Albion afternoons had a garbage kind of lighting. The sun never really set normally here. It just dragged its feet. Right now it was throwing these distorted, purple-looking shadows over the study floor. Made every dent and scrape in the wood look twice as deep. Trice hated this time of day. The dust in the air looked like dirt falling from the ceiling. Then there was the angle of the sun. It hit Arthur right in the face, digging into those dark, heavy circles under his eyes. Gave him the look of a dead man who forgot to stop breathing.
Trice didn't move from the glass. The draft coming through the loose window frame was biting cold. She just shoved her hands deeper into her coat pockets and kept staring outside. Staring specifically at the Western Wall miles away. The city lords called that massive slab of rock a shield. To her, it was just a cage. A really big cage.
Decades. That's how long she'd known the guy sitting across the room. Way too long. Seeing him hunched over the desk like this was making her physically nauseous. He was covered in grey dust. The whole room smelled like paper left out in the rain to rot. It was wrong. Back in the day, his name alone meant whole fields burning to ash. You used to stand next to him and literally taste the iron from all the bleeding he caused. Now look at him. Surrounded by old books. Playing the quiet hermit. It was a pathetic, suffocating kind of peace. Sure, a tiny, selfish piece of her brain liked the warmth of it. But mostly? It just pissed her off. This little sanctuary was a luxury they couldn't afford anymore. They were out of currency. Out of favors. And it physically hurt her chest to watch Arthur toss bits of his own life force into the furnace just to keep the illusion going for one more day.
"You really went soft on me, Art," she finally said.
Her voice cracked a little in the big room. No polite manners. No pretending. Just a tired, heavy fact. Saying it actually made her throat tight, mostly because she couldn't stop staring at how much his hands were shaking. He didn't even look up.
"Who would've thought?" she kept going. She pushed off the window frame because standing still was driving her crazy. "The Star Reaper. The guy who used to crack the earth open just by stepping on it. Now you're... what? A librarian? Tucking yourself away in a basement that literally smells like wet animal fur and mold."
She poured the sarcasm on thick, hoping it would actually make him mad.
Nothing. No reaction. He just kept rubbing a stained cloth over that pipe of his. The rag was a mess, probably hadn't been washed since the last siege. He just kept rubbing the wood. Over and over. It was that blank, staring-at-the-wall focus. The kind soldiers get when they don't want to think about the people they buried.
"Folks change," he muttered. He wasn't even looking at her. He was talking to the pipe. "They always do," he added, scratching at a piece of soot. "It's the one law the System can't cheat. Doesn't matter how many Tiers you climb or how many beast souls you rip out in the dark. Time always collects the tax." He paused, blowing a speck of ash off the rim. "I just stopped fighting the weight. Decided to carry the years instead of letting them drag me through the mud. Quieter this way. Less friction."
He finally lifted his gaze.
For one single, terrifying heartbeat, the tired grandfather act vanished completely. Behind those clouded, milky eyes—eyes that looked like they were going blind—Trice caught a violent flash of the Reaper. It was the cold, predatory spark of a legend that refused to stay buried in the history books. A look that didn't belong in a dusty study. It belonged on a battlefield. Right before a massacre.
"Age?" Trice let out a dry, hacking laugh. It scraped her throat like rusted iron.
"Yeah," Art agreed, going right back to his pipe.
"Don't play dumb with me. Age is a number. Just days stacking up," she snapped. She felt a spike of heat right in her chest. Real, fast anger. Her jaw locked. The silver stains on her fingers rubbed against her palms as she curled her hands into fists. She wanted to hit something.
"You know what actually tears a person apart?" she raised her voice, stepping forward. "It's the dirt you can't scrub out from under your nails. It's the things you did that won't wash off. I don't care how much soap you use. If it was just counting days, every single human alive would be a toddler next to some random ash-demon." She closed the distance to the desk in three wide steps. She slammed both palms on the mahogany. Hard. "You didn't get those lines on your face from a clock, Arthur. You aren't just old. You're eroded. Weathered. Marked by things that should have erased your existence entirely."
He laughed. It wasn't a good sound. It was rough. It sounded like someone stepping on dead winter branches.
"You're still terrible at letting people be nice, Trice," he said. A cough interrupted him. It sounded awful, rattling deep in his lungs with a wet noise. "You care too much. Always have. You just cover it up by acting nasty."
"I don't do weaknesses, you miserable old man," she snapped back, way too fast.
She looked away instantly. Stared at a pile of useless tax papers on the corner of the desk. Anything to avoid looking at his face. Anything to hide the fact that her eyes were burning and she was half a second away from cracking her stoic facade wide open.
"Relax. It's just us relics in here," Art chuckled, knocking the pipe against a brass ashtray. Clink.
"War doesn't do kindness," Trice said. Her eyes went desolate. There was a bug circling the candle flame on his desk. Just flying right into the heat over and over. Stupid thing. "You know that. It eats. It just chews everything up until there's nothing left but ash, cold silence, and widows. You taught me that yourself. Back on the front lines when we were standing ankle-deep in red mud."
She swallowed hard. The phantom memory of burning trenches flashed behind her eyes. "Did you forget the smell of the rot, Art?"
The grandfather act dropped. He just looked ancient. Hollow cheeks, skin looking paper-thin over his bones. He leaned his weight back. The wooden chair let out a loud, terrible creak.
"Yeah," he muttered, staring blankly upward. "It eats. Eats everything. And the worst part is, it always asks for a second helping."
The quiet got thick. Annoyingly thick. The brass clock on the shelf kept ticking. Tick, tick, tick. Loud enough to give someone a headache. Trice refused to back down. Nostalgia was dangerous. They were living in a city that was about to fall apart, they didn't have time to reminisce.