Gasps rang out when Agnes pulled up to the guild hall.

She grinned as she dismounted from a gleaming motorcycle that dwarfed her. The first hundred years of her blessing-turned-curse, she'd religiously cast an illusion over her body every morning to give the impression of age. The next hundred, she'd spent in disguises, pretending first to be her daughter, then her granddaughter. A thousand more she spent in travel, taking a different appearance for each town, lest she become a legend or a target. But finally, even that had grown tiresome. After multiple millennia of life, the only entertainment remaining to her was shock.

Hence the giant bike towering comically over her slight, forever-fifteen-year-old body.

"Ms. Littel." The guild members greeted her with amusement.

Agnes barely suppressed a sigh. In her era, fifteen had been properly of-age, nothing unusual when she took up her father's shield and great-grandmother's staff and set out to join her brothers in battle. Perhaps, in a moment of desperation on the field, she'd made a rash decision, when she'd begged the gods to spare her people and offered to pay any price. She'd become the protection she'd sought, an ageless, deathless being. For a while, her power seemed to come without cost.

Now, two thousand years on, she cursed her family name. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Agnes had been small for her age, and would forever remain so. Times had changed, but Agnes stood still. She'd learned long ago that forever was a long time to pay.

But Richard the Pulverizer was the one who surprised her at their second meeting, a quiet luncheon in the hills. The meal was simple: wine and cheese and bread. Their conversation was equally unremarkable. No, the only surprising thing about Richard was the timing of their first meeting.

Twenty years prior, and he hadn't aged a day. Hope unfurled in Agnes's chest.

It came as no surprise when they were chosen to investigate the disturbances: reports of hauntings and ghost sightings in Camellia Town, followed by a wave of wasting illness that swept through the town. "Immortality is a rare gift and a rarer curse. "You may have some insight," Guild Master Orrin explained.

"I'm nothing like a disembodied spirit!" Agnes protested.

"You are also durable," Orrin said pointedly, and Agnes could not argue with that. With Richard in tow, they set out that very night.

Richard had come by his eternal life honestly, as befitting a lifelong brawler. Richard was brave, kind, unwaveringly loyal, and extremely straightforward. He defended villages from terrifying monsters, and he loved children. Richard would never barter his soul in exchange for eternal power, however noble or worthy the cause.

("Cursed by the Arcane Alchemist," he'd grumbled in explanation. "Remember when I brawled with him, and we went tumbling into the potions? One of them was a synthetic Water of Life.")

In the twenty years since, he'd mostly stuck to his old habits, taken the same precautions that he always had. Agnes sympathized: it took a few centuries for finality of it to sink it. Now, he was eyeing the darkened roads with apprehension. "It's dangerous to travel at night," he declared with confidence.

"It's safe enough for us," Agnes snapped.

Richard flushed, abashed. Being paired with Agnes had been the best-worst thing that could have happened to his solid-but-uninspiring career. Agnes was as old and wise as the hills, and she always knew what to do. In the twenty years of their partnership, they'd taken on the world's most dangerous monsters, saved thousands of civilians. He was proud of the good they'd done, and he learned a great deal every time. But sometimes, when Agnes took a single whiff of the place and immediately declared their plan of attack, an odd, lonely pang shot through his chest.

"I couldn't do it without you, you know," Agnes had once said. "We're a team. You hold them off while I cast my longer spells. Even if I can't die, I'm no good if I can't cast."

And Richard did see the truth in that, but as he grunted and grappled with Camellia Town's resident dark cleric, he couldn't help but feel like a brute. She hadn't event told him what spell she would use!

"Oh, is it Bring Your Daughter to Work Day?" the Cleric taunted. "Must have missed it on the calendar!"

Richard growled indignantly, too out of breath for words. It was convenient for their foes to underestimate Agnes. All the same, he bristled at it, even if he was cross with her.

"I'm sorry. I didn't think it needed saying," Agnes explained sincerely when they returned to camp, after she'd set the resurrected spirits free in a dramatic explosion that reduced the manor to rubble. "There were eight similar summonings in the last five hundred years alone. All the clues and patterns were familiar. . . ."

She was deep in the weeds again. Richard frowned in exasperation; Agnes didn't notice. "I first suspected when I saw the rare pressed poppy, prized for their medicinal properties, that I first saw on a mountain in the Andes in the year 382 BC. Then, the rough sketch on the antique desk was peppered with equations resembling research done by Antoine Lavoisier in 1790, research used by the dark cleric Lucilla to invent the modern version of the call to summons—"

"I don't know about all. . . that," he interrupted dourly. "I wasn't there."

". . . Oh," Agnes said, falling silent.

Richard sighed. "Sorry," he grumbled. "Rude of me. You were only trying to teach me."

"Well, hearing it is far different from living it," Agnes mused. "Look at you. You're barely seventy. Plenty of time to collect up your own wisdom."

Richard chuckled. "Barely? Seventy is pretty advanced, in case you've forgotten. I'd be a wise old master brawler of my own if I hadn't. . . well."

"And I'd be visiting less each year, pulling away so that when the inevitable came, I wouldn't grieve."

Her tone was light, a throwaway line, well-rehearsed: easier to joke than to remember. The sat together then, side-by-side, tending their wounds and staring into the fire.

"Teach me one thing, then," Richard said, his voice low. "I'm not collecting wisdom. I'm just fighting when you say, and not knowing why."

Agnes was quiet, thinking through the investigation and battle. What could she say? What lay at the heart of this cleric's ghost army, that first recognizable spark, the motive on which every other detail hung like decoration?

"The key clue lay in the region's history," she heard herself saying. "Camellia Town is on the border of two great powers. The town has been the scene of many a destructive battle. It begins with ruins and good intentions, with the desire to protect, and it ends with a cleric who would raise her own beloved dead. Despair and hope." The wild desperation she recognized in herself, and on every battlefield since.

"I. . . see. How very ordinary, huh. Still, you've got to feel for her."

"I felt for Grimsby the first time it happened in the year 50 BCE," Agnes mused, her voice distant.

Richard turned to look at her, and she glanced back at him, dull and weary. "I must be a brash young fool in your eyes," he said, leaning in slowly and watching her eyes widen. "You might not see much of this though." A final, maddening pause, and then she shifted forward the tiniest bit, and closed the last inch between them.

How long had it been since she'd been kissed? A hundred years? A thousand? Her lips were rounded in surprise until they suddenly came apart, and she melted into him with a gasp.

"I have all the time in the world," he promised when they broke apart. "I'll get up to speed."

Her laugh was bright and breathless. "Don't you worry. One day, we'll be the same age."

Richard smiled indulgently. "You'll always be some two thousand years older than me, give or take," he reminded her.

Agnes regarded him with mock sincerity. "When you're my age, we'll see how you feel."