I did a round of spell practiy uping wizardry exam- the question of which spells I would have to be able to cast for the exam had been answered for years thanks to it being a standardized exam administered by the Mage's Guild- and then decided that I'd been more than productive enough for one day, and that I should reward myself for my efforts.

  "Hello there, Joseph," Antiope said, as I walked into the store. "How's Frederick doing?"

  "Just got done fixing his wheelchair, so maybe he'll e by tomorrow and tell you himself," I said. "He told me he's got at least two more decades in him, though."

  "e surprised," Tim said, carefully levitating a heavy cardboard box down from a high shelf. "I know he's a half-elf and all, but a creaky old man like that feels like he should be dying in a few years, y'know?"

  Antiope and Tim were iing figures in Greenwood Vilge- or 'Elftown,' as some outsiders called our neighborhood. Antiope was a druid, just like my dad, although she wasn't quite as powerful as the guy who'd been trained by a uni for two turies before the War. But, like Dad, she'd settled down here in Greenwood Vilge pretty soon after the War, and hadn't moved since. Over the course of her three turies here, she'd ended up marrying a succession of human men, raising children with them, and m their loss, until this time, the ma and fell in love with happeo be an elf.

  Tim, by trast, was far closer to a peer to me, for all that he was more than old enough to be my father. He was a full-blooded elf, just like Antiope, but uiope and most of the other elves in Greenwood Vilge, he was in his mid-40s, and had never known a world where elves weren't a subject people of the Hikaano Empire. And for some reasoe Tim having been just as old as Antiope's human husbands had beehey first met... Iunno. Something about it always wigged me out, a little.

  "I get what you mean," I said. "Twenty years is plenty of time for him to have some kind of household act, even with him being a pretty meticulous and careful man who lives with a powerful druid. I might not have that full twenty years. But... well. I hope I do."

  "I hope so too," Tim said. "I'll admit, I wasn't super sure about bringing Frederito the publishing house, but I am more than happy to be proven wrong. That dude write."

  "Speaking of the publishing house..." I began, pulling out a few shiny brass dolr s aing them on the ter.

  "Yep, got your monthlies right here," Antiope said, reag uhe ter and rummaging through a box. "Here we are." She pulled a stack of ic books out and dropped them on the ter. "You do know we carry ic books starring boys, right?"

  "Do you really need me to expin why a teenage boy would prefer looking at drawings of, shall we say, rger than life women?" I said dryly.

  "Suit yourself," Antiope said, jotting down a note in her records- that I'd e to pick up my monthly subscriptions, what time I'd dohat, and a bunch of other tedious bookkeeping stuff that gave Antiope an objective view of which hours were the busiest for her family's store, and thus required more staffing. After all, it wasn't just her and Tim who worked here, they were simply the only ones here right now. "Enjoy yourself, young man."

  "I fully io," I said, nodding back at her as I stowed the thick stack of books in my coat's internal Bag of Holding. "Tell Talia I said hi."

  "I'm here!" Talia called, before bursting out of the stairwell behind the ter and s through the air at me.

  "Do we have to do this every time?" I asked, as I caught Talia in midair with a burst of are force. "You know I'm going to screw it up and break somethiually, right?"

  "But it's funnn," Talia whined.

  "Everything on that side of the ter is ented for durability," Tim added. "It'll be fine."

  I rolled my eyes, and threw my arms open to accept the iable Talia Hug, which came right on cue.

  Talia wasn't built like the typical elf. The typical elf was tall and slender, and with even weaker sexual dimorphism than the already weak dimorphism of humans- there was a reason the human idea of "androgynous" was simply "an ordinary elf." And while Talia's parents, both being noticeably shorter than the average elf, could possibly expin why Talia was eighteen years old and still only five feet tall, there was no reasonable expnation for why Talia was so curvy. Not that I was pining, mind you; Talia was a very affeate friend, and... well...

  ...I was the grandson of Artorias Wind-Caller. He liked 'em thick, and so do I.

  I had to i something, didn't I?

  "Mom, Dad, I-" Talia began.

  "You're an adult, you do what you want," Antiope said.

  "Have fun," Tim added.

  "You sure do read a lot of ic books about girls kissing, huh?" Talia remarked, as we sat on the roof of my house and picked through my monthly subscriptions for the most tantalizing bits.

  "You're also reading them," I pointed out.

  "Yeah, but I'm a girl," Talia said. "It's normal for me."

  "I'm pretty sure the humans would disagree with that," I said. "I just enjoy artwork of attractive women, and happen to prefer it in a text where there isn't some random-ass poorly-written dude I have to pretend isn't there. You enjoying that same artwork for the same reasons, though, would be 'elven deviancy,' because humans are homophobic."

  "The ic books are also elven deviancy," Talia pointed out. "That's why Greenwood Vilge has its own publishing house, remember?"

  My mother, a powerful wizard, was already expected to keep up with teological innovations as part of her work as a wizard-for-hire. As such, she'd often fill her free time by tinkering with various iterations of the printing press, and ended up sp a small publishing house in our neighborhood just to get the damn presses out of our house.

  Naturally, the local publishing house that existed entirely because a powerful wizard realized she didn't have a use for all these printing presses but still wanted someoo use them ended up getting a lot of use from locals with their own artistic impulses, printing all sorts of random bullshit... until someone mao print something that people actually liked, and suddenly Greenwood Vilge's artistiunity began to take the publishing house much more seriously.

  The publishing house's output retty diverse, all told. Most of its output was serialized media, usually oher a weekly or monthly basis, although it did publish a few whole, standalone works that weren't just lightly-edited colles of a serialized work. Some people published an ongoing story about the adventures of some fictitious protagonist, some published fictitious stories about real historical people, and some people just wrote a hing every week or month that was in the same vein as the things they'd made every publishing cycle for the past while and so simply spped the same name on it and called it a day.

  "Yeah, but humans are more fih women kissing each other than men doing so," I said. "Since humans are, generally, pretty patriarchal, and boys think it's hot when girls kiss but gross when boys do it. I uand it's currently not happening, but I think it pusibly could happen that a human publishing house decided to unch its own ao 'Girls Loving Girls In Improbable Situations.'"

  "They'd fuck up the improbable situations," Talia muttered. "They wouldn't get that the series is a high-cept joke about strange advehat always end the same way: with two chicks making out."

  "Sure, but I think there's still some artistic merit to drawings of girls kissing, even if they're not the pune to a high cept joke," I said. "I mea's be real with each other: you know I'm not reading this series because it makes me ugh."

  "Right, you're reading it because you're theoretically into girls," Talia said.

  "Talia," I began, wearily.

  "e on, man," Talia pleaded. "The unis are gohe mage-knights are gohe old days are gone, and were gone since long before you were born. Your insistenaintaining your virginity-"

  "Talia," I said, more firmly. "We're not having this argument again. Yes, you're my girlfriend. Yes, I do think you're attractive. Yes, I do io put a few babies in you one day. But... not yet. The unis are not gone. Sightings are rare, out on the frontier, but they do happen, and they are still out there. For so long as they're still out there... I 't give up hope. Elken could still be alive."

  "He probably died in the War."

  "He threw his own rider into a snowbank and ran away; if any uni survived the War Of The Roses, it would be Elken." I shrugged. "But even if he has died iime since, we know there are some unis left."

  "Joseph..."

  "My father was a mage-knight. His father was a mage-knight. And his father, too." I ched my fist. "I'm the test in a long line of mage-knights."

  Talia simply sighed, but I kept going.

  "If anyone is going t them back, it's going to be me."