I was returning from my walk through the forest when the Dragon's fairy wisp found me. I had just turned the knob to my cottage door when the crystal sizzle of the little ghostly creature carried through the autumn draft and I instinctively raised my eyes to the sky to find it first. It floated around my hut like it was carried solely by the winds, pressing it into the stained glass of my windows. I pursed my lips at the thought of Sarkan towering over the valley, willing the wisps to find me from the seclusion of his laboratory. My eyes drifted to the tall tower in the far distance, glowing red in the setting sun and I was cruelly reminded that all my imagination was just that and that the Dragon hadn't visited the valley in ages. It was my valley now, my forest, my tower, if I had wished it. But I just let it sit there, torn under the decades of storms and snow, shingles falling from the roofs and birds nesting between the crumbling stones. Only once every year I travel to the base of the tower to cut down any new growths of vines and ivy because I knew he wouldn't have liked nature to intrude in his white prison. Not that he cared about it any more since he was summoned to the capital of Polnya a whole life ago. There was no use having the two most powerful wizards of the kingdom huddled together in a far off valley no one cared about any more since the forest was rehabilitated.

We had received the summon and without question, Sarkan had accepted with so much serenity that it was hard to argue if he hadn't looked forward to be called back to court all this time. There was more honour to be had there because people still needed him for their aches and intrigues and wars. He was most at home when he had people to command and curse at for their imperfections and I knew he had missed it all those calm years he'd spent with me here.

The wisp danced in big circles around my shoulders when it finally spotted me and I smiled against my will. This was his doing but linking this creatures excitement back to him was foolish. He was also not longingly waiting by the tower's window for it to return. He'd sent it out and gone back to whatever work has kept him from visiting for 65 years. My hand scooped the wisp up and held it in front of my face for a moment. It felt impossibly hot like a living flame. Like his own hands.

Disgruntled, I flung it back into the air and it raced out of my sight, undoubtedly back to him. I left the door open when I entered my home. I had maybe a minute, three at the most, before he would appear out of thin air. Had he only wanted to talk, he'd sent a messenger or letter. Maybe even just a bubble of speech so I didn't have the opportunity to read and reread the words in his hand writing. There were so many ways he'd avoided meeting me eye to eye that I was sure this time, it was different. I emptied my sack of lucky findings of the forest onto the table in my hut and packed spare clothes, my own compilation of useful spells and a feather I had hexed to always have ink. I didn't bother cleaning the dirt out of my bag since earth and leaves had become so much part of my existence that I couldn't shake them even if I wanted to. The Dragon would disapprove of it of course. He'd frown at my dirty hem and the berry stained apron that had been white once. He'd hate the vines growing in the dome of my hut and the creaking wooden furniture an Dvernik woodworker gifted me for saving his son from smallpox a century ago. Everything I owned, I had gathered or was gifted. A collection of my life as a fullfledged witch, a life for myself. And I just knew the Dragon would hate every untidy, unperfect part of it.

For a moment I contemplated if I should wash up the used plates in the washing stone or pull the bedspread over my feather bed to make it seem more tidy but I shook my head, wildly disapproving of my own urge to make Sarkan more comfortable. He was intruding in my home and he would have to deal with me living my way.

I felt the magic wash over me before I heard his steps on the broken stone floor of my cottage. He hadn't knocked and instead stepped over the threshold like he was used to visiting the valley witch. I stuffed flacons of potions into my travel bag and pretended like I hadn't noticed him.

He halted a few steps in and I heard his expensive fabrics rustle as he turned to judge my living arrangements. "You have no protective charms."

I was thankful, I had my back turned because hearing his voice made my reserve crumble for the blink of an eye and I felt a familiar sting in my eyes. I blinked it away ferociously and continued packing. "I don't need protection. No one in this valley wants me harm."

"No one here maybe but the world is bigger than this valley." He was always lecturing, even now after all this time.

"I assure you no one, not even in Kralia, wastes a moment of thought on a witch in an ancient forest. By now, they must have forgotten about me entirely." I pushed past him, intentionally keeping my eyes on the ground because I didn't trust my heart in his presence. It's as if I was cursed to always yield to him. No matter how stern my resolutions to keep my distance for my own sanities sake.

As I threw my readied bag on the table, his long fingers rummaged through the pile of lucky findings I brought with me from my walk. He held his expensive red and gold stitched sleeve back from touching the dirt covered roots of healing plants and plugged out a golden ring. My eyes followed his motion involuntarily as he lifted it closer to his face and instantly I forgot all about the ring. There were new lines at the corners of his intent eyes. His frown looked somehow even more disappointed in everything and the worst part of it all was the speckle of white hair at his temple. Of course he must have aged during the last lifetime but in my head, ageing wasn't something that was so obvious in wizards. How many years had he lived through now? I wanted to ask but didn't.

"You've been deep into the forest." he stated matter of factly with the same clean raspy voice he always had. "This is old rosyan, before the parting war. Laced with protective magic. It's worth a fortune."

"You can keep it. I don't want war magic here." I said and averted my eyes to bring distance and my table between us. I gathered all my sternness and sat down without offering him to sit. He laid down the ring beside the pile and almost timidly looked around for a chair for himself.

"Why are you here?"

He sighed and gave up on his search for a seat. Instead he tightened his shoulders and I could almost see the wizard he had been two hundred years ago again. Young and angry. Alone to fight for himself in a valley where everyone he met was scared of him and a source of mild amusement for his own people who should have known better.

"I will not lie to you and give an unimaginatively trite excuse." He began and my cruel huff made him hesitate in an almost indignant way. If he only knew I was laughing at myself and not him, for my own hopes that he had somehow missed me. With a booming formal tone he resumed. "I was sent by the King to call you to duty."

"There was no need. I received his letters and his messenger and the riders he'd send me some time ago, too."

"And you ignored every single one of them."

"I did." I quibbed, quite proud of myself for my resistance to this foolishness.

"Are you being intentionally difficult?" he said it like his words called me an idiot. In his rising annoyance, he hid his crossed arms in his wide sleeves in front of his chest.

I sighed. "Fine. What does he want?"

"You know what he wants. You received his calling."

"Remind me again." I toyed with his impatience because it soothed the ache for revenge his disappearance had left behind in my soul.

"You're the greatest witch of this realm and your king needs your support in defending Polnya." His face crunched up in a weird grimmace as he tried himself at flattery because it's probably what would have worked on him. It made his cheeks look even more hollow and his eyes bleak. I had heard the songs of the wizard, right hand to the king, mighty and great, plucking farmers with magic affinity from their poor lives to grant them a chance to apprentice under him and make themselves into great wizards in turn. There were also few and far wailing songs inbetween, telling the story of young, barely named wizards being sent to the front lines in wars and never returning home. But no one in the valley wanted to hear about tragedies when there were stories to be heard about new fortunes and heros.

"Which honorable purpose is it this time?"

Sarkan sighed as if he forsaw his defeat in this matter. "The young king of West Rosya occupied trading routes over the mountains and closed shipping over the Rudva River. We need to establish dominance over the region to assure trading rights."

I remained silent. His sentences made sense in themselves but I couldn't really fathom the weight of them like he did. All these matters didn't touch the valley. Crops would be brought in regardless. Cattle grazed on the hillside pastures with no care about trading routes and the villagers helped oneanother no matter if people killed each other on the other side of the mountains.

"This should be the last necessary war. If we win back the mountains, we can make a peace treaty and …" His words trailed off in his own thoughts and then seeped away entirely as he looked out of my front door into the calm of the woods. I had heard all this before. The first times I had naively believed him when he told me he needed to go join this great cause or that war to defend the people. He had always come back slightly changed. Like the woods had infiltrated him with dark slithers that needed to be cleansed again before he could return fully. I had tried my best. Every time. But some grasps couldn't be severed from the outside and his striving for honour or obedience to duty always pulled him back again.

I stood and pulled a chair from behind the curtains. The stacks of old dresses that rested on it, I threw on my unmade bed. Only when I returned to his side and placed the chair behind him with a clank did his lost attention return to me again. Immediately the cold distance in his eyes melted into something soft and malleable.

"Sit." I said short but careful. I looked him up and down. His tidy robes, clean cut hair. He looked every bit as elegant and put together as his importance dictated but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was hollow like a burnt out tree. Only held upright by the outer shell of his appearance. "You look terrible."

His eyebrows twitched. A long time he said nothing, then he sat. The metal scales on his tunic's back scraped at the soft wood of the chair. I went to heat water on the coals and brewed tea with the fresh herbs I had found today. I'd never seen them there before and probably will never find them again. They appeared especially for this one encounter like the harbinger of doom. I sat the cup of tea on the edge of the table in front of him without a saucer and he granted me a disapproving chuckle.

"It's been a long time since you've visited." I couldn't help the accusation in my tone and climbed on my own chair, pulling my bare feet up with me.

He eyed me weary and interested at the same time. "Nothing has much changed."

"That's not true." I snapped, suddenly exhausted with anger. "Katarzyna married and had her own children. They left the valley when she died. You wouldn't know because you weren't at her funeral. She's burried under Kasia's tree. She loved her great aunt very much."

I spared him the details of our devastation over Kasia's slow death. The older she got, the harder it was for her to move and one day she just got up and walked on a hill and never moved again. Over the decades, she grew into a great birch tree that still stood where she chose to rest for the remainder of her existence and I visited her every day. Her and the grave of my granddaughter next to my son's.

"Yes." Sarkan said dryly but never left my gaze. "I remember the girl from the funeral."

"She's not just a girl. She was your granddaughter and she only saw her grandfather once at her father's funeral."

"It's better this way."

"Better for who?" The rasp in my throat almost didn't let the words escape. Instead my eyes welled up with tears for the many memories I had with our family that he never wanted to share with me. "She had your sense of order. You would have liked her."

"That's specifically what I impeded."

"She had a knack for healing magic. Not very gifted but good enough for Dvernik. Her husband was a sheep herder and they had three children." All the memories spilled out of me, all the things I had kept safe in myself but were too much to hold alone. I threw them at him and watched him crumble under the weight. I wanted him to feel with me. Feel what I had felt when I'd missed him in the meantime and then grew to despise him because I loved too much and he not enough.

"Stop, Nieszka." His voice was soft, almost desperate.

"You know your son had asked for you before he died and I had to make up things why you couldn't be there. Sometimes heroic tasks just aren't enough of an explanation why his father didn't want to be part of his families' life."

"Stop!" A rumble shook my hut and clanked the metal pans hanging in front of the kitchen window. Flocks of birds took off cawing at the edges of the forest as the treetops swayed slightly. Sarkan rubbed his temple and squeezed his eyes shut in a distressed attempt to keep his insides hollow and devoid of emotions. Once the rumble subsided, he looked at me over the bridge of his nose, breathing deeply and angry. "I can't allow myself to grow attached to people that I inevitable have to bury in a few years. You might be able to stomach the loss with your inexhaustible ability to love everything with your whole being but I have to safe myself from splintering my soul into too many pieces or I will lose the grasp on my sanity."

As much as I didn't want to understand, I did. I remembered the times he left me to go follow a king's call. The way he looked at me when he tore himself away like he ripped stitches out that tied his flesh to mine. It only got worse when our son waved him goodbye from his place on my hips and then ran away when Sarkan returned years later because he didn't recognize his father and was scared of the new stranger. The memory softened a little of the hurt in my chest but still tears fell off my chin and onto the blueberry stained apron.

"I never wanted to hurt you, Nieszka. Everything I did was just so you could follow your wish of living in your valley, serving your people your own way. You know, I would have never left you if there was a way for both of us staying here forever."

"I know." I said to make him feel better. I dried my cheeks with the back of my earthy hands and got up to hand him the cup of lukewarm tea. I felt the stitches between us pulling tighter, like thorns under my skin. The vines snaked around us and I couldn't resist anymore. I was pulled to him against everything I said, everything I told myself over the last decades. With all the calmness of his exhaustion, I kneeled next to his feet on the floor, put my elbow on his knees and leaned my chin on my arm like he was the armrest I draped myself over. "Why are you here?" I asked again.

Perplexed by my sudden closeness and the idiotic repetition of my question, he leaned to put the cup back on the table.

"No, drink." I said and gave his hand a little push towards his mouth.

His nose wrinkled but he obeyed. "The king send me because he knows of our intertwinement and foolishly thought I had control over you."

I smiled at his words and looked up at him until he took another sip. "I didn't know they still remembered in the capital. The songs about us have long been forgotten in this valley. They sing of other loves now."

"I still remember the songs." He said softly and reached out to hold a lock of my hair between his fingers. "And that you forced me to dance every time they were played on the town square."

I smiled and closed my eyes for a moment. He didn't dare touch my skin but I still felt the heat of his hovering fingers on my cheek. "You know there will always be another war, another king calling you into service."

Sarkan hummed distantly.

"But even a wizard's time is limited." My hushed voice was barely audible and I couldn't hide my fear for him behind banter or anger. No one ever thought that even a wizards life had to end. Just because no person ever saw a wizard age in their own limited lifetime, doesn't mean we were eternal. War or Execution wasn't the only way to die. One day the magic would have ate away enough of the person to make them just a shell of energy, no more alive than a memory. "You are the eldest wizard in all the kingdoms. Your knowledge and power are exemplary but you shouldn't be made to fight in every war yet another king deems necessary."

He smirked because of the flattery and because he saw right through my brittle attempt to sway him. "What else is there to do? I've learned everything there is to learn, read every book. I travelled and seen the world, seen kings come and go. Yet the world is turning every day and nothing ever changes really. There will always be new evil no matter what we accomplish. I've seen to much to have no purpose. If I don't lend myself to a cause, I could very well stop existing."

"There's still life to be lived if you're not too scared to experience it."

"Ah, Agnieszka. You're merely 110 years old. You've seen this kingdom fall and rebuild itself just once. Let me tell you that it isn't the first nor the last time and it will all be the same. When you've seen as much as I have-"

"Oh shut up, old man." I interrupted, half joking and with a warm smile. "You've been alone too long."

"I'm not alone." He snapped indignantly and put the empty cup on the table to escape my gaze.

"Yes you are. You are as alone as you were when you locked yourself away in your tower with a village girl. You had company but you never let their presence touch you."

His frown grew discontent and I propped another arm on his lap to keep him from leaving yet.

"I know you are lonely because I am too and I at least try to talk to people. It's not their fault. They feel our differentness and are disturbed or frightened. Everyone I loved left my life and I am alone in my own valley. They look at me like they ought to remember who I am but they don't know me." I looked out the open door for a moment, longing for times that had passed here but will never come back. Footsteps of my son on the dirt path leading away from the door. Kasia's laugh when she told me stories of her travels. The face of my mother that I couldn't quite remember any more.

"Come with me." Sarkan said and finally buried his hand in my unruly locks of hair. "When nothing's holding you here, let me."

For a breath, tears welled in my eyes as I looked up at him. "I'm not made for court life."

"Join me in this fight and I will find a way to renounce my duty to the king and we can go away from here. Live a lifetime somewhere and see what we want to do next."

Sarkan had promised to live with me in my valley and not return to court two times. First time I had believed him and we had our son and we lived for a few years until the riders came and called for his aid. The second time when he returned to find our son feared him, I didn't hang my heart on his promise. I waited every day for him to leave me, every dust cloud on the sky meant another death. He managed thirty years, turned many advances of kings away. But when he left the next time, he only returned for the day of our son's funeral and never again.

My smile was a grimace. "Where would we go?" I asked but didn't expect an answer, not really.

"There is a new continent discovered over the great sea. We could set sail and never look back."

His smile told me he knew that he was unreasonable but he was desperate enough to chose to ignore it. I felt it through the drumming of my heart that he could never live up to his promise. I heard the echo of his voice trying to reason with both of us: "Do try not to be this dense."

There was no way we could escape kings who thought themselves entitled to a wizard's life. And if we manage to escape the kings, we could never escape Sarkan's own restlessness. He was made to be exceptional and surpass any other wizard. It was what he had dedicated his life to. He had formed it into something that songs and poems would be written about so he never had to feel like he didn't matter.

Yet, I chose to believe him because I didn't want to see him tear the stitches again and dissolve into duty for another hundred years until I heard the songs of the greatest wizard's heroic death. The inevitability of it gnawed in my insides and I couldn't leave him to fight it alone.

I nodded with a teary smile on my face and his eyes lit up for the first time since he appeared in the frame of my door. Like the sun breathed life into spring.

He plucked me from the ground like a daisy. His hug was suffocating and warm and he buried his face in the mess of my hair as my hands grabbed his tunic to pull him closer. I wanted to hold him for a life time, had held him for more. He was a part of me and I of him. I felt the pain he had feared, of losing someone dear and I heard the dust cloud gather on the horizon. The threat of loss and the rift it would tear into me. There was never any eternity safe enough for us. No matter where we went. But I grabbed my prepared travel bag and left the door to my cottage open when I stepped outside.

"Do you want me to put up protections?" Sarkan asked me, lingering behind me as I looked back at my home of decades. Its mossy straw roofing and weeds growing out of the base of the walls. I'd loved my life here, loved my family here. But now Sarkan was my only family left and I will not watch him leave and be left waiting one more time.

"No. I don't plan on coming back."

He walked with me for a bit, crossing a small side stream of the spindle, through the golden wheat fields ready to be thrashed and across the high grass of hills. We walked past Kasia's tree and the graves of generations beyond us. Then, when I was ready to let go, he wrapped his arm tightly around my middle and together we stepped through the framework of existence and back onto the dusty road where a caravan of horses and knights waited for us. They looked at me funny, the way I had looked at the Dragon when he came to my village to take his promised girl. The men waited for me to say or do something but I didn't know how to act.

"A horse!" Sarkan commanded the gawping crowd and waited until they brought him a dotted white mare. He bellowed more commands, distracting the men enough for me to catch my breath as they all climbed on their horses and shifted them into formation. Sarkan helped me into the saddle during the tumult of departure but rested his hands on both sides of me on the saddle.

He looked up with a little uncertainty behind his stern expression. Doubt sprawling in the way his eyes scanned my face. "I will find a way." He repeated his words from before, all the weight of an oath in a small sentence and when it was said, he retreated back behind his stoic facade. On the way to his own horse, he stretched his hands as if he'd burned himself on me, the only impossible thing in his life that managed to curse him with his own fondness.