Elandra watches the stranger from her throne for the third night. He stands at the far edge of the hall, hands empty, mouth closed. The first night she dismissed him as lost. The second night she marked him as stubborn. Tonight she knows what he is — someone who keeps coming back because he senses he belongs here, even if he cannot say why. She rises and walks toward him, her steps echoing through the stone chamber. He does not flinch. The others in her court pull back slightly, recognizing the moment for what it is. She stops three paces from him, close enough to see the weathered tomb visible through the open archway behind him. It marks the place he has chosen each night, standing in its shadow like he is waiting to be buried or raised. She speaks one word. "Why?" He meets her eyes and says nothing, but his silence is different now. It is not empty. It is an answer she has been searching two thousand years to hear.

She does not answer right away. Instead, she leads him deeper into the hall, past the tomb he has chosen to stand beside these three nights, to a side chamber where the divination bowl rests on its pedestal. The onyx surface catches the torchlight. The silver water inside moves without wind, shimmering like something alive. She gestures for him to look into it. He leans forward, and whatever he sees in the rippling surface makes his breath catch. She watches his face, not the water. She already knows what it shows — the days he has left, numbered and finite. When he straightens, his expression has not changed. He knew before he came here. The bowl has only confirmed it. She speaks the question she has never asked a mortal this early. "How long?" He meets her eyes without flinching. "Six days. Maybe seven." The answer settles into her like a stone dropping into deep water. She has time to decide, but not much. Not enough to wait and watch him return again, not enough to test whether he understands what he is asking for. She could turn him tonight and never know if he was worthy, or she could wait and lose him entirely. The choice has always been hers to make. Now it has a deadline. She nods once, dismissing him, and he leaves without another word. Alone in the chamber, she stares into the bowl. The water shows her nothing new. It never does.

A wizard enters through the hall's main door without invitation or announcement. He walks with the confidence of someone who believes they own the answer to a question no one has asked aloud. His robes shimmer with starlight patterns that seem too perfect, too deliberate. Elandra does not move from her position near the divination chamber. She watches him approach, noting how he reaches into his pocket before she speaks. He produces a small marble that holds an entire galaxy within its glass — stars twinkling, nebulas swirling in vibrant colors that pulse with their own light. He extends it toward her with an open palm. "The price of the unmaking," he says. "I offer it freely. No cost to you, High Queen. No decades of waiting, no tests of worthiness. Just this — my knowledge, my power, given without condition." The marble catches the torchlight and throws miniature constellations across the stone floor. Elandra does not reach for it. She has learned that anything offered without price carries the heaviest cost of all. A wizard who claims to unmake part of themselves for nothing is either lying about the spell or lying about the sacrifice — and either way, she cannot build a child's future on that foundation. She meets his eyes and sees what she expected: eagerness, ambition, the particular hunger of someone who wants something from her more than they want to give something to her. "Leave," she says. The word is final. He blinks, confused, the marble still extended. "But I'm offering you everything you've searched for." She does not repeat herself. After a long moment, he lowers his hand and backs toward the door, the galaxy marble dimming in his grip. When he is gone, she returns to the main hall where the dying man still waits by the tomb. The wizard was a test she did not ask for, but one that clarified everything. This man has asked for nothing. He has only returned, three times, and stood in the place that matters. That is the only offer she can trust.

Elandra crosses the hall to where the dying man stands beside the tomb. She has made her choice. The wizard's false gift clarified what she already knew — this stranger, who has returned three times and asked for nothing, is the one she will trust. But trust is not enough. She leads him deeper into the hall, past the empty chambers where others she has turned once slept, to a room she has kept closed for centuries. Inside, a circle of blue fire burns on the stone floor without fuel or smoke. The flames cast dancing shadows across walls bare of ornament. In the center of the circle stands a black canopy bed draped in cobwebs that have grown undisturbed for longer than most kingdoms have existed. This is the place she prepared two thousand years ago for a child who never came. She has carried it forward through every century, through every disappointment, through every turned mortal who sensed her rage and kept their distance. She has preserved it because letting it go would mean admitting the hope was foolish. Now she must surrender it to bind him to forever. The man looks at the bed, then at her. He understands without words what she is offering — not just immortality, but the emptiness she has guarded against all reason. She removes the silver chain from around her neck. The vial of crimson blood inside catches the blue firelight. This pendant marked every turning she has performed, worn against her skin as reminder and burden both. She places it on the bed's pillow, the only object that will remain when the binding is complete. The rest — the bed, the room, the two-thousand-year refusal to accept what cannot be changed — she leaves behind. He steps into the circle. The blue flames rise higher, responding to his mortal heat, and she follows him across the threshold. When she bites into his throat, the blood tastes of salt and copper and the particular sharpness of a life nearly spent. She feels the bed behind them dissolve into shadow and dust, the cobwebs turning to smoke, the walls of the chamber crumbling to nothing. The pendant falls through empty air and lands on stone where furniture once stood. What she carried is gone. What she gains stands before her with new eyes, no longer dying, bound to her by the price she finally paid.