant, of when he’d died, and of the days that had followed.
There wasn’t any real reason for her reminiscence. Worn out from the banquet, her mind was simply idling along on meaningless topics; it sought comfort before it would be ready to begin weaving its next plot. That, and the title her husband—who was currently busy muttering rude comments about the baroness—had read aloud put it into her head.
Although the thought of an everlasting love had nothing to do with her, the words naturally pulled up old memories from her imperishable mind.
Looking back, theirs had been a long road.
When they first married—and she’d seen this coming, of course—things had been quite chaotic. No different from a pup being taken to be immunized just as it settled into a household, the boy’s resistance had been fierce and his subsequent distrust in humanity impossible to dislodge.
However, no matter how much vitriol he possessed, the efforts of a boy not yet of age had been simple enough to crush. Looking back now, the methuselah felt some amount of culpability: her methodical plan to cut off his every escape hadn’t exactly been the most considerate course of action. While she’d need to put in conscious effort to recall why she’d been in such a rush to get things settled, it was clear in hindsight that there had been plenty of other ways to get her way.
Even after she’d finished persuading him—read: breaking his spirit—the tension between them continued. Obviously, a boy forced to give up his dreams of adventure and break his vow to the girl from his hometown was never going to open his heart to the very person who’d derailed his life.
It was all but certain that had Agrippina been even marginally weaker than Erich, he would have come for her life. Alas, quixotic dreams and good sense were not mutually exclusive: he’d realized that his only hope was to bet on a better tomorrow. Armed with this wisdom, he’d chosen to keep his head down so as not to let a momentary rage endanger the lives of his family.
Agrippina’s strained relationships—with husband and disciple both—had gone on for another few years. Shaken like a scared puppy, her spouse could do no more than make snide jabs in that time; though it’d been enough to set off a handful of verbal spats, the fact of the matter was that mensch were not built to remain angry forever.
The first turning point had come when he’d long since gotten used to carrying himself as a count, around the age of thirty: to Agrippina’s complete and total surprise, a new life had taken hold within her.
In the first place, the preceding circumstances had only arisen because she’d recognized her injustice and had thought it only fair to at least do something vaguely wifelike in exchange. For that to hit the target, as it were, had never been a consideration. Not only were methuselah beyond the biological need for reproduction, but they physically were not well tailored for the process: female methuselah were fertile for a few days per year at most.
Bemused by the peculiar turn of events, she’d decided to let her husband know. Yet while she’d taken the time to share the news out of a sense of obligation—he’d been the one to supply one half of the mixture, after all—Agrippina hadn’t considered childbirth in any real sense.
Unaging and undying, she fell in line with the rest of her ilk on the topic of rearing a successor. Winning greater glory through the achievements of her children spurred zero interest, and she could not have cared less about causing trouble for others in the event she died without a proper heir. Whatever fate befell the county after she was gone was, in no uncertain terms, not her damn problem.
Thus, in Agrippina’s mind, the option to flush it all away as water under the bridge had been prominent. If she had to have an heir, an adoptee would do; she’d seen no reason to bother pushing a newborn out between her legs just to spend a full century raising one of her own kind. Frankly, she had been perfectly content to adopt one of the bastard children Erich had fathered—if he’d done so in an attempt to spite her, he’d made a hilarious miscalculation—in his youth.
Yet when she broke the news, her husband’s jaw had gone slack with shock; he’d wobbled over to her, placed a hand on her stomach, and after a few moments of silence, said, “I see.”
For whatever reason, when she heard those words and saw his tender expression, the first thought to cross her mind had been I suppose I’ll bear him a child.
What precisely had set off this change of heart, not even Agrippina herself truly understood. Had she found it funny how the ornery man she’d penned into her family register had suddenly softened up? Had some faint, dormant sense of motherly instinct risen up from the basest parts of her mind? Even now, the answer eluded her, and her retrospections brought it no closer.
It wasn’t as if her pregnancy had changed everything all at once. But where her husband had once vanished without a trace in between his duties, he’d begun to mention where he’d be headed in advance; when he returned home, he did so with presents in hand. For her part, she hadn’t given their relationship any deliberation either, and had kept along perfectly normally.
However, the same could not be said after their child was born.
In a world where men were keen to sow their seed without any intention to harvest, Erich was the dedicated sort, keen to fret and fuss over the most minor of things. He’d stayed at Agrippina’s bedside—much to the chagrin of the midwives—during labor, and had held her hand even as she completely dulled the pain with magic.
After a delivery devoid of hardship, the only impression she could muster upon taking the thing in hand had been, So this is it? Yet when her husband came to pluck the babe away, he’d held the newborn up with bleary eyes and cooed, “You’re finally here... Welcome to the world.” The image was forever branded into Agrippina’s eyes.
Erich’s piety had not stopped after childbirth. When he came to visit them in the days following, he would always take their daughter—that Agrippina hadn’t been able to tell at first whether she’d borne a boy or girl was a secret she guarded to this day—from the wet nurse and go about his work with her cradled in his arms.
Was it then out of some fanciful whim that she’d asked? Laying in a bed she’d planned to leave vacant with her husband dragging on a smoldering pipe, the words had come out: “Why do you trouble yourself so with the child?”
He balked, words stuck in his throat. And then, exhaling fumes that gave shape to his shame, he answered: “Because I finally understand what she meant by, ‘I won’t let you near her until your heart is pure.’”
Basically, the woman with whom Erich had been seeking solace hadn’t been an entirely convenient entity ready to accept his every selfish desire. Agrippina didn’t even know his mistress’s name, but surmised that while she was willing to be used as sanctuary for another’s comfort, she couldn’t stand to let her child be subject to the same treatment—a very human sentiment, the methuselah thought.
For whatever reason, Agrippina had found that hilarious: she’d laughed and laughed until her sides nearly twisted off. She vividly remembered how he’d eventually lost his temper and gone off on her too.
As the air between them loosened and their baby turned into a toddler, she had been astonished to find that one unlikely surprise could be followed by another of its variety: by the time their firstborn was fully weaned at the age of five, Agrippina’s belly had begun to swell again.
This time, she had truly been stunned. Not seeing the need for any additional children, she’d begun employing contraceptive spells; yet it seemed she had stumbled into a most curious turn of fate. Truth be told, she had a vague idea of the culprit: on some nights, she had been so thoroughly exhausted that she’d drifted off with what could hardly be called perfect precautions.
But why would we ever need two? she had been ready to say, only for her husband to once again place a hand on her stomach and whisper, “I see...” He had even gone to fetch their daughter, beckoning her to do the same; it was then that Agrippina once more was overcome with a sense that, oh, fine, she’d bear him another.
For that to repeat a total of four times was a real feat. In particular, their second and third had been born in back-to-back years; the public had reacted as if they were the forewarning of world-ending cataclysm.
Around that time, the pair had grown completely accustomed to their “loving couple” act, and whether as a genuine commendation or an ironic slight, they’d been cemented in imperial lexicon with references to Stahlian love; even then, the thought of a single methuselah mothering so many children had been nigh unthinkable. Two over the course of a long life was impressive enough, but three was basically a miracle. Their disinterest in reproduction was the only thing keeping their kind from dominating the planet, after all.
Regardless, a third child they had, and only a year off from their second at that. Everywhere she went, Agrippina had been welcomed with surprise and well-wishes; she’d found it tiresome, of course, but also uncomfortable in equal part. Despite knowing that it would push back many of her plans, she’d distanced herself from social life—it seemed not even a self-centered methuselah like her could shrug off the embarrassment the rumors stirred up. This was an inconvenience to others, but no one could get a word in edgewise with her husband backing the decision.
By the time their firstborn had enrolled at the College at the age of thirty, her husband had set foot into the territory of old age. Yet he still stood straight and had all his teeth, so Agrippina hadn’t paid it much mind when others pointed it out.
True, a closer inspection saw his skin beginning to sag, or his shimmering gold hair washing out to a dull silver; but it had been difficult to see a man who dauntlessly hopped onto horses to ride around as elderly. Perhaps least convincing of all was another dimension of his continued activity: though she’d heard mortal men were less susceptible to waning libido than their female counterparts, his vitality was hardly that of a graying soul.
Still, numbers were numbers. Agrippina had carelessly written off the possibility of fertility for a mensch sixty years of age, only to be shocked by an unprecedented fourth child.
Society had erupted as feverishly as when they’d conceived two years in a row. While one might expect waves of joy to see another avenue of connection with the illustrious Stahl household, the pervasive attitude had been closer to that of perplexity. Was the count really a mensch? Was the countess really a methuselah?
Destiny was a curious thing—for the servant who had once been Erich of Konigstuhl, to be sure, but also for the woman who had intended to live and die as the individual Agrippina du Stahl.
At the mercy of her children’s growth and the occasional debacles they caused—whomever did they take after, she wondered—Agrippina had lost track of time. But time was steadfast; its unwavering flow left no mortal behind, no matter how full of life they seemed to be.
By eighty, the hand that had carried his son was wrapped around a walking cane.
At eighty-five, he could no longer mount a horse.
Counting to ninety, he lost his teeth and bemoaned all that he could not eat.
Reaching ninety-five, the time he spent upright drastically declined, until he spent most of his day bedridden at one hundred.
And in the winter of his 106th year, their farewell came.
Apologizing for failing to see his children come of age and entrusting her with a letter for their second daughter, conspicuously absent from his deathbed, the count ended his long service to his wife with the words, “It’s finally over...”
Yet even as she watched the coffin sink into earth, nothing had changed for Agrippina...or so she would have liked to claim. But she caught herself calling his name when a chore came up, ordering new nightgowns that nobody would ever see, and sitting in his office, wondering if he might return in spite of knowing full well that he wouldn’t.
Faced with her irrational behavior, she explained it to herself: this was all because her convenient scapegoat had vanished all on his own.
Immediately, Agrippina was engulfed in fury. Who had said he was free to die? Who had given him permission to abandon his post as her husband to rest peacefully upon the laps of the gods?
The overflowing anger had become a force pushing her forward, fueling her research until finally they reached the present day.
Glancing up at her husband, dutifully serving as her pillow as he’d done in life, the methuselah chuckled to herself. This wasn’t the love of which the poets sang; it was merely the product of a self-serving desire.
[Tips] Artificial wraithification is the brainchild of Countess Agrippina du Stahl, developed in tandem with several College professors, most notable among them Professor Magdalena von Leizniz.
The process can resurrect a deceased individual in the form of a wraith, but has many restrictions: the target must have immense magical power, the catalyst must be deeply intertwined with the target’s soul, the target’s body must be well-preserved, etc. With a list of prerequisites dozens of entries long, a second instance of the ritual has yet to be confirmed; as for the committee responsible for the only documented success, it has since dissolved, citing the revival of Count Erich du Stahl as a completion of the project’s goals.
The oddities of your own family are hard to spot until you grow up.
“Oh, you’re here?”
At least, that was the feeling that sank in upon seeing my mother for the first time in a long while. It was hard to imagine she was talking to her own son with a greeting this brusque, but I was used to it. My old man loved getting himself involved with my life—to the point of meddling, at times—but my mother had hardly ever bothered. That said, it wasn’t like I was the odd one out: she treated my sisters in the exact same way.
“Your reception is as terse as ever, mother.”
Contrasted against her aloof demeanor, I felt like I was in the running for the picture of filial piety. I spent all my time putting out fires she should’ve been handling to cover for my dad, who was constantly saddled under a mountain of work. My main duty was cleaning up after my sisters—the youngest’s botched marriage talks I’d smoothed out the other day had been a true catastrophe—if and when they caused trouble; frankly, anyone else in my position would’ve married off or run away.
In fact, I’d just come back from a tea party with some folks who wanted to make friends with my dad. Could you believe it? I wasn’t even an adult yet!
Exhausted, I’d dragged myself to our tearoom to blow off steam in the short break I had before my next social event, only to run into my mother and receive the most affectionate of greetings. It sure must be easy when you can push all your responsibilities aside and go sit in a library for months on end.
More importantly, had she seriously forgotten? I hadn’t taken time out of my busy schedule—for our family’s interests, mind you—to come home without reason. Seriously, she should be thankful that I hadn’t abandoned my post and run off.
Letting my noble mask slip, I scratched at my head in frustration; my mother then casually got up from the couch she was laying on and came over. She drew closer and closer, and even though she was my own mother, my heart skipped a beat when she leaned right into my neck.
“Wh-What are—”
“How gallant you must be to have perfume clinging to you while the sun still hangs high.”
My heart skipped again, but for a completely different reason. No—no, no, no. That’s not it. I just, you know, figured that talks would go smoother if I was close to the lord’s daughter. And, uh...
“Goodness. Why have you turned out to be such a philanderer?”
“I-It’s not like I’m the one going after them.”
“But you are the one inviting the chase, aren’t you?” With a mocking scoff, my mother returned to the couch and started filing through the letters on the table; while her eyes were fixed on paper, though, I could feel her attention remain on me. “Refrain from playing with mensch, will you?”
“Wha— How can you tell?”
“Any girl covered in a layer of fragrance so desperate is all but sure to be mensch.”
That she’d seen through me to this degree sent a chill down my spine. How did everyone else get along with their mothers? Just the thought that I’d been pried from this monster’s legs made the monster between my own shrivel up in fear.
“...Then why are you wed to father?” I spat, trying to reclaim some semblance of pride.
“I’m a different matter,” she said through another derisive chuckle. “When all is said and done, I took care of him until his final breath.”
I wondered how dad would react if I told him she’d said that. My best guess is he’d make the same face as when he’d bitten into that spoiled strawberry.
“Mensch are sentimental—much more so than we can ever be. Their every moment is more densely packed.”
Neither the letters nor her lecture showed any signs of slowing down. Deeply stained by academe, her words felt like a rationalization of a belief originating somewhere deeper.
Mensch were frail, their whole lives passing by in fractions of our own. Those born in the same year as me had grown up, retired, and been laid to rest; to me, they seemed to be rushing through life. Perhaps that was why we could replicate their thinking, but never their feelings.
Mortal emotion was a passionate thing. Their intensity was so great that I could only wonder how they gave so much of themselves to a single day, hour, or passing moment.
“They are creatures susceptible to devotion. Should they take a liking to you, they will offer up the rest of their fleeting lives without hesitation. Do you have what it takes to accept their zeal?”
My only response was a quiet grumble. She was right: I’d been sworn such love before. For your sake; for your smile; anything for you—how many times had I heard these words accompanied by presents or favors, spoken by those I called acquaintances, friends, or even lovers?
Among them, I was sure that some would have been willing to hand me their beating heart in no metaphorical sense had I only willed it; to push away their next of kin to hold my hand in their final moments had been proof enough to show their depths of love.
“If you don’t, then shoo them away. It isn’t as if you’re going to inherit the house, are you?”
“Well...no.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I know your father has high expectations for you, but nobody in Rhine will say a word about your sister taking on the title instead. And it isn’t as though there’s anybody else who might complain, with how tiny our family is.”
She briskly worked through the stack of papers, jotting down notes for those she’d need to reply to—a habit she must’ve picked up from dad, since she obviously didn’t need help with her recollection—but I was stuck standing awkwardly without anything left to say.
The title of Count Stahl came with its own localized field of supergravitational pull—such was the weight of the burden. As “tiny” as my mother made it out to be, our household held power wildly disproportionate to its size. Though the whole of our bloodline was contained between us six and our territory was middling at best, we were just as influential as, if not even stronger in some places than, the electorate houses.
Our ties to the throne ran deep: for a long stretch, Count Stahl had been upheld as the crown’s most trusted vassal. Furthermore, our sprawling social network was packed with powerful allies. The only thing holding us back was that my sisters, despite all being of age, had failed to solidify even a single marital alliance between the three of them.
In more tangible terms, the clans in the Empire capable of matching our fortune could be counted on my fingers, and our military capacity was absurdly high. Not only did I keep a personal entourage of generals, but my old man had once taken the time to tour around and personally train our citizenry—lunacy, according to the other lords—to bolster the combat readiness of our lowest foot soldiers.
Besides, why would we worry when all of these forces combined couldn’t even come close to my oldest sister? After all, merely hinting that the Ashsower might appear in battle was usually enough to drain the color from our enemies’ faces. Standing armies aside, our resident polemurge was more than enough to solidify us as a force to be reckoned with.
Putting the walking weapon of mass destruction aside, we were also related to the powerful Forets barony of Seine; the connection magnified our political standing to absurd levels.
Anyone who wanted to inherit the title would need a heart of pure steel.
On that note, my oldest sister was a good fit, making her the default front-runner for the position. Physically, she looked like someone had handpicked all the best features from each of our parents; magically, she was an unkillable monster permanently encased in impenetrable barriers. Her talent for polemurgy was so remarkable that she’d developed a large-scale, battlefield-wiping spell that got our old man to babble something about “tiltowaits” in awe; we’d never have to worry about her being assassinated.
Moreover, her mentality was stronger than the stiffest arcane alloys. Despite earning many, many epithets that were rather rude descriptions for an unwed maiden, she had the fortitude to shrug off the whispering voices. Personally, I thought she would make the best count out of all of us.
Unfortunately, she either didn’t know or didn’t care about the expectations on her shoulders, and spent the whole of her time drowning in her hobbies.
Gods, she was the oldest, so would it have killed her to show a little responsibility? I was sick of hearing her fairy-tale dreams about how one day a Prince Charming would come for her. I wished she’d find a decent man and take the house already—I wished she’d let our old man be free.
“But you know,” my mother said, “the title is actually quite useful if you wish to collect your favorite mortals for yourself. Whether you choose to marry them, lock them away, or employ them as your servants, it is all too easy for a count to do.”
“...I would never go that far.”
They might vanish in the blink of an eye, but bearing witness to every passing second of a mortal’s life didn’t speak to me. If they, as part of their own journey, came to call me a friend, that was wonderful; if they loved me enough to keep me close until the very end, then I could ask for nothing more. But to cage them up like mom had done to dad? I just didn’t have the heart to see a whole life spent that way.
Let me be perfectly frank. I loved mortals. Their emotions were more dazzling than fireworks, hot enough to melt away the rust ever encroaching on my own.
Yet my love was not that of a gardener gently raising a greenhouse rose. The vivacity that had stolen my heart was that of a summer blossom, blooming proudly in the face of the callous march of time.
I knew that this was immortal arrogance at its finest. They had their own struggles, and the very emotions that I found so mesmerizing were the source of much of their grief; I’d at least learned that much in the time I’d spent with them.
And so too had I learned that we would never truly feel the same.
They were beautiful because they were beyond my comprehension; they were lovable because they were beyond my knowing; they gleamed in maddening radiance because they were beyond my grasp.
How? How had mother convinced herself to fence my old man away? Let loose, he would no doubt have lived such a wonderful life. Even as his son, the precious moments I’d spent on his lap reading stories seemed a hideous waste of his potential.
By the time my mind had formed, my dad had already been walking with a cane; yet even then, he had lived in such a fun and delightful way. He’d taught me more than any tutor, and his bedtime stories had been better than any nanny’s.
But every time, I couldn’t help but wonder: If he’s this exciting now, what kind of amazing person would he be if he’d been free to do whatever he wanted?
So why? Why had she squandered his life as a boring old husband, only to do so again as a wraith? It was like she’d held the script to the drama to end all dramas in hand, but had burned it away before the actors could put on a show.
“Oh! You’re home already?”
While I was busy brooding over a feeling too confusing to boil down to one emotion, someone had come into the room without so much as opening the door. I didn’t need to turn around, of course; the source of this subdued voice and quiet presence had phased through the wall out of laziness.
“Welcome home. Did you have fun at the tea party?”
“Yes, I did. And welcome home to you too, father.”
My old man flashed me a gentle smile—one much younger than any I’d seen in my childhood. Though now translucent, this had been his body in days long since passed; what kind of person had he been then? What sort of feelings had he borne, and how had he carried himself at mother’s side?
I hid my curiosity behind the polite grin he’d passed down to me and capped off my greeting with a light bow.
“My, what brings you home as well?” mother asked.
“Don’t tell me you forgot.”
“Was...there something I should have remembered? Well, in any case, here—switch with me.”
After a stunningly heartless statement, she got up and pushed the stack of envelopes into my old man’s hands and pulled him over to the couch. Sitting him down, she joined him and immediately reclined onto his lap; the will to do any work at all simply did not exist inside her. My highborn friends often complained that their parents continued to meddle after giving up their official position, but there wasn’t a chance our mother would ever bother.
But, to be fair, my dad was just as much at fault for slavishly accepting his place. He always had the option of erasing his physical form so she’d fall straight through him. Sighing wouldn’t do him any good if he just put up with her selfishness; that was why she was so spoiled in the first place.
“Wow, we sure have gotten a lot of invitations... Wait! Don’t just reject everything when I’m not around. Look at this: we have to attend this one from Viscount Werdian. We’re in the middle of talks over trade route maintenance, remember?”
“Oh, can’t we not? He’s just marrying off his second daughter. A celebratory letter is more than enough for those nobodies.”
“You can’t go around calling them ‘nobodies’ when they’ve just secured a marriage with an imperial branch family. And this is his favorite daughter—look at how obvious it is that he wants to show off her big day. In fact, it sounds like he wants us to bring our kids along too, which is convenient enough.”
“But it’s so apparent that he wants to take in one of ours. Does he think we aren’t aware he lost all his money in that plumbing fiasco?”
The tension hanging in the room instantly vanished as my mother let her laziness take hold; I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Ever since dad had come back, I felt like her degeneration had only been accelerating. It was as if she was trying to scrounge up the decades of lethargy she’d lost while he’d been gone.
Back when he’d been sleeping easy in the underworld, our mother wouldn’t have wasted a single moment seizing hold of us, dressing us up, and dragging us around with a dainty smile. I swore she hadn’t been the type to let her interests preoccupy her to the degree that she’d let a juicy political opportunity like this one slip. Hell, even when dad had been alive, she’d done a fine job when he could no longer walk.
My old man’s presence only served to worsen her disgrace. If he’d stopped coddling her and forced her to act like her rank, maybe he could’ve actually done whatever it was he’d wanted to. Honestly, they were such a puzzling match that it was hard to believe both their blood ran through my veins.
After fixing all the sloppy paperwork and grumbling the whole while, he sighed and reached into a pocket of space. At the same time, I noticed three unhidden waves of mana shake up the hallway just outside. I would know these mystic signatures anywhere: it had to be my sisters. Wildly talented yet deeply flawed, they were prone to brushing off our mother’s summons; however, not even they could ignore one from our father.
“What is this?”
My mother squinted apprehensively at the small box dad handed her, but I knew the truth. Too embarrassed to accept an earnest celebration, she’d tweaked her brain to always forget the occasion. She couldn’t hide that from me; I’d been her son for nearly a century.
That being said, it seemed like Father Dearest hadn’t caught on after over a century of being her husband. That seemed a little dense, even if he’d been mortal at one point.
“Happy anniversary, mother! Let’s go eat something yummy! Oh, and father, can I please open the 544-year Seinian red for the occasion?”
“I wonder if this is really a day to celebrate when it’s the reason we were born...”
“Congratulations, Mother Dearest. And my deepest condolences to you, Father Dearest. I take it you haven’t brought any troublesome marital talks with you this time?”
Not a single one of them bothered with a proper greeting—frankly, I could see any other parents losing their minds over this level of impudence—but their filing through the doorway finally got mother to catch on. She held up the box without much interest and dubiously said, “Ahh, I see.”
Eating dinner together on the night of their wedding anniversary was apparently a practice my dad had come up with as an act of petty vengeance. Not that he’d told me or anything; I’d just gleaned as much from the journal entries he’d written around that time. Speaking of which...he didn’t know I read through his diary after he’d passed, did he?
“Well, that’s how it is,” he said. “Congratulations, and here’s to another year.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you very much.”
As casual as her thanks were, mother unwrapped the box with unparalleled care. Opening it, she took out the contents and raised it up to the light: it was a new hairpin. At the end of its wooden shaft were a handful of chains, each beaded with bloodred gems that glistened like candy drops. Traces of dad’s mana wafted off, proving its handmade quality; enchanted with powerful protective magic, he’d selected for materials valuable enough to uphold its recipient’s status.
Now I knew why he’d vanished on our way home from the capital the other day to go handle a “quick errand”; he must’ve been busy preparing this gift. Even as his son, it was hard to get a read on the guy.
But boy, I wished he’d let us go first.
“This is going to be such a chore to maintain...”
Because despite mother’s detached response, she merrily tucked the pin into her hair. How was I supposed to follow that?
[Tips] Celebrations for wedding anniversaries used to be very uncommon, but as references to Stahlian love grow, so too do Stahlian customs. In recent years, some nobles have begun to imitate the namesake couple as a show of romantic flair.
With supper shifting into full swing, I looked around a table a touch too small for a household of nobles. Yet they were all merry, and a sudden thought came to me: My family sure is full of weirdos.
Of my sisters, the oldest really was the perfect mix between our parents—on the outside. The gentle waves of her golden hair paired perfectly with the deep blue of her eyes. On top of that, she was tall and slender, her chest was huge, and her face was the epitome of a tender maiden; but the cover did not tell the whole story.
Famed as a direct disciple of Dean Leizniz of the largest Daybreak cadre in the College, she had earned so much notoriety as a polemurge that her moniker, the Ashsower, preceded her abroad.
The heavens may have bestowed her with many a gift, but they had taken all her common sense in return. Even with all my brotherly love, I couldn’t deny the allegations that she was a fucking loon.
Aristocratic class was a foreign concept to her: she spent most of the year wandering other countries in the name of paleontology. I didn’t know what had set off this obsession of hers, but last time, she’d come back from the Southern Sea saying she’d dug up the fossil of a prehistoric dragon. If that wasn’t easygoing enough, she’d brought home a whole mountain’s worth of rocks and clogged up our entire storehouse.
Worst of all, her canned response whenever anyone brought up the idea of marriage was, “Aww, but I’m waiting for my Prince Charming. I want someone stronger than me to sweep me off my feet!” Sorry to say, but I’d yet to come across a living person who fit that description. Please, I’m begging you. Just come back to reality and settle for a normal guy.
On the same note, the requirements that her husband had to be as skilled and lenient as our old man needed to go; our dad was a statistical anomaly in both metrics. Dreaming that she might stumble into the same ludicrous luck as mother was pure fantasy.
Alas, our dad still fawned on her like she was a little girl in spite of the fact that she was closing in on the age our mother had married at. The two of them looked to be having fun tonight, but I couldn’t help but wonder if my sister understood the tremendous burden he carried out of sight.
Next in line, my middle sister was problematic in entirely different ways. In fact, she was such a cloistered shut-in that I’d hardly spoken to her in the past few years.
Setting aside how everyone I knew said her face was just a feminine copy of our dad’s—mainly because now that he’d regained his youthful visage, I could hardly see any difference at all—her appearance was most notable for the recessive black hair she’d gotten from our mother’s end. More notable than that, however, was that she was a professor of Polar Night, and that she led a small cadre of like-minded weirdos as their dean.
Having received honors directly from the Emperor for her achievements, she’d become known as the Inky Magekiller. Although she’d begun carrying herself with more dignity since earning the epithet, at home she was the runt of the litter, sheepishly sitting as far away from dad as she could while glancing up at him every few seconds.
If there was anything she’d inherited from our mother, it was her decadent level of indolence and her penchant for cajoling lower-born sons into entering her orbit. But for all her outward decorum, I knew the real her: not only had she spent decades regretting how she hadn’t come to dad’s deathbed because of a long-standing fight, but she hadn’t gotten in a single real conversation with him since he came back.
Though, if I was being fair, our old man definitely shared some of the blame. No matter how well written they were, compiling all of the poems she’d stashed away and sending the finished anthology to her crossed the line. Look, I loved my dad, but even I would’ve snapped had he done that to me. I wasn’t going to defend him just because he hadn’t published it: few in number as they were, he’d shown others her work. The understanding that he’d done so out of fatherly pride did not alleviate the issue.
That still didn’t warrant my sister’s final response, of course, but we were all back together now. Carrying this awkwardness for years and years was absurd; if she worked up the courage to say sorry, I knew our dad would smile, forgive her, and apologize himself.
With the first and second children of our household being so troubled, you might expect the third to seem better by comparison. Unfortunately, she came with her own set of loose screws.
The youngest of my older sisters was the very same person who’d thrown me a heaping pile of issues to solve after bungling her marriage negotiations. She, too, was a magus. Like the others, she was a verifiable genius who’d already been inducted into the professoriat; however, her quirks had taken a very unique spin.
You see, my third sister was a First Light scholar, loyal to the Sponheim cadre. That’s right: she was the final apprentice of our dad’s oldest friend, of the target of many unsubstantiated rumors, of Professor Mika von Sponheim. Now, I didn’t know what kind of bizarre fermentation process a mind had to go through to reach this point, but her final takeaway as their pupil had been to boldly and openly declare that our old man should’ve married von Sponheim instead.
I understood the reverence for von Sponheim: I’d loved them too. Just like my old man, they’d been a kind old grandma, grandpa, or sometimes grandperson by the time my wits had come about me, and they’d been a truly upstanding character. Being a tivisco, we’d said our farewells many years ago; I still vividly remembered how hard I’d sobbed then.
Even so, I couldn’t condone how my sister picked a fight with dad for not choosing—for not being able to choose, as far as I was concerned—von Sponheim every time she got drunk. That, and how she cried over their not staying with us as a wraith. On the latter point, I couldn’t see why she’d ever say that. Wraiths were only ever born from powerful anguish over work not yet accomplished; how could she believe that was possible when von Sponheim had looked like they were falling into a peaceful midday nap in their final moments?
This dogged fealty to von Sponheim had earned my sister the delicately worded nickname Frozen Gold. Architects—and especially oikodomurges—were constantly in demand amongst the gentry; she should’ve had her pick of potential suitors if not for her fixations.
Uh... Now that I think about it, my sisters are horrible, aren’t they?
Compared to them, I was a perfectly normal guy. Though I’d been inducted into the College, I still wasn’t of age and sat at the rank of researcher as a result. In the meantime, I did my part to serve the Empire as a loyal bureaucrat. I’d signed up with the Leizniz cadre of Daybreak, taking after mother; despite being indebted to the dean for two generations in a row, I managed to get along with everyone just fine.
From what I could gather, my sisters had left all the diligence our father had tried to pass on in the womb; clearly, I’d been the one to pick it up. That must’ve been why I was stuck cleaning up after their bohemian lifestyles. Our old man had done the same for our mom, so this was a clear case of genetics.
As the rest of my family mystically lowered their tolerance to get tipsy off wine, I alone watched them, dead sober. But as I surveyed the table, I happened to lock eyes with my father.
So I asked him.
“Father, did your marriage make you happy?”
Yet the only response that I got was the same kind, ambiguous smile as always.
[Tips] House Stahl’s only son has made a name for himself off his resemblance to his father, though most would agree he sports an air of cuter innocence. However, he is perhaps better known for his talent and ruthlessness in the political sphere, where the Second Wolf is spoken of only in hushed whispers. His great number of loyal adherents and casual ability to stack every card in his favor have led some to believe he is the most difficult to deal with amongst his family.
Once upon a time, I had been terrified of the undying.
After all, the only immortals I’d known had possessed very intense personalities. The first one I’d ever met had been a methuselah personifying the very idea of sloth; the next had been a wraith who continued to enjoy her perverse pastimes to this day; after that had come an undead warrior trying to pass on his favorite blade; and then I’d run into a vampire, centuries old. Each and every one had been a colossus in their own right, fit to crown a campaign as its final boss.
Gripped by fear, I could have never imagined this fate as I was then.
“Hey.”
“Mm?”
In a world only populated by the turning of paper or occasional scribble, a splash of color rang out: the familiar voice soaked into my ears. Looking over, I was met with my nuisance of an other half.
No matter how many times I cast eyes upon her, I could never get used to the perfect form of her beauty. It had been over a century since we’d first met, but the figure she hid under only a single nightgown had not dulled in the slightest. The soft light of mystic lamps shimmered off silver strands of hair in the most enchanting of ways; deep blue and light jade listlessly squinted my way, threatening to enthrall me with just one look.
Sat facing me with her back resting on the other end of the couch, Countess Agrippina du Stahl let out a yawn and asked, “What day is it?”
I thought about it, but the answer did not come readily.
“Oh... What day is it?”
Engrossed in my reading, I’d lost track of time. More to the point, I couldn’t remember how long we’d been camped up here in one of the College library’s private rooms. The room was furnished only with an unembellished desk, a small sofa to rest on, and the massive piles of books we’d brought in—such was the way of things in the library’s lowest floors. Despite being colloquially referred to as the forbidden vault, the censored sea of content it offered was free to swim in so long as one had reasonable justification; we waded in head-high.
It had all begun at the end of the social season. Not even this bothersome wife of mine could get through a whole winter of fraternizing without growing tired, and she’d moaned that she wanted to fill her mind with “only the enjoyable things in life” for a time.
Obviously, what she found most enjoyable of all was to coop up and read. To that end, she’d built a massive library in our own manor—not that she’d been involved in its design or construction—and usually crawled into that whenever she felt weary.
I’d thought that, as per usual, she was going to do so again and leave the trifling matters of daily life to me. Yet the possibility of abdication—Her Majesty had cried about potentially running away again—had made this past winter particularly exhausting with how involved we were in the matter. Not content with her usual indulgences, she dragged me here with our son and daughters in tow.
Why bring the children, you ask? Well, we needed permission to enter the forbidden vault, to use the keys for its locked sections, to hole up for an extended period of time, and to get away with jotting down light notes that we could take home with us. Cutting a deal with Lady Leizniz to trade one child per clause had been, in my wife’s words, an easy sell.
Around now, they were probably being lavishly pampered with the most excessive clothes money could buy. In particular, I was most concerned about my son: the dean had taken a keen liking to him, and I was worried she might spoil him in a way that would see the Leizniz name added to his official records.
Man, that would be a disaster. What kind of terrible karma would he have to be born with to have a wraith parent and a wraith bride? I started feeling pity for the boy; if he began cursing me over his baby face and small stature, I wouldn’t know what to say.
“It seems as if we’ve been here for some time, but also as if it’s hardly been a minute.”
“I feel that.”
I so felt that. This was a quale that I simply could not have understood as a mensch. Eternal life warped the senses: concentration wound the clock faster and faster, and the outside world never stopped to wait. Capable of literally forgoing food and sleep, the concept of time was reduced to a mere frivolity for the immortal.
The occasions on which we paid it any mind were scarce: either when a schedule was rigidly set in place, or when watching over a mortal who might vanish as soon as we looked away. In that sense, I understood now that Agrippina had been rather delicate with me when I had been a mensch.
“How many have you read?”
“Uh... Thirty-two.”
“I’ve read sixty-two.”
She’d managed to gain a huge lead on me, but that was only because she’d chosen tales and historical annals banned for social or religious reasons. Meanwhile, I’d been working through thaumaturgic treatises that required more time to decipher. I’d once gotten bored enough with my infinite time to develop a spell that decoded a text and instantaneously transmitted the information contained within to my brain, but it had been so dreary that I hadn’t used it since. Instead, I relied on skills like Speed Reading and Quick Context to get through books at a solid pace.
That said, our stacks of finished tomes weren’t a useful measure of how much time had passed. Both of us were the types to read a good page over and over again, leaving us without a benchmark for how long it took to get from cover to cover.
Besides, I was a wraith and she was a methuselah. We didn’t have any regular interruptions of food, water, and the digestive needs they introduced to count. As convenient as it was to reduce consumption to an aesthetic choice, it was just as detrimental in different vectors. I could see why solitary confinement was the highest punishment in all the lands.
“What have you read?” she asked.
“Hrm... There was one from three hundred years ago that caught my interest. It theorizes a possible exploitation of the heat-dispersing side effects that come with transferring extradimensional matter to the physical world. I can only imagine it got thrown down here because of the scribbled note at the end speculating that the world itself could potentially end if someone managed to bring an object with negative heat from an alternate plane.”
“I recall reading that in my youth. It was rather enjoyable.”
“I bet you thought to yourself, ‘I could pull that off.’”
“But of course.”
Although she giggled like a mischievous child, that meant she was capable of pulling off the worst case of terrorism ever at any given moment.
Though, honestly, I wasn’t one to talk: I’d gotten to the same level in the past century or so. At this point, I could show up in someone else’s long-form campaign as a true archenemy—let it be known that if I ever got the chance to face a party of adventurers as their final challenge, I would do everything in my power to live up to the role.
Trying to discern how much time had passed was a fruitless endeavor, and we had yet to be scolded; we got back to it like the depraved bookworms we were. We’d picked out a lot of books before setting up camp, and our pile of unread tomes was still brimming with options.
Returning to a world populated only by myself and pages of words, time ticked on. Minutes or eons passed, when I suddenly felt a tickling on my legs.
I glanced over to see the missus wriggling her toes. Her fingers unconsciously did the same, sliding across a cover with a rather salacious title. The work was probably a sensuous love story, sent to the library’s depths for its outrageous depictions of romance.
Multiculturalism in the Trialist Empire meant the national value set remained in a minor state of flux; at times, erotica was published freely, and at others, our moral standards were markedly more stoic. This one seemed like a tale that had been outlawed under puritan oversight, left here simply because relabelling it was too much work.
Agrippina had a habit of wiggling her fingers and toes when absorbed in a book, but I’d only noticed after I’d given up, so to speak. That I’d failed to take note of her finer mannerisms back when she was the sort to fling off her clothes and loiter around naked made me think she only let them slip when she was truly relaxed—like, say, while reading.
Huh. Do I have habits like that?
I turned the page. If I did have some kind of quirk of manner, then it was probably something I could never catch onto myself. Just as I knew hers, she probably knew mine...and much to my perplexity, that thought didn’t bother me in the slightest.
[Tips] The College’s forbidden vault of books contains works of writing censored for both technical and moral reasons.
Rhetorical devices expertly danced around literal depiction, outlining the ravenous connection between man and woman. The mind nibbled at prose, carefully savoring the flavor before eventually letting out a satisfied sigh—truly, time well spent. Where lesser work would have failed to draw out so much as the basest sense of eroticism, the technical skill upon which it was formed struck Agrippina with a sense of admiration. Letting out a deep breath, she made a mental note to petition the crown for a reclassification: she wished to have a full copy transcribed.
Finished with her book, she looked up at her better half. His brow was furrowed, and he was so deeply immersed in his reading that he failed to notice the movements of their interlocked legs as she leaned over to set her book aside. She’d seen him like this many times since his return, but his old habit of rolling his neck to loosen up nonexistent muscles never ceased to amuse her.
All those years ago, when she had first plucked his soul from its tranquil slumber at the bottom of the underworld, her first observation had been one of grievance: he’d adapted too swiftly.
Agrippina had heard that mortals-turned-immortals tended to carry old habits around with them. There were tales of vampires eating three meals a day and tucking in at night, or wraiths who pondered how to best bathe for the sake of eliminating their hypothetical body odor. She’d found these anecdotes terribly funny; those born everlasting couldn’t quite understand their hurried peers, but those born with limited time never truly caught up to the vastness of eternity.
However, the husband she’d spent a lifetime with had been unnaturally quick to readjust.
Any loss of focus could cause him to slip through objects, but he mastered his ethereality within the day and nonchalantly commented, “It’s nice not having to open doors.” On the topic of food and drink, he had always been the type to be absorbed in his work, and he took the change as a great blessing.
Yet of all the things he could have kept with him, the eccentric fellow’s unbreakable habit was to soothe a crick in his neck. It was so ridiculous that Agrippina had once told him that surely there was something closer to the heart after a century as a mensch. The experimental report she’d secretly been compiling had gone to waste; the results didn’t mean anything with such an odd primary source.
And here she’d gone out of her way to prepare for the worst-case scenario: the possibility that the gap between his death and resurrection could have caused him to run wild in a fit of insanity.
Well, in any case, she was fine with how things had gone. Her backup plan to capture and assuage him had taken a tremendous amount of work to set up, but it wasn’t that she wanted to test it; she’d only thought it up as a failsafe.
Ah, but wait—had she managed to soothe his tempestuous soul, she would surely have held the edge in their relationship forevermore. After years and years of training her brain to fantasize about what-ifs at the end of a story, Agrippina had at last begun to apply the thought process to her own life.
“Not bad...”
“Hm?”
A wayward comment slipped out from the bog of her imagination, and Erich looked up from his intricate arcane essay.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I simply thought the book I finished wasn’t too bad.”
“Wow, rare to see you voice your opinion like that. Let me see it later.”
“Mm. Then I’ll put it somewhere easy to find.”
Coolly covering up her mishap, Agrippina evaded any further prodding.
The hypothetical was an interesting thought experiment. After all, she still remembered the intensity of Erich’s rage when she’d first propped him up as a noble. His eyes had burned with enmity like that of an orphan staring down their parents’ killer.
The moment his glare burned brightest had come on the day of their wedding. Dressed up in lavish regalia of her own choice, he’d looked like the prince of a timeworn saga. Yet while his outward appearance was dashing enough to make Lady Leizniz nearly fade out of reality, the undiluted malice in his gaze was scorched into Agrippina’s recollection.
So much had happened over the course of their long history; the memories lived on in her unforgetting mind with striking detail, perfectly immortalizing those fierce eyes. But look at him now: his kitten-blue eyes had brightened to an icier hue, and the pupils within were fixed carelessly on a book.
Here they were, slovenly laying on a couch with their legs intertwined. Even the old knife he’d perennially carried in life—which, as she recalled, had gone to their eldest daughter after a massive fight between the children—was nowhere to be found.
If she struck now, she could kill him; it would still be a struggle, and there was great risk he’d bring her down as well, but his guard was low enough to die.
But that went both ways.
Agrippina had removed all the accessories she wore to boost her mana and bolster her spells. The only ornament on her person was a dragonscale barrette her husband had gotten for her—how in the world had he managed to find the scales when he was nearly sixty, she still wondered—to celebrate their forty-third anniversary.
If Erich struck now, when she was fully relaxed, the best she could hope to do was take him down with her.
“Yes, this is much better.”
Mumbling to herself in an inaudible tone, Agrippina reached for her next book with an Unseen Hand. The fantasy had been entertaining, but the best it could ever be was “not bad.” Given the choice between that and what she had now, she would choose this life every time.
The obnoxious stream of suitors trying to take his place was gone; her talented husband once again handled all the tedious paperwork; and, aside from the occasional complaint of mass destruction, her children had become much easier to handle.
Peace was easier to come by now. Research was fun in its own right, but nothing could beat the joy of cozying up with a book in hand.
So I’m sure that this is how it was meant to be.
Cracking open a new cover with a smile, she quietly strengthened the barrier enveloping the room. As far as she was concerned, every extra moment they went undisturbed was one well spent.
And so, despite the numerous attempts made to interrupt them, the couple went on to read until just before the following social season. They say that when the husband saw the mountain of work that awaited him, his ghastly face went paler than death itself.
[Tips] Nobles wield power in direct proportion to their responsibilities.
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