When they returned to the cottage, Lithia immediately laid out the bed rolls of fur for the girls again, and together she and the Elder Lich tucked them in for a sound and weary slumber. “I suppose ‘dinner’ will have to be breakfast instead.” Varus said as he watched them sleep without any hint that they planned on waking up to eat.

  Lithia crossed her arms and leaned against the wall with one foot out and one foot back on its toe with heel to the hard surface behind her. “Yeah, poor kids were exhausted, I swear I don’t think they slept more than six or eight hours total since we left.” She raised a critical blonde eyebrow and said with a dead-on look at Varus, “Next time don’t take so long to chase after them.”

  “Right… but since we’re bringing that up-” he hesitated for a moment and then sat down at the table with the fingers of his right hand drumming on the surface, “I still don’t know what I’m doing with them, and the thing I worried about, it’s still as much a worry now as it was before you left.”

  “The thing-” Lithia thought and paused mid-sentence as she sought through the fog of memory, her fingers snapped and an expression almost childlike in its earnestness and excitement at recalling the answer without having to ask for it, came over her face. “Right, preparing them to live in the wider world. That thing, eh?” She asked as if she was trying to sound like she knew the answer, but her self doubt was clear when she added again, “That thing?”

  “Yes.” Varus answered, his voice flat and his eyes glancing worriedly down at the pair who slept on their pelts and stirred only lightly in their dreams.

  “That shouldn’t be hard. Just keep them alive until they’re all grown up and they’ll figure it out.” Lithia brushed his worry aside with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  Varus did his best not to stare at her in disbelief at her absurd dismissal. Though in the back of his mind he corrected himself, ‘I take back what I said about her being the smartest person I’ve ever met.’

  “It’s not that simple. Unless the world has changed more than I can imagine, the people that children connect to when they are young, are the source of the bonds that let them become successful adults.”

  “Friends, yes.” Lithia said with a little snort, then spread out her hands at her side and said, “Then all we have to do is help them find friends, like, a community, a village, even?”

  Varus let out an exasperated breath and approached the window of his home. The hour was dark, kept only from being black as pitch by the light of the stars and the rare conjoinment of the two moons above. “Should I make a village out of the wolves of the forest?” He let out a deeply sarcastic chuckle, “I’ve heard of transmorphic magic casters capable of changing animals into people and people into animals, but I’m a necromancer, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with magic like that.”

  Lithia made a low whistle, “Really? That sort of magic is like…” she hesitated and scratched her head through the thick blonde hair on her head, “I don’t know, something out of the dawn of time, or out of myths and legends.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “There were a handful like that in my lifetime, but they were few.” Varus admitted, “According to what I know of, not since the Dark Mother and the Dark Father gave magic to the first people, and told them to choose their people from the beasts of the world was it common.”

  “Huh…how about that? I’ve never heard that story.” Lithia felt the urge rising in her to ask for more, the lure of a story she’d never heard set her skin to tingling with excitement greater than she’d ever had with a new crush.

  But she pushed it down, ‘Focus. You don’t need to get side tracked now.’ She told herself and approached Varus. She noticed the way he’d listened closer when he felt a physical touch, and so she put her hand out to close over the skinless white bones of the hand that now rested on the base of his window. “Anyhow, no, not that, and here I thought you were smart. You’ll do the obvious.” She said with a gentle smile up toward the silent Elder Lich who looked down at her with quiet expectation. “I mean, you can go with me to the village, you can settle there, with them.”

  Had her hand not lain over his as it did, and had he not seen her expression in the shadows of his cottage, Varus would have believed it was a joke of some sort. As it was, he still suspected it was such. “You’re pulling my bones. I’m an Elder Lich, and an ancient one. I have no living summoner, no driving commands, no one controlling me. You weren’t wrong before, by all rights I should be considered extremely dangerous to be near. That’s why I’ve chosen to work and remain alone since I first woke up from death. There’s no chance I will be accepted even by an adventurer’s guild, let alone common villagers? Or am I wrong?” His last question was more sarcasm than anything else, but as if she just enjoyed being contrary, she argued with him.

  “Maybe? There are vampire adventurers, right? Even in your era, you had noble undead, didn’t you?” She pointed out, and on the surface it was true.

  ‘On the surface.’ He repeated the thought before he replied out loud, “Yes. That’s true. But those are undead whose minds remain intact as long as they’re able to feed themselves.” Varus paused and began to rub his chin. “Hmm, there’s a story idea, a vampire struggling to stay sane when a curse prevents feeding from maintaining his mind…” In that moment, the world vanished as he hastened to his desk to scribble out the idea before it could be forgotten.

  “Ahem?” Lithia said with an impatient little voice, followed by a repeated coughing that interrupted his focus before he could even finish writing it down.

  “You have an intact mind.” She said as if he had not just stopped everything to write down a story idea. “All you need to do is show that you do.”

  “So your plan,” Varus said while he laid the quill delicately down beside his paper, “is for me to just ‘show up’ at that village with two children and move in, and just hope they don’t all run away screaming? Do you want them to run away screaming? Because that is how you make villagers run away screaming.”

  “No.” She practically skipped over to where he stood and rose to her tiptoes, then slapped her hands flat onto his shoulders. “My plan is to go with you to help you move in so that people don’t run away screaming. I am a pretty powerful adventurer, and I’m from a long, distinguished line of nobility. If I go with you, things will work out just fine. Trust me.” She emphasized, and for just a moment, a span of time no longer than a single twinkle of one of the infinite stars in the sky outside his cottage, he saw not the Lithia he knew in the present, but a valkyrie whose friendship the living Varus valued as much as life itself.

  Right down to that same reassuring smile.

  At his back, he could have sworn his protagonist and his party were winking and giving him a thumbs up to move forward for the first time in five thousand years.

  “I’ll go with you.” He promised, and when she clapped her hands together while exclaiming…

  “That settles that!”

  It was hard not to feel optimistic about the future.