Age Is Just a Number
"Oh!~ The clock!~" one of the liches crooned, her smile stretching too wide on her face.
"For that particular spin," the second lich said, eyes glittering, "we'll ask you to trade… twenty years of your life!"
Lucretia almost laughed.
She only didn't because she knew, objectively, that this was a terrible sacrifice.
The collection of the relics was supposed to be quick. She had promised Magnus as much, she'd promised all of them. This would only be for a little while.
Reality had never cared much for promises.
The collection wasn't going quickly. Lucretia now had no idea how long the mission would actually take. Five years, ten, twenty, thirty—
She didn't want to think beyond that.
But it might take a long, long time.
This world, and all the worlds beyond it, were depending on her, alone. She needed all the strength, all the agility, all the vitality, all the life, that she had.
But she needed the Bell, so she took the trade.
The moment Lucretia accepted the deal, she felt it. A half-dozen new little aches and pains. An extra exhaustion in her bones. A weighty weariness in her mind.
But she didn't actually get to see the changes until days and days and days later. When she managed by leaving a man to suffer in her stead, when she'd trekked through the Felicity Wilds, alone and half dead, only to finally, finally, reach home.
In the bathroom closest to her cabin on the empty Starblaster, there was an unfamiliar reflection staring back at her. Pure white hair, wrinkles lining her face, heavy bags beneath her eyes.
Lucretia did not laugh, but she smiled.
Not really so unfamiliar, truth to be told.
One hundred and twenty-eight.
That's how old she was.
For a century, she had lived as a perpetual twenty-three-year-old. It had been easy to forget, that that wasn't how time really worked.
Even with the most subtle of magics and most advanced technologies her home world could have offered, if her human body had been allowed to age naturally— and had not simply been just a skeleton by this point—it would be lying in a bed. Breath laboured, weary and worn.
So. Physically, she was now forty-eight. Still only a fraction of her true age, but…
Lucretia liked her new body.
It felt a little less like a lie.