The Trickster's arrival shifted something fundamental in the Archive's atmosphere. The silver threads that had been pulsing with anxious energy now vibrated with a different frequency—anticipation mixed with chaos, order meeting disorder at the boundary where interesting things happened.
"Right then," the Trickster said, producing a silver pocket watch from nowhere and checking it with theatrical precision. "We have approximately ninety minutes before Dr. Vance and her erasure squad arrive. That's plenty of time to plan, prepare, and hopefully avoid complete annihilation."
"Hopefully?" Skitty repeated. "That's not reassuring."
"Hope is rarely reassuring," the Trickster replied cheerfully. "But it's remarkably persistent. Now, Wolf—or whatever distributed consciousness you're currently calling yourself—how close are you to reconstitution?"
Wolf's presence gathered in the center of the reading room, threads converging like a constellation trying to remember its shape. "Closer than I was. The act of focusing on Emma, of channeling that much intentional connection, helped. But I'm still... scattered. Pieces of me exist in too many places simultaneously."
"Then we'll give you a focus point," the Trickster said. He reached into the air and pulled—not a word like Wolf did, but a concept. The space rippled, and suddenly he held something that looked like crystallized starlight. "Identity anchor. Very rare. Very illegal to possess. Fortunately, I've never been particularly concerned with legality."
"Where did you get that?" Ari asked, her copper eyes widening. She'd been around long enough to recognize dangerous artifacts.
"Let's just say I've been preparing for this moment for longer than you'd believe." The Trickster placed the crystallized light on the floor next to Wolf's mask. "This will serve as a nexus point. Wolf, when you try to reconstitute, direct everything toward this anchor. It'll hold your scattered pieces together long enough to reform."
"That's..." Wolf's voice carried wonder. "That might actually work."
"Of course it will work," the Trickster said. "I don't do 'might.' Now, while Wolf pulls himself together—literally—we need to address the Consensus Enforcement problem. They're coming with erasure protocols, yes?"
"Narrative weapons, reality anchors, probably a full tactical team," Ari confirmed. "Standard procedure for Class Four threats."
"Excellent." The Trickster's split mask somehow conveyed pure delight. "I do love a good tactical challenge. Here's what we're going to do..."
He moved to the center of the room, and with gestures that seemed to bend space itself, began drawing diagrams in the air with light trails. "First, we establish a welcome perimeter. Not hostile, but clearly defined. Sarah, your dream manifestations can create a visual boundary—something beautiful but unmistakable. Flowers that can't be crossed without permission."
"I can do that," Sarah said, her gold-glowing eyes already envisioning the pattern.
"Amber, you'll position yourself where you can see Dr. Vance's approach. The moment her team enters your sight line, start sketching. Show them futures where they succeed—and futures where their 'success' causes worse problems than we ever could."
"Prophecy as negotiating tactic," Amber said slowly. "That's... actually brilliant."
"Skitty, you're our anchor point. Literally. Your reality-stabilizing presence will sit at the negotiation table with the legal documentation you found. You'll present the Monitored Autonomy option as if it's a reasonable compromise rather than our only hope."
"Why me?" Skitty asked. "I'm the least impressive person here."
"Exactly," the Trickster said with approval. "Dr. Vance expects threats, power, cosmic horror. She won't know how to process someone who's genuinely, aggressively normal offering paperwork and reasonable solutions. You'll throw her off balance."
"Weaponized bureaucracy," Skitty muttered. "I can work with that."
"Ari, you're defense. If things go sideways—and they might—your job is to protect the others. You know the Archive's hidden passages, its defenses. Use them."
"Understood." Ari's hand moved to her side where that blade of crystallized memory waited.
"And me?" the Trickster said, his split mask's grin widening impossibly. "I'm the wild card. The element that makes Dr. Vance's carefully planned assault turn into something unpredictable. I'll be... myself. Which is the most terrifying thing anyone can be."
"What about me?" Wolf asked. "While I'm reconstituting, what's my role?"
The Trickster was quiet for a moment, uncharacteristically serious. "Your role, old friend, is to become whole one last time. To remember what it feels like to be Wolf instead of the Archive. Because if this goes wrong, if violence becomes necessary, we'll need the version of you that can make reality question its own rules."
"The version that terrified Dr. Vance," Wolf said quietly.
"Precisely. Though let's hope it doesn't come to that."
From somewhere distant—Emma's bedroom across the city—a child's voice echoed through the dream-connections Sarah maintained: "I can help. I know I messed up before, but I can create distractions. Make their technology malfunction. Buy you time."
"No," Wolf said immediately. "Emma, you need to rest. You've done enough."
"But—"
"He's right," Sarah said gently, her consciousness touching Emma's through the dream-bridge. "You've been carrying too much for too long. Let us handle this. That's what families do—they take turns carrying the weight."
Emma was silent, then: "Okay. But if you need me, I'll be here. I promise."
The connection settled into gentle background presence, Emma watching but not interfering, learning what it meant to trust others with impossible problems.
Wolf's mask began to glow.
The silver threads throughout the Archive stopped their ambient pulsing and snapped rigid, all of them suddenly pointing toward the crystallized starlight anchor the Trickster had placed. The temperature dropped, then rose, then dropped again as reality tried to decide what was happening.
"It's working," Ari breathed.
Threads converged on the anchor from every direction—from the walls, the ceiling, the books on their shelves, from spaces between spaces where Wolf's consciousness had spread during his dissolution. They wrapped around the crystallized light like desperate fingers grasping at solidity.
The light began to burn.
Not with heat or flame, but with pure concentrated existence. The kind of radiance that happened when scattered identity remembered how to be singular, when distributed consciousness chose location over ubiquity.
A figure formed.
Not gradually. Not peacefully.
Reality screamed as Wolf tore himself free from the Archive's structure, pulling his essence back from books and walls and threads, forcing himself to be contained in human-shaped boundaries again. The sound wasn't audible—it was conceptual, the noise existence makes when something that should be everywhere decides to be somewhere instead.
The figure solidified.
6'1" of elegant menace in charcoal wool and midnight silk, the purple vest with its silver embroidery blazing like circuitry carrying impossible equations. Long fingers adorned with silver rings flexed experimentally. The short mullet caught the Archive's amber light. The wolf mask settled onto features that were both familiar and strange—ancient stone carved with geometric patterns that hurt to perceive, patterns that now pulsed with renewed purpose.
And the eyes.
Those deep blue eyes that had held ocean's depths now blazed with something more—the accumulated knowledge of every story in the Archive, every thread he'd touched, every consciousness he'd filtered. They glowed with soft silver-blue light that was nothing like the rage-radiance from before. This was controlled power. Directed will. The scholar-warrior ready to defend what he'd built.
Wolf took a breath—his first independent breath in hours—and spoke:
"I'd forgotten how limiting singular existence feels. How small. How... defined." He looked down at his hands, turned them over, watched the silver rings catch light. "But also how real. Thank you, Trickster. For the anchor. For remembering when I'd forgotten I could be whole."
"What are old friends for?" the Trickster replied, though his voice carried unusual weight. "Besides, we're going to need you fully corporeal for what comes next."
As if on cue, Amber's hands began moving across her sketchbook without conscious direction. Her hazel eyes—those gold flecks now blazing bright—went distant as precognitive sight activated.
"They're here," she whispered. "Three blocks away. Twelve agents, four vehicles, enough narrative-disruption technology to turn this entire building into a blank spot on the map."
"Positions," Wolf said, his voice carrying authority that came from lifetimes of practiced command. "Everyone to their assigned roles. Skitty, you're with me at the entrance. Amber, second-floor balcony where you can see their approach. Sarah, establish the boundary. Ari, hidden but ready. Trickster—"
"Already gone," the Trickster said, and indeed he was—vanished between one breath and the next, existing somewhere in the spaces between visible and invisible, waiting for the perfect moment to disrupt expectations.
They moved.
Sarah knelt on the Archive's front steps and closed her eyes. Her consciousness dove into dream-space, that realm between sleeping and waking where possibility became manifest. She envisioned flowers—not the aggressive, invasive blooms from before, but something gentler. Moonflowers and night-blooming jasmine, ghost orchids and lunar roses, each petal translucent as memory and twice as beautiful.
They erupted from the ground in a perfect circle around the Archive, marking territory with elegance rather than threat. The boundary was clear: You may enter, but you must choose to. You cannot stumble here accidentally.
Amber positioned herself on the second-floor balcony, sketchbook open, pencil ready. Through the tall windows, she could see the approaching convoy—black vehicles moving with bureaucratic precision, agents inside radiating grim determination.
She began to draw.
Not attacking them. Not showing them horrors. Just... consequences. Futures where their erasure protocols succeeded and six months later, worse reality manipulators emerged with no Archive to contain them. Timelines where Emma, abandoned by the only people who'd tried to help her, lost control completely and accidentally rewrote half the Eastern seaboard into narrative chaos. Possibilities where Dr. Vance's professional success at eliminating this threat became her personal nightmare as the unintended consequences mounted.
The sketches glowed with prophetic certainty, each one a glimpse of tomorrow saying: Be careful what you destroy. You might need it later.
Skitty stood beside Wolf at the entrance, wearing her most professional outfit—jeans, a sensible blazer, her collection of plush keychains making her look more like a confused graduate student than someone defending against existential erasure. She held a folder containing printouts of Consensus Enforcement's own charter, Section Twelve, subsection D carefully highlighted.
"Remember," Wolf said quietly, his deep blue eyes meeting hers, "you're not asking for mercy. You're offering them a solution to a problem they don't want to deal with long-term. We're volunteers for their oversight program."
"Volunteers who happen to be the only option that doesn't end in disaster," Skitty agreed. "Got it."
The convoy stopped at the flower boundary.
Doors opened.
Dr. Vance emerged, flanked by agents in tactical gear carrying weapons that hummed with reality-disruption frequencies. Her pale eyes swept the scene—the Archive standing peaceful but undeniably present, the impossible flowers marking boundaries, the two figures waiting at the entrance like hosts greeting expected guests rather than targets awaiting execution.
"Guardian," she said, her voice carrying across the space between them. "I see you've reconstituted. That's... unexpected."
"I'm full of surprises," Wolf replied pleasantly. "Would you like to come in? We have tea. And a proposal that I think you'll find infinitely preferable to the paperwork involved in erasing an entire city block."
Dr. Vance's expression didn't change, but Skitty saw her hand move to the device at her belt—the narrative-disruption weapon. "This isn't a negotiation. You were given seventy-two hours. You've had less than twelve. The threat assessment stands."
"Does it?" Wolf tilted his head, the wolf mask's geometric patterns catching light in ways that suggested depth beyond the physical. "Tell me, Dr. Vance, when you filed your threat report, did you mention that the primary source of the awakening—the child whose power was forcing stories into consciousness—has been peacefully contained? That she's no longer a danger?"
Dr. Vance hesitated. Just for a moment. "The child is... contained?"
"Sleeping peacefully in her foster home, under our remote supervision," Wolf confirmed. "We found her. Talked to her. Helped her understand her abilities and choose to stop using them destructively. Isn't that exactly what you'd want a sanctioned oversight facility to do?"
"You're not sanctioned," Dr. Vance countered.
Skitty stepped forward, folder extended. "Section Twelve, subsection D of the Consensus Enforcement charter. Monitored Autonomy status for reality manipulators who demonstrate ongoing stability maintenance. We're formally applying."
Dr. Vance took the folder reflexively, then looked down at it as if Skitty had just handed her a live snake. "This... this provision has never been granted."
"Because no one's ever applied," Skitty said reasonably. "Most reality manipulators either don't know it exists or are too hostile to use it. We're neither. We're volunteers for your oversight. We want accountability, boundaries, regular inspections—whatever makes you comfortable that we're not a threat."
"You're absolutely a threat," Dr. Vance said flatly. "The Guardian dissolved into non-corporeal form. Displayed power levels that shouldn't be possible. Terrified trained agents."
"I was having a bad day," Wolf said mildly. "It won't happen again."
"You can't guarantee that."
"No," Wolf agreed. "But I can guarantee that destroying us will create a power vacuum. The Archive filters awakening stories, contains dangerous narratives, trains Sensitives before they become dangerous. Remove us, and all those functions disappear. Along with the institutional knowledge of how to perform them."
From the balcony above, Amber's voice carried down: "Dr. Vance? I have something you should see."
She held up her sketchbook, pages turned toward the agents below. Even from a distance, the prophetic drawings were clear enough to make their point. Timelines branching, consequences cascading, futures where the erasure of the Archive led to exactly the kind of reality collapse Consensus Enforcement existed to prevent.
"I see possibilities," Amber called down. "These aren't threats. They're predictions. If you erase us, these happen. Not because we're making them happen, but because natural consequences exist. We're currently preventing these futures. Dead people don't prevent things very well."
Dr. Vance stared at the sketches, her professional composure finally cracking. "This is coercion."
"This is information," Wolf corrected. "You're welcome to verify through your own precognitive consultants. We're not unique, Dr. Vance. We're just organized. And willing to work with you instead of against you."
"Why?" Dr. Vance demanded. "Why submit to oversight? What do you gain?"
"Permission to exist," Wolf said simply. "To continue doing what I've been doing for far longer than you can imagine, but with your approval instead of your enmity. Is that not worth exploring before you commit to mutual destruction?"
Dr. Vance looked at the folder in her hands, at the flowers marking boundaries, at the two figures who could have fought but chose to negotiate. Behind her, agents waited for orders—weapons ready, reality anchors primed, erasure protocols loaded and targeting.
The moment stretched.
Then: "Stand down," Dr. Vance ordered her team. "Lower weapons. Maintain perimeter but do not engage."
Wolf's shoulders relaxed fractionally. Skitty let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
"This isn't approval," Dr. Vance clarified. "This is... investigation. I'll need to consult with my superiors, verify your claims, establish protocols for ongoing monitoring."
"We understand completely," Wolf said. "Take all the time you need. We'll be here. Maintaining stability. Helping Sensitives. Doing exactly what a sanctioned facility should do."
Dr. Vance's pale eyes studied him. "You're very calm for someone who came within minutes of erasure."
"I've been erased before," Wolf said quietly. "Or my predecessors have. The Archive always returns. The question is whether it returns hostile or cooperative. I'm voting for cooperative."
"Your predecessors?" Dr. Vance caught the phrasing. "How many Guardians have there been?"
Wolf's smile behind the mask was sad and ancient. "Would you like to know the truth, Dr. Vance? The real history of this place?"
"I would."
Wolf gestured toward the Archive's entrance. "Then please, come inside. You and two agents of your choosing. Leave the weapons—they won't work inside anyway. I'll show you the records. All of them. Including the ones that explain why the Archive has survived every attempt to destroy it for longer than human civilization has recorded history."
Dr. Vance's eyes narrowed. "That's impossible. No organization can survive that long."
"Come inside," Wolf repeated gently. "And I'll show you just how possible the impossible can be."
Dr. Vance made a decision. She selected two agents, ordered the rest to maintain position, and followed Wolf and Skitty into the Archive.
Ari met them in the reading room, her translucent form solidifying slightly out of respect for guests. "Dr. Vance. Welcome to the Archive. Your reputation precedes you."
"As does yours," Dr. Vance replied, studying Ari with clinical interest. "An echo given form. That shouldn't be possible."
"Many impossible things happen here," Ari said. "That's rather the point. This way, please."
She led them deeper into the Archive, past shelves that stretched impossibly high, through corridors that existed in more dimensions than standard architecture allowed. Finally, they reached a room that none of the women had seen before—a circular chamber with walls covered entirely in portraits.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each portrait showed a figure in a wolf mask. Different clothing styles spanning eras so ancient Dr. Vance couldn't identify them, but always the same height, always the same build, always those deep blue eyes visible beneath the carved stone.
"The previous Guardians," Dr. Vance said, moving along the wall. She stopped at one portrait showing Wolf in clothing that looked Egyptian, another in what appeared to be Sumerian dress, another in styles that predated any known civilization. "These date back... this isn't possible. These show cultures from before written records."
"None," Wolf said quietly from behind her.
Everyone turned to look at him.
"What?" Dr. Vance demanded.
Wolf moved to the center of the chamber, his silver rings catching light from sources that didn't exist. The deep blue eyes behind his mask carried weight that suddenly made sense—the accumulated existence of time spans that shouldn't fit inside a single consciousness.
"Every portrait on these walls is me. Every Guardian the Archive has ever had was me. I don't have predecessors, Dr. Vance. I have previous lives. Iterations. Versions spanning back to when humans first learned that stories could hold power."
Skitty's hand went to her mouth. "Wolf, what are you saying?"
"I'm saying I'm older than I've admitted. Than I've allowed myself to remember fully." He walked along the portrait wall, touching frames with reverence born of recognition. "The Archive wasn't founded in any year you'd find in history books. It began when the first human looked at cave paintings and understood that images could carry meaning beyond their physical form. When the first storyteller realized tales could outlive their teller."
He stopped before a portrait showing himself in animal skins, holding a primitive version of the wolf mask carved from bone rather than stone.
"I was there," Wolf said softly. "When story first became separate from experience. When humans learned to preserve consciousness in narrative form. I've been the Guardian ever since. One hundred thousand years, give or take a few millennia. When one form wears out or gets destroyed, I find another way to continue. Reconstitute. Begin again. Forget and remember and forget again in cycles so long that sometimes I can't recall which memories are mine and which are stories I've absorbed."
The room was absolutely silent.
Dr. Vance's professional mask had shattered completely. She stared at the portraits, at Wolf, her mind clearly trying to process information that contradicted everything she understood about consciousness, identity, human limitation.
"That's not possible," she whispered. "No consciousness can sustain itself across that much time. The human brain couldn't contain that many memories, that much experience—"
"The human brain can't," Wolf agreed. "But I stopped being entirely human approximately ninety-eight thousand years ago. I'm... something else now. Story and person, fiction and flesh, the boundary between narrative and reality given shape and purpose and a name that's been spoken in more languages than currently exist."
He moved to a section of the wall showing more recent portraits—the last few thousand years, civilizations Dr. Vance could actually identify. "This was me in ancient Greece, when the first philosophers asked whether reality was objective or subjective. This was me in Alexandria, trying to save the Library before it burned—I failed, but I saved the idea of the Library. This was me in medieval monasteries, preserving stories through ages that wanted to burn them."
His voice grew quieter as he traced through more recent portraits. "This was me during the Enlightenment, when science and story first declared themselves enemies. This was me in the Industrial Revolution, watching machines try to replace narrative meaning with mechanical process. And this—" He stopped before a portrait from the 1940s. "This was me when the first atomic bomb proved that humanity had gained power to unmake reality itself. That's when I knew we needed formal structures. Oversight. Organizations like Consensus Enforcement to keep reality-benders from destroying what they were trying to protect."
Dr. Vance found her voice. "You're claiming to be one hundred thousand years old. To have lived through the entirety of human storytelling. To have witnessed every civilization, every epoch, every—" She stopped. "Why tell me this? This makes you incomprehensibly dangerous. An entity that old, with that much accumulated power—"
"Because you need to understand what you're actually dealing with," Wolf interrupted gently. "You can kill this body. Erase this location. Scatter my consciousness across the planet. I've experienced that death thousands of times. But I always return. Sometimes within years, sometimes within generations. Because reality needs a place where stories are understood, where the boundary between fiction and reality is carefully maintained, where Sensitives can learn they're not mad or dangerous—just different."
He turned to face Dr. Vance directly, and the deep blue eyes that had witnessed the birth of human consciousness itself held her gaze with gentle, terrible certainty.
"You can spend your entire career hunting me, Dr. Vance. And your successors' careers. And their successors'. I will outlive your organization as I've outlived every other attempt to control or destroy the Archive. Or—" His voice softened further. "—you can work with me. Make this the first time in one hundred thousand years that the Guardian and human authority are allies instead of adversaries. That we protect reality together instead of fighting over who gets to define it."
The silence that followed stretched like story-time itself, both eternal and fleeting.
Then Dr. Vance did something that surprised everyone.
She sat down.
Just... sat down on the floor of the portrait chamber, staring at the walls covered in Wolf's faces spanning from cave-dwelling origins to modern day.
"I need a moment," she said faintly. "To process. To think. To decide if I'm losing my mind or if reality is stranger than any protocol ever prepared me for."
"Take your time," Wolf said kindly, settling into a cross-legged position across from her. "I've waited one hundred thousand years. I can wait a few more minutes."
Skitty looked at Ari, who looked at the two agents who'd accompanied Dr. Vance, who looked at each other with expressions suggesting their entire worldview was being forcibly reconstructed.
Finally, Dr. Vance spoke again: "If what you're saying is true—and I'm not confirming I believe it, just... theorizing—why hasn't Consensus Enforcement found evidence of this before? We have records going back decades. Centuries for some divisions. None of them mention a Guardian of this age."
"Because I learned to hide," Wolf said simply. "After the first few thousand years of being worshipped, feared, hunted, and martyred in endless cycles, I understood that longevity attracts attention. So I became careful. Changed identities frequently. Pretended each iteration was a different person inheriting the role. Kept the scope of my operations small enough not to draw cosmic-level scrutiny. The Archive has only been in its current form for about three hundred years. Before that, it was wandering repositories, hidden collections, sacred groves where stories were protected from those who would destroy them."
"And before that?"
"Oral traditions kept by shamans who understood I was something other than human but accepted me anyway. Cave paintings I helped preserve. Stone tablets I taught scribes to carve. Every method humanity has developed to preserve narrative, I've been there, ensuring the dangerous stories were contained and the valuable ones survived."
Dr. Vance pressed her palms against her eyes. "This is insane."
"Yes," Wolf agreed. "But no more insane than a government organization that hunts people who can manifest dreams or see the future or manipulate reality through drawn images. Once you've accepted that consciousness can bend reality, is it really so impossible that it can persist across time?"
"I suppose not," Dr. Vance admitted. She lowered her hands and looked at Wolf with new understanding—and new respect. "You're offering me a historic opportunity. To be the first Consensus Enforcement director to successfully negotiate with an entity that predates modern civilization."
"I'm offering you partnership," Wolf corrected. "To work together instead of exhausting ourselves fighting. You provide oversight, legitimacy, legal protection. I provide institutional knowledge, Sensitive training, story containment. We both get to protect reality, just from different directions."
Dr. Vance was quiet for a long moment, her pale eyes moving between Wolf and the portraits covering the walls—one hundred thousand years of evidence that some stories truly do persist beyond any single lifetime.
"Monitored Autonomy," she said finally. "With extensive conditions. Monthly inspections. Quarterly reports. Complete transparency about every Sensitive you train and every narrative you contain. And if—if—you show signs of losing control, if that much accumulated power starts becoming more threat than asset, the erasure protocols activate immediately. No warnings. No negotiations."
"Agreed," Wolf said without hesitation. "All of it. Gladly. Gratefully."
"Just like that?" Dr. Vance looked suspicious. "An entity one hundred thousand years old just... submits to oversight?"
"Dr. Vance, I've lived through empires rising and falling, through ages of enlightenment and darkness, through humanity's best and worst moments repeated in endless patterns." Wolf's voice carried profound weariness. "I'm tired. So tired of hiding, of pretending, of watching each generation rediscover the same truths and make the same mistakes. If the price of finally having legitimate protection for the Archive and the Sensitives who need it is bureaucratic oversight, I'll pay it without a second thought. Paperwork is infinitely preferable to another millennium of being hunted."
Skitty stepped forward, folder still in hand. "And I'll be your liaison. Point of contact for inspections, documentation coordinator, general translator between cosmic timescales and quarterly reports."
Dr. Vance studied her. "You're very calm about learning your mentor is older than recorded history."
"I've had a weird week," Skitty replied. "At this point, finding out Wolf is ancient is actually one of the less surprising things. At least it explains why he's so good at making tea—he's had a hundred thousand years to practice."
Despite everything, Wolf laughed. "That's fair. I do make excellent tea."
Dr. Vance stood, brushing off her suit. "Then we have an agreement. Provisional Monitored Autonomy status, pending final approval from my superiors—which I'll recommend approving, because I'm not interested in fighting a hundred-thousand-year war of attrition with an entity that's already proven it can outlast anything we throw at it."
She extended her hand. "Welcome to legitimate oversight, Guardian."
Wolf stood as well, his 6'1" frame graceful despite the weight of one hundred millennia, and shook her hand. His silver-ringed fingers closed around hers with gentle certainty.
"Thank you, Dr. Vance. For listening. For adapting. For choosing coexistence over elimination. It's a rarer gift than you might think."
"Don't make me regret it," she warned.
"I won't," Wolf promised. "I've had one hundred thousand years to learn from my mistakes. I'm fairly good at not repeating them by now."
Dr. Vance and her agents departed, their convoy pulling away with erasure protocols deactivated, weapons powered down, reality itself feeling slightly more stable now that ancient threat and modern authority had found common ground.
The moment they were gone, everyone reconvened in the reading room.
"One hundred thousand years," Sarah breathed. "You're one hundred thousand years old."
"Approximately," Wolf confirmed. "The early millennia are... fuzzy. Record-keeping wasn't really a thing yet. But yes. I've been the Guardian since before humanity had words for what a Guardian was."
"That's..." Amber searched for words and failed. She looked at her precognitive sketches, at timelines that spanned maybe a century at most, and tried to comprehend existence measured in geological epochs. "I can't even imagine how lonely that must have been."
"It was," Wolf said quietly. "Is. Will continue to be, I suspect. That's the price of persistence—you watch everyone you care about grow old and die while you simply... continue. Reconstitute. Begin again with new faces who don't know your true age, so you can pretend for a little while that you're young and mortal and temporary like everyone else."
He looked at each of them—Skitty with her practical concerns and stabilizing presence, Ari with her translucent form and copper eyes that had seen decades but not millennia, Amber with her prophetic gifts barely beginning to understand their potential, Sarah with her dreams that manifested reality in ways Wolf had been doing for epochs.
"But today," Wolf said, and his voice carried something like hope despite the exhaustion, "today I don't have to pretend. Today I told the truth. And somehow, incredibly, you're all still here. Still willing to work alongside something that should be mythology instead of flesh."
"You're not 'something,'" Skitty said firmly. "You're Wolf. Yes, you're absurdly old and apparently immortal and have witnessed literally all of human history. But you still make terrible jokes. You still get excited about proper tea preparation. You still care about a lonely ten-year-old more than you care about your own dissolution. That's not mythology. That's just... you."
"Skitty's right," Ari added. "I've known you for decades—or known one iteration of you, I suppose. The age doesn't change who you fundamentally are: someone who protects because he cares, not because he has to."
"And we're not going anywhere," Sarah said quietly. "You've been alone for a hundred thousand years. Maybe it's time you weren't."
Amber was already sketching, her pencil moving across the page with renewed purpose. "I'm drawing futures where we all grow old here together. Where the Archive becomes what you've always wanted it to be—a true home instead of just a duty. They're beautiful, Wolf. These futures are beautiful."
Wolf was silent for a long moment, his deep blue eyes bright with something that might have been tears if entities who'd existed for a hundred thousand years could still cry.
"Thank you," he said finally. "For seeing past the impossible number. For still seeing me. That's..." His voice caught. "That's worth more than you know."
The Trickster materialized from wherever he'd been observing, his split mask somehow conveying satisfaction. "Well done, old friend. You finally told the truth after all this time. How does it feel?"
"Terrifying," Wolf admitted. "Liberating. Strange. All of the above."
"Good." The Trickster moved to the center of the room, studying the assembled group with those dark brown eyes that held their own impossible depths. "Now comes the hard part."
"Harder than revealing I'm ancient and negotiating with people who wanted to erase us?" Wolf asked.
"Much harder," the Trickster confirmed. "Because now you have to do something you haven't done in a hundred thousand years: let go."
"What?" Wolf's voice sharpened with sudden understanding. "No. Trickster, the anchor was supposed to—"
"The anchor was always temporary," the Trickster said gently. "You know that. You've always known that. This reconstitution was a gift, Wolf. A chance to say goodbye properly. To transfer knowledge, to establish your successor, to end one era so another can begin."
"I'm not ready," Wolf said, and for the first time, his voice held genuine fear. "The Archive still needs—"
"The Archive needs a Guardian," the Trickster interrupted. "Not necessarily you. These four are ready. They've proven themselves. Emma waits to be trained. The structures are in place. Everything you've spent a hundred thousand years building will continue."
"But—"
"Wolf," the Trickster said, his voice impossibly gentle. "You've earned rest. Real rest. Not just reconstitution and beginning again. An ending. A proper ending. Don't you want that?"
The room fell silent.
Wolf looked at each of them—at Skitty's determined expression, at Ari's understanding acceptance, at Sarah's dream-touched eyes, at Amber's sketches showing futures that didn't require his presence to be good.
"I do," he whispered. "I'm so tired, Trickster. One hundred thousand years of watching, protecting, hiding, dying and returning and dying again. I'm so tired."
"I know," the Trickster said. "Which is why I'm giving you permission to stop. To truly stop, just this once. The Archive will survive. They'll make sure of it."
As he spoke, the crystallized starlight anchor that had helped Wolf reconstitute began to crack.
Wolf's form flickered.
"No," Skitty said, stepping forward. "Not yet. We just found out