Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The number never left Albus. Forty years for each of his own. He had spent a week bent over the old book, searching every margin for a rite that took nothing. The ivy-wrapped cottage stayed quiet around him. His wife slept. His four winged children slept in the loft. He turned the leather pages by candlelight and looked for a door out of the bargain he had made. The book showed him the same wall again and again. The hourglass loop paired life with loss. Give and take. Take and give. Every symbol demanded a source, and every source paid. Albus pressed his thumb to the page where the rite bent once, into the bond that made her a woman. If it bent for love, he had thought, it could bend for mercy. He read that section a hundred times. Then he found the truth he did not want. The bond was not a loophole. It was the price made visible. The rite had chosen her as the source because she loved him enough to say yes. There was no third way in the book. No renewing life that lost nothing. The magic always drew from a living thing, and a living thing always faded faster for it. Albus set down his pen. His hand did not shake this time. He simply stopped. He had wanted a rite that cheated death without a bill. It did not exist. He closed the book and pushed it to the far edge of the desk. For a year he had chased a cure for the loss he caused. The chase was over. He could not undo the forty years. He could not buy them back. He went to the loft and looked at his children. They breathed slow, their small wings folded, bright even in the dark. They would live on through her blood. She would not. He had traded her years for his. No page in any book would reverse that. But a new thought arrived, plain and cold as the number had been. If he could not make her fade slower, he could make her remaining years count for everything. He had extended his own life. He would spend that life beside her, every day of it, until she faded. Then he would not seek immortality for himself. He would let the rite die with the burned page and go when she went. At dawn his wife found him at the desk with the book shut. She rested her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers were warm. "You stopped searching," she said. "There is nothing to find," Albus said. "I looked at every page." She did not weep. She pulled a chair beside him and sat. Outside, the cherry tree let its pink petals fall against the glass. Albus took her hand and did not let go. The book stayed closed between them, and for the first time he did not reach for it.