Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

A year in the cottage should have quieted Albus. It did not. He sat at his desk while his four winged children darted through the rafters, throwing colored light on the walls. His wife stood in the doorway, tall now, her bare feet on the worn boards. She had given a year of her fading for the rite. But he did not know how much of her that year had truly cost. A year of a fading sprite's life was not a year of a woman's. He had no way to measure it. He pulled out the old book and spread it flat. The symbols that paired birth with ending stared back. He traced the hourglass loop with an inky thumb. Somewhere in these margins the rite must count the cost. If he could read the counting, he could know how many years she had left. "Come sit," he told her. She crossed the room and folded her wings behind the chair. He held her wrist and pressed his thumb to the blue mark still faint under her skin. The symbol answered his touch. A number rose in his mind, cold and plain. She had not spent one year of her natural fading. She had spent forty. The rite took from her the way it once took from strangers, greedy and blind. Every year it gave him, it tore forty from the endless loop that made her. Albus let go of her wrist. His hands shook the way they had the night he spoke the rite. He had believed she lost nothing. He had believed wrong. She would fade sooner now, and the sprites do not return the same after they fade too fast. He had thought love spared her. It had only hidden the bill. She watched his face and understood before he spoke. "You are afraid," she said, her voice like wind through leaves. She did not ask for the number. "Forty," he said. "For each of my years. I did not know." Outside, the cherry tree dropped pink petals against the window. The children laughed above him, small and bright and immortal through her blood. They would live on. She would not, not the way he had promised himself. He closed the book. The counting was done, and it gave him no comfort. But it gave him a new question. The rite bent for its own kind once already, into a bond he never planned. If it could bend, it could bend further. There had to be a source that renewed without cost, a life that gave without losing. Albus lit a fresh candle and pulled a blank sheet toward him. He would not watch her fade for his sake. He set his pen to the paper and began again, hunting the version of the rite that took nothing at all.