Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

Albus never reached the vault gate. He turned back that night with the ruined book under his arm and a new question in his head. The rite took a life for every year. But the book listed the dead beside the immortal. What if the death and the life were not two people, but one? He carried the book home and read it again, slower this time, marking the symbols that paired birth with ending. The answer sat in the margins he had skipped for years. The rite did not need a stranger. It needed a life that renewed itself. The sprite watched from the inkwell as he traced the loop of the hourglass symbol. Her kind did not age like men. They faded and returned, over and over, a single life worn thin and made new. She was both the death and the life the rite demanded. "It doesn't cost a stranger," he told her. His hands shook. "It costs one year of your fading, and it gives that year to me. You lose nothing you would not lose anyway. And I stop dying." She hovered close and pressed her small hand to his thumb. He did not force it. He explained the price twice, then a third time, until she nodded. That night he spoke the rite over a candle, and she gave the year freely. The blue symbols flared and sank into his chest. His breath steadied. He felt the years stop counting. But the rite did more than he asked. Sprite magic bends toward its own kind. When her fading passed into him, it bound them the way sprites bind to mates. She grew before his eyes, tall as a woman, her wings still bright, her feet bare on the floorboards. She spoke his name for the first time in a voice like wind through leaves. A year later they lived far from any road, in a cottage wrapped thick with ivy. A cherry tree stood by the door, pink and heavy each spring. Albus wrote at a small desk while four tiny winged children chased each other through the rafters. Their wings threw colored light across the walls. They were half his and half hers, and they did not age the way he once feared he would. He had found immortality without a stranger's grave. He had found it without watching her die. He set down his pen and watched his family fill the small bright room.