The Grand Old Leprechaun had promised himself one last journey to the end of the rainbow, but this morning his legs would not carry him to the door. He gripped his walking stick and pushed. His knees folded. He sat back down on the low bench outside the mushroom-capped cottage and stared at the horizon, where a rainbow touched the far hills. His grandfather had died reaching for that place. Now the old leprechaun could not even cross his own garden. He was small, smaller each year, and the stick that once helped him now felt like a crutch he could not trust. He tried again. He planted the stick, leaned his weight, and rose halfway. The ground seemed to tilt. He caught the doorframe and held on, breathing hard. Ten steps to the gate. A hundred miles beyond it. He could not do the ten. His daughter found him there, clinging to the wood. Annie wore her green dress with the black belt, and she moved fast, the way she always did when something was broken. She took his elbow before he could wave her off. "You're going anyway," she said. It was not a question. She knew his plan. She had argued against it for weeks. "I have to," he said. "He never got there. I will." Annie looked at the walking stick, then at his shaking hands. She did not tell him to sit. Instead she knelt and studied the stick's worn tip, where the wood had gone smooth and slick. She pressed her thumb against it and frowned. "This is why you keep slipping," she said. "It can't hold you." She went inside. He heard her digging through drawers. When she came back, she carried a small spool wound with pale thread. He knew what it was, and his chest tightened. That thread was all she had left of her grandmother's tapestry. She had unraveled a century of work to get one spool, and there was no way to make more. "Not that," he said. "Not for me." "It holds a charm," Annie said. "Ordinary thread won't." She wrapped the lucky thread tight around the stick's tip, knotting it again and again until the wood gripped the ground like a hand. "There. Now stand." He planted the stick. He rose. His knees held. The tip bit the earth and did not slide. For the first time in months he stood tall without fear, and he took one step, then another, all the way to the gate. He turned back, grateful and afraid. Annie stood in the doorway with the empty spool. She had spent the last of her only treasure so he could walk. "Then don't waste it," she said. "Reach the end for both of us." The road opened before him, long and bright. He could walk now. But every step would spend a gift that could never be given again.