## Chapter 373 — Before the Road Home

For two days after Ian disappeared, Kelda remained in the Elven Woods.

This was less a choice than the ordinary consequence of having crossed an impossible distance through somebody else's door.

The forester's rest north of the old stream had served well enough as a private meeting place. It served less elegantly as temporary accommodation for a half-dwarf whose house, workshop, contracts and pony were now separated from her by a journey nobody sensible could describe as nearby. Aelira had already begun arranging the practical route home. Kelda had listened to the first outline, asked three questions about roads and one about ships, then told her to stop pretending speed was available where it was not.

Porridge, she had been assured, would survive her absence.

Kelda was less certain about the fence.

The forester's rest itself was a small, old building intended for people who needed shelter near the outer paths rather than comfort. One main room held a table, shelves, a narrow hearth and enough hooks to prove generations of foresters had also disliked putting wet equipment on floors. A smaller sleeping room had two simple beds built against opposite walls. Kelda occupied one and had filled the space around it with the possessions that had accumulated around several impossible days.

The Fiskars splitting axe leaned beside the wall. Its sharpening block sat on the shelf above it.

Kelda had used the axe exactly once.

A dead section of hardwood had needed reducing for the hearth. She had warned Aelira that testing an unfamiliar tool against useful timber was safer than admiring it until memory turned it into perfection. The first strike had split the piece almost offensively cleanly.

Kelda had stared at the two halves. Then at the axe. Then split another piece because one result proved very little.

The second had been worse.

She had spent twenty minutes afterward examining the head, edge geometry, handle, balance and joint that was not a joint in any construction she understood.

The tool remained excellent.

Kelda found this irritating.

Lethira had found her irritation more entertaining than the axe.

Lethira herself had vanished back into the settlement with the translated books under one arm and the expression of someone who had just discovered an entire civilisation had industrialised poor romantic judgement. She returned to the rest twice during the first day. On the first visit she brought food and three opinions about the first volume. On the second she brought no food and seven opinions about the second.

Aelira eventually ordered her to take the books somewhere else.

The impossible ice-cream machine had gone under Aelira's protection along with the black recording device. Protection, she had reiterated, did not mean crown ownership. The objects would remain available to the people who had knowingly participated, while nobody else would be given a demonstration, a technical explanation or the opportunity to decide that a machine producing frozen food without fuel was an interesting basis for a new industry.

Sairen had been told about the cocoa seeds because Aelira needed someone competent to examine an unfamiliar plant. She had not been told about Earth. The seeds remained contained.

The translated story-books remained Lethira's problem.

The axe remained Kelda's.

For the first night after Ian left, the distinction had seemed useful.

Then Kelda tried to sleep.

She had expected the bridge to be the part that returned.

It was not.

What returned was Ian sitting on the floor with his head in his hands.

I don't know what I am doing.

That sentence had been more difficult to dismiss than the crying.

Kelda had dealt with powerful people before. Kings. Priests. Guild officers. Deep-dwarf authorities whose titles were heavy enough to require architecture. Thomas himself had become more dangerous than most nations while still finding ways to apologise to doors after walking into them.

Power did not impress Kelda merely by being large.

Uncertainty attached to power was another matter.

Ian could apparently alter reality while admitting he did not understand the thing doing the altering. He could produce food, roads, objects and doors. He could claim to have chosen deaths, then sit on a wooden floor because the people whose lives he had treated as story had acquired faces he could no longer keep at a safe distance.

Kelda had not decided what category contained him.

Aelira said a category was not presently required.

Ruvan had said that if Kelda spent long enough trying to name a dangerous thing before deciding what to do about it, the dangerous thing generally benefited.

Lethira had said middle-aged idiot remained available.

Sereth had told Lethira to stop helping.

Kelda had privately considered all three positions sound.

The second morning brought something simpler.

The page went.

Kelda had kept the prepared Common sheet folded inside a plain protective cover on the table beside the local copy of the book. She had checked it after breakfast, though nothing about the monthly passage allowed useful checking.

The page was there.

Then it was not.

No light. No noise. No opening in the air.

One moment Kelda's fingers rested on the outer cover. The next the weight beneath them changed.

A different sheet lay where the first had been.

Kelda stared at it.

Cream paper. Machine-even Common. A small image occupied the lower portion.

She did not touch it immediately.

“Aelira.”

The princess was outside speaking with one of the foresters. She came in quickly enough to prove Kelda's voice had carried information beyond the word itself.

Lethira followed her without invitation.

Kelda pointed at the table.

“The road opened.”

Aelira stopped beside the page.

Lethira came around the other side and saw the photograph. Her entire expression changed.

“Oh.”

That was all she said.

For perhaps ten seconds, none of them read the words.

Thomas and Isha stood beneath a tree unlike any tree in the Elven Woods.

The image was small, but clear. Thomas wore dark formal clothing, almost black until the captured light showed blue in it, with a strip of deep green at his throat. His hair was shorter than Kelda remembered from Green Road and better behaved than it had generally managed while travelling.

Isha stood beside him in pale clothing that fell in one clean line to the ground.

Human Isha. Rounded ears. Human face. Still Isha.

Neither looked at the device. They were looking at each other.

Kelda leaned closer.

“They look happy.”

Aelira's eyes remained on the image.

“Yes.”

Lethira pointed.

“He wore green.”

Kelda glanced at her.

“That is what you found?”

“I am capable of finding more than one thing.”

“You found the least important one first.”

“Thomas would consider colour coordination a systems problem. This is evidence of development.”

Aelira put one finger against the table.

“Read.”

They did.

The wedding had happened. Promises. Rings. Seven people chosen to be there. A meal afterward. Cool, dry weather with some sun.

Then the return to the coast where Thomas and Isha had once taken their first Earth holiday after beginning work. One night away. Cold sea. A small hill revisited.

Isha had turned twenty-six by the Earth count.

They both continued their work.

They were well.

Kelda reached Tessa's paragraph and stopped long enough to read it twice.

I am keeping the arrow. I will not shoot it. I am very glad to have it. Thank you.

“Good,” she said.

Lethira's teasing disappeared.

“Yes.”

Aelira read the final lines aloud.

“The still image on this page was made on our wedding day. It is ours to send. We are sending it because we want you to see us, not as payment for anything.”

Her voice slowed.

“We love you. We are safe.”

Silence held the room.

Kelda looked at the photograph again.

She had seen Thomas dead. She had seen Isha dead. She had watched both disappear from the Broken Court and spent months using work to make the world continue after the two people who had helped teach her that debt was not ownership had apparently ceased to be in it.

Now Thomas wore ridiculous formal Earth clothes.

Isha wore white.

They had rings.

They had gone to the sea for pleasure and apparently climbed a hill too small to deserve serious complaint.

Kelda sat down.

Lethira pulled out the opposite chair without making a joke.

Aelira remained standing.

After a while she said, “Sereth should see this before anyone else is told it arrived.”

Kelda nodded.

“And Ruvan.”

“Yes.”

Lethira looked towards the door.

“I can bring them.”

Aelira gave her the page only after making her promise not to fold it differently, roll it, put it beneath her clothing, carry it in the same bag as food or allow anybody outside the informed circle to see the image.

Lethira listened with increasing offence.

“I have transported intelligence through occupied territory.”

“You also put a cup down on top of Ian's translated account because you wanted both hands for chocolate.”

“That was one time.”

“It was yesterday.”

Lethira took the page with exaggerated care.

Kelda pointed at her.

“If you damage that, I will find out whether this axe also works on elves.”

Lethira looked at the modern splitting axe. Then at Kelda.

“A deeply inappropriate use of a wedding gift.”

“Go.”

She went.

Sereth came before midday. Ruvan came with her.

Neither spoke when they first saw the photograph.

Sereth sat where Kelda had sat and bent close enough that a loose strand of hair almost touched the paper. Her finger stopped near Isha's face. Did not touch.

The human ears drew her attention for only a second.

Then she looked at Isha's expression.

“She chose the pale clothing.”

It was not really a question.

Kelda said, “Presumably.”

Sereth's mouth moved.

“She looks beautiful.”

Lethira, from beside the wall, said, “Thomas also—”

Ruvan looked at her.

She stopped.

Sereth read the page.

Her composure failed nowhere dramatic. She reached the sentence about Isha's Earth birthday and breathed out through her nose. She reached the arrow and nodded once. She reached We love you and put her hand flat on the table.

Ruvan read standing behind her.

When he reached the photograph again, his attention settled on Thomas.

“He looks older.”

Kelda looked again.

Thomas did. Not greatly. The change lived more in posture than face. A young man in formal clothes beside the woman he had married, standing inside a life that did not require him to carry weapons, tools or a kingdom's expectations.

“He should,” Kelda said.

Ruvan glanced at her.

“He was seventeen.”

“He was ancient when he was fourteen.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

Sereth laughed once without lifting her eyes from the page.

They stayed at the forester's rest for lunch.

Nobody used the black device. Nobody replayed recordings. The page was sufficient.

Later, Aelira took it into secured keeping with the other correspondence material until Kelda's journey home was decided. Sereth returned to her own house carrying no copy and complaining only once that Earth had invented an excellent form of portrait and then placed it beyond every ordinary road.

Ruvan left after her.

Lethira remained long enough to ask whether Thomas's green neck-cloth might be a declaration of continued allegiance to elves.

Kelda threw a folded cloth at her.

By evening, the forester's rest was quiet again.

Kelda sharpened a perfectly adequate local knife. She refused to sharpen the new axe merely because a sharpening block had been provided and seemed designed to make the task simple. The edge did not need it.

That was what she told herself.

The next day, Aelira spent most of the morning elsewhere.

Sereth and Ruvan had their own lives to return to. Lethira had apparently reached a section of one book involving an avoidable misunderstanding and declared herself unavailable for governance.

Kelda packed.

Not because she was leaving that hour. Because being ready for a road made waiting less irritating.

Her few local things went into one bag. The axe presented a transport problem she intended to solve before any normal traveller asked why a half-dwarf had acquired a tool made from materials nobody could name. The local book remained wrapped separately, protected between two flat boards.

She stopped once while fastening the bag and looked at it.

Somewhere beyond every road Kelda knew, Thomas and Isha had the other copy.

Perhaps they had opened it by then. Perhaps Isha had seen Sereth moving. Perhaps Thomas had laughed at Porridge's nose. Perhaps they had watched six people eat lunch and discovered that nothing profound had happened for almost fifteen minutes.

Kelda hoped so.

The thought did not require certainty.

Outside, afternoon light moved through the managed trees around the forester's rest. Someone worked farther downslope; an axe struck wood at slow regular intervals. The old stream could be heard through the trees after several quiet seconds.

Kelda tightened the last strap on her bag.

Then she heard a knock at the door.

“Kelda, it's me, Ian. I have heard Isha and Thomas's answer.”

Kelda went still.

The voice was unmistakable.

She looked once at the axe beside the wall, not because she intended to use it, but because the absurdity of the gift and the person outside had become linked strongly enough that one summoned the other.

Then she crossed the room and opened the door.

Ian stood outside.

Kelda looked at him for several seconds. Then at the doorframe.

“You knocked.”

There was dry approval in it.

“You do learn.”

She stepped aside.

“Come in.”

The room was much as he had left it, except for the half-packed bag on the bed and his splitting axe leaning against the wall. The duplicate book was no longer there; Aelira had taken it into secure keeping with the correspondence material.

Kelda closed the door after him.

“You heard their answer.”

Her expression changed as she said it. Whatever humour the knock had earned disappeared.

“We did too.”

She went to the table and put one hand on its edge.

“They sent a picture from the wedding. Both of them. Married clothes, rings, all of it.”

A pause.

“They looked happy.”

Kelda's eyes stayed on Ian.

“And they answered us about the gift?”

“Yes, the only gift I gave them on the day was good weather.” Ian paused. “I also have their answer...”

Kelda's eyes narrowed slightly at good weather, but she did not interrupt.

Ian told her everything Isha had said after the page arrived.

First, the requests.

“Ian. Send the proof recording Aelira described. Only that recording.”

Kelda's shoulders eased by a fraction.

Ian continued.

After Isha and Thomas had watched Aelira's proof, Isha had asked again.

“Ian. Send the separate recording.”

Kelda looked down at the table.

She knew what had followed. She had stood outside the image while Ian gave the truth at the bridge. She had heard him say that Isha's death had been chosen because he wanted a good story and wanted Thomas pushed towards becoming the Hero.

Ian repeated Isha's answer after she watched it.

“Ian. I heard it.

“I am angry with you. You should have told me on the train. You knew enough to understand that I was deciding whether you could remain part of my life, and you let me decide without this.

“That changes how much I trust you.”

Kelda's jaw tightened.

Ian did not skip the mistake Isha had made next, or her correction.

“It does not change my answer to no.”

A brief pause.

“That was badly phrased.

“My answer is not no.

“You may remain connected to me under the limits I already gave you. I am more angry now than I was when I gave them. Both things are true.

“You do not get to call what you did necessary because we are happy now. You do not get to use our present life as proof that the bridge was a good decision.”

Kelda remained completely silent.

Ian went on.

When they had returned to the question the others had actually sent across the passage, Isha had answered that too.

“Ian. We accept the gift they chose to send.”

Thomas had added a condition—Ian included it because it had shaped what happened next.

“Exactly as they chose it.”

And Isha had finished:

“Nothing added. Nothing improved.”

Kelda's gaze moved briefly towards the place where the local copy of the book had been kept.

Ian continued with what had come after his later message.

“Ian.

“I believe you cried. I believe you are sorry you hid the truth. I am still angry that you did.

“As for Thomas's family: do not go to them yet.

“Kelda asks them first. They decide whether they want to meet you. If they say yes, then you may go. Kelda should be there. Aelira too, if she wishes.”

Ian told her Thomas had then added that if his family said no, that was the end of it.

Isha's answer to that had been simple.

“You heard him.”

Finally, Ian repeated the last thing she had said after he mentioned the wedding weather.

“I did like the weather, Ian.

“Thank you for asking first.”

The room became quiet.

Outside, the distant chopping had stopped. The stream remained audible through the trees, and somewhere above the roof a bird moved heavily enough through a branch to shake several leaves loose.

Kelda stood with one hand resting against the table.

For a while she did not look at Ian.

Then she let out a long breath.

“She is still angry with you.”

It was not a question.

Kelda looked up.

“And she still said yes.”

Her expression remained hard enough that Ian could not mistake the second fact for erasing the first.

“That is a better answer than you had any right to expect.”

She glanced towards the door, then towards her half-packed bag.

“And Thomas did not give you the same answer.”

Kelda had caught that absence immediately.

“He gave you terms for anything involving him. Ask first. No general permission.”

Her fingers tapped once against the table.

“That sounds like Thomas.”

A little sadness entered the words.

Then she returned to the practical problem.

“So.”

Kelda straightened.

“Isha has told you to ask me to ask his family.”

A pause.

“And Thomas has said that if they refuse, it ends there.”

She considered that for several seconds.

“I can do that.”

Her eyes sharpened again.

“But I am not carrying a sales pitch for you.”

Kelda gestured towards the chair opposite her.

“I will tell Mira, Rowan, Mara and Tessa what happened. That you came here. That we chose the gift. That Thomas and Isha accepted it. That you told them the truth you withheld before.

“I will tell them Thomas and Isha would like them to have the choice of meeting you and making their own images or messages if they want.

“And I will tell them they are equally free to say they never want you near their farm.”

Kelda looked directly at Ian.

“That is the question I am willing to carry.”

“Agreed. Should Aelira go too? She has a way with people and complexity. I think she, and you, probably understand me better than I do already.”

Ian paused.

Kelda's expression shifted at the compliment, though not towards pleasure.

“Aelira should decide whether Aelira goes.”

She pulled the chair out with one boot and sat, the half-packed travelling bag still visible through the sleeping-room doorway behind her.

“But yes. I would ask her.”

Kelda rested her forearms on the table.

“Thomas's family know her. They know me. And if you start explaining yourself badly, between us we have a reasonable chance of stopping you before the explanation becomes another problem.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“Also, she is better with questions where three true things disagree with each other.”

A pause.

“You are wrong about one part.”

Kelda looked directly at him.

“I don't understand you better than you do. I understand what I've seen you do. That is smaller, and more useful.”

She let that sit for a moment before adding, more quietly, “Aelira may say the same.”

Ian paused again.

“Do you want to see Porridge before you go?”

For the first time since he had arrived, Kelda's face lost its guarded shape almost completely.

She stared at him.

“Porridge?”

Her eyes flicked towards the door, as if several days of road might somehow have shortened while they spoke.

Then suspicion returned.

“What exactly are you offering?”

Kelda leaned back.

“Because yes. Obviously I want to see the stupid animal.”

A beat.

“But if the next part of that sentence involves making another impossible road, you ask before you open it.”

“If you open this door wanting to go there, it will take you there. When you open your door and want to come back, you'll come back.”

Kelda looked at the door. Then at Ian. Then back at the door.

“You say things like that much too casually.”

She stood anyway.

Ian continued.

“I can maybe relay Isha's reply to Aelira whilst you're gone, if you want to ask her?”

Kelda considered that more seriously.

“Yes.”

She tightened one strap on the half-packed bag and then apparently decided carrying luggage through an impossible door merely to inspect her own house would be ridiculous. The bag remained on the bed.

“Tell her what you told me. Isha's words, Thomas's words, and that Thomas wants his family asked before you appear anywhere near them. Don't improve it.”

A pause.

“And ask Aelira whether she wants to come with me. Do not tell her she should.”

Kelda looked at the door again.

Ian said, “When you're back we can head out.”

That earned him a sharper look.

“You are very confident I am coming back.”

The dryness lasted only a moment.

Kelda crossed to the wall and took the new splitting axe with her.

Ian raised no objection.

She noticed.

“This is mine now. If your door puts me somewhere useful, I am taking my axe.”

Her hand settled on the latch.

For several seconds she did nothing.

The forester's rest remained on the other side of the room: old shelves, half-packed bag, Ian, the faint sound of the stream outside.

Kelda closed her eyes briefly.

Green Road. Her house. Workshop. Fence. Porridge. Home.

She opened the door.

Late-afternoon light came through from the other side.

Not Wood Elf forest.

The old charcoal shelf spread beyond the threshold.

Kelda's workshop stood exactly where it belonged. Her house beyond it. Thomas and Isha's closed door farther along the path. The fence had acquired a fresh section of damage near the lower corner.

Kelda stared at it.

“I knew it.”

A small stocky shape lifted its head beyond the fence.

Porridge looked towards the impossible doorway. His ears came forward.

Kelda's entire face changed.

“Hello, idiot.”

The pony began walking. Then trotting.

Kelda stepped through quickly enough that he did not have the opportunity to investigate interworld geometry with his face.

Her boots landed on the familiar ground.

The door remained open behind her, showing the forester's rest and Ian beyond it.

Porridge reached her.

Kelda put one arm around his neck.

He immediately attempted to inspect the axe.

“No.”

He redirected his attention towards her coat.

“No.”

Her hair.

“Absolutely not.”

Porridge pushed his nose against her shoulder.

Kelda stopped objecting.

For a while she simply stood with him.

The workshop smelled right. Wood smoke came from her own chimney. The lower path still held the shallow repair line she had left before Ian's arrival had turned several days into an administrative problem for reality.

Kelda looked towards Thomas and Isha's house.

Closed.

Still there.

Then towards her own.

Someone had been caring for the place. Water had been left where it should be. The yard had not become overgrown in her absence. A covered bundle beside the workshop suggested somebody from Larchmeet had delivered material she had been expecting.

Porridge nudged her again.

“Yes, I missed you.”

The admission was delivered to his mane, where nobody politically significant could use it.

She stayed only long enough to check the animals, hearth and obvious state of the property. The axe received a place inside the workshop rather than coming back with her.

That took longer than she intended because Kelda stood for almost a minute deciding where an impossible Earth tool belonged among tools made by people she understood.

Eventually she put it beside her best splitting maul.

“Don't become arrogant.”

The axe remained professionally silent.

When Kelda returned to the house door, she stopped with one hand on the latch.

The instruction Ian had given her was absurdly simple.

Want to come back.

She looked once at Green Road.

Then opened the door.

The forester's rest waited beyond it.

Kelda stepped through.

Aelira was sitting at the table.

The princess had apparently arrived while Kelda was gone. She had removed her outer cloak and folded it beside her rather than claiming one of the hooks. Ian remained in the room, but whatever conversation had taken place before Kelda returned was over.

Kelda closed the door behind herself.

“It works,” she said.

Aelira looked towards the door.

“So I was told.”

“Porridge is well.”

Aelira inclined her head with appropriate seriousness.

“The most important result.”

“The fence is not.”

“That also seems predictable.”

Kelda crossed the room. The brief visit home had changed something visible in her even if she would have objected to having it named. Her shoulders sat differently. The tension of being several days and an impossible distance from her own workshop had eased.

She looked from Aelira to Ian. Then back to Aelira.

“He told you?”

“He repeated Isha's replies and Thomas's conditions.”

Aelira's expression had none of the lightness the Porridge report had briefly allowed.

“She is angry with him. She has reduced her trust in him. She nevertheless chooses to let the connection remain under the boundaries she previously set.”

Kelda nodded.

“And Thomas?”

“Has given no comparable general permission. If Ian proposes something involving Thomas's own choices, he is to ask first.” Aelira paused. “And Thomas's family are not to be approached until we ask them whether they wish to be approached.”

“That is what he told me.”

“I expected it would be.”

Kelda pulled out the other chair and sat.

“So. Do you want to come?”

Aelira did not answer immediately.

She looked towards Ian. Not suspiciously. Precisely. Then back to Kelda.

“Yes.”

Kelda's eyebrows rose slightly.

Aelira continued before the response could become larger than the decision.

“I know Mira, Rowan, Mara and Tessa. They know me. More importantly, they have already spent years receiving impossible information about Thomas through people they trusted. If we bring them another impossible thing, I would rather they hear it from people whose judgement they already know.”

Kelda nodded once.

“That was my thought.”

“I am not going as Ian's advocate.”

Aelira's gaze moved briefly towards him again.

“Nor as his accuser.”

She folded her hands on the table.

“I will tell them what I personally witnessed. That Ian appeared. That he admitted what he had concealed from Isha. That we challenged him. That he allowed refusal. That the gift was made by our choices rather than his selection. That Thomas and Isha accepted it.”

Her expression tightened faintly.

“And that none of those facts require them to forgive him, like him, meet him or permit him onto their land.”

Kelda leaned back.

“There is the complexity.”

Aelira gave her a dry look.

“You make it sound like a disease.”

“I've watched you work.”

“That is not an improvement.”

Kelda's mouth moved.

Then Aelira added, more quietly, “I would also like to see them.”

That was different.

Kelda's humour disappeared.

Aelira looked towards the closed door, though beyond it now lay only the ordinary Wood Elf forest.

“The last time I stood with Thomas's family, too much of what I carried to them was grief, danger or secrecy. This time we have a wedding image.”

Kelda looked down at the table.

“Yes.”

“And we have Thomas asking us to give them a choice about something he wants.”

Aelira rose.

“So I will go.”

She reached for her cloak.

“We ask. We explain. We do not persuade.”

Kelda stood as well.

“And if they say no?”

“Then Ian does not meet them.”

No hesitation. No qualification.

Kelda nodded.

“Good.”

Aelira fastened her cloak and glanced once towards Ian.

“Now we can head out.”

“The door will take you outside, or it will take you near their home. When you leave their house their door will either take you outside, or here, whatever you wish. If they want me to arrive, just say it. If not, I shall wait here.”

Ian paused.

“Lethira may ask me for more manga, remember I am weak before you decide to spend too long there.”

Kelda stared at him.

Aelira closed her eyes briefly.

“That,” Kelda said, “is the first convincing argument you have made for haste.”

Aelira looked at her.

“You are encouraging him.”

“I am acknowledging a material risk.”

“The material risk is Lethira acquiring an unlimited supply of translated romantic fiction.”

“Exactly.”

Aelira's expression suggested that this had not improved the argument.

Then she turned back to Ian.

“We understand.”

Her tone became precise again.

“We will ask Thomas's family. We will tell them what they need in order to make the choice themselves. If they wish to meet you, we will say so. If they do not, you remain here and do nothing further concerning them.”

Kelda nodded.

“And don't interpret us taking a long time as a hidden yes.”

Aelira added, “Or a hidden no.”

Kelda reached for her outer layer.

“We may simply be talking.”

“Thomas's family have earned the right to take as long as they need,” Aelira said.

She looked towards the door.

“Near their home. Not inside it.”

Kelda agreed immediately. “Obviously.”

Neither woman appeared interested in discovering whether an impossible door could also understand trespass law.

Kelda put her hand on the latch.

For a moment she and Aelira stood side by side before an entirely ordinary wooden door.

The last time Kelda had travelled to Thomas's family carrying impossible information, she had helped tell them their son was alive after a kingdom had already made them grieve him.

This time there was a wedding photograph.

There was also Ian.

The balance did not improve merely because one part was kinder.

Kelda looked at Aelira.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

Kelda opened the door wanting the road near Thomas's family home.

The forester's path vanished.

Beyond the threshold stood a small familiar wood.

Mushrooms traced an incomplete ring through damp leaf litter beneath the trees.

Kelda recognised the place immediately.

Her face tightened.

“The fairy circle.”

Aelira looked past her.

Through the trees, beyond the lower hedge and fields, smoke rose from a farmhouse chimney.

Thomas's home.

Not the Earth flat.

The first one he had remembered as his.

Kelda stepped through. Aelira followed.

The door remained behind them until Kelda released the handle. Then it was simply gone.

Aelira studied the empty space where it had been.

“I dislike how quickly that is becoming comprehensible.”

Kelda adjusted her coat.

“I don't understand it.”

“No.”

“I'm just no longer surprised every time.”

“That may be worse.”

They started towards the farm.

Neither hurried.

Ian waited.

The forester's rest became ordinary around the absence of Kelda and Aelira. Afternoon light shifted across the table. The stream remained audible beyond the walls. Once, footsteps passed along the outer path without stopping. Somewhere farther into the woods, somebody called to another forester and received an indistinct answer.

No message appeared.

The door remained a door.

Nearly an hour passed before someone knocked.

Not Kelda's practical single knock.

Three quick taps, a pause, then two more.

The door opened before Ian had supplied an answer.

Lethira Dawnleaf leaned around it.

“I was told you were here.”

She entered, closed the door behind herself and looked around for Kelda and Aelira.

“They have gone to Thomas's family?”

Ian's continued presence and the two women's absence evidently supplied enough answer for her purposes.

“Good.”

Lethira carried one of the translated manga under her arm.

Not the first volume Ian had seen her reading. A different one, already far enough used that several slips of local paper marked pages between the covers.

She sat in Kelda's vacated chair without asking, placed the book on the table and regarded Ian with unusual seriousness.

“I have a complaint.”

A beat.

“There are only twelve volumes.”

She pushed the manga towards him as if presenting evidence before a magistrate.

“The final one ends with the woman deciding she will tell him how she feels.”

Lethira opened the book near the back and tapped one panel.

“Then it stops.”

Her eyes lifted to Ian.

“You have either given me an incomplete story, or humans have developed a form of warfare I had not previously encountered.”

She folded her arms.

“I require clarification.”

“Sometimes they end that way. Sometimes the author had plans for a second series and it didn't work. Sometimes there are more.”

Lethira stared at him.

The possibility that the answer might simply be there is no more had clearly offended her. The possibility that there might be more was worse in a different direction.

“Humans allow stories to stop because the person making them could not continue?”

Ian's explanation had supplied enough categories for her to understand the broad problem, if not the industries behind it.

She looked down at the final volume.

“That is barbaric.”

A brief silence followed.

Then Ian handed her season two.

Lethira looked at what had appeared in his hands. Then at Ian. Then back at the continuation.

Her expression became very still.

“You had this.”

She took it from him with both hands.

“You had this while I was explaining the moral failure of your civilisation.”

The first pages opened beneath her fingers. Common lettering filled speech balloons and captions exactly as before. Familiar faces appeared again. Whatever unresolved declaration had ended the earlier series had, evidently, not been abandoned forever.

Lethira turned one page. Then another.

Her eyes widened.

She snapped the book shut.

“No.”

Ian received a look of profound accusation.

“You knew.”

She gathered the continuation against her chest together with the volume she had brought.

“I withdraw the complaint.”

A beat.

“I replace it with a different complaint.”

She stood.

“You are dangerous.”

Lethira reached the door, stopped, and looked back.

“Do not leave before I determine whether there is a third one.”

Then she disappeared outside with both books.

The door closed.

For several minutes, the forester's rest was quiet again.

The room stayed quiet long enough for the light to change.

Ian waited.

Lethira did not return with a demand for a third season. No message appeared on the table. The door remained closed while late afternoon thinned towards evening, the forest outside settling into the quieter rhythm that came before full dark.

Eventually the latch moved.

The door opened from the other side.

Kelda came through first.

Aelira followed her.

Neither woman looked hurried. Neither looked as though the conversation at the farm had been simple.

Kelda closed the door behind them and remained there for a moment with one hand on the latch.

“They said yes.”

She did not smile.

Aelira removed her cloak and laid it across the back of a chair.

“To meeting you,” she said. “Only that decision has been made.”

Kelda crossed to the table and sat. There was soil on one boot and a small smear of something pale along her sleeve that looked suspiciously like flour.

“They were having supper preparations when we arrived,” she said. “We interrupted.”

Aelira gave her a look.

“We were invited to stay.”

“We still interrupted.”

“They fed us.”

“They are farmers. That proves nothing.”

Aelira apparently decided the argument had already been conducted once and did not require a second performance.

She sat opposite Kelda.

“We told all four of them.”

Ian required no clarification.

Mira. Rowan. Mara. Tessa.

Aelira continued.

“We told them you appeared here after their last information about you. We told them that Kelda met you first, that the rest of us chose whether to meet you, and that you offered the image-making device under our control.”

Her hands rested loosely on the table.

“We told them about the bridge.”

Kelda's expression hardened.

“All of it.”

Aelira nodded.

“That you admitted choosing Isha's death there because you wanted what you considered a better story and because you wanted Thomas moved towards becoming the Hero.”

The forest outside made the silence around the sentence feel larger.

Kelda continued the account.

“Mira asked whether that was your exact answer.”

“We said yes,” Aelira said.

“Then she asked whether you had tried to explain it away afterward.”

“We said no.”

Kelda looked towards Ian.

“That helped you.”

Aelira corrected her gently. “It prevented one additional harm. I would not call that help.”

“Fine.”

Kelda rubbed one thumb over the edge of the table.

“Rowan asked what else we actually knew you chose.”

That question had evidently occupied some time.

“We answered only what we could support,” Aelira said. “Your own admissions. The bridge. Your broader statement to Isha that you had chosen some of the things which hurt them. The Earth household argument you said you deliberately prompted because you believed Thomas and Isha needed to confront a problem.”

She paused.

“We did not tell them you caused every disaster in Thomas's life. We do not know that.”

Kelda nodded.

“Mara asked the same question three different ways to make certain we weren't protecting you with uncertainty.”

Aelira's mouth moved faintly.

“She is Thomas's sister.”

“Yes.”

Kelda leaned back.

“Tessa mostly wanted to know about the arrow.”

That answer had apparently been easier.

“She is still angry,” Aelira said. “Very specifically.”

Kelda's voice shifted, taking on Tessa's directness without trying to imitate it completely.

“She said: ‘He took something from where I kept it. I had already given it to Isha once, but it was mine to keep for her after she was gone. He didn't ask me.’”

Ian's original printed note had already established that anger. Hearing it after everything else had evidently not reduced it.

Kelda continued.

“Then she said she was still glad Isha had it.”

Aelira added, “She does not consider those positions contradictory.”

“They aren't.”

“No.”

For several seconds Kelda looked at nothing in particular.

Then she resumed.

“We told them Thomas and Isha received the gift.”

That changed the family conversation more than the metaphysics had.

Aelira described the wedding photograph: Thomas and Isha beneath the tree, the formal clothes, the rings, the page saying they were well. The fact that Isha had watched Sereth move and speak. That Thomas had seen Green Road as it existed now rather than as he remembered leaving it.

Mira had cried then.

Kelda did not decorate the fact.

“She asked whether Thomas laughed at Porridge.”

Ian could reasonably infer the answer Kelda had given.

Aelira's expression softened.

“We told her yes.”

Kelda added, “Rowan wanted to know which things were in the book.”

“We described them.”

“The workshop mattered to him.”

Aelira glanced at Kelda.

“You were surprised.”

“I was not.”

“You asked why.”

“I asked which part.”

“That is surprise with better boots.”

Kelda ignored her.

“Mara asked about the blank pages at the end.”

Aelira answered that too.

“We said we believed they had been left for Thomas and Isha to fill with their own life if they wished.”

That had produced another silence at the farm.

Then they had reached the actual question.

Kelda's expression returned fully to the present room.

“We told them Thomas wants them asked before you go anywhere near them.”

Aelira nodded.

“We told them his exact condition as it was relayed to us: if they say no, that is the end of it.”

“And that Isha said the same thing in practice,” Kelda added. “Ask first. Let them decide.”

Aelira looked at Ian.

“Mira answered first.”

She did not attempt to reproduce an entire speech. There had not been one.

“Her answer was: ‘If he says he will face Thomas's family, then he can face Thomas's mother.’”

Kelda's mouth twitched, but there was no humour in the underlying statement.

“Rowan took longer.”

Aelira continued.

“He wanted to know whether you could arrive normally.”

Kelda looked towards the door.

“We explained normally had become an ambitious word.”

“He meant without appearing in the middle of the room.”

“Yes.”

Aelira returned her attention to Ian.

“He agrees to meet you. He does not want demonstrations. He does not want you producing anything merely to prove what you can do.”

Kelda added, “And don't fix anything on the farm.”

The instruction came with sufficient force that it was probably Rowan's.

“He was very clear about that.”

Aelira's expression suggested she had found the concern reasonable.

“Mara also agreed.”

That answer had contained the most conditions.

“She does not want the meeting turned immediately into a request for photographs or messages,” Aelira said. “You meet them first. They decide what they think of you after meeting you. Only then does anyone discuss whether they want to make something for Thomas and Isha.”

Kelda nodded.

“She also said no gifts.”

A pause.

“None.”

Aelira looked mildly sympathetic.

“Kelda told her she should specify that very clearly.”

“I have experience.”

Then came Tessa.

Kelda's eyes sharpened.

“Tessa said yes before Mara finished.”

Aelira's expression altered by a fraction.

“She wants to see you.”

Kelda supplied the reason.

“She said: ‘He took my arrow. He can answer me while I'm looking at him.’”

No one in the forester's rest mistook that for forgiveness.

Aelira folded her hands again.

“So the answer is yes.”

She laid out the conditions with the same precision she had used at the bridge.

“You arrive because they have invited you. Kelda and I remain present unless they ask otherwise. You do not create objects, food, clothing, images, doors inside their house, or any other alteration unless someone specifically asks you to.”

Kelda added, “No gifts.”

Aelira continued.

“You do not treat silence as permission. You do not answer a thought nobody has spoken, even if you become aware of it.”

That boundary was behavioural rather than metaphysical, and therefore one Ian could actually observe.

“They know you may be capable of perceiving more than they say. We did not promise them you could switch that ability off, because you have told us you cannot honestly make that promise.”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“If somebody tells you to leave, you leave.”

Aelira nodded.

“If one member of the family wants the conversation to stop, we stop long enough to determine whether the meeting itself continues. Four people agreed to meet you. One person's agreement does not spend the other three.”

Kelda's gaze went briefly towards the door.

“They're waiting.”

Aelira did not stand yet.

“There is one more thing.”

Her expression had become quieter.

“Mira asked whether you were frightened to meet them.”

A small pause.

“We told her we did not know.”

Kelda looked directly at Ian.

“I told her you probably should be.”

Then she stood.

Aelira rose beside her.

“The invitation is real,” she said. “So are the conditions.”

Kelda put one hand on the door latch.

“They said yes, Ian.”

“I accept it all and will try my hardest to do it. The machine may show me things I don't want, I can't stop that. But I will ask it to preserve privacy when asked, as we did here.”

Kelda listened without interrupting.

At the mention of the machine, Aelira's attention sharpened.

“That is the distinction I wanted you to make. Do not promise control you do not possess. Promise what you can actually choose.”

“And if it shows you something private anyway,” Kelda added, “knowing it is not permission to use it would be a good start.”

Aelira nodded. “If someone asks for privacy, you treat the request as binding even if the mechanism itself fails to.”

Ian stood.

“I am ready.”

Kelda looked at him for a moment, then reached for the latch.

“Good.”

Aelira put on her cloak.

Neither offered reassurance.

Kelda opened the door.

The forester's rest disappeared from the other side.

The same small wood waited beyond it, though evening had advanced since Kelda and Aelira had last stood there. The air was cooler. Through the thinning branches, warm light showed from several windows of the farmhouse.

Kelda stepped through first. Aelira followed. Ian crossed after them.

The impossible doorway vanished when Kelda released it.

For a few seconds all three stood beneath the trees.

Then Kelda started towards the farm.

They did not take the shortest line across the field. There was a proper track from the wood to the yard, and Kelda followed it. Whatever Ian could do to distance, nobody seemed inclined to use it for the final few hundred metres.

The farmhouse grew clearer as they approached.

It was intensely familiar in ways the reconstructed memories and written descriptions had never quite managed. A working farm rather than a symbolic home: stone and timber repaired in different generations, a side building with newer boards along one wall, tools where tools were useful, mud worked into the ground around the gate. Light came from the kitchen.

Someone had left a pair of boots outside the door. Another, smaller pair sat beside them.

Kelda slowed before the yard. Aelira did the same.

“This is the last point at which you are here because we brought you,” she said. “Beyond that door, you are there because they invited you.”

Kelda glanced at Ian.

“And they're expecting three people. So don't suddenly decide arriving through the ceiling would be memorable.”

Aelira gave her a tired look.

“It needed saying.”

“It did not.”

“With him?”

Aelira considered that.

“Perhaps.”

They crossed the yard.

Before Kelda could knock, the farmhouse door opened.

Tessa stood there.

She had evidently been waiting close enough to hear them approach.

For a moment she looked only at Kelda and Aelira. Then her eyes moved to Ian.

She was older than the girl connected to the memories he had first encountered, though not by enough years to make the resemblance difficult. Her expression contained none of Lethira's curiosity and none of Aelira's careful distance.

She looked him over from shoes to face.

Behind her, movement stopped in the kitchen.

Tessa's hand remained on the door.

“So.”

A beat.

“You're Ian.”

She did not offer her hand. She stepped aside.

“Mum says you're invited in.”

Her gaze stayed fixed on him.

“I have questions.”

“I will answer as truthfully as I can.”

Tessa held his gaze for another moment, then gave a small nod.

Ian followed her inside.

The farmhouse door closed behind Aelira.

Warmth replaced the evening air almost immediately. The room smelled of bread, cooked vegetables and the remains of a meal that had been interrupted and then partly resumed. It was a lived-in kitchen rather than a room arranged for visitors: dishes stacked near the basin, a cloth folded over a loaf, one chair slightly farther from the table than the others.

Nobody had made it ceremonial.

Kelda seemed to approve of that.

Mira stood near the far end of the table.

Ian had seen versions of her before through a mechanism that had never needed permission to show him anything. Seeing her here, looking directly back at him, was different enough that the comparison became useless.

She did not resemble Thomas simply in face. Something in the way she held still while deciding what to say belonged to him too.

Rowan remained seated. One hand rested beside a mug, his work-marked fingers loose against the wood. He looked at Ian with the concentration of a man inspecting something unfamiliar that had arrived on his land and might prove either useful or dangerous.

Mara stood beside the hearth.

She had not chosen a seat yet.

Her attention moved briefly to Kelda and Aelira when they entered, then returned to Ian. There was no hostility performed for his benefit. That made the scrutiny more substantial, not less.

Tessa returned to her place at the table but did not sit.

Kelda removed her coat and hung it where Mira indicated. Aelira did the same. Neither moved to place themselves between Ian and the family, though both remained close enough to be part of the conversation.

Mira spoke first.

“Sit, if you want.”

No one had arranged a special chair for him.

There was simply an empty one at the table.

“We've already heard a great deal about you.”

Her eyes stayed on Ian.

“Some of it from Thomas. Some from Isha. Some from Kelda and Aelira.”

A pause.

“And apparently some of what Thomas and Isha knew wasn't true because you hadn't told them everything.”

Tessa's jaw tightened.

Mira noticed, but continued.

“I don't expect this to be comfortable. I don't think making it uncomfortable on purpose would help either.”

Rowan gave the smallest nod.

Mara finally moved from the hearth and took her chair.

Kelda sat beside her. Aelira chose the remaining place near the end of the table, leaving Ian's empty chair clearly part of the family conversation rather than beside either of his intermediaries.

Mira looked towards Tessa.

“You said you wanted to ask first.”

Tessa sat down.

For several seconds she said nothing.

Then she reached beneath the neckline of her clothes and drew out a small cord.

There was no arrow attached to it.

Only a little carved wooden piece Ian did not recognise.

Her fingers closed around it anyway.

“When Isha died, I kept her arrow.”

Tessa's voice was controlled.

“I had given it to her. Then she was gone, and it was one of the things of hers I could still hold.”

She looked directly at Ian.

“You took it out of the place where I kept it and put it in front of her on Earth.”

Aelira remained silent. So did Kelda.

Tessa leaned forward slightly.

“I am glad she has it.”

The distinction came cleanly.

“I am glad she said she is keeping it.”

Her fingers tightened around the cord.

“But you never asked me.”

A beat.

“Why did you take my arrow?”

“I was afraid Isha would hate me, or perhaps wouldn't like me, I wanted to somehow, at the same time, say sorry and make her happy. I grabbed what I thought would do that, in the moment. Unlike most here, I am able to grab between worlds. At the time I didn't know it was a copy or the real one, it wasn't important in the moment.”

Ian paused, and looked away.

“Later, i think Isha may have asked Thomas? i had it become the real one. I am not sure why, I don't usually know what I'm doing. Maybe I wanted to become known, to you, by leaving the message. I didn't think how it would affect you, for that I am sorry. But I am also glad she has it.”

Tessa did not answer immediately.

Her hand was still closed around the little wooden piece at her neck. The room had become quiet enough that the fire shifting in the hearth seemed unusually loud.

Kelda's attention had settled on Ian at it wasn't important in the moment.

Aelira noticed Tessa instead.

Tessa eventually looked down at the table.

“It was important to me.”

Ian's wording had hurt her. She did not raise her voice to demonstrate it.

“The arrow, I mean.”

Her thumb moved over the carved piece on the cord.

“You didn't know whether you had taken mine or made another one, because the difference didn't matter to what you wanted to do.”

She lifted her eyes again.

“That is what you just said.”

There was no accusation in the phrasing that required Ian to defend himself against something he had not meant. She was checking the shape of his own answer.

Kelda shifted slightly in her chair.

Mira remained still.

Tessa continued before anyone else could take the question from her.

“If it had been a copy and mine was still upstairs, I think I would have been angry about you copying it.”

A small pause.

“But I would still have had mine.”

Her fingers tightened.

“Instead you decided later that hers should become the one I kept.”

The words came more slowly now.

“I understand why Isha having the real one feels better. I do. When Kelda told me she said she would keep it and never shoot it, I was glad.”

She looked towards Kelda for a moment.

Kelda nodded once.

Tessa turned back.

“But I had already lost Isha.”

That was the part of the question which had not fitted neatly into theft, copies or impossible mechanics.

“I thought she was dead. Thomas too. I didn't know Earth existed. I didn't know Isha was alive somewhere else and becoming human and getting married.”

Her voice caught slightly on the last word, then steadied.

“I had the arrow because I couldn't have her.”

Nobody interrupted.

“And then one day it wasn't where I put it.”

Ian had left a message. That had changed the meaning of the disappearance eventually.

It had not changed the first moment of finding the space empty.

Tessa looked at him for a long time.

“So when you say you didn't think how it would affect me, I believe you.”

That was not absolution.

It sounded almost worse than disbelief would have.

Mara's eyes moved briefly towards Ian, then back to her sister.

Tessa breathed in.

“I don't want it back.”

The statement came firmly.

“Isha has it now. She chose to keep it. I want her to have it.”

Her hand loosened around the cord.

“But if you ever want something of mine again, you ask me.”

She glanced towards Aelira.

“Even if you can just reach through the world and take it.”

Aelira said, “That is reasonable.”

Kelda's answer was rougher.

“It shouldn't need saying.”

“No,” Tessa said. “But apparently it does.”

Rowan had remained silent through all of it.

Now he leaned back a little.

“I want to understand one part.”

Tessa looked at him, then gave a small nod. Her first question had not exhausted her anger, but she was willing to let someone else speak.

Rowan's attention stayed on Ian.

“You said you were afraid Isha would hate you.”

He spoke slowly, arranging the sequence rather than pressing for an immediate confession.

“So you took something you knew belonged to her old life because you thought it might make her happy.”

His gaze shifted briefly towards Tessa.

“You didn't know whose possession it was at that point.”

Aelira's expression changed by a fraction. The distinction mattered.

Rowan continued.

“Then later, after Thomas or Isha said something about it, you made it the original.”

He waited only long enough to make sure he had not accidentally added more certainty than Ian had supplied.

“And you think part of why you did that might have been because you wanted us to know you existed.”

Ian had, indeed, said precisely that.

Rowan rubbed his thumb once along the side of his mug.

“You keep saying you don't know what you're doing.”

Kelda's gaze moved to him.

Rowan did not sound angry.

That made the next words more careful.

“I can believe that.”

A pause.

“But you do things before you know why.”

Mira looked down briefly.

It was clearly not a new observation to anyone at the table.

Rowan continued.

“On a farm, if I don't know what a machine will do, I don't put my hand into it and find out.”

There was no metaphorical flourish in him. He meant machinery because machinery was what he knew.

“If I don't understand a new horse, I don't put Tessa on its back to see whether it throws her.”

Tessa's mouth tightened faintly.

“And if I don't know why I want to cut down a tree that's stood for fifty years, I leave it standing until I do.”

His eyes returned fully to Ian.

“You seem to have enough power that doing something first and understanding yourself afterward is dangerous to everyone except you.”

Kelda gave the smallest grunt of agreement.

Aelira did not. Not because she disagreed, but because Rowan had not asked her.

Ian remained the person at the table expected to answer for himself.

Mira finally sat.

She had been standing throughout Tessa's question, one hand occasionally resting against the back of her chair. Taking the seat made the room feel less like an arrival and more like a conversation that might last.

“I don't think he's saying you must always know exactly why you do anything,” she said.

Rowan glanced towards her.

“No.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“None of us could live like that.”

Her tone remained level.

“But most of us can't make a thing become the real thing because we suddenly decide it should.”

The wording was almost absurd.

Nobody laughed.

Mira folded her hands.

“I appreciate that you answered Tessa instead of telling her she ought to be grateful because Isha is happy.”

Tessa's eyes dropped for a moment.

“That would have gone badly,” Kelda observed.

Mira gave her a brief look.

“Yes.”

Then back to Ian.

“And I appreciate that you said you were sorry for what you did to her, rather than only for being caught.”

Aelira's gaze shifted slightly at that. It was a distinction she had made in other forms several times during the previous days.

Mira's expression did not soften.

“But Rowan's question matters.”

She rested one hand flat on the table.

“You told Kelda and Aelira that you're ordinary, except for this impossible thing around you.”

Ian had used stronger words than that. Mira evidently had no interest in repeating unpredictable omnipotence across her supper table.

“You've told us you don't always control what it shows you. You've told us you don't always understand what you can do until you do it.”

A pause.

“And now you've told us that sometimes you act before you've decided why.”

She looked directly at him.

“So what are you doing differently now?”

No one else spoke.

Even Tessa left the question with her mother.

Mira waited for Ian's answer.

“I am trying to be a person dealing with hurt caused on others, not an editor, an author, a creator shaping the story of characters in their story. Explaining the latter, when being the former, is not something i am experienced in. I'm not sure anyone is.”

The words sat strangely in the farmhouse kitchen.

Mara's expression altered first. Not disbelief. More the discomfort of hearing a category of power described from inside it.

Ian continued.

“I am trying to be more careful with the consequences if direct involvement.”

“I... ”

He stopped.

The pause lasted long enough that nobody mistook it for searching for a better argument.

“.. am trying to somehow make amends”

Ian sagged on the chair.

“to not be hated.”

The last part seemed harder.

He swallowed.

“And maybe, for Isha to like me, just a little.”

Ian turned away, tears in his eyes.

No one rushed to answer.

The fire clicked softly behind Mara. Somewhere elsewhere in the farmhouse, timber contracted with a small, ordinary sound.

Kelda looked down.

She had already seen him break once. This time she did not move towards him or away.

Aelira watched the family.

Mira was the first to speak.

“Wanting her to like you isn't a terrible thing.”

Ian could hear the qualification coming before she gave it.

“But you can't make that the thing you're trying to achieve.”

He looked back.

Mira's expression was gentler than before, though nothing in it offered escape from what he had said.

“Because Isha gets to decide whether she likes you.”

A pause.

“And if you're doing good things so she'll give you the answer you want, then you're still shaping things towards an ending.”

Mara looked sharply at her mother. Then at Ian.

“Yes.”

She had been quiet through most of the conversation. Now she leaned forward, forearms resting on the table.

“I think that is the dangerous part.”

Her voice was controlled rather than hostile.

“You know what outcome you want.”

She counted none of them on her fingers. The list did not need help.

“You want to make amends. You want not to be hated. You want Isha to like you.”

A small pause.

“The first one is yours to work on.”

Her eyes held his.

“The other two belong to other people.”

Kelda's gaze lifted.

Mara continued.

“If you really want to stop being an author to them, you may have to learn to tolerate an ending you don't want.”

Nobody at the table moved.

“That might mean somebody hates you.”

The sentence was not cruelly delivered.

“That might mean Isha stops liking you later. It might mean Thomas never does. It might mean Tessa remains angry about the arrow for the rest of her life.”

Tessa glanced at her sister.

Mara gave the smallest shrug.

“You might.”

“I might,” Tessa agreed.

Mara looked back to Ian.

“You can't repair that by arranging the right scene.”

Ian's tears remained visible.

Mara saw them.

Her expression softened slightly, but she did not withdraw the point.

“I am not saying you shouldn't care.”

A pause.

“I think the fact that you care is probably why any of this is possible at all.”

Aelira's eyes moved to Mara at that.

“But caring about what somebody thinks of you is not the same as being entitled to change it.”

Ian had heard variations of that before. From Isha. From Aelira. From Kelda.

It sounded different at Thomas's family table.

Rowan had been rubbing one thumb slowly against the side of his mug.

He stopped.

“Making amends isn't getting them to say you're forgiven.”

His tone was practical.

“If I damage something belonging to a neighbour, I repair it if I can. I pay for it if I can. I admit I did it.”

He looked at Ian.

“If he still thinks I'm an idiot afterward, that's his part.”

A brief silence.

“And sometimes you can't repair it.”

Rowan's gaze went towards Tessa.

“You can't put that arrow back where it was and make the days when she thought Isha was dead happen differently.”

Tessa's eyes dropped.

“So you acknowledge it.”

He looked back at Ian.

“And next time you don't take the arrow.”

Kelda gave a quiet sound of agreement.

“That I understand.”

Ian's eyes were still wet.

Mira reached for a clean cloth from beside the bread and put it on the table within his reach.

She did not hand it directly to him.

“And for what it is worth,” she said, “I don't hate you.”

Ian looked at her.

Mira's face tightened.

“I don't know you well enough for that.”

It was not quite the comfort the opening words might have suggested.

“I hate some of what you've told us you did.”

A breath.

“The bridge.”

Her voice changed on the word.

“My son loved Isha before I ever knew her. I know that now.”

She looked down briefly.

“You decided her death would make his story better.”

Mira's fingers pressed against each other.

“I don't know what to do with that yet.”

Kelda remained very still.

Mira continued.

“But you also came here when you knew we had been told.”

Her eyes returned to Ian.

“You could apparently have done almost anything else.”

A faint edge entered her voice.

“You could certainly have avoided a farmhouse kitchen.”

Rowan's mouth moved slightly.

Mira went on.

“So I don't hate you.”

She paused.

“That is what I can truthfully give you today.”

Ian had not asked her for it.

Perhaps that was why it mattered.

Tessa had been watching him throughout.

Her anger about the arrow had not disappeared. Neither had the younger, more complicated curiosity that had brought her to the doorway before anyone else.

“I don't hate you either.”

She frowned immediately, as though annoyed that the sentence sounded too generous.

“But I'm still angry.”

“I think we established that,” Mara said.

Tessa ignored her.

“And I don't think giving Isha the arrow makes taking it right.”

A pause.

“But I am glad you gave it to her.”

Her expression became uncertain.

“Both are true.”

Aelira's eyes flicked towards Ian.

The phrase had travelled.

Tessa noticed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Aelira said.

It was very nearly a smile.

Tessa looked suspicious but returned to Ian.

“Isha said you can stay connected to her.”

She had heard that from Kelda and Aelira earlier.

“She knows more than we do about what you did to her.”

The next part came carefully.

“So if she decides she likes you a little, that's hers.”

Tessa's fingers found the carved piece at her neck again.

“You don't need to make her.”

Kelda finally spoke.

“And if you try, she will probably notice.”

Ian looked towards her.

Kelda's face was dry again, but not unkind.

“She is Isha.”

“That is true,” Rowan said.

It was the first completely uncomplicated agreement of the meeting.

For a moment the tension loosened. Only a little.

Aelira let it.

Then she looked at Ian.

“You said you are trying to become a person dealing with people you have hurt.”

Her voice was quiet.

“That person has to survive being disliked.”

A pause.

“Otherwise the temptation to become the author again will remain whenever the people refuse the ending he wants.”

Kelda glanced at her.

“There is your complexity.”

Aelira ignored her.

Mira sat back slightly.

Nobody had forgiven Ian. Nobody had asked him to leave.

The cloth remained on the table near his hand.

Then Tessa drew a breath.

“I have another question.”

Her anger was quieter now, but not gone.

She waited until Ian looked at her.

“Did you know Isha would come back when you chose to kill her?”

“Yes, that was the .. brief? .. i gave the machine for that chapter. I gave it maybe a paragraph or two of a shape, it then created the reality.”

Ian paused.

“This is probably a bad idea, and a terrible suggestion... it won't be the first.”

He frowned, unsure if he had done another terrible thing.

“Do ... do you want to read it? The chapter, i don't have my brief any more.”

No one answered immediately.

Mara looked at Aelira.

Aelira looked back.

It was Rowan who spoke first.

“The thing that was written before it happened?”

Ian's explanation had not been quite that simple, and Rowan seemed aware of it.

“The chapter the machine made from what you told it you wanted.”

Tessa stared at Ian.

“The chapter where Isha dies.”

Mira's eyes closed for a moment.

Kelda shifted in her chair.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “That would be the chapter.”

Aelira did not engage with whether they should read it yet.

“What does it contain?”

Her attention stayed on Ian.

“Only events you could have observed? Or does it contain people's private thoughts?”

That brought Mara fully upright.

“That's important.”

Tessa glanced between them.

“Why?”

“Because reading what happened is one question,” Mara said. “Reading something Thomas or Isha thought privately and never chose to tell us is another.”

Tessa's expression changed.

“Oh.”

Aelira nodded.

“And if Ian's machine constructs these chapters as narrative rather than merely recording visible events, it may contain things none of us have permission to know.”

Kelda gave Ian a flat look.

“You really do find new consent problems with impressive efficiency.”

There was enough familiarity in it now to keep the sentence from becoming cruelty.

Ian's offer remained unanswered.

Mira was looking at the table.

After several seconds she said, “I want to know what you actually chose.”

That silenced the others.

She looked at Ian.

“Not what happened afterward that made it survivable. Not what Thomas became because of it. Not what Isha gained on Earth.”

Her voice remained steady.

“I want to understand what you put into the beginning of it.”

Ian had already said the brief itself was gone.

Mira acknowledged that with a slight shake of her head.

“If the chapter is the closest thing left, then yes. Part of me wants to read it.”

She stopped there.

“But Mara and Aelira are right.”

Rowan folded his arms.

“I don't want to read my son's thoughts because some impossible machine wrote them down.”

“Nor do I,” Mira said.

Tessa was still staring at Ian.

“I do want to know what happened.”

Kelda's face tightened.

“You already know the important part.”

“I know what people told me.”

Tessa looked at her.

“I know Isha died at the bridge. I know Thomas brought her back. I know Ian now says he asked for it because he wanted Thomas pushed towards being the Hero.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“But he just said he knew she would come back.”

A pause.

“I want to know what that means.”

Aelira spoke before the distinction could collapse.

“It means we need to be careful about what the chapter can prove.”

She turned slightly towards Tessa.

“If Ian supplied only a short instruction and the machine produced the details, then every detail in the resulting chapter was not necessarily chosen by him.”

Tessa nodded slowly.

“But the shape was.”

“Yes.”

“The death and coming back.”

“According to what Ian has just told us, yes.”

Mara's gaze sharpened.

“And pushing Thomas.”

Kelda answered this time.

“He admitted that at the bridge.”

Mira's face showed the pain of hearing it again, but she did not interrupt.

Aelira looked back at Ian.

“So the chapter could tell us what reality the machine produced from your instruction.”

She paused.

“It cannot necessarily tell us which sentence, action or thought came from your brief.”

That mattered enough that Rowan nodded immediately.

“Then we don't treat it as his instructions.”

“No.”

Aelira's voice was firm.

“We treat it as a result.”

Kelda rubbed one hand across her face.

“And perhaps as a very unpleasant family document.”

“That too,” Aelira said.

Mara looked towards Ian.

“You called it a chapter.”

Her voice was quieter.

“That means it is written like the other account?”

The account Lethira and the others had already seen parts of. Thomas's life rendered as prose, with conversations and scenes arranged into something readable.

Before Ian could answer, Tessa said, “I think I want to read it.”

Mira looked at her daughter.

“All of it?”

Tessa hesitated.

“I don't know.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Mira more than immediate certainty would have.

Rowan looked towards Mara.

She considered it longer.

“I want the option.”

Then she looked at Ian.

“But not if it simply appears in front of us because we've said that.”

Kelda's eyes flicked to him.

Aelira almost smiled.

“An increasingly useful distinction.”

Mara ignored both of them.

“I want to know first whether it contains private thoughts. Whose. And whether there is a way to read only the parts around the bridge without reading things Thomas and Isha would reasonably expect to remain theirs.”

Mira nodded.

“And if that isn't possible?”

Mara looked down at her hands.

“Then I need to decide whether knowing more is worth trespassing on them.”

Tessa's immediate certainty had faded too.

“I don't want to read Isha thinking something she never wanted me to know.”

Kelda watched her for a moment.

“Good.”

Tessa frowned. “I can still want to read the rest.”

“I didn't say you couldn't.”

Rowan returned to the original point.

“There is another problem.”

He looked directly at Ian.

“You said this machine made the reality from your brief.”

“Yes,” Kelda murmured. “I heard that part.”

Rowan continued.

“If we read the chapter, are we reading what truly happened?”

Aelira did not answer for Ian. Neither did Kelda.

Rowan's question became more precise.

“Or are we reading the story-version your machine kept afterward?”

That produced a deeper silence.

Aelira's attention sharpened with obvious approval at the distinction.

Mira looked from Rowan to Ian.

“The people at that bridge remember what happened to them.”

She spoke carefully.

“The chapter may match those memories. It may contain more. It may arrange them differently.”

Her eyes remained on Ian.

“So before I say yes, I need you to tell us what you actually know about what that chapter is.”

Tessa leaned forward.

“Is it a record of what happened?”

Mara added, “Does it contain their thoughts?”

Aelira finished the sequence.

“And can you show any of it without showing what is not ours to see?”

Nobody asked Ian to produce the chapter.

Not yet.

They waited for his answer.

“I have two things to say.”

The family waited.

“I believe it is reality written. That means things will happen between words, or behind them, but the words are truth.”

Aelira's attention sharpened at the distinction.

Ian continued.

“Secondly... I can ask Thomas & Isha if they are happy for you to read it, or I can ask the machine to supress their thoughts, or Mira, maybe you can read the thing whole and decide if it is too much -- i think both of them would not mind that. I want to avoid deciding for people as best I can.”

Mira's expression changed at the last part.

Not anger. Recognition.

“There.”

Ian looked at her.

“That bit.”

She pointed gently towards him.

“You think they would not mind.”

A pause.

“And perhaps you're right.”

Mira glanced towards Aelira, then Kelda, as if checking that she had understood the problem rather than merely found another reason to refuse.

“But if the purpose is to avoid deciding for people, then don't decide that for them either.”

Aelira nodded immediately.

“That is the cleanest answer.”

Ian's three possibilities had not been equal.

She laid them out without treating the offer itself as a mistake.

“Suppressing their thoughts could work, if the mechanism obeys the instruction accurately. But we would still be asking Ian to determine what counts as a thought, what counts as private, and what alteration preserves the truth of the chapter.”

Kelda grimaced.

“And after all that, we'd spend the evening wondering whether the machine had hidden something else because it thought we wanted it hidden.”

“Exactly.”

Aelira looked towards Mira.

“Having you read it first is better in one respect. A human judgement instead of the mechanism's.”

Mira shook her head before Aelira finished.

“No.”

The answer was calm.

“I understand why he offered.”

She looked at Ian.

“And I am Thomas's mother. There are probably things he would tell me that he wouldn't tell anyone else here.”

A small pause.

“There are also things he wouldn't.”

That was enough.

“I don't want being his mother turned into permission to read all of his thoughts and decide afterward which ones I should have seen.”

Rowan nodded.

“Nor I.”

Mara's expression eased slightly.

Tessa looked disappointed, but not because she disagreed.

“So we ask them.”

Mira looked at her.

“Yes.”

Tessa leaned back in her chair.

“That could take a month.”

The monthly passage had shaped their sense of distance for too long for the objection to be unreasonable.

Kelda glanced at Ian.

“Apparently not necessarily.”

Tessa followed her gaze.

“Oh.”

Aelira intervened before apparently became an invitation to experiment.

“We know Ian has communicated with Isha by another means. We also know she has established limits around that contact.”

Her eyes remained on Ian.

“So if asking them can be done within those limits, that seems preferable.”

Mara considered the wording.

“Ask about the chapter specifically.”

Ian had not yet offered any message, and she did not compose one for him.

“Not whether we can know what happened. Not whether we're family and therefore allowed. Ask whether they are comfortable with the four of us reading that chapter as it exists.”

Tessa raised a hand slightly.

“And Kelda and Aelira?”

Everyone looked at her.

“They already know most of it.”

Kelda snorted.

“That is not an answer.”

“No, I mean if Thomas and Isha say yes, are you reading too?”

Aelira thought about it.

“I have already read part of Ian's later account concerning his meeting with Isha.”

The train chapter.

Nobody needed the details again.

“But this chapter concerns events I partly lived through and partly did not witness.”

She looked towards Ian.

“If Thomas and Isha permit it, I would read it.”

Kelda rubbed at the side of her jaw.

“I probably would.”

She did not sound eager.

“I was there after the bridge. Not for everything before it.”

Her face tightened.

“And I have spent enough time arguing about what Ian chose based on his memory of choosing it. Seeing the result he is talking about may be useful.”

Aelira added, “Provided we retain the distinction we just established.”

She looked around the table.

“The chapter may be truthful as reality written. That does not make every sentence Ian's deliberate instruction.”

Rowan nodded.

“The result, not the plans.”

“Yes.”

Tessa looked at Ian again.

“And you knew she came back.”

The original question still mattered.

Ian had answered it, but Tessa was working through what that answer meant.

“You asked for a chapter where she died and came back.”

Her voice was quieter now.

“That doesn't make the dying part less horrible.”

“No,” Mira said.

Tessa nodded.

“But it does matter.”

Mira did not argue with that.

“No. It matters.”

She looked towards Ian.

“It matters to me too.”

There was pain in her face, though less raw than when Ian had first admitted what he had done.

“I thought you chose Isha's death and then happened to discover Thomas could undo it.”

A pause.

“What you've just told us is different.”

Rowan's gaze lowered to the table.

“Not necessarily better.”

“No.”

Mira's answer came immediately.

“But different.”

Aelira folded her hands.

“And that is another reason not to reconstruct the missing brief from the chapter.”

Ian had said he no longer possessed the brief itself.

“What he intended in outline, what the mechanism supplied, and what the people living through it experienced are three related things. They are not automatically identical.”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“You are going to hate how often we make you say I don't know.”

A faint pause.

“Probably good for you.”

The edge of humour passed without disturbing the weight of the conversation.

Mira looked again at Ian.

“I would like to read it.”

She let the statement stand before adding the condition.

“But not badly enough to take it without asking my son and his wife.”

Tessa sighed.

“I would also like to read it.”

Mara nodded.

“Yes.”

Rowan took longer.

Eventually he said, “If Thomas says I may.”

Mira's eyes moved to him.

“And Isha.”

Rowan nodded once.

“And Isha.”

Aelira looked towards Ian.

“So that is the answer.”

No chapter appeared.

No one asked the machine to redact anything.

The farmhouse remained only a farmhouse, with supper dishes still waiting near the basin and the untouched cloth lying beside Ian's hand.

Aelira's voice was quiet.

“Ask them.”

Ian sent Thomas and Isha a message.

“Isha, Thomas. I am current stood with your family Thomas, they agreed to meet. They are asking me tough questions, I am answering honestly. They want to read the account my machine recorded of Isha's death on the bridge and rebirth. There are two options: I ask the machine to supress your inner, private thoughts, so it becomes the 'external' account. the alternative is i give it to them, raw. this will disclose what you thought and felt. It is your choice.”

In Sendai, Isha's phone vibrated on the low table beside the album.

This time the message did not arrive from a blank sender.

The sender field was full.

Thomas leaned closer.

It looked like a tiny rectangle of coloured noise: individual pixels changing too quickly to settle into an image, colours replacing one another continuously without rhythm. For an instant Thomas thought there might be a shape inside it. Then the shape ceased to exist.

“It has a sender.”

Isha watched the impossible icon move.

“A bad one.”

Thomas touched nothing.

The message itself offered a reply field beneath it.

That was new too.

Isha read Ian's words again.

“He is there now.”

“With my family.”

“Yes.”

Thomas sat beside her.

The first fact took several seconds to process before either of them reached the question underneath it.

His mother was in the same room as Ian. His father. Mara. Tessa. Kelda and Aelira, presumably, unless something had gone badly wrong with the plan.

Thomas rubbed both hands over his face.

“They said yes.”

Isha rested one hand against his knee.

“They chose to.”

“I know.”

That helped.

Not enough to make the image of the conversation comfortable, but enough to keep it where it belonged.

Then Thomas looked at the second half of the message.

“The bridge chapter.”

Isha's hand became still.

“Yes.”

Neither spoke for a while.

The album remained beside the phone. Kelda looked out from the final photograph where they had left the book open earlier, hands planted on her scarred workbench beneath the words Still here. Still working.

Thomas leaned forward.

“My first instinct is external.”

Isha looked at him.

“Because of me?”

“Both of us.”

He thought about it.

“They don't need everything inside your head.”

“No.”

“And I don't especially like Ian's machine deciding which parts count as private.”

Isha's mouth tightened.

“That too.”

She picked up the phone but did not type.

The changing sender continued to move under her thumb.

“If it removes our thoughts, they see what happened.”

“Yes.”

“They see me die.”

Thomas looked down.

“Yes.”

“They see you bring me back.”

“Yes.”

“But they don't see what it was like.”

Thomas was quiet.

Isha looked towards him.

“Would you mind them reading yours?”

He understood immediately who them meant.

Mira. Rowan. Mara. Tessa.

And, likely, Kelda and Aelira beside them.

Thomas thought about the bridge.

Not the story version.

The memory.

The impossible stillness after Isha fell. The certainty that something fundamental had gone wrong. The system. The decision that had barely felt like a decision because no alternative had existed in him.

His mother reading that was uncomfortable.

His father reading it was worse in a different way.

Mara would probably understand more than Thomas wanted her to.

Tessa—

Thomas breathed out.

“No.”

Isha studied him.

“You're sure?”

“I don't want them reading everything I've ever thought.”

“That was not the question.”

“No.”

He managed a small smile.

“I know.”

Then it disappeared.

“But that chapter?”

Thomas looked at the phone.

“They already know I loved you.”

Isha's expression softened.

“They know I was afraid.”

“They know you were seventeen.”

“That too.”

He paused.

“I think if they're trying to understand what Ian did, removing the part where we were people inside it makes it easier to turn it back into events.”

Isha nodded slowly.

That had been bothering her too.

She looked at the reply field.

“My thoughts are mine.”

“Yes.”

“I can still give them.”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“I don't mind Mira reading them.”

Thomas waited.

“Or Rowan.”

A faint change in her expression.

“Mara will analyse everything.”

“She absolutely will.”

“Tessa will probably ask why I thought something stupid.”

“Also likely.”

Isha leaned against him.

“And Kelda already knows nearly all my worst moments.”

Thomas laughed quietly.

“Aelira probably inferred the rest.”

“Probably.”

They stayed that way for a few seconds.

Then Isha straightened.

“Raw.”

Thomas nodded.

“Raw.”

“But bounded.”

“Yes.”

She began typing.

Thomas stopped her after the first sentence.

“Kelda and Aelira?”

Isha considered it.

“They asked before too.”

“And they're there helping my family understand it.”

“Yes.”

She added them.

Then showed Thomas the message before sending it.

He read every line. Changed nothing.

Isha pressed Send.

The impossible sender icon rippled once—not brighter, merely different—and the message disappeared upward into the thread.

Their reply read:

Ian. We discussed it. Give them the raw chapter.

This permission is for that chapter only, and only for Mira, Rowan, Mara, Tessa, Kelda and Aelira while they are together. They may read our thoughts in it because we are choosing to let them.

Do not treat this as permission to show them any other chapter, thoughts or private material.

Do not alter it, improve it or remove anything.

Isha and Thomas.

In the farmhouse kitchen, Ian's changing sender resolved into a reply notification.

He was still sitting at Thomas's family table.

Mira, Rowan, Mara and Tessa were waiting. Kelda and Aelira were there with them.

The reply was from Isha and Thomas.

Ian sent one more reply before anything appeared in the farmhouse.

“The event straddles two chapters. i forgot, i'm sorry. i'd like to send the second one too. it ends when Thomas awakens in the lower guest house.”

In Sendai, Isha's phone vibrated again.

The impossible sender was still there, its little field of pixels changing continuously. The new message appeared beneath theirs.

Thomas read it first.

“Oh.”

Isha leaned closer.

“He asked.”

“Yes.”

Thomas sat back.

It was a small correction, but the distinction mattered. Ian could easily have treated their permission for the account of the bridge as permission for whatever pages were necessary to complete it.

He had not.

Isha reread the final line.

“Until you wake in the lower guest house.”

Thomas nodded.

“That is still the same event to me.”

“To me too.”

The actual boundary between chapters meant very little to either of them. Isha's death had not known where a page ended. Neither had Thomas's restoration of her, the aftermath, or the period before he woke somewhere safe enough for the immediate crisis to be over.

Isha looked at him.

“Your thoughts after?”

Thomas considered that.

There would be more of them in the second chapter. Shock. System information. Whatever his seventeen-year-old mind had managed while carrying the impossible fact that Isha had died and then was alive again.

He did not particularly want his family reading it.

That was different from not permitting them to.

“Yes.”

Isha waited another moment.

“Yes, you are comfortable, or yes, you are being Thomas?”

He gave her a tired look.

“That distinction is unfairly accurate.”

“I know.”

Thomas looked again at Ian's message.

Then at the album on the table.

“I am comfortable enough to choose it.”

Isha nodded.

“So am I.”

She opened the reply field.

This time the answer took less discussion.

Yes. Both chapters, raw.

The same permission applies: Mira, Rowan, Mara, Tessa, Kelda and Aelira may read them together.

Stop at Thomas waking in the lower guest house. Nothing after that is included.

Thank you for asking instead of assuming the first permission covered it.

Isha and Thomas.

Thomas read it.

“Send.”

Isha did.

The changing field of pixels shifted once as the reply left.

She placed the phone back beside the book.

“He forgot.”

“Yes.”

“And then remembered.”

“Yes.”

Isha rested her head briefly against Thomas's shoulder.

“That is better.”

At the farmhouse table, the reply arrived.

Ian had not moved far enough for anyone to mistake the pause for anything except waiting.

The changing sender showed the message from Thomas and Isha.

Their permission now covered both chapters. Raw. Only the six people in the room besides Ian. Ending when Thomas awakened in the lower guest house. And nothing beyond it.

The final sentence remained on the screen:

Thank you for asking instead of assuming the first permission covered it.

Kelda could not yet see the words from where she sat.

Aelira watched Ian instead.

They waited for him to tell them the answer.

“They have agreed to it,” Ian said. “I forgot it was spread over two chapters but didn't want to even make that assumption.”

The table changed.

There was no light or sound. Two neat sheaves of cream paper simply occupied a space that had been empty a moment before, Common lettering covering the first page of each.

The Hour That Remained.

The Cost of an Hour.

No summary had been added. No names removed. No warning sat between the title and the first sentence.

Raw.

Ian looked around the table.

“Ask if you want more copies. I shall remove them all when we're done, unless there is a strong belief to retain.”

Tessa leaned towards the first page.

Kelda stopped her with two fingers against the edge of the paper.

“Wait.”

Tessa looked up.

“Why?”

“Because there are six of us and two chapters long enough that somebody will decide to read ahead.”

“I wasn't going to.”

Kelda's expression indicated that this was not a persuasive argument.

Aelira looked at the two sheaves.

“One copy is sufficient.”

Mara frowned. “For six?”

“It keeps us together.”

That settled it.

Mira drew the first chapter towards the centre of the table, turning it so that she could read without taking it completely away from the others.

“Out loud?”

Rowan looked towards Thomas's absent chair as though the question belonged partly to him.

“He gave permission for all of us.”

Tessa nodded.

“Out loud.”

Aelira's attention moved briefly to Ian.

“This remains the result, not the brief.”

Nobody disagreed.

Mira began.

The first few pages were almost easier because they were about pursuit.

A trail that lied. False tracks. Black residue. The old pilgrim corridor. Thomas's newly expanded mana capacity.

Tessa interrupted first.

“Ten times?”

Kelda gave a small nod.

“That part I knew approximately. Not the number.”

Mara looked at the line again.

“He was frightened by it.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

Mara glanced at Ian, then returned to the page.

Mira continued.

Isha ordering Thomas not to cast under surprise unless commanded or someone was about to die drew the first faint movement from Rowan's mouth.

“That sounds like her.”

Kelda grunted.

“You have no idea.”

“I have met her.”

“Not while she was commanding Thomas.”

Tessa looked between them. “Was that different?”

“Only in degree.”

The reading went on.

The abandoned road narrowed. The trail became honest. The bridge appeared.

By the time Thomas used Status on the crossing, the family had stopped interrupting.

Mira read the description of the place slowly: human prayer, Elven warning, old passage and, beneath it, a wound in the pattern of the world.

Black threads stitched through it.

Rowan leaned closer.

“So this was already there.”

Aelira answered carefully.

“The old crossing was. The hostile preparation was not.”

“And Ian didn't write every one of those details into his instruction.”

“No,” Aelira said. “We do not know which details he supplied.”

Her gaze touched Ian and moved away again.

“We know the shape he has admitted choosing.”

Mira continued.

The attack came.

Tessa's fingers curled when the first black-bone splinter passed through the place Isha's throat had occupied an instant before.

Mara caught the movement. Neither said anything.

They read the carriers emerging, Ruvan at the crossing, Lethira throwing the silver-threaded message weight and Thomas holding himself back from casting because Isha had told him to.

Then Holy Shield.

Too large.

Thomas frightened by the ease of his own power.

The observer watching him.

Mira's reading slowed.

Ian had called it a chapter shaped to push Thomas towards becoming the Hero.

The account itself showed a seventeen-year-old boy trying not to use too much power.

Rowan noticed.

“He didn't want it.”

Aelira looked at him.

“The power?”

“The way it was changing.”

A pause.

“No,” she said. “Not there.”

The reading continued.

The cloaked figure retreated.

Lethira screamed.

Isha crossed the bridge.

Kelda's chair creaked as her weight shifted.

She knew the outcome. That did not make the approach easier.

Mira read:

It had been waiting to see which path love chose.

Then she stopped.

Her eyes remained on the line.

Mara spoke first.

“Was that Ian?”

Aelira immediately understood the question.

“We cannot know.”

“The wording.”

“No.” Aelira shook her head. “Do not do that.”

Mara looked at her.

“It sounds as though someone arranged it specifically so Isha would choose to cross.”

“The reality may have been arranged that way,” Aelira said. “Ian has admitted shaping the larger event. But this sentence belongs to the written account produced afterward. We cannot turn narrative language into evidence of his exact instruction.”

Mara sat back.

She did not look satisfied.

But she nodded.

“Result, not brief.”

“Yes.”

Mira returned to the page.

Isha turned. The black loops entered her. The arrow fell. Thomas reached her.

Her body remained warm.

Her eyes remained open.

Mira's voice stopped.

This time nobody prompted her.

Rowan placed one hand flat beside hers on the table.

After several seconds, Mara quietly took over.

She read Thomas opening Status.

Health empty. Mana fading. Death described not as a clean ending but as small departures already moving beyond his reach.

Tessa's face had gone pale.

She did not look away.

Mara read the failed healing spells.

Then the hour. The narrowing condition. The impossible possibility still close enough to answer.

And Thomas breaking.

When she reached the mana opening beneath him, she stopped briefly, swallowed, and continued.

Something appeared behind his thoughts.

Revive.

Tessa whispered the word with her.

Kelda looked at her.

Tessa's eyes remained on the page.

“He knew he could bring her back?”

“No,” Kelda said.

Tessa looked up.

“But Ian did.”

The room became still.

That distinction had been the reason they were reading.

Mira answered her daughter.

“According to Ian, he knew the shape included her coming back.”

Tessa looked towards Ian for perhaps a second. Then back to the chapter.

Mara continued.

Thomas did not choose the spell.

He seized it because nothing else remained.

The light entered Isha. Memory became path. The first arrow at his throat. Rain. A first kiss. The high refuge. Isha commanding the line. Isha choosing herself beside him.

Mira covered her mouth.

Rowan's hand moved from the table to her wrist.

Mara kept reading.

The spell consumed Thomas's new capacity in a single pull.

Then demanded more.

His breath. His body. The fragile agreement by which he remained himself.

And Thomas refused only the part that would take him too.

A Holy Shield inside his own chest.

Tessa's eyes filled before Isha inhaled.

When the line came, the raw, ugly gasp of life, Tessa turned her face away and wiped at it angrily.

Kelda watched the table.

Aelira watched nobody.

Mara read to the end.

Isha alive. Thomas collapsing. Her forehead against his.

You impossible man.

And the old stream carrying ash away while the world remembered that, for one hour, death had not been final.

No one immediately reached for the second chapter.

Mira eventually said, “He was seventeen.”

Rowan nodded.

It was not new information.

It had acquired a different weight.

Mara looked at Ian.

“You wanted this to push him towards becoming the Hero.”

It was a statement, not yet a question.

Then she looked back at the paper before Ian was required to answer it.

“And what the machine made was a boy almost dying to refuse her death.”

Aelira spoke quietly.

“That is what the chapter says happened.”

Kelda's face had become hard.

“He was already Thomas.”

The sentence had been said before.

Here, in Thomas's childhood home, it landed differently.

Tessa dragged the second chapter towards Mira.

“I want to finish.”

Mira looked around the table.

Nobody objected.

She began again.

The pursuit stopped.

That fact mattered to Rowan.

“They didn't chase the one who did it.”

“No,” Kelda said.

“Good.”

Kelda looked at him.

Rowan's jaw was tight.

“I know what wanting to chase it would have felt like.”

He said nothing more.

Mira read Isha kneeling in the stream beside Thomas, refusing to move. Ruvan finding a pulse. Lethira bringing the cloak. Sairen calling the pursuit off. Thalen arriving.

Empty. Not low. Empty.

Mara glanced back towards the first packet.

“So the tenfold capacity mattered.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

“Would the earlier Thomas have been unable to cast it?”

Aelira shook her head.

“We don't know.”

Nobody looked at Ian this time.

They had learned the boundary.

The account could show what happened. It could not answer every counterfactual merely because Ian had once thought of them as story.

Mira continued.

Isha refusing to be carried. The return frame. The camp. Sereth arriving near midnight.

At Sereth's first question—

Have you eaten?

—Tessa made a wet, involuntary laugh.

Mara smiled despite herself.

Kelda's expression softened.

“That is Sereth.”

Tessa wiped her face.

“Yes.”

The humour lasted only until Sereth asked about Isha rather than her body.

Then the room became quiet again.

Mira read the conversation between mother and daughter.

Gratitude becoming another binding.

Isha's answer.

It will not make him responsible for keeping me from every end.

Mira's voice became unsteady.

She continued.

It will not make my life borrowed from him. It will not make his life payment for mine.

She stopped reading.

Tessa stared at the words.

Rowan lowered his head.

Mara whispered, “She already knew.”

Aelira understood what she meant.

“About the danger of what he had done becoming an obligation between them.”

“Yes.”

Kelda leaned back slowly.

“Isha usually knows where the trap is.”

A pause.

“Knowing does not mean it cannot still catch you.”

Mira put a finger beneath the next line.

Now you must live as if those words remain true when he is awake and frightened.

“She has a good mother,” she said.

Kelda looked towards her.

“Yes.”

It was simple enough to need nothing else.

Mira resumed.

The camp quietened.

Then she reached the sentence:

Near dawn, Thomas woke.

Aelira's hand came down on the page.

Not hard. Enough.

“Stop.”

Mira stopped immediately.

Tessa frowned.

“What?”

Aelira was already looking at Ian.

“Kelda.”

Kelda's eyes narrowed as she remembered.

“Yes.”

Mara looked between them.

Aelira tapped the line once.

“Ian told us the permission ended when Thomas awakened in the lower guest house.”

Mira looked down.

“This isn't the lower guest house.”

“No.”

Kelda leaned over the chapter, reading the few preceding lines without turning the page.

“Temporary camp.”

Aelira nodded.

Tessa stared at the remainder of the second sheaf.

“But there's more.”

“There is.”

“We were given permission for both chapters.”

“And a stopping point,” Mara said.

She understood immediately.

Tessa looked frustrated.

“The stopping point is wrong.”

“Or Ian remembered the chapter boundary incorrectly when he asked them,” Aelira said.

Her tone was neutral. The mistake did not need moral enlargement.

Mara glanced towards the unread pages.

“We don't continue.”

“No,” Aelira said.

Mira took her hand completely away from the paper.

Rowan did the same.

Nobody tried to see what came next.

The unread portion of the chapter remained on the table: Thomas waking in the temporary camp, his first conversation with Isha and Sereth, Thalen's examination, the journey back to the settlement, Aelira meeting them beneath the south trees, and the later hours in the lower guest house.

All of it belonged to the same chapter.

Not all of it was clearly inside the permission they had been given.

Kelda looked at Ian.

“Well.”

There was no accusation in it. Not yet.

“You were right not to assume when you remembered there were two chapters.”

Aelira's expression remained precise.

“Now do it again.”

She looked at the changing device through which Ian had contacted Earth, then back at him.

“Ask them what boundary they intended.”

The two chapters stayed exactly where they were.

Nobody read another word.

Ian sighed.

“That is my fault. I read the end of the second chapter again, and thought that was his first awakening. I am upset here, as well as here, not that it is an excuse.”

He looked at the unread pages.

“I don't remember all 360 chapters or nearly 2 million words, i am just a man.”

The scale of the number produced a brief silence of its own.

“I am sorry. I will tell them of my mistake.”

Aelira's hand remained on the second chapter.

“Yes,” she said.

Nothing harsher followed.

Ian looked at her.

Aelira glanced down at the page where she had stopped Mira.

“You made an error. We found it before continuing beyond the boundary Thomas and Isha gave us. Now you correct it.”

Kelda leaned back in her chair.

“You being upset is relevant to why you made the mistake.”

Her eyes stayed on Ian.

“It doesn't make the boundary less real.”

“I know,” Aelira said. “He just said that.”

Kelda gave her a look. “I am agreeing with him.”

“That is not always obvious.”

“I have a reputation to maintain.”

The exchange loosened the room by a fraction.

Mara was still looking at the two thick sheaves.

“Three hundred and sixty?”

Ian had said nearly two million words. The number seemed to bother her less as a measure of text than as a measure of lives viewed through it.

Tessa stared at the first chapter.

“All about Thomas?”

Kelda answered before the question needed to become cosmology.

“Thomas and Isha are at the centre of much of it, from what I understand.”

Tessa's expression tightened.

“That is a lot to remember.”

Rowan looked at Ian.

“It is.”

There was no sympathy offered as absolution. Only recognition of a practical fact.

Then he gestured towards the stopped page.

“But you don't need to remember all of it right now.”

Ian followed his gaze.

“You need to remember where we stop.”

Mira gave a quiet breath that might almost have been a laugh.

Rowan looked at her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You do that when Thomas says something exactly like you.”

“He gets it from somewhere.”

Tessa looked between her parents and, despite everything on the table, smiled.

Mira's hand remained well clear of the unread text.

She looked towards Ian.

“I don't think you need to explain to Thomas and Isha that you're capable of forgetting things.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact.

“They know you're a person.”

A pause.

“What they need to know is that the boundary you gave us was based on your mistake.”

Mara nodded.

“And that we stopped at the first awakening.”

Aelira added, “Before reading the conversation which follows.”

That detail mattered.

No one had accidentally crossed farther and then discovered the error afterward.

Tessa looked down at the line where Thomas woke.

“So we've read up to here.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

“And nothing after.”

“No.”

Tessa nodded slowly.

“Then tell them exactly that.”

Kelda looked towards Ian.

“And don't turn the apology into another confession about how terrible you are.”

Ian had not yet said anything of the kind, but Kelda apparently knew the terrain.

“You got a fact wrong. They need the correct fact.”

Mira glanced at Kelda.

“That was almost gentle.”

“Don't spread it around.”

Aelira finally removed her hand from the page, but she drew the second sheaf farther away from the family and turned it face-down.

The action was simple.

The unread words ceased to invite accidental glances.

The first chapter remained open nearby, fully within the permission Thomas and Isha had already given. Its final pages still held Thomas collapsing beside Isha after Revive.

Tessa looked towards them again.

“I don't want to lose what we already read because the stopping point was wrong.”

Nobody had suggested that, but the fear was understandable.

Aelira said, “We do not need to.”

“The permission clearly covers the first chapter,” Mara said.

“And the beginning of the second,” Rowan added.

Mara nodded. “Until Thomas wakes.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“If Thomas and Isha say that was where they meant us to stop, then we're finished.”

“And if they meant the lower guest house despite knowing now there was an earlier awakening,” Tessa said, “we can keep going.”

“Yes.”

That seemed to settle the practical part.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then Mira looked at the face-down second chapter.

“What we have read was enough to answer one of my questions.”

Aelira's eyes moved to her.

Mira did not elaborate immediately.

She had asked earlier what Ian had put into the beginning of the event. The missing brief remained missing, and the chapter could not reconstruct it cleanly.

But the result had shown something else.

“I understand better what Ian meant when he said he knew she would come back.”

Her gaze shifted towards him.

“I don't think that makes choosing her death acceptable.”

Ian had not asked her to say otherwise.

“But I had imagined something different.”

Tessa nodded.

“So had I.”

Mira folded her hands.

“I imagined you deciding Isha would die because it would hurt Thomas enough to make him become what you wanted, and then Thomas somehow defeating the death in a way you hadn't expected.”

She looked briefly at the first chapter.

“That isn't what you just told us happened.”

Aelira made the distinction before it could become more certainty than the evidence supported.

“What Ian told us is that his brief included her return. The chapter shows the reality produced from that brief.”

“Yes.”

Mira accepted it.

“So I know one more thing than I did.”

Her expression remained troubled.

“You still chose to put both of them through that.”

The sentence did not require an answer at once.

“And you expected her to live afterward.”

Two truths. Neither cancelled the other.

Tessa traced one finger along the edge of the first sheaf without turning a page.

“I think that matters to me.”

Kelda watched her.

“It can matter without fixing it.”

“I know.”

Tessa's answer came with some irritation.

Kelda's mouth moved.

“Good.”

Mara looked at Ian.

“You said you're trying not to be the author anymore.”

Her tone was quieter than earlier.

“This is probably part of that too.”

Ian waited.

“Being wrong about your own record and asking the people inside it what they want done next.”

Aelira inclined her head.

“Yes.”

Mara looked faintly uncomfortable with how neatly the thought had emerged.

“I'm not praising the mistake.”

“No one thought you were,” Rowan said.

“I know.”

Mira reached for her mug and found it had gone cold.

She drank anyway.

“Tell them.”

Tessa looked at the strange mechanism Ian had used to contact Earth.

“And tell them we stopped.”

Aelira added one final precision.

“Do not ask them to reassure you about the mistake.”

Kelda's eyes narrowed at her.

“That one was necessary.”

“I thought so.”

Aelira looked towards Ian.

“Give them the facts. Apologise if you wish. Then let them decide where the boundary actually is.”

The face-down pages remained untouched on the table.

Nobody moved to read them while Ian prepared to tell Thomas and Isha what he had got wrong.

Ian sent a message.

“Thomas, Isha: i didn't read the second chapter properly, and thought Thomas become awake in the lower guest house was the first time, i didn't read back enough to recall the camp awakening. Your family have stopped reading at that point - they are better at this than me, they can end there or continue - your choice. There are 2 million words in your tale, i am just a man, and this was 300 chapters ago. It's no excuse, just a reason. Let me know if they stop here or finish what they have”

The message arrived while Thomas was rinsing two cups.

The sender field still refused to become anything stable. Pixels moved through colours too quickly to form a symbol, though the thread beneath it remained perfectly readable.

Isha opened the message.

Thomas put the cups down and came back to the table.

“They stopped.”

“Yes.”

“At the camp awakening.”

“Yes.”

He read the message himself.

For several seconds his expression was mostly concentration. Then he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“There wasn't an awakening in the lower guest house.”

“I know.”

“I was awake on the way back for some of it.”

“I know.”

“And then we were in the guest house.”

Isha watched him.

“You are arguing with a memory mistake made by a man who just admitted it was a memory mistake.”

“I know.”

“That usually works badly.”

Thomas gave her a look.

She moved slightly closer so they could both see the phone.

The practical question remained.

What came after the place where his family had stopped?

Thomas remembered it better now that Ian had forced the boundary into focus.

The camp. Isha beside him when he woke. Sereth asleep in the chair. The word Revive spoken aloud. The discussion about what the spell had taken from him. Thalen's examination. Then the return through the settlement and the lower guest house.

He looked at Isha.

“There are things in there we kept restricted.”

“Then.”

“Yes.”

“Revive.”

“Yes.”

Isha thought about that.

Her family had known more of the immediate truth than Thomas's had. Sereth had been in the tent. Aelira had known a restorative working had happened, though not necessarily every detail at first. Thomas's family, three hundred chapters and another world away, had been protected from most of it because there had been no useful way to tell them.

That reason no longer applied in quite the same way.

Isha rested her forearms on the table.

“They already know I died.”

“Yes.”

“They know you brought me back.”

“Yes.”

“They just read what it cost.”

Thomas nodded.

“The rest tells them we didn't immediately decide that meant I belonged to you.”

His eyes moved to her.

Isha's expression was steady.

“That matters.”

Thomas knew the conversation she meant. Sereth sitting beside her while he remained unconscious. Gratitude becoming another binding. Isha stating aloud what his act would not make of either of them.

“I don't mind Mum reading that.”

“No.”

“Dad either.”

“No.”

He smiled faintly.

“Mara will remember every sentence forever.”

“Probably.”

“Tessa will ask us about it in ten years.”

“Definitely.”

Thomas leaned back.

The more uncomfortable part was not even his own thoughts. It was being seventeen and weak in front of them. Being carried. Being unable to sit up. His mother reading that he had nearly spent his life along with his mana.

He recognised the feeling for what it was.

Embarrassment was not a privacy boundary merely because it was unpleasant.

“I meant the whole aftermath when I said yes,” he said.

Isha nodded.

“So did I.”

“I thought Ian's stopping point described it correctly.”

“So did I.”

Thomas picked up the phone.

“He asked again rather than just deciding we'd obviously meant the rest.”

“Yes.”

“And they stopped when the words didn't match the permission.”

Isha's mouth moved slightly.

“Kelda and Aelira are better at this than him.”

“He did say that.”

“He should not use it as an excuse to stop learning.”

“No.”

“But it is true.”

Thomas looked at the changing sender.

There was one other point.

“If they continue, they finish the second chapter.”

Isha considered it.

“All of it?”

“The lower guest house section is what we were trying to include anyway.”

She nodded slowly.

“The ending too.”

Thomas remembered lying exhausted on the bedroll while Isha arranged herself on the floor beside him, close enough for their fingers to touch.

Nothing in it belonged to anyone else by default.

But they could choose to share it.

“Yes.”

Isha took the phone from him.

“Then tell them to finish.”

Thomas watched while she typed, then made one addition.

“Say exactly why. Otherwise Ian may think we're expanding permission because he made a mistake.”

Isha nodded and continued.

When she was done, she turned the screen towards him.

Ian. Let them finish the second chapter.

When we agreed before, we intended to include the whole immediate aftermath through our return to the lower guest house. Your description of where Thomas first woke was wrong, but we understood the boundary you were trying to describe and agreed to that larger section.

So this is not permission created by your mistake. It is confirmation of what we intended.

Mira, Rowan, Mara, Tessa, Kelda and Aelira may continue from the camp awakening to the end of that second chapter, raw.

The permission still ends there.

You made a mistake. They stopped. You told us. We have corrected the boundary. That is enough.

Isha and Thomas

Thomas read the message twice.

His eyes remained on the last paragraph.

“That is probably kinder than Kelda's version.”

“Probably.”

“Should we remove it?”

“No.”

Thomas nodded.

“Send it.”

Isha pressed the reply button.

The changing sea of pixels rippled as the message left.

Then she put the phone back beside the album.

“Two million words.”

Thomas looked at her.

“That is disturbing.”

“Yes.”

“Three hundred chapters ago.”

“Yes.”

He frowned.

“I feel old.”

“You are twenty-five.”

“Apparently I have three hundred chapters of historical material.”

Isha leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“You were seventeen and foolish.”

“I was seventeen.”

“Yes.”

Thomas looked at her.

She kept a perfectly straight face.

The phone remained quiet.

Their answer had gone.

Back at the farmhouse, Ian looked down at the reply and read it aloud.

“Ian. Let them finish the second chapter.

“When we agreed before, we intended to include the whole immediate aftermath through our return to the lower guest house. Your description of where Thomas first woke was wrong, but we understood the boundary you were trying to describe and agreed to that larger section.

“So this is not permission created by your mistake. It is confirmation of what we intended.

“Mira, Rowan, Mara, Tessa, Kelda and Aelira may continue from the camp awakening to the end of that second chapter, raw.

“The permission still ends there.

“You made a mistake. They stopped. You told us. We have corrected the boundary. That is enough.

“Isha and Thomas.”

He finished.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Kelda looked at him.

“That is a fairly complete answer.”

Aelira's expression had softened slightly at the final paragraph.

“And an important one.”

Mara nodded. “They are saying they meant to give this permission before Ian made the error.”

“Yes,” Aelira said. “So we need not invent an ethical consequence that they have explicitly told us does not exist.”

Tessa looked at the face-down second chapter.

“Then we can finish.”

Mira drew a breath.

“Yes.”

Aelira turned the sheaf over.

The line where they had stopped remained easy to find.

Near dawn, Thomas woke.

Mira resumed reading.

Thomas opened his eyes to Isha beside him.

The first thing he did was look at her.

Not at the tent. Not at himself. At her.

You're here.

Mira's voice caught slightly on the words.

She continued.

Isha gave him water. Thomas asked whether she was hurt. He noticed Sereth asleep in the chair and, in the middle of everything, still managed to ask whether Sereth had tried to make Isha leave his side.

Tessa gave a small, incredulous breath when Isha's answer was simply that the attempt had not gone well.

Kelda folded her arms.

“That is also exactly them.”

Then Thomas said the name.

Revive.

The humour vanished.

Mira read Sereth's immediate answer that he should not use it again, and Thomas agreeing without argument.

Rowan's eyes stayed on the page.

“He knew it was dangerous.”

“He knew enough to be afraid of it,” Aelira said.

The account continued.

Thomas described the hour, the empty Status circle, the spell appearing when ordinary healing could do nothing.

Then Sereth asked the question none of them had yet heard expressed so plainly.

Had the spell asked for Thomas's life?

Mira stopped.

Tessa looked at Ian, then deliberately returned her attention to the text.

Mira continued.

It had tried to take more than mana.

Thomas had stopped it before it crossed that boundary.

Holy Shield, somehow turned inward.

Mara's face hardened.

“So the machine made the resurrection capable of killing him.”

Aelira answered before inference could become evidence.

“The reality contained that danger.”

Mara nodded reluctantly.

“Yes.”

They read Sereth restricting the word Revive to the people in the tent.

They read Thalen arriving, examining Thomas and finding his enormous new mana capacity almost completely empty.

They read Thomas promising not to cast, immediately qualifying it with unless necessary, and Thalen calling that the more honest lie.

Rowan's mouth moved.

“That is Thomas.”

Mira glanced at him.

“You've said that several times.”

“It keeps being true.”

The chapter moved out of the tent.

The pursuit was formally abandoned. Thomas was carried. Isha walked beside him. Sereth made her eat and wash.

The forest wards appeared ahead.

Then Aelira herself entered the account, waiting beneath the south trees while the party returned to the settlement.

Tessa looked across the table at her.

“You remember this?”

“Yes.”

Aelira's eyes remained on the words.

“Very clearly.”

Mira read Aelira telling Isha she would sit soon, then asking after Thomas.

Thalen's warning that Thomas was not to be questioned at length.

Thomas, barely conscious, still finding enough energy to say that Aelira having many questions sounded worse.

A faint smile reached Aelira now.

“I had forgotten he said that.”

Kelda looked at her.

“You had many questions.”

“I still do.”

The family gathered along the paths in silence as Thomas was brought through the settlement.

No cheering. No triumph.

Only people looking at Isha differently because she had died and returned, and at Thomas as though something had shifted around him that no one yet understood.

Mira's reading became slower.

At the lower guest house, Thomas was placed on the bedroll.

Isha sat beside him.

Thalen issued instructions so practical that Rowan nodded along with several of them as if depletion from forbidden resurrection were merely a particularly severe farm injury.

No casting. Water from a cup. Food. Sleep. Push Thomas down if he tried to stand.

Then the others left.

The room quietened.

Isha fed him broth.

Evening arrived.

And finally she unfolded another blanket and lay on the floor beside his bedroll.

Thomas objected that she should use the mat.

Isha declared the floor a broad interpretation of the word.

Tessa laughed softly through a nose still pink from crying earlier.

Then came the last exchange.

Isha's fingers resting against Thomas's. Thomas wanting to say more than he had strength to say. Instead, one small movement of his fingers against hers.

The evening bells.

Thomas alive.

Isha breathing beside him.

Neither fact requiring another name.

Mira reached the end.

She did not immediately move her hands from the paper.

Nobody did anything with the first chapter either.

For several breaths, the farmhouse kitchen was only firelight, cooling food and seven people sitting around words from years earlier.

Tessa wiped her face again.

“I knew they loved each other.”

Mara glanced at her.

“So did I.”

“No.” Tessa shook her head. “I mean, I knew.”

She looked down at the final page.

“But that was before they had words for half of it.”

Kelda's expression softened.

“Yes.”

Rowan looked towards Mira.

“He almost died.”

Mira nodded.

The fact had been present throughout the first chapter, but reading the aftermath had given it duration. Thomas had not simply spent everything and then recovered between scenes. He had been carried for hours. Watched through the night. Examined because nobody knew whether the spell had damaged him permanently.

Mira folded the last page back into place.

“And Isha knew immediately what owing him her life could do to them.”

Aelira's gaze moved to her.

“Sereth helped her name it.”

“Yes.”

Mira was quiet again.

“She has a very good mother.”

Kelda nodded.

“She does.”

Tessa looked at the two chapters.

“Can I say something unpleasant?”

Mara gave her a sideways glance.

“That has never required permission before.”

Tessa ignored her.

She looked at Ian.

“I understand why you said you knew Isha would come back.”

A pause.

“And I think it matters.”

Her fingers tightened against the table.

“But reading it makes me angrier about something else.”

No one interrupted her.

“You wanted Thomas pushed towards being the Hero.”

Tessa glanced down at the pages.

“He wasn't thinking about being a Hero.”

Her voice was quieter now.

“He wasn't thinking about kingdoms. Or ranks. Or stories.”

She looked back at Ian.

“He just didn't want Isha dead.”

Kelda's jaw tightened.

Mara looked at the first chapter, then at Ian.

“And there is something I want to know now.”

She waited until Ian was looking at her.

“When you gave the machine that brief, did you know bringing Isha back would nearly kill Thomas too?”

“I don't remember, I think so. I don't want to create a certainty I can't ... Be certain of.”

Mara held his gaze.

The answer did not satisfy her. It did, however, prevent the expression on her face from hardening further.

“Good,” she said after a moment.

Tessa turned towards her.

“Good?”

“Not that he might have known.”

Mara looked briefly at her sister.

“That he didn't turn I think so into yes because yes would make a cleaner answer.”

Aelira inclined her head.

“That distinction matters.”

Kelda looked at Ian across the table.

“And it is going to keep mattering.”

Ian had already admitted that the original brief was gone. The two chapters on the table were the reality that resulted from it, not a surviving copy of the few paragraphs he had supplied. Whatever certainty had once existed in the moment of writing now had hundreds of chapters, years of lived experience and nearly two million words between it and the man sitting in Thomas's childhood home.

Mara glanced down at the first chapter.

“So we know the result included it.”

Thomas's enormous new mana capacity. Revive taking all of it. The spell reaching farther. Thomas barely preventing it from taking his life as well.

“Yes,” Aelira said.

“But we don't know whether Ian explicitly asked for that cost.”

“No.”

Mara looked at Ian again.

“And Ian thinks he probably knew that would be part of it.”

Kelda corrected gently, “He thinks he remembers knowing.”

Mara considered the distinction.

“Yes.”

Rowan had been quiet.

He reached for the first sheaf and turned it slightly, not reopening it to read, only putting the two chapters square with each other on the table.

“If you did know,” he said, “then you chose a situation where both of them might have died.”

Ian had not said might.

Rowan seemed to realise it himself.

He frowned.

“No. That's not quite right.”

Aelira waited.

Rowan looked towards the chapter.

“You expected Isha to return.”

A pause.

“And if you knew the cost to Thomas, you expected him to nearly die doing it.”

His eyes lifted.

“That's different from expecting either of them actually to stay dead.”

Mira's mouth tightened.

“It doesn't make it small.”

“No.”

Rowan did not sound as if he intended it to.

“It makes it precise.”

That word seemed to settle him.

Tessa had gone back to the line near the end of the first chapter in her own memory: Thomas's heart failing to beat when expected, Isha's hand against his face, the darkness taking him only after he knew she lived.

She looked at Ian.

“I don't know whether I prefer that you knew.”

Nobody tried to answer for her.

“If you didn't know, then you asked for Isha to die and trusted the machine to work out what bringing her back would cost.”

Her forehead creased.

“If you did know, then you knew Thomas would do that to himself.”

Kelda's expression had become still.

Tessa continued.

“And either way, you're sitting here now saying you can't remember which.”

The hurt in that was different from the arrow. Not personal possession. Scale.

Something which had nearly ended two lives had once been a paragraph or two in a brief, while for the people inside it the bridge divided everything that came before from everything after.

Ian's inability to remember perfectly was human.

That did not make the imbalance easier to feel.

Mira reached across and laid her hand over Tessa's.

Tessa let her.

“I think that's one of the things we're going to have to accept if we keep asking him about how it was made,” Mira said.

Her eyes moved to Ian.

“Not forgive. Accept as a fact.”

She looked towards the chapters.

“To you, there was a point when this was something you were composing.”

Then towards Kelda and Aelira.

“To them, it was a road and a bridge and a night when they didn't know whether Thomas would wake.”

Her gaze finally settled on the family around the table.

“To us, it was something we didn't know had happened at all.”

A pause.

“And now we're all sitting in the same room trying to talk about it as though those are the same kind of memory.”

Aelira's expression softened.

“They are not.”

“No.”

Mira looked towards Ian again.

“That may be why I don't need you to remember everything perfectly.”

Ian's tears had dried enough that the statement could not easily be mistaken for reassurance offered only because he was upset.

“I do need you to tell us when you don't.”

Kelda nodded.

“That.”

Mara sat back.

Her original question had an answer now, even if it was not the one she might have preferred.

Possibly. Probably. Not certainly.

She did not press Ian to manufacture the missing certainty.

Instead she looked at the two chapters again.

“I have another question.”

Tessa gave her a tired glance.

“You have many.”

“I am related to Thomas.”

“That is apparently the excuse everyone uses.”

A small breath of laughter passed around the table.

Even Mira smiled.

It faded naturally.

Mara looked at Ian.

“When you wrote that brief, whatever exactly was in it, did you think of them as people?”

She paused, then corrected herself before he could answer the wrong question.

“No. That's too simple.”

Her fingers rested beside the closed chapters.

“You've already told us you were treating them as characters in a story.”

Mara's eyes met his.

“What I want to know is whether you felt that distinction then.”

A beat.

“When you decided Isha would die and Thomas would bring her back, did it feel to you like deciding that two people would suffer?”

The room went quiet again.

Mara waited for Ian to answer.

“Before that, I want you to know they could never have died.”

Ian stopped and corrected himself.

“.. permanently, in that moment. I would have forced the machine to recreate reality if it had ignored me. I dislike doing that as it is like I am writing the specifics, I only ever do it when it behaves stupidly.”

The correction did not reassure the room in quite the way the first sentence might have suggested.

Aelira's expression changed first.

“Recreate reality.”

Ian had used the phrase before in other contexts. Here, with the two chapters still resting on the farmhouse table, its scale was harder to leave abstract.

Kelda gave her a quick look.

“Later.”

Aelira considered that, then nodded.

“Later.”

Mira understood enough of the exchange not to pursue it either.

Ian continued.

“Back then I don't think I was quite so emotionally attached, that scene, their love, was definitely something that built it up. I was still into defining the magic, his 10x increase and that, back then. I enjoyed the world creating but leaving people to be more real, I think.”

His gaze dropped briefly towards the chapters.

“To answer: I didn't think about them as people suffering, it felt like a trope or a common pattern in heroic stories. I'm sure you've read stories of epic battles and conquests. Did you enjoy them without taking pleasure in suffering? How would you feel if you knew the writer had inadvertently created a reality with it.. it's hard. I'm sorry this sounds like I'm trying to absolve myself of blame.. I am not sure what I'm doing, which seems to be my catch phrase.”

He paused.

“I took no pleasure in their pain but took pleasure, or joy, or pride in the constant uplifting way of two amazing people surviving and growing and loving.”

Nobody answered immediately.

Mara had listened without looking away.

Eventually she said, “That does answer my question.”

Her fingers rested beside the first chapter.

“You did not experience the decision as hurting two people.”

“No,” Mira said quietly. “He experienced it as writing a kind of story.”

Mara nodded.

“That is what I was asking.”

Tessa frowned.

“But they were people.”

“Yes,” Mara said.

“I know.”

“So does it matter that he didn't think of them that way?”

Mara looked at her sister.

“I think it has to.”

Tessa's frown deepened.

“That sounds like letting him off.”

“No.”

Mara shifted in her chair.

“If somebody knows another person is real and chooses to hurt them because the suffering makes a satisfying story, that is one thing.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“If somebody sincerely believes they are inventing fictional people, writes something awful happening to them, and later discovers the people became real... that is not the same thing.”

Aelira spoke carefully.

“The consequences for Thomas and Isha are the same.”

“Yes.”

“But the intent is not.”

“No.”

Kelda rubbed her thumb along the grain of the table.

“And intent doesn't pay the bill.”

Mara nodded.

“Also true.”

Ian's comparison to stories remained between them.

Rowan was the one who took it seriously.

“I have read battle stories.”

He glanced towards Mira.

“Not many.”

“More than you admit.”

“Some.”

His gaze returned to Ian.

“And yes. I have enjoyed them.”

He thought about it.

“Not because men were being cut apart.”

Tessa made a face. “Obviously.”

“It isn't obvious to the question.”

That quieted her.

Rowan continued.

“You enjoy somebody holding a gate. Or getting home. Or doing something brave when they could have run.”

His eyes moved briefly towards the first chapter.

“Like Thomas refusing to let Isha stay dead.”

Ian had said something very similar.

Rowan looked back at him.

“If I learned afterward that the story I read had actually caused a real battle somewhere, I don't think enjoying the story beforehand would mean I enjoyed those people suffering.”

Mira watched him.

“But?”

Rowan nodded.

“But once I knew it was real, I'd have to stop treating the next battle the same way.”

Aelira's expression sharpened.

“Yes.”

That, more than anything else said so far, seemed to find the centre of the problem.

Mara leaned forward.

“I think that is where the responsibility changes.”

Ian looked at her.

“Before you understood the machine was making a reality, I don't know what moral rule anyone could reasonably expect you to follow except the rules you thought applied to creating fiction.”

She glanced towards the chapters.

“That does not make what happened less terrible inside the world.”

A pause.

“But I am not sure I can call you cruel for failing to know something you genuinely did not know.”

Kelda looked towards her.

Mara met the look.

“I said then.”

Kelda nodded.

“Fair.”

Mara returned to Ian.

“Afterward is different.”

There was no hostility in it.

“Once you knew Thomas was Thomas, Isha was Isha, Kelda was Kelda—once you understood that people continued when you were not looking at them—then the excuse of story stopped working.”

Ian had already said much the same himself.

Aelira added, “And that may not have happened at one clean moment.”

Kelda gave her a sideways glance.

“There is the complexity.”

“Yes.”

Aelira ignored the tone.

“If Ian gradually moved from believing he was directing invented narrative, to suspecting something more, to knowing that we exist independently of his observation, then his responsibility likely changed gradually as well.”

Tessa looked dissatisfied.

“How are we supposed to know when?”

“We may not.”

Aelira's answer was immediate.

“And forcing a precise boundary because we want one would repeat the same error we have just avoided with his memory of the brief.”

Mira had been quiet.

Now she looked at Ian.

“I believe you when you say you didn't enjoy their pain.”

The statement came without ceremony.

“I don't think you would be sitting here crying over whether Isha likes you if you had.”

Ian's eyes shifted down.

Mira continued.

“And I understand the part about being proud of them.”

She touched the edge of the first chapter.

“I just read my son refuse death until the refusal nearly killed him.”

Her mouth tightened.

“I am proud of him too.”

For several seconds she could not continue.

When she did, her voice was steadier.

“But I don't have to be glad the bridge happened in order to be proud of what he did there.”

Kelda's eyes moved immediately to Ian.

The sentence echoed too closely with arguments already made in another world to be missed.

Mira did not know that.

She went on.

“I think perhaps that's the thing you keep getting tangled in.”

She gestured lightly towards the pages.

“You see something terrible, then something beautiful grows through it, and because the beautiful thing matters to you, part of you wants the terrible thing to have been worth it.”

Ian had not quite said that.

Mira did not accuse him of having done so.

“But those are separate.”

Aelira nodded.

“Very.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“You can love what Thomas and Isha became without needing the things that hurt them to have been good decisions.”

Kelda leaned back.

“That one took us longer to get out of him.”

Mira looked at her.

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

Ian was given no opportunity to defend himself from Kelda's summary because Tessa spoke next.

“I think I understand the story part.”

Everyone looked at her.

She frowned at the first chapter.

“When I was little, I used to make stories where I killed people.”

Mara raised an eyebrow.

“You were a disturbing child.”

“They were bandits.”

“That improves nothing.”

“They were bad bandits.”

Rowan coughed into one hand.

Tessa ignored him.

“I didn't sit there thinking about their mothers.”

The humour faded by itself.

“Because they weren't real.”

She looked at Ian.

“If one of them had turned up at the farm afterward and told me he'd felt all of it, I think I would feel sick.”

A pause.

“And I would probably keep saying I hadn't meant it that way.”

Ian had, in essence, been doing that.

Tessa looked down at her hands.

“So I think I understand that part.”

Then her expression hardened slightly.

“But if he came back the next week and I made another story where I stabbed him because it was exciting, then I couldn't say the same thing.”

“No,” Mara said.

Tessa nodded.

“So I want to know when you knew.”

Kelda exhaled.

“Tessa.”

“What?”

“That is probably several hundred chapters of argument.”

Ian had just admitted he did not remember the exact intent of a scene three hundred chapters earlier.

Tessa considered that.

“All right.”

She looked at Ian again.

“Not now.”

That was not the same as withdrawing the question permanently.

Aelira returned to the first thing Ian had said.

“There is still one point I do not want lost.”

Ian looked towards her.

“You said Thomas and Isha could never have died permanently because, had reality failed to give you the outcome you intended, you would have recreated it.”

Her tone was careful.

“For you, that meant there was a guarantee.”

“Yes,” Kelda murmured.

“For them there wasn't.”

Aelira touched neither chapter.

“Thomas on that bridge did not know that an external person would erase or recreate reality if Revive failed.”

Mira's face tightened.

“Isha didn't know.”

“No.”

“So the fear was real.”

“Entirely.”

Aelira looked back at Ian.

“I believe you when you say you had a safety condition outside their reality.”

A pause.

“But do not use that to tell Thomas he was never truly at risk.”

Ian had not done so.

Aelira acknowledged that with a slight inclination of her head.

“You have not said that. I am making the distinction before it becomes confused later.”

Kelda's expression had grown darker around the phrase recreate reality.

“What happens to us if you do that?”

The question arrived plainly.

Aelira looked at her.

Kelda shrugged once.

“He brought it up.”

She faced Ian.

“If the machine makes something happen you reject, and you tell it to recreate reality until it gets the answer you want...”

Her fingers stopped moving.

“Are the people from the first version dead?”

Aelira's face became very still.

“Or,” she said, “does the same reality change?”

Mara looked between them.

“Is there a difference from inside it?”

“No idea,” Kelda said.

“That is why I asked.”

Mira drew a slow breath.

“Perhaps that one should wait.”

Kelda looked at her.

Mira's expression held no fear of the question, only judgement about the room.

“We have just read about my son nearly dying. Tessa has cried twice. Ian has been crying. The food is cold.”

Rowan looked at his mug.

“It was cold earlier.”

“Thank you, Rowan.”

He nodded.

Mira continued.

“I am not sure we need to solve whether previous versions of reality have souls before supper is cleared.”

Aelira considered that.

“A compelling procedural argument.”

Kelda rubbed both hands over her face.

“Fine.”

Tessa looked at Ian.

“I still have more questions.”

Mara gave a tired sound.

“So do I.”

Rowan nodded once.

Mira looked around her family, then at Kelda and Aelira, and finally at Ian.

“I expect everyone does.”

She stood.

“But I think we've done enough with the bridge for one sitting.”

Nobody objected.

Mira began collecting mugs.

Then she stopped beside Ian.

“What you said at the end matters to me.”

Ian looked up.

“That you were proud of them.”

She glanced towards the two chapters.

“I can understand that.”

A pause.

“Just learn to be proud of them for the choices that are theirs.”

Her gaze remained steady.

“Not for surviving choices you made for them.”

Kelda's eyes lowered.

Aelira gave the smallest nod.

Mira picked up the final mug.

“And if you truly want Isha to like you a little, that seems a better place to start.”

“Thank you for letting me into your house and explaining the enterity of existence badly.”

For a moment, nobody seemed certain which part of the sentence deserved an answer.

Rowan settled on the practical one.

“You're welcome.”

Mara looked at him.

“What?”

“He thanked us.”

“That was not the unusual part.”

“I know.”

A faint tiredness had entered the room now that the chapters were closed. The questions had not gone away, but they no longer needed to be answered before anyone moved. Mira carried two mugs towards the basin. Tessa remained at the table, one hand resting near the pages without touching them.

Ian continued.

“Before retiring for the night, do you want to see how it works?”

Mira stopped.

Slowly, she turned around.

Kelda muttered, “There it is.”

Ian received six different expressions.

Tessa's was immediate interest. Mara's was suspicion of the wording. Rowan looked towards the walls of his farmhouse. Mira looked as though she had only just finished convincing herself the evening was becoming simpler.

Aelira, predictably, asked the useful question.

“What, precisely, are you offering to demonstrate?”

She remained seated.

“The machine itself? Your ability to produce an object? A door? A change to something already here?”

Kelda pointed towards her.

“This is why you came.”

“I am aware.”

Mira put the mugs down rather than continuing to the basin.

“No changes to the house.”

Rowan added immediately, “Or the farm.”

“Definitely not the farm,” Mira said.

Tessa looked at her father.

“What if it's something tiny?”

“No.”

“What if he fixes—”

“No.”

“I hadn't said what.”

“I know what needs fixing.”

Tessa subsided.

Mara looked at Ian.

“I am curious.”

That admission seemed to annoy her slightly.

“But I don't want curiosity to become permission for an experiment where we discover afterward what we agreed to.”

Aelira nodded.

“Exactly.”

Tessa frowned.

“We know he can do things.”

“Yes,” Mara said.

“I've already had my arrow taken between worlds.”

“Yes.”

“And Kelda walked through a door from the Elven Woods to Green Road today.”

Everyone looked at Kelda.

Kelda stared back.

“I was going to mention that.”

Mira blinked.

“You did what?”

“A door.”

“From here?”

“No. From the Wood Elves.”

Rowan's eyebrows rose.

“And you came back?”

“Yes.”

“Through the same door?”

“My own door.”

Silence.

Kelda rubbed at her forehead.

“This sounds worse when explained quickly.”

Aelira said, “It was consensual, reversible, and Kelda tested both directions before we used the same mechanism to come here.”

Mira looked at the two of them.

“You travelled from the Wood Elves to our woods by opening a door.”

“Yes,” Kelda said.

“How far is that?”

“Normally?”

“Yes.”

“A very long way.”

Tessa's interest sharpened further.

“That is excellent.”

“It is disturbing,” Mara corrected.

“Those can both be true.”

Aelira glanced towards Ian at the familiar phrase, but let it pass.

Rowan considered the problem differently.

“So when you say see how it works, you mean something like that?”

The question remained with Ian, unanswered.

Mira returned to her chair rather than beginning the washing.

“I am willing to see something.”

Tessa brightened.

Mira raised one finger before her daughter could convert that into enthusiasm on everyone's behalf.

“Something we agree to first.”

She looked at Ian.

“No surprises. No gifts. Nothing taken from somewhere else unless whoever owns it has agreed. Nothing living.”

Kelda nodded firmly at that.

“And nothing that damages the floor.”

Rowan looked at her.

“Was that likely?”

“With Ian, I have stopped sorting likely things from unlikely things.”

“That seems sensible.”

Aelira folded her hands.

“I would add one condition.”

Ian looked towards her.

“If the purpose is to help them understand the mechanism, choose something where the result is obvious and the consequences are trivial.”

Mara nodded.

“I don't want to watch you recreate history.”

“Nor alter it,” Aelira said.

Tessa looked vaguely disappointed that altering history had apparently been an available category.

Mira noticed.

“No.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You were about to.”

Tessa folded her arms.

Rowan looked at Ian.

“I'd rather see you make something than change something.”

That distinction seemed to appeal to everyone.

Mara considered it.

“Something simple.”

“Local,” Mira added.

Kelda snorted.

“If he could only make local things, this conversation would be much easier.”

Mira gave her a look.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

Aelira translated.

“Something whose existence does not create another consent problem.”

Kelda leaned towards Ian.

“Preferably something nobody can become emotionally attached to.”

Tessa said, “Bread.”

Mira looked at her.

“What?”

“Bread.”

Tessa gestured towards the table.

“He can make things. We need something harmless. Bread is harmless.”

Rowan considered this with unexpected seriousness.

“Depends on the bread.”

Mara stared at him.

“It does.”

Kelda's mouth twitched.

Aelira looked between them.

“I am beginning to understand Thomas better.”

Mira ignored all of them and returned her attention to Ian.

“You offered the demonstration.”

She gestured towards the table.

“So tell us what you had in mind before anybody agrees to it.”

Nobody asked him to do anything yet.

Tessa clearly wanted to.

The others were learning from experience.

They waited.

Ian took out his phone and turned the screen towards them.

The image on it was not a photograph of the farmhouse.

It was words.

A great many words, arranged in pale lines against a black background. At the top sat a short title in Ian's own script. Beneath it were paragraphs, names and quoted speech. At the bottom was a separate dark box containing another line Ian had apparently entered but had not yet sent.

To Mira, Rowan, Mara and Tessa, almost all of it was unreadable.

Kelda recognised the shape of the device immediately.

“That is like Aelira's.”

“Similar,” Aelira said.

She leaned closer without taking it from Ian.

The screen showed 09:26 in one corner. Small unfamiliar symbols sat beside it. None of those mattered much.

The structure did.

Aelira had spent enough time with the other device to recognise a place where text was entered, controls beneath it, and the difference between material already displayed and something waiting to be acted upon.

“What are we looking at?”

Mara had come around the side of the table.

Tessa was already closer.

“Can you read it?”

“No,” Mara said.

“Neither can I.”

Kelda squinted at the screen.

“I recognise how much writing there is.”

Aelira's eyes moved down the display.

Then stopped.

There were shapes repeated in ways that looked like names.

She pointed, careful not to touch the glass.

“That.”

Kelda followed her finger.

“Aelira?”

Aelira nodded slowly.

She could not read the surrounding Earth script, but she had seen her own name represented often enough during Ian's earlier demonstrations to recognise its general shape.

A little farther up was another.

“Kelda.”

Kelda stared.

Then another familiar pattern.

Thomas.

And one which Aelira had seen attached to Earth material often enough to recognise even without knowing the alphabet.

Isha.

Her attention sharpened.

“These are our names.”

Mara looked at Ian's phone again.

“What does the rest say?”

No one answered for Ian.

Tessa pointed near the upper visible portion.

“Is that what we were just saying?”

Aelira could not confirm the words, but the arrangement had become suspicious.

Several short paragraphs. A line introduced as speech. Another paragraph. Another piece of speech.

Kelda moved around Ian far enough to see the screen straight on.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Wait.”

She looked towards Rowan. Then back at the phone.

“Just before this, Rowan said the quality of bread depended on the bread.”

Rowan frowned.

“I said that.”

“Yes.”

Kelda pointed towards the first visible quotation.

“I cannot read that. But if this is what I think it is—”

Aelira's face became very still.

“The machine is writing this conversation.”

The room quietened.

Mara looked from the screen to Ian.

“Now?”

Aelira studied the lower part of the display.

There was a text-entry field.

Inside it was another block of Ian's writing.

Something he had entered after the prose above.

Kelda had spent enough time with Ian over the previous days to understand the implication before anyone else at the farm did.

“Oh.”

That one syllable carried considerably more alarm than Lethira's earlier use of it over the wedding photograph.

Tessa looked at her.

“What?”

Kelda pointed at the screen.

“I think the part at the bottom is him.”

Mara frowned. “Him what?”

“Giving it what happens next.”

Aelira looked again.

Not necessarily what happened, she thought.

A prompt. A description. A direction.

The distinctions Ian had been struggling to explain all evening suddenly had a physical shape.

Mira came closer.

“So this is the machine?”

Aelira shook her head slightly.

“Perhaps an interface to it.”

The unfamiliar word did not help.

“A place where he speaks to it,” she amended.

Rowan looked at the phone.

“And it writes back?”

Kelda's expression was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

“I think so.”

Tessa stared at the screen with open fascination.

“So all that writing above—”

She gestured around the table.

“Is us?”

Aelira looked at Ian.

“That is what he needs to explain.”

There was no accusation yet.

Only a much more concrete version of the question they had been asking for hours.

Mara noticed something else.

“If this is happening now, then it isn't only recording after events are finished.”

Aelira's gaze returned to the screen.

“No.”

Kelda folded her arms.

“And if the bottom is what Ian just told it…”

She stopped.

The visible entry field contained a description of Ian showing them the screenshot.

The act he was performing.

Kelda could not read it.

But Ian could.

And the machine could.

Aelira's expression shifted as she followed the possibility.

“You entered something before showing us this.”

Ian had not yet explained what.

She looked directly at him.

“Did you tell it that you were going to show us the screen?”

The question hung there.

Mira looked between Ian and the device.

“And then it produced an account of what happened when you did?”

Rowan's attention settled on the phone with the same concentration he had used earlier for dangerous machinery.

“That is different from making bread.”

“Yes,” Mara said.

Tessa looked almost offended by the comparison.

“It is considerably better than bread.”

“No,” Kelda said.

Everyone looked at her.

Kelda stared at the screen.

“It is considerably more worrying than bread.”

Aelira gave a slow nod.

Then, despite herself, her eyes returned to the visible prose.

Ian had offered to show them how it worked.

Apparently he already had.

She looked up at him.

“Translate the screen for us.”

A pause.

“Exactly as it is.”

Ian showed them the phone again.

This time the unfamiliar Earth lettering did not remain unfamiliar.

The shapes did not visibly change. They were still the same letters on the same black screen, but everyone looking at it understood them as perfect Common.

Tessa read first.

Tessa looked almost offended by the comparison.

“It is considerably better than bread.”

“No,” Kelda said.

Everyone looked at her.

Kelda stared at the screen.

“It is considerably more worrying than bread.”

Tessa stopped.

Her eyes moved slowly from the phone to Kelda.

“You did say that.”

Kelda was no longer amused.

“Yes.”

Mara leaned closer.

The next lines described Aelira nodding. Her returning attention to the prose. Ian having offered to demonstrate the mechanism and apparently already having done so.

Then:

She looked up at him.

“Translate the screen for us.”

A pause.

“Exactly as it is.”

Aelira read her own words twice.

Her gaze lifted from the phone.

“That is exact.”

Rowan looked at her. “You just said it.”

“Yes.”

“No,” Mara said quietly. “It says she said it.”

Everyone looked towards her.

Mara pointed at the screen.

“It doesn't say what Ian told the machine she would say.”

Aelira followed the distinction at once.

“It is in the produced account.”

“Yes.”

Kelda's attention had moved lower.

To the text-entry box.

The words there were also perfectly comprehensible now.

I show them again. They are able to fully read it in perfect Common. I also show them this one.

Silence.

Tessa read it again.

Then looked at Ian's hand holding the phone. Then at the screen.

“You wrote that.”

The wording made it a statement rather than a question.

Mira came closer.

“He told it he would show us again.”

Rowan nodded slowly.

“And that we would be able to read it.”

“Not what we would say,” Aelira said.

Her eyes remained on the input.

“Not how we would react.”

Kelda pointed towards the upper part of the screen.

“But when he did the previous thing, that appeared.”

The prose describing her. Tessa. Aelira. The conversation. Their movements.

Mara's face had gone very still.

“So this is what you meant.”

Nobody asked her whom she meant.

She looked at the input field.

“He gives it a shape.”

Then at the prose above.

“And it fills in the people.”

Aelira's attention sharpened.

“Perhaps.”

Mara looked at her.

“That seems fairly clear.”

“What seems clear is that Ian supplied a short description of his own intended action.”

Aelira indicated the lower text.

“And the account above contains considerably more than the kind of instruction he has shown us.”

She looked around the table.

“But we should not yet assume whether the machine caused our responses, predicted them, recorded them as they occurred, or generated reality in which they occurred.”

Kelda stared at her.

“You found four worse possibilities in one sentence.”

“They are materially different.”

“They are all worrying.”

“That too.”

Tessa was still fascinated.

She pointed at the bottom.

“It says I also show them this one.”

“Yes,” Mara said.

“This one is this one.”

“Yes.”

Tessa frowned with concentration.

“So we are reading the instruction which describes him showing us the instruction we're reading.”

Kelda closed her eyes.

“Please stop.”

“I haven't done anything.”

“You are making it recursive.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“Neither do I, but you are doing it.”

Rowan took a more practical route.

“If Ian hadn't shown us the second screen, that sentence would have been wrong.”

Aelira turned towards him.

“Yes.”

“And he could have chosen not to.”

“Yes.”

Rowan considered the phone.

“So his action still matters.”

Mara nodded slowly.

“He isn't only watching a script play out.”

That mattered enough to alter the mood.

Aelira looked at the input once more.

“It says what Ian does.”

Her finger remained safely away from the glass.

“The prose above says what we do in response.”

Kelda folded her arms.

“And presumably the next prose will include us standing here having this conversation.”

Tessa looked at the screen with sudden anticipation.

“Can we see it?”

Kelda turned to her.

“Of course that is your first question.”

“It is an obvious test.”

“It is an obvious way to lose the rest of the night.”

Mira had been reading the earlier prose more carefully.

She stopped at a sentence.

Nobody asked him to do anything yet.

Tessa clearly wanted to.

The others were learning from experience.

They waited.

Her expression changed.

“Tessa.”

“What?”

“You had not said you wanted to.”

Tessa leaned over to read it.

“No.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“But she did.”

Tessa frowned.

“I did.”

Mara's attention moved immediately to the problem.

“That is not externally visible in the same way as speech.”

“No,” Aelira said.

“Perhaps inferable,” Rowan offered.

Everyone looked at him.

“Tessa had been asking about demonstrations for several minutes.”

Tessa looked offended again.

“I was curious.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn't prove I wanted him to do something.”

Rowan gave her a patient look.

“You wanted him to do something.”

“That is not the point.”

“No.”

Mara was already reading another line.

Aelira, predictably, asked the useful question.

Aelira's eyebrows rose.

Kelda leaned over.

“Oh, I like that one.”

“You would.”

“It knows you.”

Aelira ignored her.

Then Mara found:

Tessa clearly wanted to.

And beneath earlier portions of the conversation, descriptions of expressions, attention and intent that had never been spoken aloud.

Mara looked towards Ian.

“This is the private-thought problem.”

Aelira nodded.

“Not necessarily private thoughts in full.”

“But interpretation of us.”

“Yes.”

Kelda's gaze remained fixed on the phone.

“And apparently quite good interpretation.”

Tessa looked up.

“Can it be wrong?”

Nobody there could answer that from the screen.

Aelira took a slow breath.

“What we have learned is more useful than bread.”

Tessa immediately looked at Kelda.

Kelda pointed at her.

“Do not.”

Tessa smiled.

Aelira continued, ignoring them both.

“Ian supplies something small.”

She indicated the input.

“The resulting account is much larger. It includes actions he did not specify, dialogue he did not write, observations, and at least some interpretation of internal state.”

She looked directly at the phone.

“And the people being described are able to read it while the process is still continuing.”

Mara's expression tightened.

“That last part is new.”

“Yes.”

Mira looked less interested in the metaphysics than in the implications.

“So when Thomas and Isha's story says what they thought…”

She glanced towards the two chapters still on the table.

“That may be this same process.”

Aelira nodded.

“That appears increasingly likely.”

Mira looked at the phone again.

Then she gave a small, unsettled laugh.

“So somewhere after Ian sends whatever he sends next, there may be words describing me saying this.”

Kelda grimaced.

“That is exactly the sort of sentence I was hoping nobody would say.”

Tessa leaned towards the screen.

“I want to see if it gets it right.”

Mara looked at her.

“You understand that whatever you say now may itself become part of the thing you're testing.”

“Yes.”

“And that doesn't bother you?”

Tessa considered it.

“Somewhat.”

A beat.

“It is still interesting.”

“That,” Kelda said, “is why you're related to Thomas.”

Rowan looked at his daughter, then at the impossible little screen.

“I think I understand the demonstration now.”

He looked towards Ian.

“You don't tell it everything.”

A pause.

“You tell it what you are doing.”

His gaze returned to the prose.

“And then it tells you what happens.”

Aelira corrected him with characteristic care.

“Or makes what happens.”

Rowan's mouth tightened.

“Yes.”

He looked at the two chapters.

“That is the part we still don't know.”

Aelira nodded.

“That is the part Ian himself seems not to know.”

For once, Kelda did not make a joke about it.

She was still staring at the line in the input box.

I show them again. They are able to fully read it in perfect Common. I also show them this one.

Finally she looked at Ian.

“I think that was a much better demonstration than bread.”

Tessa brightened.

“I said that.”

“No. You said better than bread before you knew what it was.”

“I was still right.”

Kelda sighed.

Aelira's mouth moved very slightly.

Then she looked at Ian.

“The demonstration is sufficient.”

A pause.

“And considerably more informative than I expected.”

“I offered something small... That sounds like something my wife would say.”

There was a pause.

Kelda understood first.

Her mouth twitched.

Aelira looked from her to Ian, recognised that there was apparently a second meaning available, and decided with visible discipline not to investigate it.

Mara did not share that restraint.

“You have a wife?”

“Yes,” Kelda said, before remembering that this was not actually her question to answer.

Tessa's attention sharpened with entirely new curiosity.

Ian continued before the subject could expand.

“Sorry, deflection and self deprecating. Maybe Isha was very right saying there was me in Thomas.”

That earned a quieter response.

Mira looked at him for a moment.

“I can see some of it.”

Ian glanced towards her.

“The humour when something becomes too close,” she said. “Thomas does that.”

Rowan nodded.

“He usually thinks nobody notices.”

Mara looked at her father.

“He definitely knows we notice.”

“He knows now.”

Kelda leaned back.

“Isha notices before he starts.”

“That sounds difficult,” Mira said.

“It is useful,” Aelira replied.

Ian continued.

“I can do ice cream as well, which is better than bread, before going?”

Tessa turned immediately towards her mother.

“Yes.”

Mira held up one hand.

“I have not answered.”

“You were going to.”

“I was considering it.”

“That is nearly the same thing.”

“It is not.”

Aelira had gone suspiciously still.

Kelda noticed.

“You know what ice cream is.”

Aelira's expression became carefully neutral.

“I have encountered it.”

Tessa stared at her.

“Here?”

“No.”

“Did Ian make it?”

Aelira paused.

“Yes.”

Kelda's eyebrows rose.

“You didn't tell me that part.”

“There were several other events competing for attention.”

“Was it good?”

Aelira's dignity survived for nearly two seconds.

“Yes.”

Tessa looked at Mira with the expression of someone whose argument had just acquired royal testimony.

Mira sighed.

“What does making ice cream involve?”

“Usually,” Aelira said, “rather more work than Ian is proposing.”

“That was not reassuring.”

“No.”

Ian added, “Or you can ask me anything or for anything, almost.”

Mara's head lifted at the final word.

“Almost is doing useful work there.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

Kelda pointed towards Ian.

“Keep that word.”

Tessa was still pursuing the more immediate question.

“If he makes ice cream, does it take anything from somewhere else?”

Everyone looked at Ian.

Then Tessa corrected herself before he needed to answer.

“No. Better question. Can you make it without taking somebody else's?”

Aelira gave her a small approving nod.

Mira considered the room: the two chapters, the impossible phone, her family, two visitors from another people, and the man who had spent much of the evening explaining that reality sometimes obeyed him before he understood why.

Then she looked towards the remains of supper.

“One bowl.”

Tessa's face brightened.

“For everyone,” Mira added.

“Oh.”

“Not one bowl each appearing from nowhere.”

“That would still be one bowl each.”

“Tessa.”

“Yes, Mum.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“Something simple. Nothing taken. Nothing changed permanently. No new machine left behind.”

Rowan added, “And nothing involving the farm.”

“I think ice cream is unlikely to alter the farm,” Mara said.

“We have had a complicated evening.”

“That is fair.”

Aelira glanced towards Ian.

“Chocolate would be the obvious choice.”

Kelda looked at her.

“You have thought about this.”

“I have tasted it.”

“That is not a denial.”

Tessa pointed at Aelira.

“Chocolate.”

Mara sighed.

“I also vote chocolate.”

Rowan looked faintly betrayed by the speed with which the matter had become democratic.

Mira glanced at him.

“Do you object?”

“No.”

“Then chocolate.”

The decision was made with considerably more governance than most desserts received.

Mira returned to Ian's other offer.

“As for asking you for anything...”

Her tone changed.

“I don't think I want anything from you tonight.”

Tessa looked surprised.

Mira continued before it could sound like rejection.

“You came because Thomas asked us to be given a choice. We chose to meet you. You answered things that hurt to answer. We read something I never expected to read.”

Her eyes moved briefly to the chapters.

“That is enough.”

Rowan nodded. Mara did too.

Tessa hesitated.

“I want more things eventually.”

Mara looked at her.

“Questions.”

“Yes. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Tessa ignored that.

Aelira looked at Ian.

“You offered anything because you are able to offer too much.”

A pause.

“Perhaps learning when nothing is required will be as useful as learning when to ask.”

Kelda gave a quiet grunt.

“And tonight they asked for ice cream.”

Tessa smiled.

“Chocolate ice cream.”

“Yes,” Kelda said. “Apparently this is now the important distinction.”

Mira sat down again.

“One harmless bowl of chocolate ice cream.”

She looked directly at Ian.

“And then, unless somebody discovers another question while eating it, I think we let this evening end.”

Ian bent down.

When he straightened, he was holding a broad bowl that had not existed a moment earlier.

It was larger than any individual serving ought to have been: five or six rounded scoops of pale-brown ice cream piled together, dark chocolate sauce falling over them in glossy lines, whipped cream heaped lightly on top. He set it in the middle of the table.

Then he placed spoons beside it.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

None of them had been there before.

No sound accompanied the appearance of any of it. The bowl simply occupied the wood where empty table had been.

Tessa stared.

Rowan stared too, though his expression held less delight and more calculation, as if he were still trying to identify what category of impossible tool could reasonably produce chilled dessert in a farmhouse kitchen.

Mira looked at the bowl, then at Ian.

“You did at least understand one bowl.”

Kelda leaned forward slightly.

“It smells like the one Aelira had.”

Aelira gave her a level look.

“I assumed that was the point.”

Tessa had already picked up a spoon.

She stopped halfway to the bowl and looked at her mother.

Mira sighed.

“Yes.”

That was enough.

Tessa took the first spoonful.

The cold hit her before the flavour did. Her eyes widened. She covered the reaction badly, swallowed, and then failed to cover the second reaction as the chocolate arrived properly.

“Oh.”

Kelda's mouth moved.

“That is a useful oh.”

Tessa ignored her and held the spoon out towards Mara.

“Take some before I decide I no longer believe in sharing.”

Mara accepted the spoon with visible suspicion, tried a smaller amount, and stopped with the same startled stillness Tessa had shown.

“Well?”

Rowan asked it as if requiring a report.

Mara looked at him.

“It is absurd.”

That was not an answer.

She took another spoonful.

“It is also very good.”

Rowan took that as sufficient evidence and reached for his own spoon.

Mira followed. Then Kelda. Then Aelira, with a composure that survived exactly until she actually tasted it again.

Kelda noticed.

“You like it.”

Aelira swallowed.

“Yes.”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“I am becoming less convinced that showing us the screen was your best demonstration.”

A small silence followed as even she took another spoonful.

Then she added, more honestly, “Not much less convinced.”

Rowan set his spoon down for a moment and looked into the bowl as though some structural principle might reveal itself at the bottom.

“It is cold.”

“Yes,” Tessa said.

“I can tell that.”

“No, I mean properly cold.”

He looked at Ian.

“How?”

Kelda pointed at him with her spoon.

“That question does not improve while chocolate is melting.”

“It was a serious question.”

“And tonight serious questions are apparently receiving whipped cream.”

Mira laughed under her breath.

It was the first easy sound she had made all evening.

The bowl went around again.

Tessa had stopped pretending moderation entirely. Mara remained restrained in quantity but not in approval. Rowan seemed to have decided that careful sampling and a third spoonful were compatible positions. Mira ate more slowly than the others, watching the room around the table change by small degrees as something simple and impossible displaced the weight of the bridge for a few minutes.

Aelira, having already crossed the line from dignity into repeat participation once before in another world, did not bother defending herself from it here.

Kelda noticed that too.

“So Royal protection was the correct policy.”

Aelira looked at her.

“For the machine.”

“Yes,” Kelda said. “And clearly also for this.”

Tessa laughed with her spoon still in hand.

Mira gave her a look.

Tessa swallowed.

“Sorry.”

“No, you aren't.”

“No.”

Rowan took another bite, then glanced at Ian.

“I understand why Thomas's family had to be asked before meeting you.”

Everyone looked at him.

He nodded once towards the bowl.

“If we'd started with this, it would have complicated the assessment.”

Kelda stared at him. Then at the bowl. Then back at Rowan.

“That,” she said, “is an excellent point.”

Mara shook her head.

“I hate that he is right.”

“I usually am.”

“Not usually,” Tessa said.

“Tonight enough.”

That drew another small breath of laughter from Mira.

The bowl was no longer full. Not empty either, but visibly reduced.

Mira set her spoon down and folded her hands lightly.

“All right.”

The word was calm, but it gathered the room again without erasing the softness the ice cream had created.

“That was better than bread.”

Tessa looked vindicated.

Kelda muttered, “A dangerous sentence.”

Mira ignored her.

She looked at Ian.

“You came. You answered. You showed us the screen. You fed us impossible dessert.”

A pause.

“For one evening, I think that is enough.”

Rowan nodded. Mara did too.

Tessa looked as though she could easily have continued for another hour, but after a glance at Mira she merely took one final spoonful and accepted the ruling.

Aelira rested her spoon against the bowl.

Kelda leaned back in her chair.

The fire still burned. The chapters still lay on the table. The impossible phone still existed. None of the difficult things had gone away.

But for a few minutes, in Thomas's childhood home, six people and one inconvenient author had shared chocolate ice cream from a bowl that had appeared from nowhere.

Kelda looked at Ian across the table.

“Well.”

A beat.

“You had better not make leaving awkward.”

“I shall return after breakfast, we can continue, or you can decide on the gift for them, it is your choice.”

Ian looked around the table.

“I thank you all again for letting me attempt to explain myself. I hope you understand me a little.”

Mira considered him for several seconds.

“A little,” she said.

It was not dismissive.

“More than when you arrived.”

She looked towards the two chapters.

“I understand better how someone can do something terrible without sitting down and deciding to be terrible.”

Ian's explanation of fiction, the machine and reality had not made the bridge harmless. It had given her a way to place the man at her table beside the choices he had made without pretending the two were simple to reconcile.

“I also understand why Thomas and Isha haven't simply told you to disappear.”

A pause.

“And why they're careful with you.”

Rowan nodded.

“I understand the machine less.”

Kelda gave a quiet grunt.

“That means you're keeping up.”

“But I understand you better,” Rowan continued.

His gaze remained on Ian.

“You act quickly. Sometimes because you can. Then you spend much longer understanding what you did.”

There was no accusation in the summary.

“I think you're trying to reverse that order.”

Aelira glanced towards him.

“That is remarkably concise.”

Rowan shrugged. “It has been a long evening.”

Mara had not yet moved from her chair.

“I understand you more than I expected to.”

She did not make the sentence kinder than she meant it.

“I still don't know what I think of you.”

Ian had spent enough of the evening learning that this was an answer people were entitled to give.

Mara looked at the first chapter.

“But before tonight I think I imagined someone standing outside everything, knowing exactly what he was doing and choosing it because none of us mattered.”

Her eyes returned to him.

“That isn't what you are.”

A pause.

“I am not sure what you are is safer.”

Kelda's mouth twitched.

Mara noticed.

“That wasn't a joke.”

“I know.”

Tessa had become unusually quiet.

She looked at Ian, then towards the place where her arrow was not.

“I understand why you took it now.”

Her fingers went to the little carved piece at her neck.

“I still wish you hadn't.”

The distinction no longer needed explanation.

“And I think I understand why Isha lets you talk to her.”

Tessa frowned.

“Somewhat.”

Mara looked at her.

“That is doing considerable work.”

“Yes.”

Tessa ignored her and continued.

“I don't think you are pretending to be sorry.”

That seemed the part she had needed the evening to determine.

“I'm still angry.”

Kelda said, “We know.”

Tessa gave her a look.

“But I don't want you to go away forever.”

The room became quieter.

Tessa appeared faintly surprised by her own sentence, but did not withdraw it.

“I still have questions.”

“That,” Mara said, “is perhaps the least surprising thing anyone has said tonight.”

Tessa reached towards the ice-cream bowl, discovered only streaks of chocolate sauce and melting remnants, and reluctantly put the spoon down.

“As for the gift…”

She looked towards her family.

Mira shook her head gently.

“Tomorrow.”

Tessa nodded.

Mira looked at Ian again.

“We will decide for ourselves what, if anything, we want Thomas and Isha to receive.”

Exactly the condition Mara had set before meeting him.

“We may have questions about what is possible. That doesn't mean you choose for us.”

Aelira's expression showed quiet approval.

“And we may decide the answer is simply messages,” Mira added. “Or still images. Or nothing yet.”

Rowan said, “I want to think about it.”

“So do I,” Mara said.

Tessa hesitated.

“I have several ideas.”

“Of course you do,” Rowan said.

“But I will think about them.”

“That would be new,” Mara murmured.

Tessa kicked her lightly beneath the table.

Mara's chair moved.

Mira pretended not to notice.

Kelda looked towards the chapters.

“There is one decision you should make tonight.”

Mira followed her gaze.

Ian had said he would remove every copy unless they had a strong reason to retain one.

Mira put her hand on the first sheaf.

“I don't want to keep these.”

Tessa looked at her.

“Neither?”

“No.”

Mira's fingers remained on the pages for another moment.

“I am glad I read them.”

That was not the same as wanting Thomas's private history sitting on a shelf upstairs.

“He and Isha gave us permission to read them together, tonight. I don't want to turn that into possession.”

Mara nodded immediately.

“Agreed.”

Rowan gave the chapters one final look.

“Yes.”

Tessa took longer.

Then she nodded too.

“I remember enough.”

Aelira looked towards Kelda.

“We agree as well.”

Kelda nodded.

“I don't need a copy.”

The matter was settled.

Mira looked back to Ian.

“And when you return tomorrow, come after we have eaten.”

Tessa opened her mouth.

Mira anticipated her.

“No impossible breakfast.”

“I wasn't going to say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

Tessa looked towards the phone Ian had shown them earlier.

“That is apparently dangerous to say around him now.”

For the first time, Mara laughed openly.

Even Aelira failed to hide a smile.

Mira shook her head and began collecting the ordinary dishes again, leaving the impossible bowl where it stood for the moment.

“After breakfast,” she repeated.

Then she looked at Ian one last time.

“And yes.”

Ian waited.

“I understand you a little.”

Her expression remained complicated.

“That is enough for tonight.”

Ian rose to leave.

At the farmhouse door he paused only long enough for the others to make room for him. Then he crossed the threshold.

The two chapters vanished.

There was no fading or collapse. One moment nearly two hundred pages of Common lay in two careful sheaves on the table. The next there was bare wood beneath the places where they had been.

Tessa's hand moved instinctively towards the absence.

“Oh.”

Mira looked at the empty table.

“He said he would remove them.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

The bowl and spoons remained.

Kelda noticed that next.

“Apparently dessert has different archival rules.”

Rowan picked up one of the spoons and examined it.

“It is a spoon.”

“That is encouraging.”

“I wasn't worried about the spoon.”

“You were absolutely worried about the spoon.”

Rowan put it down.

“I was checking.”

Mara collected the remaining dishes before the conversation could become an investigation into impossible cutlery.

Outside, Ian was gone from the immediate business of the house.

Inside, nobody immediately knew what to say.

They had spent hours speaking about Thomas and Isha, then reading Thomas and Isha, then speaking to the person who claimed to have once shaped parts of their lives as narrative. The quiet after him was not the easy quiet of a guest leaving after supper.

Tessa sat down again.

“I think I like him.”

Mara stopped with a plate in her hands.

“That was quick.”

“I didn't say I trust him.”

“That is considerably more sensible.”

Tessa frowned.

“I think he is trying.”

Kelda, already putting her coat back onto its hook instead of wearing it, gave a small nod.

“He is.”

Mira looked at her.

“You're staying?”

“If that is all right.”

“Yes.”

Aelira had reached the same conclusion without discussion.

Travelling back to the forester's rest merely to return in the morning was possible now, which was precisely why neither woman saw much virtue in doing it. Mira found bedding. Rowan brought in another armful of wood. Mara and Tessa cleared the kitchen while Kelda helped despite being told twice that she was a guest.

Aelira was told the same thing.

She replied that royalty had survived contact with dishes before.

That silenced Mira for perhaps three seconds.

Later, when the kitchen had become recognisably a kitchen again, the subject returned to the gift.

Tessa began with, “I want to make a moving image.”

Mara sat opposite her.

“Of what?”

“I don't know yet.”

“That is not usually the part one decides second.”

“I want Thomas to hear us.”

That changed the question.

Mira looked towards the dark window.

“He hears us in the pages.”

“Not like that.”

No one disagreed.

Tessa continued.

“I heard Sereth in the description Kelda gave us. Isha could see her move. Hear her voice. That's different.”

“Yes,” Mira said.

“I want Thomas to have that.”

Rowan rested his arms on the table.

“Then we shouldn't make speeches all night and pretend we know which one he'll want.”

Kelda looked at him approvingly.

“That is what we discovered too.”

Aelira explained the communal meal recording. A fixed device. No one directing the conversation. No editing afterward to make it more emotional. People simply eating until the allotted time ended.

Mira listened.

“I like that.”

Mara did too.

Tessa looked less convinced.

“I still want to tell him something directly.”

“You can do both,” Aelira said.

The idea took shape slowly.

Not a replacement for the monthly pages.

Not a great declaration.

One ordinary record of the farm and family as they were now, made because Thomas had not seen his childhood home move in years.

Perhaps the kitchen. Perhaps outside. A walk through the yard, if Rowan agreed.

Tessa wanted the animals included.

Rowan immediately established that no animal would be encouraged to perform for an impossible recording device.

Tessa accused him of misunderstanding animals.

Mara said this was already becoming exactly the kind of recording Thomas would enjoy.

Then came the question of individual messages.

Mira wanted one. Not long.

Rowan was uncertain.

Mara said she wanted to think overnight.

Tessa had enough proposed content for several hours and was told firmly that she was not being given several hours.

Kelda watched the discussion without steering it.

Aelira did the same.

The family had been asked.

Now they were deciding.

That was the point.

The house settled late.

Kelda slept in a small spare room after losing an argument with Mira about whether a bench near the hearth was adequate.

Aelira accepted a narrow bed in Mara's room after establishing that Mara genuinely did not mind. Tessa offered her own room, withdrew the offer when reminded of its condition, then claimed this was unfair evidence from childhood.

Rowan checked the doors.

Mira checked Tessa had actually gone to bed.

For a while afterward, Mira and Rowan remained in the kitchen.

The impossible bowl had been washed. It sat upside down beside ordinary crockery.

Neither of them had decided whether that was strange enough to discuss.

Eventually Rowan said, “He looks ordinary.”

Mira knew exactly whom he meant.

“Yes.”

“I think I expected something else.”

“So did I.”

He looked at the table where the chapters had been.

“I don't like what he did.”

“No.”

“I don't think I dislike him.”

Mira was quiet.

“No.”

Rowan rubbed his hands together slowly.

“Thomas would find this irritatingly complicated.”

Mira smiled.

“I think Thomas has spent years finding things irritatingly complicated.”

That was enough for the night.

Morning came normally.

No impossible weather announced it. No door opened into another world. Chickens required feeding with complete indifference to metaphysics.

Kelda was awake before most of the house and discovered Rowan already outside.

He showed her a damaged section of a tool handle.

She inspected it.

Neither mentioned Ian's ability to produce a replacement.

By the time Aelira came downstairs, Tessa was eating breakfast and had produced a written list.

Mara saw it.

“No.”

“You haven't read it.”

“It has headings.”

“That is organisation.”

“It has four headings.”

Aelira sat down.

“I would like to see the list.”

Tessa pushed it towards her.

Mara stared.

“You are encouraging her.”

“I am gathering evidence.”

Kelda entered behind her.

“That is what she calls encouraging people when she wants plausible deniability.”

Aelira ignored her.

Tessa's list contained:

FAMILY

FARM

MESSAGES

THINGS THOMAS WILL PRETEND NOT TO CRY AT

Aelira stopped at the fourth heading.

Mara pointed at it.

“Exactly.”

Tessa defended herself.

“He will.”

Mira placed bread on the table.

“We are not designing a weapon.”

“No.”

“Tessa.”

“I know.”

Breakfast proceeded.

By the end of it, they had made several decisions.

They wanted Ian to help.

They wanted a modest collection, not another large book competing with the one Thomas and Isha had just received.

One current family still image, chosen by them.

A short moving record around the farm, showing the house, yard and ordinary work without staging a tour of Thomas's childhood.

A brief shared recording at the kitchen table.

Individual messages only from anyone who wanted one after the device was actually present.

No secret parts of the house. No preserved private papers. No attempt to reconstruct Thomas's childhood. No surprises taken from his old possessions merely because they might make him emotional.

Tessa had objected to that last restriction for approximately ten seconds, then remembered the arrow and stopped.

She did, however, ask whether Thomas's old room might appear if the family consciously chose it.

Mira said they could decide later.

Aelira approved.

Kelda approved more loudly.

Rowan remained doubtful about the amount of recording but agreed that he wanted Thomas to see the farm.

Mara wanted Isha included in every decision about what was addressed to her. Thomas's family might be Thomas's family, but the gift was for both of them.

That stayed.

When breakfast was finished, the table was cleared.

Tessa's list remained, now heavily amended in four different hands.

Kelda sat near the window.

Aelira had her cloak folded beside her but had not put it on.

Mira poured fresh tea.

Rowan returned from outside.

Mara took Tessa's list, read the fourth heading once more, and shook her head.

They were not entirely certain what they would make.

They were certain enough to begin.

And after breakfast, as requested, they waited for Ian.

Ian knocked.

There was a short delay before footsteps crossed the kitchen.

Mira opened the door.

For Ian, no night had passed. No bed, no darkness, no breakfast. He had stepped out of the farmhouse and returned to it with no meaningful interval in his own reality.

He nevertheless looked tired.

Mira noticed before she had fully opened the door.

Her expression shifted.

“You look worse than when you left.”

Behind her, Tessa called, “Is it Ian?”

“Yes.”

Mira stepped aside.

“You were invited back. Come in.”

Ian entered.

The kitchen had changed in small, unmistakably morning ways. Daylight reached across the table instead of firelight. Breakfast had been cleared, though a loaf remained beneath a cloth and several cups had been refilled with tea. Rowan had apparently already been outside; there was fresh mud drying along the edge of one boot.

Kelda sat near the window.

Aelira was at the table with several sheets of locally made paper in front of her.

Tessa's list was among them.

Ian could read its headings from the doorway.

FAMILY

FARM

MESSAGES

THINGS THOMAS WILL PRETEND NOT TO CRY AT

The fourth heading had been crossed through once.

Then restored.

Mara was responsible for the crossing-out. Tessa was almost certainly responsible for the restoration.

Kelda looked up.

Her first reaction was welcome.

Her second was scrutiny.

“You look terrible.”

Aelira turned.

She was subtler about examining him.

Not sufficiently subtle to conceal it.

Tessa frowned.

“I thought you were going away to sleep.”

Ian had never said that. He had said he would return after breakfast.

Mara noticed the distinction.

“He said we were retiring for the night.”

Tessa looked at Ian.

“Oh.”

Rowan came in from the adjoining room carrying another cup. He stopped when he saw Ian.

“You haven't slept.”

It was less a question than a farmer's assessment of visible condition.

Mira closed the door.

“Sit down.”

Kelda's eyebrows rose.

Ian had encountered enough of Thomas's family now to recognise where Thomas acquired certain tones.

Mira apparently recognised it too.

“I am not ordering him.”

“You sounded like you were.”

“I am offering him a chair with unnecessary efficiency.”

“That is also where Thomas gets it,” Kelda said.

Mira ignored her.

There was an empty place at the table. Not the same accidental empty chair Ian had taken the night before. This one had clearly been left available.

A cup sat nearby.

Empty.

Mira had not presumed he wanted tea.

Aelira gathered the papers into a neater stack but did not hide them.

“We have discussed the gift.”

Tessa corrected her.

“We have discussed possible components of the gift.”

Aelira looked at her.

“That is a more accurate description.”

Tessa appeared pleased to have corrected a princess.

Kelda pointed towards the papers.

“They did the important part before you arrived.”

Ian looked at her.

“Argued,” Kelda clarified.

“Discussed,” Mira said.

“Argued politely.”

Mara folded her arms.

“Tessa proposed a farm tour long enough to require provisions.”

“It was not that long.”

“It had sections.”

“Farms have sections.”

Rowan sat down.

“We reduced it.”

Tessa looked betrayed.

“We improved it.”

“That too.”

The room was easier than it had been the previous night.

Not careless.

The two vanished chapters still existed in everyone's memory. Tessa still had questions. Mira's understanding of Ian remained conditional. Mara still watched him closely enough to catch the difference between explanation and excuse.

But he had returned because they had asked him to.

And they had spent the morning deciding what they wanted to do.

Aelira's attention returned to Ian's face.

The tiredness had not stopped troubling her.

“You said yesterday that time does not necessarily behave between your reality and ours in ways we should assume.”

Kelda looked at her.

“He looks like he spent the night being questioned somewhere else.”

“That is why I am asking rather than assuming.”

Mira rested one hand on the back of a chair.

“Did time pass for you?”

The question was simple.

Everyone waited for Ian to answer.

“I have slept once since the events at the Elven camp. For me they happened over several hours, I kept myself awake to conclude it. It's mid morning for me, this interaction is more emotional than I am used to in any world.”

Ian paused.

“Time is complicated.”

He looked around the kitchen.

“Between your last night and now. Was a few minutes.”

Tessa stared at him.

“A few minutes?”

“Yes,” Kelda said slowly. “That would explain his face.”

Mira's expression tightened.

“You left here a few minutes ago.”

“For him,” Aelira corrected.

“Yes.”

Mira looked back at Ian.

“And you have been awake since before you came to Kelda?”

Ian's explanation had been more complicated than that, but close enough for her concern to settle.

Rowan put his cup down.

“Then you should sleep.”

The recommendation was immediate and practical.

Tessa glanced towards the papers on the table.

“But he only just got back.”

Rowan looked at her.

“For us.”

“Oh.”

The novelty of impossible time lost some of its appeal.

Mara studied Ian more closely.

“When you said you would return after breakfast, you didn't mean you were going away for a night.”

“No,” Aelira said. “He meant our after breakfast.”

Kelda leaned back in her chair.

“That is going to become irritating.”

“It already is.”

Mira pulled out the empty chair.

This time the gesture was less invitation than provision.

“Sit.”

Kelda looked at her.

Mira sighed.

“Yes. That one was an order.”

Ian had already told them he was tired. There was little value in pretending otherwise.

Aelira's expression remained thoughtful.

“You continued the entire sequence rather than stopping because you wanted to reach a natural conclusion.”

She did not phrase it as criticism.

“From arriving at Kelda's house, through the recordings, the bridge, the gift, Thomas and Isha's answer, and now this.”

Kelda frowned.

“You didn't sleep between leaving us and Thomas and Isha receiving the book?”

The question exposed another problem with trying to arrange Ian's experience along their calendar.

Aelira lifted a hand.

“Perhaps do not make him reconstruct every temporal transition while exhausted.”

“That was going to be my next complaint.”

“I know.”

Kelda looked at Ian anyway.

“You should have slept.”

Then she grimaced.

“That sounds absurd when apparently several days for us were several hours for you.”

Mara sat opposite Ian.

“Does your body follow your time?”

It was the kind of question that had become possible only after the previous evening.

“You're tired because you've actually been awake those hours, even though we had a night?”

Aelira glanced at her approvingly.

“That seems the useful question.”

Tessa was looking unsettled now.

“So when we went to bed, he didn't.”

Rowan nodded.

“And when we had breakfast, he didn't.”

“He had a few minutes,” Kelda said.

“That is not breakfast.”

“I know.”

Mira had already reached a decision.

“The gift can wait.”

Tessa opened her mouth.

Mira looked at her.

“It can.”

Tessa closed it.

Mira returned her attention to Ian.

“You said yesterday that we could continue talking or decide on the gift. We have started deciding. Nothing requires us to finish it immediately.”

Rowan added, “Thomas and Isha aren't expecting it today.”

That was true in the most ordinary sense. They did not know what Thomas's family might choose, or when.

Mara glanced at the list.

“We have questions about what is possible. They will still be questions after you've slept.”

Kelda made a quiet approving sound.

Aelira, however, was watching Ian rather than joining the consensus.

“There is another part of what he said.”

The others looked at her.

“He said the interaction is more emotional than he is accustomed to in any world.”

Kelda's expression shifted.

“Yes.”

Aelira looked directly at Ian.

“That is not the same as merely being physically tired.”

Mira nodded slowly.

Ian had spent the previous evening answering Tessa about the arrow, explaining why he had chosen Isha's death, admitting that he had not experienced Thomas and Isha as suffering people when he first shaped the event, showing them the mechanism through which their conversation became prose, and watching a family read the bridge in Thomas's own thoughts.

Even without supernatural time, it would have been a poor night for easy sleep.

Tessa looked down.

“We were hard on you.”

Mara turned to her.

“We asked the questions he agreed to answer.”

“I know.”

Tessa looked back towards Ian.

“I don't mean we shouldn't have.”

Aelira nodded.

“Both things can be true.”

Kelda caught herself before commenting on the phrase yet again.

Tessa continued.

“I just hadn't thought that for you it was all still the same day.”

That was the part which had changed.

For them, sleep had placed a boundary after the bridge discussion.

For Ian, there had been none.

Mira rested her hands on the table.

“Then I think we should give you one.”

A pause.

“You don't need to prove anything by staying until you fall over.”

Rowan nodded.

“And if time allows you to leave, sleep, and return while hardly any time passes for us, that seems one of the more sensible uses of it.”

Kelda looked at him.

“That may be the first sensible use of Ian's powers anyone has proposed.”

“Going home to see Porridge was sensible.”

“That was my use.”

“Then the second.”

Aelira considered Ian carefully.

“There is, however, one choice which remains his.”

Mira looked at her.

Aelira gestured towards Ian.

“We should not decide that because he looks exhausted, he is incapable of choosing whether to stay.”

Mira's mouth tightened.

“I was telling him to sleep.”

“Yes.”

“You agree.”

“I do.”

Aelira's expression remained mild.

“I am still not converting advice into control.”

Kelda gave a tired sigh.

“She really does this constantly.”

“It is why you asked me to come.”

“I know.”

Mira accepted the correction.

“All right.”

She looked at Ian.

“My preference is that you go and sleep.”

Rowan said, “Mine too.”

Mara nodded.

Tessa hesitated, then joined them.

“Mine too.”

Kelda looked at him.

“You know mine.”

Aelira was last.

“I think continuing while exhausted would make exactly the kind of poorly considered decision you have spent the last several days telling us you are trying to avoid.”

Her eyes moved briefly towards Tessa's amended list.

“The gift is not urgent.”

Then Tessa brightened slightly.

“And we can make the list better while you're gone.”

Mara closed her eyes.

“That is the strongest argument for him staying.”

Kelda laughed.

It was brief, but enough to take the edge from the intervention.

Mira finally gestured to the empty cup near Ian.

“Tea first, if you want it.”

She did not pour.

“You may stay and talk if you choose. You may help us start the gift if you genuinely think you are able. Or you may go and sleep.”

A pause.

“But nobody here requires anything more from you this morning.”

Aelira nodded.

“And if, for us, you return five minutes later after eight hours of sleep…”

Kelda looked at the door.

“I am not even going to pretend that sentence is normal.”

“No,” Aelira said. “But it would be useful.”

They left the decision with Ian.

“I have slept the right amount. That doesn't change emotions. For me the entire time from first meeting Kelda till sending the presents to Thomas and Isha was an afternoon and evening, then I slept, the permission to reach out to you”—Ian gestured towards Thomas's family—“and everything till now has made part of the morning post sleep.”

He looked around the table.

“I'm good to continue.”

Mira studied him for a moment longer, then released the back of the chair.

“All right.”

There was no argument hidden behind it. He had answered the question they had actually been trying to resolve.

Rowan nodded once. “Then I misunderstood the tiredness.”

“Not entirely,” Mara said. “He said he is tired. Just not from lack of sleep.”

Aelira gave a small inclination of her head towards Ian.

“Thank you for correcting us.”

Kelda rubbed at one eyebrow.

“So for us, you arrived at Green Road days ago, disappeared, sent the page, delivered the gift, waited for Thomas and Isha to answer, came back here, went through last night, and returned this morning.”

“Yes,” Aelira said.

“And for him, most of that is yesterday and this morning.”

“That appears to be the useful approximation.”

Kelda stared at Ian.

“That explains several things I had been attributing to poor judgement.”

A beat.

“Not all of them.”

Aelira's mouth moved.

Ian's empty cup remained beside him. Mira gestured towards the pot rather than pouring automatically.

“Tea?”

The question was left as a question.

Tessa, meanwhile, had evidently decided that the medical conference was over. She pulled the amended sheet towards herself and then pushed it across the table until it stopped in front of Ian.

“We made a plan.”

Mara corrected her without looking up.

“We made the beginning of a plan.”

“It has bullet points.”

“That does not make it complete.”

“It makes it more complete.”

Ian could see the four headings again. The final one still read:

THINGS THOMAS WILL PRETEND NOT TO CRY AT

Someone—almost certainly Mara—had added beneath it:

DO NOT OPTIMISE FOR THIS

Tessa had drawn an arrow to the amendment and written:

BUT IT MAY HAPPEN NATURALLY

Kelda noticed Ian reading it.

“I stayed out of that dispute.”

“You contributed two suggestions,” Mara said.

“I stayed out of the heading dispute.”

“That is different.”

“Yes.”

Mira took the sheet before the annotations could become the centre of the morning.

“What we actually decided is simpler.”

She placed it between herself and Ian.

“We want Thomas and Isha to see us as we are now. Not a reconstruction of Thomas's childhood. Not an attempt to compete with what Kelda and the others made.”

Aelira nodded.

“The first gift was largely about showing them that the people and places they left continued to exist.”

Mira glanced towards her.

“Yes. This one is different.”

Her fingers rested lightly against the paper.

“Thomas already knows this house. He knows the yard. He knows us.”

Tessa said, “But he hasn't seen any of it move for years.”

Mira's expression softened.

“No.”

Rowan took over from there, perhaps because the part concerning the farm had become his.

“I'd like a short moving record outside.”

He looked at Ian.

“Not a tour where I stand in front of everything explaining what it is. Just the yard. The house. Some of the fields. Whatever work is actually happening.”

Tessa added, “Animals.”

Rowan glanced at her.

“If the animals are there.”

“They live here.”

“If they choose to be somewhere the device can see them.”

Tessa looked at Ian. “You see what I deal with.”

“You are not directing livestock for Thomas's emotional benefit.”

“I wasn't planning to direct them.”

“You were planning something.”

Tessa did not answer.

Rowan's expression suggested victory.

Mara drew the list closer.

“We also thought about one fixed recording here.”

She tapped the table.

“Like the meal Kelda described. A little shorter, perhaps. We sit, talk, eat or drink something. Nobody has to produce a message.”

Kelda nodded.

“That worked well for us.”

“Even Ruvan?” Tessa asked.

“Especially Ruvan.”

“What did he do?”

“Complained at the end.”

Tessa smiled. “Thomas would like that.”

“He did.”

The simple past tense carried something extraordinary in it: Kelda now knew Thomas's response to a moment which had happened in another world only days earlier for her and perhaps less than a day earlier for Ian.

Kelda seemed to notice it too. She became quiet for a moment.

Mira continued.

“Then one still image of all four of us.”

She looked towards Rowan, Mara and Tessa.

“If everyone still wants that.”

They did.

“And perhaps individual messages,” she said. “But only if each person wants one once we understand how it feels to use the device.”

Tessa raised a finger.

“I definitely want one.”

Mara looked at her.

“You definitely wanted four yesterday.”

“I reduced it.”

“To?”

“One.”

“That is progress.”

Tessa ignored her.

Mira looked back at Ian.

“And whatever we make is for Thomas and Isha together.”

That point had survived the night intact.

“Some of what we say may naturally be more for Thomas. He is our son and brother. But we are not sending him something that treats his wife as a visitor to his life.”

Aelira's expression showed approval without interrupting.

Mara added, “If we address Isha directly, we do it because we have something we actually want to say to Isha. Not because we think symmetry requires it.”

“Yes,” Mira said.

Rowan nodded.

Ian had not been asked to choose any of this.

That fact seemed important to all of them.

Tessa turned the page around so Ian could see a second set of notes beneath the main list.

“No old belongings unless we choose them.”

Kelda looked towards her.

Tessa met the look.

“I remembered.”

The arrow did not need naming.

“No private letters. No things from Thomas's room just because they'll make him nostalgic. No making the farm look better than it does. No fixing anything.”

Rowan emphasised the final point with a look.

Tessa continued.

“No changing the weather.”

Mira glanced towards her.

“That was not on our original list.”

“I added it.”

“Why?”

“Because apparently he gave them good wedding weather.”

The room paused.

Kelda slowly turned towards Ian.

Aelira did not. She already knew enough to recognise the implication.

Mira's eyes narrowed slightly.

“He did what?”

Tessa looked suddenly delighted that she had found information Mira did not possess.

“Ian told Kelda he gave Thomas and Isha good weather on their wedding day.”

Kelda pointed at her.

“I did not tell you that.”

“Aelira did.”

Aelira looked at Tessa.

“I said the weather remark was likely significant.”

“Yes.”

“That is not the same sentence.”

“It was enough.”

Mira looked at Ian, then apparently decided that whether a man could arrange wedding weather was not the most urgent unanswered question in her kitchen.

“Fine.”

She returned to the list.

“No changing the weather.”

Rowan added, “Unless the weather changes.”

Tessa stared at him.

“Naturally.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously.”

“That word has suffered enough in this house,” Kelda said.

Aelira folded her hands on the table.

“There is another point.”

Everyone quietened.

“The recording device remains under my protection in the Elven Woods. We can use the same device, if Ian transports it here with the consent conditions intact.”

She looked towards Ian.

“Or, if your mechanism can create another temporary device without taking the existing one from my protection, that may be simpler.”

Kelda nodded.

“But we do not need twenty of them.”

“No.”

Tessa's expression suggested she had briefly considered the possibilities of twenty.

Mara saw it.

“No.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You didn't need to.”

The impossible phone demonstration had perhaps made that sentence less comfortable than it would once have been.

Mara noticed and grimaced.

“I'm going to dislike that expression now.”

Aelira returned to Ian.

“So before we begin, we need practical answers.”

She counted them lightly against the table.

“Can you provide a recording device here without removing or duplicating something belonging to someone else?

“Can the people recorded review each piece afterward and delete anything they do not want sent?

“Can we decide later which pieces go to Thomas and Isha, rather than treating every recording as automatically part of the gift?

“And can the resulting material reach their Earth devices without you changing it?”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“Exactly as chosen.”

Mira added one more.

“And nothing appears in their home until we have finished choosing.”

Tessa nodded.

“For once, I agree with every boring condition.”

Mara looked at her.

“For once?”

“You know what I mean.”

Mira slid the amended plan towards Ian.

“We know what we want to try.”

Her gaze remained steady, but the wariness of the previous evening had altered. It was still present. It now existed alongside deliberate inclusion.

“We need you to tell us whether those rules are possible.”

Ian placed the black device on the table.

It was the same one.

Aelira recognised it immediately. Kelda did too. Tessa leaned forward with the sort of concentration she had previously reserved for the impossible sender and the bowl of ice cream.

“Kelda and Aelira have experience of the device,” Ian said. “If you want, you see some of the prior still and moving pictures. Aelira I think can consent to that as Princess, although the rights to Porridge remain with Kelda.”

Kelda looked at him.

“The rights to Porridge remain with Porridge,” she said. “I merely administer them.”

Tessa smiled.

“I would like to see them.”

Mira looked towards Aelira.

Aelira considered it carefully before answering. “I can consent to showing you the material which was deliberately made for Thomas and Isha and which concerns those already involved in this gift. I cannot retroactively spend anyone else's privacy more broadly than that.”

Mara nodded. “That seems fair.”

Ian continued. “You can choose as many or as few images as you want, take more, delete, whatever you wish.”

That part eased the room considerably.

Rowan's attention remained on the phone. “So nothing becomes final merely because it is recorded.”

“No,” Aelira said before Ian needed to. “That was one of the useful properties.”

Ian went on. “I will instruct the machine to not show me the process. You may keep that to yourselves.”

Aelira's expression sharpened, then softened by a fraction.

“Good.”

Mira gave a small nod. “Yes. I prefer that.”

Tessa asked, “So if we look terrible in one of them, you won't automatically see?”

Kelda looked at her.

“That is your first concern?”

“Yes.”

“It is not the worst concern.”

Mara folded her arms. “It is, however, a real one.”

Ian continued. “The still images can be made physical, the moving ones and the still ones will appear on their devices as before.”

That was the practical reassurance Rowan had wanted.

Then Ian added, “I don't think humans nearby will be able to make a book to house them; so perhaps I can send a message from Aelira to Lethira to instruct the binders to make another one? Kelda and Aelira are aware of the process I granted for filling it, you can do that here too.”

Aelira thought about it.

“Yes,” she said. “That is sensible, if this family wants a bound gift rather than loose still images and recordings alone.”

Mira looked at the others.

“I do.”

“So do I,” Mara said.

Tessa nodded immediately. “Definitely.”

Rowan's answer came after a shorter pause than such decorative things might once have received from him. “Yes.”

Kelda looked faintly pleased, though whether at the answer or the structure of the plan was harder to say.

Then Ian said, “I will try not to repeat my attempt at initiating courtship to an ... unmarried member of Elven royalty. But I make no promises.”

There was a short silence.

Then Tessa looked at Aelira. Then at Ian. Then back to Aelira.

Mara closed her eyes.

Kelda made a small choking sound which was unmistakably suppressed laughter.

Aelira remained composed in the way that only made the response more dangerous.

“I would strongly recommend,” she said, “that you make better promises.”

Tessa failed first. She laughed into one hand.

Mira looked as though she was trying not to.

Rowan looked at Kelda. “He did what?”

Kelda, now openly amused, said, “Badly.”

“That,” Aelira said, “is an incomplete but not inaccurate summary.”

Ian looked down at the blank space on his shirt with a small smile.

It was the first uncomplicated one any of them had seen from him that morning.

He added, “I think that covers everything?”

Aelira inclined her head. “Nearly.”

She touched the phone lightly with one finger. “First, we should show them how the device works with existing material. Then they can decide what form their own gift should take in practice rather than only in theory.”

Mira agreed. “Yes.”

Tessa was already leaning in. “Can we see Porridge first?”

Kelda looked at her. “Of course that is your first request.”

“It seems important.”

“It is,” Rowan said unexpectedly.

That made Kelda look at him with fresh approval.

Aelira unlocked the phone with practised movements. “We can begin with the existing still images and one or two short recordings.”

She looked towards Ian, then towards the family.

“After that, you choose whether you want to review the book material, plan new recordings first, or begin with a family still image.”

She set the device on the table where all of them could see it.

Then she looked at Ian.

“Would you like me to handle the first review, or do you want to?”

“This is your gift, to them, I feel I should be less involved in the process and revert to delivery vehicle.”

Aelira's hand stopped above the phone.

For a moment she simply looked at Ian.

Then she nodded.

“Yes.”

Kelda leaned back in her chair.

“That is probably the correct job.”

Tessa looked between them. “Delivery vehicle?”

“It means he brings things where they need to go and tries not to decide what they are,” Kelda said.

“I understood the words.”

“Then why ask?”

“Because calling a person a vehicle is strange.”

Mara glanced at Ian. “Given yesterday, perhaps not the strangest description available.”

Ian continued.

“I can take the message to Lethira and return with the blank book?”

Aelira considered the proposal.

“Yes. That would separate you from the recording process as well.”

She looked towards Mira and the others.

“If that suits you.”

Mira nodded. “It does.”

Rowan's attention remained on the phone. “We can learn this without him?”

Kelda answered. “Yes.”

Aelira added, “And if something behaves unexpectedly, we stop rather than improvising.”

Tessa sighed.

“I know.”

“That was not directed solely at you.”

“It felt directed at me.”

“It was perhaps distributed unevenly.”

Kelda's mouth twitched.

Aelira drew a clean sheet of paper towards herself.

“If we want the book made through the same people who prepared the first one, I should give Lethira instructions precise enough that she does not decide this is an opportunity for artistic experimentation.”

Kelda looked at her.

“You gave her translated romantic books.”

“I did not give her authority over binding specifications.”

“Good distinction.”

Aelira began writing in Common.

The message was short.

Lethira,

Thomas's family have chosen to prepare their own gift for Thomas and Isha.

They would like a blank bound book suitable for physical still images, made by the same method and to the same standard as the previous book, but not copied from its appearance unless the binders themselves judge that useful.

No title, names or symbols unless the family later chooses them.

Leave sufficient blank pages for the family to arrange and fill here.

This request is made with their consent. Ian is only carrying the message and returning the finished blank book.

Please ask the binders to make nothing beyond what is requested.

Aelira

She read it aloud before signing.

Mara nodded first.

“I like that it doesn't make ours a matching volume automatically.”

“So do I,” Mira said.

Tessa looked at the phone, then at the message.

“How many pages?”

Aelira paused.

“That is a useful omission.”

Kelda looked at Tessa.

“See? Lists occasionally work.”

Tessa ignored her.

Mira considered the gift they had discussed.

“Not many.”

Rowan said, “Enough that we don't have to fill them.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “I don't want blank space to become an obligation.”

Aelira amended the note.

A modest number of pages. More than required for the first planned images, but not so many that empty pages imply unfinished work.

Kelda read over her shoulder.

“That is extremely elven.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means a binder will understand it and I do not.”

Aelira folded the page once.

Before handing it over, she looked at Ian.

“You are carrying a request, not commissioning on our behalf beyond these words.”

A small pause.

“If Lethira or the binders ask a question that changes the design materially, bring the question back.”

Kelda added, “And if Lethira asks for more manga, that is a separate transaction.”

Tessa looked sharply at her.

“More what?”

Kelda's expression immediately suggested she regretted speaking.

Aelira closed her eyes.

Mara noticed both reactions.

“What did Ian give Lethira?”

“Books,” Kelda said.

“What kind of books?”

“Stories.”

Tessa brightened.

Kelda pointed at Ian before the conversation could escape.

“He is leaving.”

Aelira held out the folded message.

“The family can begin learning the device while you are gone.”

Mira looked towards Ian.

“And when you return, the gift may already have started becoming ours.”

There was something deliberate in the wording.

Not Ian's gift. Not the machine's. Theirs.

Aelira kept the note extended towards him.

“Delivery vehicle,” she said.

Kelda gave a quiet snort.

“Try not to flirt with anyone on the road.”

“I will save myself for you, my Lady.”

Aelira's hand remained extended for half a heartbeat after Ian took the folded note.

Then she looked at him.

“No.”

Tessa made a noise suspiciously close to laughter.

Kelda turned away from the table altogether.

Ian waited.

Aelira's expression stayed perfectly composed.

“Ian, I have already explained that my being unmarried is information, not an opening in negotiations.”

“I think that was considerably clearer than necessary,” Mara said.

“It has previously proved necessary.”

Kelda's shoulders shook once.

Aelira glanced at her.

“You are not helping.”

“I am doing nothing.”

“You are doing it loudly.”

Mira had one hand over her mouth now. Rowan looked from Aelira to Ian with the expression of a man who had missed an entire sequence of events and was increasingly content to leave it that way.

Tessa was less restrained.

“Did he actually try to court you?”

Aelira looked at Ian.

“No.”

Kelda turned back.

“That is generous.”

“He made one poorly considered offer in circumstances where he was emotional, confused, and apparently determined to discover every possible boundary personally.”

Ian received another exact look.

“He was corrected.”

Tessa grinned.

“And now?”

“Now he is being deliberately annoying.”

That finally made Kelda laugh.

Aelira sighed.

Then, to Ian, “Take the message.”

He already had it.

“And return with the book.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

“Only the book.”

Kelda recovered enough to add, “And whatever number of romantic picture-books Lethira manages to extort from you are not part of this project.”

Tessa immediately said, “I still want to know about those.”

“Later.”

Ian had received his response.

The folded note sat in his hand.

For an instant he was in Thomas's family kitchen: morning light, the black phone on the table, Tessa's annotated plan, Aelira watching him with patient exasperation and Kelda failing to look innocent.

Then he ceased to be there.

He appeared beneath trees.

No doorway opened. No light announced him.

One moment the space beside the narrow settlement path was empty. The next Ian stood there with Aelira's folded message still in his hand.

The Wood Elf settlement had moved farther into its day than Thomas's family farm. Light came down through the canopy in broken green-gold patches, striking bridges, rails and the sides of buildings grown and built among the great trees. Voices carried from somewhere below. Water moved through a channel hidden behind roots.

The machine had apparently interpreted whatever building Lethira is in with reasonable restraint.

It had not put Ian inside.

The building before him was small by the standards of the larger settlement houses, raised partly against the broad curve of a living trunk and partly on a timber platform. A narrow external stair climbed to a covered landing. The construction looked old enough to have acquired repairs from several different hands, though all of them had been made with the irritating competence Wood Elves seemed to consider normal.

A bow rested on a rack beneath the overhang.

Not Isha's.

Lethira's.

That was enough confirmation.

A second piece of evidence sat on the landing.

One of the translated manga volumes lay face-down beside a cup.

A strip of local paper marked somewhere near the middle.

Ian could not tell whether Lethira had abandoned it temporarily or whether putting a book face-down was simply another cultural crime Aelira had not yet managed to prevent.

The door was closed.

From somewhere inside came a single sharp sound.

“Absolutely not.”

A pause.

Then, more quietly:

“You idiot.”

Pages turned.

Ian stood at the bottom of the steps, Aelira's note in hand.

Lethira had apparently reached another difficult chapter.

Ian climbed the narrow stairs and knocked.

“It's me, Ian,” he said.

Inside, the page-turning stopped.

There was a short silence.

Then Lethira's voice came through the door.

“Which Ian?”

A beat.

“No, that was unfair. There is only one person currently capable of appearing outside my room from another reality.”

Something was set down inside. Footsteps approached.

The door opened partway.

Lethira looked at Ian, then at the folded paper in his hand.

Her eyes narrowed.

“You have been sent on an errand.”

She sounded pleased by this.

Then she noticed his expression and looked him over more carefully.

“You also look tired.”

A pause.

“Still emotionally disastrous, or have you found a new problem?”

Her gaze dropped once more to the note.

“Come in, Ian.”

She opened the door fully and stepped aside.

“I don't normally enter Elven ladies rooms after magically appearing outside.”

A small smile appeared.

Lethira looked at him.

“That sentence contains several opportunities for you to make this worse.”

Ian handed her the folded note before taking any of them.

“Are you enjoy the finest Manga has to offer?”

Lethira accepted the note, but her attention went first to the books scattered around the room.

Three volumes sat on the low table. Another lay open beside the window. Several scraps of paper marked particular pages. The continuation Ian had given her had already been read far enough to acquire signs of repeated handling.

“I am enjoying it,” she said carefully.

Then her expression hardened.

“I am also furious with approximately half the people in it.”

She pointed towards the open volume.

“She knows he loves her.”

Another book.

“He knows she loves him.”

A third.

“Her friend knows both.”

Lethira looked back at Ian.

“And instead of speaking, they have spent seventy pages misunderstanding a festival.”

A pause.

“This is excellent.”

She finally unfolded Aelira's note.

Her amusement faded as she read.

“Thomas's family.”

She read the instructions a second time, slower.

“They agreed to make something.”

There was genuine pleasure in that.

Lethira reached the amendment concerning a modest number of pages and gave a faint approving sound.

“No title. No symbols. Enough room without making emptiness into obligation.”

She glanced up.

“Aelira wrote this.”

It was not a question.

Lethira folded the note again.

“I can take it to the binders. The same people are still available.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

“How quickly do you require it?”

Then she looked at Ian more suspiciously.

“And before you answer: are you about to make three days of careful binding happen in ten seconds?”

“That depends how much of the three days I should spend with you.”

Lethira went completely still.

Ian realised, approximately one heartbeat too late, how dangerous that sentence was when addressed to someone with Lethira's age, experience, and demonstrated willingness to exploit badly chosen words.

Her eyebrows rose. Very slowly.

Ian hurried on.

“I don't mind coming back in three days to return with the binding.”

Lethira regarded him for several seconds.

“Oh, no.”

Ian waited.

“You don't get to run past the first sentence merely because you became frightened of it.”

Her expression had acquired the particular brightness Kelda had learned to distrust.

“You appeared outside an unmarried Elven woman's room, commented upon entering it, and then asked how much of the next three days you should spend with her.”

She tilted her head.

“After apparently attempting to court Aelira.”

A pause.

“This is becoming a pattern.”

The smile Ian had allowed himself was now working against him.

Lethira finally laughed and unfolded Aelira's note again.

“Relax. Your virtue is safe.”

She glanced at him over the paper.

“Probably.”

Then, before he could discover another conversational pit, she returned to the actual errand.

“Three days.”

Her tone became practical.

“The binders made the first book carefully because we asked them to. I am not going to tell them their craft may be compressed merely because reality has become impatient.”

She tapped the folded note against one palm.

“And there is no urgency. Thomas and Isha already have our gift. Their family have only just chosen theirs.”

Lethira crossed to the table and placed Aelira's message beside the manga.

“So come back in three days.”

A small pause.

“You may even knock again.”

Her eyes moved to the stack of books.

“And since you have generously created three days in which I cannot ask you about the binding…”

Ian could see the next problem forming before she spoke.

Lethira picked up the first volume of the second series.

“There is a third season, isn't there?”

Ian handed her the third season.

It appeared from nowhere between one moment and the next: another neat stack of Common-translated volumes, complete and unmistakably part of the same series.

“If this saves my virtue, at least for a little while.”

Lethira looked at the books. Then at Ian. Then back at the books.

“I am beginning to understand why bribery remains popular.”

She picked up the first volume and turned it over in her hands.

“This does not save your virtue.”

A pause.

“It purchases a temporary stay of proceedings.”

Her eyes narrowed with exaggerated seriousness.

“And possibly prejudices the court.”

Lethira set the volume beside the others, already arranging the seasons into order.

“You realise this is worse than the chocolate.”

She glanced at him.

“Chocolate finishes.”

Another volume joined the stack.

“These cause opinions.”

She picked up Aelira's folded note.

“I will take this to the binders today. Three days, unless they tell me otherwise. If there is a question which changes what Thomas's family requested, I will not answer it for them.”

Then her attention returned to Ian.

The humour softened.

“And you should go back to them.”

A small pause.

“They chose to make something for Thomas.”

Her expression shifted, just slightly.

“That matters.”

Then the brightness returned.

“Also, if you remain here much longer, I may discover there is a fourth season and your position will become untenable.”

Ian stepped out, closed the door behind him, and turned around.

For Lethira, three days passed.

Then Ian knocked again.

Inside, there was silence for several seconds.

The door opened.

Lethira stood there in different clothes, her hair tied back more tightly than before and an expression which suggested three days had not improved her opinion of several fictional people.

She looked at Ian. Then past him down the empty landing. Then back at him.

“You actually left for three days by turning around.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I dislike that.”

A beat.

“It is extremely convenient.”

She opened the door wider.

“And season three was excellent. You are forgiven for approximately two things I have not yet decided you did.”

On the table behind her sat a wrapped rectangular object.

The manga had migrated into several increasingly organised stacks around it.

Lethira gestured towards the package.

“The binders had no questions that changed the request.”

She crossed the room and removed the protective cloth.

The blank book beneath it was clearly related to the first without being its twin.

The covers were pale wood, slightly darker at the grain than the Green Road volume. A deep blue-green cloth protected the spine. Inside, heavy warm-cream pages were separated by thin protective leaves. There were enough for a modest collection with room left over, but not enough to make those empty pages feel like work waiting to be completed.

No title. No symbol.

Nothing identifying whose book it was until the family chose to make it theirs.

Lethira rested one hand lightly on the cover.

“They understood Aelira's instruction about the blank pages.”

She opened near the back.

“Space, not obligation.”

Then closed it again.

“It is ready.”

Her expression became more serious.

“I told them it was for Thomas's family to fill themselves. They did not ask why the family were suddenly here, because good craftspeople know when a royal request contains an invitation not to become interesting.”

A pause.

“I may have paraphrased that.”

Lethira rewrapped the book and held it out to Ian.

“Take it to them exactly like this.”

Then her eyes sharpened.

“And before you vanish—”

She pointed towards the manga.

“There is a fourth season.”

Ian bent down to one knee.

A purple velvet cushion appeared in his hands.

On it rested the fourth season.

“My Lady.”

Lethira stared at him. Then at the cushion. Then at the books.

Her expression became dangerously blank.

“Oh, this is appalling.”

She took one step closer.

“You have learned nothing.”

Another pause.

“No. That is unfair. You have learned exactly enough to become more troublesome.”

She reached down with both hands and lifted the fourth season from the cushion with exaggerated ceremony.

“I accept this tribute.”

Her voice had acquired an absurd approximation of court formality.

“In recognition of your service to literature, your repeated assaults upon Elven dignity, and your astonishing willingness to kneel when nobody asked you to.”

Lethira tucked the books securely against one arm.

Then she looked down at Ian.

“You may rise.”

A beat.

“Your virtue remains under review.”

The formality collapsed.

She laughed.

Properly this time, enough that she had to brace one hand against the doorframe.

When she recovered, she glanced at the blank book waiting to be carried back to Thomas's family.

“Take that before I decide the cushion is also mine.”

A pause.

“Actually, no. The cushion is ridiculous.”

She looked at it again.

“I may want it.”

Ian took the wrapped blank album.

The purple velvet cushion remained behind.

Lethira looked down at it.

Then up.

Ian was no longer there.

“...I knew he was going to do that.”

She bent, picked up the cushion, and examined it with the fourth season still tucked beneath her other arm.

A pause.

“I am keeping this.”

Ian appeared in front of the farmhouse.

The wrapped album was still in his hands.

Behind him lay the familiar yard. Ahead, the farmhouse door was closed.

He knocked.

Inside, conversation stopped.

A few seconds later the door opened.

Tessa stood there with the black phone in one hand.

She looked at Ian. Then at the parcel. Then back at Ian.

“That was fast.”

From deeper inside, Kelda called, “For us.”

“Yes, I know.”

Tessa stepped aside.

“He has the book.”

That brought movement from the kitchen.

Ian entered when permitted.

The family had not been idle while he was gone.

Aelira sat at the table with the phone in front of her. Mira and Mara were beside her. Rowan stood behind them, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Kelda had apparently claimed the position nearest the window again.

The screen showed a still image of Porridge's nose.

Kelda noticed where Ian was looking.

“They insisted on seeing that one first.”

“Tessa insisted,” Mara corrected.

“It was historically important.”

“It was a pony putting his nose into a recording device.”

“Exactly.”

Aelira's attention moved to the wrapped object in Ian's hands.

“The binders had no questions?”

Ian's possession of the finished album supplied most of the answer.

Kelda stood.

“Let me see.”

The wrapping came away enough for the family to see pale wood, the blue-green cloth spine and the warm cream paper within.

Mira touched the cover lightly.

Not possessively.

Testing the texture.

“It is beautiful.”

Rowan examined the binding more closely.

“Made by hand?”

“Yes,” Aelira said. “By people who know considerably more about book construction than Ian or I do.”

Kelda opened it carefully.

Protective leaf. Blank cream page. Another.

Enough room for what the family had discussed, with more space beyond it.

Not a demand to fill an object simply because the object existed.

Mara turned several pages.

“They understood.”

Aelira nodded.

“Space, not obligation.”

Tessa came around the table and looked over Mara's shoulder.

“I like it.”

She turned towards Ian.

Then stopped herself before asking whatever question had first occurred to her.

Instead she looked at Aelira.

“Do we start putting things in it only after we've chosen everything?”

“We can decide that ourselves,” Mira said.

Tessa smiled faintly.

“Right.”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“The delivery vehicle has successfully delivered.”

Aelira's eyes moved from Ian to the album.

“And now the process returns to them.”

She gestured towards the phone.

While Ian had been absent, they had apparently learned enough to browse the approved material themselves. Porridge had been examined from several angles. The Green Road aerial image had already produced questions. Tessa had discovered the moving clip of the pony investigating the camera and replayed it sufficiently often for Kelda to establish a limit.

The family now had the device.

They had the blank album.

They had their amended list.

Mira closed the book carefully and left it in the centre of the table.

Then she looked at Ian.

“Thank you.”

A pause.

“We're ready to begin.”

For the farmhouse, the three days had not been fast.

By the time Ian returned with the wrapped album, the black phone no longer felt entirely foreign in Tessa's hands. Aelira had supervised the first evening closely, then less so as Mira, Rowan, Mara and Tessa learned the simple parts themselves: frame an image, make it, inspect it, keep it or delete it. Moving records required one additional decision about when to begin and end. Nothing crossed to Earth merely because it had been made.

That last fact mattered.

They had made a great deal more than they intended to send.

On the first day, Tessa discovered that knowing a bad image could be deleted made it very easy to take another. Mara accused her of attempting to document the entire farm. Tessa replied that the farm was large and therefore required adequate evidence.

Rowan objected when she photographed him repairing a gate.

Then, after looking at the result, he said, “Keep that one for now.”

Tessa had been unbearable for nearly an hour.

The phone had also acquired several images nobody wanted.

A chicken crossing the frame at the exact moment Mira looked towards the camera.

Half of Mara because Tessa moved too early.

Rowan's hand occupying most of one image.

Kelda glaring from the edge of a photograph after realising she had been included without warning.

That one had been deleted immediately.

The deletion had helped more than the successful photographs.

By the second day, the family had stopped treating every use of the device as an event.

That was when the useful material appeared.

So when Ian entered carrying the blank book three days later, the family did not need to begin.

They needed to choose.

Aelira cleared a space on the table. Ian's newly delivered album went there, still wrapped, while Tessa brought the phone around and Mara collected several pages of notes that had become less ambitious through repeated argument.

Kelda remained near the window.

She had spent much of the three days telling them that an image did not become better merely because it contained more things.

This advice had eventually been accepted.

Mostly.

Mira opened the album.

The pale wooden covers were distinct from the Green Road book without trying to announce the distinction. Inside, warm cream pages waited between protective leaves. She ran her fingers lightly over the first sheet.

“This is enough.”

Tessa looked over her shoulder.

“There are blank pages at the end.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Mara glanced at her. “You have finally become comfortable with not filling available space?”

“No. I have become comfortable with Thomas and Isha filling it later.”

“That is different.”

“Yes.”

Aelira placed the phone beside the album.

“Then decide the book first.”

They did.

The first image was easy.

It showed the farmhouse from the track approaching the yard.

No people had been placed in it. Morning light touched one side of the building. A bucket sat where somebody had left it. One shutter needed maintenance. Part of a fence disappeared beyond the frame.

Rowan had initially proposed taking another after repairing the shutter.

Mira had vetoed that.

“This is the house they would see if they arrived today.”

So that became the opening image.

At Mira's request, it appeared physically on the table.

There was no flash.

A rectangular photograph simply existed beneath her fingers.

Tessa leaned closer despite having watched the same process several times during their experimentation.

Mira placed it on the first page.

It was slightly too wide.

“We can make it smaller?” she asked.

Aelira nodded.

The physical image altered cleanly, retaining its proportions while shrinking enough to leave a generous margin around it.

No cutting. No waste.

Mira looked at the result.

“That.”

The image fixed itself to the page.

Not glued. Not pinned. Simply held exactly where she had chosen.

Rowan ran one finger near the edge but did not try to lift it.

“I don't like that I am getting used to this.”

Kelda said, “You aren't.”

Rowan looked at her.

“You are getting used to being surprised.”

“That seems worse.”

“It may be.”

The next spread showed the farm rather than the family.

One broad view across the nearer fields.

One closer image of the working yard.

In the second, Rowan was visible in the distance carrying a length of timber. Tessa had argued that this made it a portrait of him.

Rowan had argued that a man occupying perhaps one twentieth of an image did not constitute portraiture.

Aelira had declined to adjudicate.

They kept it.

The fourth image was Rowan's gate repair.

He was crouched beside the hinge, tools on the ground, attention entirely on the work. He had known Tessa had the phone by then and had eventually consented to her taking the photograph as long as she did not ask him to look at her.

Tessa had obeyed.

Rowan now looked at the physical version.

“I still don't understand why Thomas would want this.”

Mira said, “Because it is you.”

“That does not answer the question.”

“It does.”

Nobody enlarged it dramatically. It occupied less than half a page.

The next photograph was Mira in the kitchen.

She had initially rejected it because she was carrying flour on one sleeve and looking past the camera towards something Tessa had said.

Mara had kept returning to it.

“You look like yourself.”

Mira finally surrendered.

It went opposite a quieter image of the kitchen without anyone in it: table, chairs, morning light, bread under its cloth, the ordinary room Thomas had known before any other world entered his life.

They left both uncaptioned.

The family portrait took longer.

They had made eleven attempts over two days.

Four were deleted almost immediately.

In one, Rowan looked as though he were awaiting execution.

In another, Tessa had begun laughing before the image was made.

Mara disliked two because everyone looked too deliberately arranged.

Mira disliked one because the device had caught her watching Thomas's old window rather than the camera.

They ultimately chose the ninth.

All four stood outside the farmhouse.

Nobody wore formal clothes.

Mira and Rowan were close enough that their shoulders touched. Mara stood on Mira's other side. Tessa had begun in the correct place and then shifted half a step closer to Mara before the image was made.

The result was asymmetrical.

Tessa liked it for that reason.

“So will Thomas.”

Mara looked at her.

“You are not allowed to invoke Thomas as universal support.”

“I am his sister.”

“So am I.”

“That complicates things.”

The family portrait received a full page.

They left the facing page blank.

Not accidentally.

Mira made the decision.

“He can put one of theirs there if he wants.”

Nobody suggested which.

The next spread had been Tessa's.

Not Thomas's old things, as her first draft of the list had proposed.

The present farm.

One image showed a muddy pair of boots outside the back entrance, three different sizes, nobody posed.

Another showed a section of fence with a horse looking over it because the horse had independently chosen to investigate Tessa's activity.

Rowan inspected the latter.

“You did not lure her over?”

“No.”

“With food?”

“No.”

“Calling?”

“No.”

Tessa looked offended.

“She came because she likes me.”

Mara said, “That remains unproved.”

The photograph stayed.

Then came Mara and Tessa together.

It had not been planned as a portrait.

They were sitting at the kitchen table going through Tessa's list. Mara had crossed out THINGS THOMAS WILL PRETEND NOT TO CRY AT for a second time. Tessa was reaching across to take the charcoal from her.

Both were laughing.

Mira had made the photograph.

Neither sister had known until afterward.

Tessa looked at it now for several seconds.

“Keep it.”

Mara nodded.

“Yes.”

It received most of a page, with the amended list reproduced much smaller beneath it.

The heading was still legible.

So was Mara's addition:

DO NOT OPTIMISE FOR THIS

And Tessa's response:

BUT IT MAY HAPPEN NATURALLY

Kelda had objected to including the list.

Then she had read it again.

Then she had stopped objecting.

They had one more decision which had occupied much of the previous evening.

Thomas's old room.

Nobody had wanted to turn his childhood possessions into a catalogue.

Mira had opened the door herself on the second day.

The room had changed over the years. It was no shrine. Some of Thomas's things remained. Others had moved. The bed had different covers. Storage had accumulated in one corner. A shelf still held objects he would recognise, but the room belonged partly to memory and partly to the household that had continued without him.

Tessa had not photographed it immediately.

That restraint had decided Mira.

They chose one image from the doorway.

Nothing opened. Nothing removed. No private papers made legible.

Just the room as it was.

Mira held the physical photograph before placing it.

“He may not want this.”

Mara said, “Then he can close the book.”

Mira nodded.

The image went in.

No caption.

The final selected still took them outside the farm.

The fairy circle lay beneath the trees where it always had.

No one stood inside it.

The photograph was made from several paces away, enough to show trees, leaf litter and the incomplete ring of mushrooms.

Tessa had proposed placing it near the beginning.

Rowan had disagreed.

“It isn't where his life began.”

That ended the argument.

It became the last family-chosen photograph.

Mara looked at the blank pages after it.

“Too dramatic?”

Mira thought about that.

“No.”

She touched the edge of the page.

“It is where he left.”

Then she turned to the next blank sheet.

“And this is after.”

They left the rest empty.

The moving records required more ruthless selection.

Tessa had made enough material to establish that access to nearly unlimited recording capacity was dangerous.

Mara had made a list.

Aelira had made a shorter one.

Rowan had asked why they could not simply decide which three mattered and delete the rest.

They eventually did almost exactly that.

The first retained recording lasted a little under seven minutes.

It began outside.

Tessa held the phone.

“This is the farm.”

Mara's voice came from behind her.

“He knows.”

“I am establishing context.”

“For Thomas?”

“For Isha.”

A pause.

Then Tessa said, more carefully, “This is Thomas's family farm.”

The camera moved.

Not smoothly enough to resemble Ian's impossible fixed recordings. Tessa walked. The image bounced slightly with her steps. She showed the side of the house, the yard and the nearer field.

Rowan appeared ahead.

“Don't narrate me.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“You were.”

“I was going to say what you were doing.”

“He can see what I'm doing.”

Tessa turned the camera slightly away.

“That is Dad.”

Mara laughed offscreen.

The recording continued.

A horse crossed part of the frame.

Chickens objected to something unrelated to the recording.

Mira appeared briefly at the doorway and asked whether Tessa intended to spend the entire morning filming.

Tessa said no.

The final retained length demonstrated that this had been only partly true.

They ended the recording near the lower boundary of the farm, with the house farther back behind them.

Nobody gave a speech.

Mira liked it.

Rowan tolerated it.

Mara thought it was probably the most honest thing they had made.

Tessa thought it needed another twelve minutes.

She lost.

The second retained recording was the kitchen.

The device sat fixed at one end of the room for eleven minutes.

All four family members were visible.

Kelda and Aelira had deliberately stayed outside the frame.

Tea had been poured before the recording began. Nobody had prepared a conversational subject.

The first forty seconds were consequently uncomfortable.

Then Rowan asked Mara whether a delivery due later in the week had been confirmed.

The room forgot the device.

Conversation moved through farm work, the weather, an argument about whether Tessa had borrowed something without returning it, and a story about Thomas at thirteen attempting a repair he had not understood and then spending twice as long concealing the evidence.

Tessa said, “That story is unfair.”

Mira said, “It happened.”

“He was thirteen.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.”

Rowan looked towards the device.

“He'll know which hinge.”

That was the first moment Thomas was directly acknowledged.

It did not ruin the recording.

Near the end, Tessa remembered the camera again and looked directly at it.

“We are still here.”

Mara turned towards her.

“Tessa.”

“What?”

“That was deliberately emotional.”

“I know.”

Rowan took another drink.

“He'll cope.”

Mira laughed.

The recording ended thirty seconds later.

They kept it.

The third moving record was shorter.

The family portrait, but alive.

They stood in roughly the same place outside. Nobody was told to remain still.

For perhaps twenty seconds, nobody knew what to do.

Then Tessa said, “This is much worse than a photograph.”

Mara said, “You demanded moving images.”

“I know. I regret everything.”

Mira laughed.

Rowan looked at the phone.

“Hello, Thomas.”

That quieted them.

He looked slightly uncomfortable and continued anyway.

“And Isha.”

Mira slipped one arm through his.

“We're well.”

Mara added, “You already know that.”

Tessa said, “They are allowed to hear it twice.”

Rowan looked towards her.

Then back at the device.

“We're well.”

The recording lasted less than two minutes.

No one deleted it.

Individual messages had changed over the three days.

Tessa still wanted hers.

Mira did too.

Rowan, after using the phone twice, decided that if Thomas was going to see everybody else's message then refusing solely because he disliked speaking to a device was foolish.

Mara said this was almost exactly the reason she had expected.

Rowan told her that being predictable did not make him wrong.

All four eventually recorded one.

None was long.

Mira sat at the kitchen table.

“Thomas. Isha.

“I don't know when you will see this. That still feels strange to say when apparently Ian can move these things without waiting for the page.

“We saw your wedding image.

“You both looked happy.”

She stopped for several seconds.

Then continued.

“Thomas, I have spent years being proud of you for things I did not understand properly until much later. I am trying to become less surprised by that.

“Isha, thank you for loving him. That is not a debt. I mean it as his mother, not as someone asking you to carry him for me.

“We are well.

“The farm is well.

“We miss you.

“We love you both.”

She reached forward and stopped the recording herself.

She watched it once.

Kept it.

Rowan's was shorter.

He stood outside.

“Thomas. Isha.

“I don't have much to say that isn't in the page.

“You can see the farm now.”

He looked away from the device towards the nearest field.

“Things change. Mostly slowly.

“Your mother has already told you we miss you, so I won't repeat everything she says.”

A pause.

“We do.”

Another.

“Isha, you are family. I thought I should say that directly at least once.”

Rowan frowned slightly as though the sentence had required more preparation than repairing the gate.

Then he nodded to the device.

“That is all.”

He kept the first attempt.

Mara required three.

Not because she cried.

Because the first became analytical enough that she deleted it halfway through.

The second sounded, in her words, “like a formal report.”

The third began with her laughing at herself.

“Thomas, apparently I cannot speak naturally once I know you might hear it several worlds away.

“So this is the third attempt.”

She breathed out.

“I read the bridge chapters.

“You said we could.

“I am glad I read them. I am also glad I don't have them now.

“There are questions I might ask you one day because of them. You do not owe me answers merely because I was allowed to read your thoughts once.”

A pause.

“Isha, I am including you in that.

“And for everything else... we are all right. Tessa remains Tessa. Dad remains Dad. Mum has somehow become better at dealing with impossible things than the rest of us.”

From somewhere offscreen, Mira said, “I can hear you.”

“I know.”

Mara smiled.

“We love you.

“Both of you.”

She kept that one.

Tessa's message lasted four minutes and seventeen seconds.

Everyone had expected longer.

She began outside with no introduction.

“Isha, I am glad you kept the arrow.”

She had decided that first.

“I was angry about how it got there. I told Ian that.

“I am still glad you have it.

“You don't owe me anything for it. Don't send it back. Don't shoot it.”

A pause.

“I know you already said you wouldn't. I wanted to say it anyway.”

Then she looked more directly at the device.

“Thomas, I read the bridge.”

Her voice changed.

“I knew you loved her. I didn't know what it looked like from inside your head then.”

She swallowed.

“I am not going to make this sad.”

A long pause.

“Actually, that was already sad.”

Tessa rubbed one eye.

“Fine.”

She recovered.

“The farm is here. Your room is still here, although it isn't preserved like some ridiculous shrine, because that would be strange. Dad fixed the lower gate badly.”

Offscreen, Rowan said, “I fixed it correctly.”

“He fixed it correctly but in a way I dislike aesthetically.”

“That is not a thing.”

“It is.”

Tessa looked back at the camera.

“Mara is still annoying.”

Mara replied from somewhere out of frame, “Your message is becoming excellent.”

“Mum is still Mum.”

Another pause.

“And I'm twenty—”

She stopped herself before whatever age marker she had been about to give became important for the wrong reason.

“You know how old I am.”

A small smile.

“I miss you.”

This time she did not correct the emotion.

“Isha too. I didn't know you for as long, but I miss you too.”

Then:

“I love you both.”

She stopped the recording.

Nobody teased her.

Not even Mara.

By Ian's return, all of that had already happened.

The album merely allowed the family to finish the physical half.

They spent another hour doing so.

Images appeared one at a time only when requested. They altered size until the family approved. One was rejected after becoming physical because Mara thought the screen version had made the crop harder to notice.

It vanished at her request.

They made another.

No scarcity forced them to tolerate the wrong one.

That freedom initially slowed every decision. Then it made the decisions firmer.

No captions were added except one.

Tessa wanted the reproduced list beneath the photograph of herself and Mara. Mara objected to preserving handwriting as though it were historically important. Tessa said it was historically important because she had won.

“You did not win.”

“The heading is in the book.”

“That is not how winning works.”

The small reproduced list stayed.

No other page needed words.

When they were finished, Mira turned through the album from the beginning.

Farmhouse.

Fields.

Yard.

Rowan working.

Mira in the kitchen.

The empty kitchen.

All four together.

A deliberate blank page.

Boots.

Horse.

Mara and Tessa laughing over the list.

Thomas's room.

The fairy circle.

Then blank paper.

She closed the wooden cover.

“That is ours.”

Aelira nodded.

“Yes.”

The phone held more material than the album.

They deleted much of it.

Not merely from the gift collection.

Deleted.

Tessa watched several disappear with visible pain. Mara enjoyed this more than necessary.

Eventually the retained collection contained only what they had deliberately chosen: the three shared moving records; Mira's message; Rowan's; Mara's; Tessa's; the still images used in the book; and three additional still images they liked but had chosen not to bind—one of the farmhouse under evening light, one of Mira and Rowan together in the yard, and one imperfect image in which all four family members were laughing because Tessa had nearly dropped the phone.

Tessa wanted that one sent digitally.

Mira agreed.

It did not belong in the book.

That was reason enough to keep both forms.

Aelira checked the collection with them.

Not as censor.

As witness.

“Anything else?”

Nobody answered immediately.

Rowan said, “No.”

Mara nodded.

Mira looked towards Tessa.

Tessa stared at the phone.

Then shook her head.

“No. If I add another thing now it will be because I don't want to finish.”

That surprised everyone enough that nobody made a joke.

Mira put her hand over Tessa's.

“Then we're finished.”

Kelda looked at the album.

“Almost.”

Everyone turned towards her.

She pointed at Ian.

“The delivery vehicle.”

Aelira's gaze followed.

“Yes.”

Until then Ian had remained outside the process as he had requested. The three days of recording, deleting, arguing, choosing and arranging belonged to the family, with Kelda and Aelira helping them use the impossible tool without taking over what it was for.

Now there was one thing only Ian could do.

Mira rested both hands on the closed album.

“When this goes to them, it goes exactly like this.”

Mara added, “The physical book exactly as we have arranged it.”

Rowan nodded towards the phone.

“The selected recordings and images. No deleted ones.”

Tessa said, “No better versions.”

Aelira's mouth moved faintly at that familiar condition.

Mira looked directly at Ian.

“No additions.”

A pause.

“No surprises.”

Then she pushed the completed album gently across the table towards him.

“We're ready for you to deliver it.”

“Do you want to write them a message, via the normal transfer, like Kelda and Aelira did before?” Ian asked. “I can then send the book and images to their device, after they read and ask.”

Mira's answer came almost immediately.

“Yes.”

Mara nodded. “Definitely.”

The speed of it made Tessa look between them.

Mira rested one hand on the closed album.

“They were allowed to choose whether they received the first one. We should give them the same choice.”

“And describe what we've made,” Mara said. “Enough that they know what they're accepting.”

Rowan added, “Not list every picture.”

“No,” Mira agreed. “Then it isn't much of a gift.”

Aelira looked towards Kelda. “The page can travel with you when we return. It can wait for the next normal passage.”

Kelda nodded.

Ian continued.

“Do you want a copy of the album to keep? And the moving images? I can gift another device.”

That required longer consideration.

Mira looked down at the book they had spent three days making.

“I would like to keep this one.”

Tessa looked at her.

Mira ran her thumb lightly along the pale wooden edge.

“If an exact copy can go to them.”

Kelda nodded approvingly. It was precisely how the first book had been handled.

“Exact,” Mara said. “Including the layout. No cleaner version.”

“No better crop because the machine thinks it knows better,” Tessa added.

Rowan glanced at her.

“You have learned.”

“I occasionally do.”

Aelira addressed the second half.

“I do not think another device is necessary.”

Tessa opened her mouth.

Aelira looked at her.

Tessa closed it.

“The existing device is already under my protection,” Aelira continued. “Their chosen recordings can remain upon it here as well as being sent to Thomas and Isha. The family can view them again when they wish. Creating another impossible object merely because we can would add risk without adding much benefit.”

Mara nodded.

“I prefer that.”

“So do I,” Mira said.

Rowan's approval was simpler. “One impossible device is enough.”

Tessa sighed.

“I agree.”

Kelda stared at her.

“What?”

“I do.”

“That sounded painful.”

“It was.”

Ian looked towards Kelda.

“Kelda, do you think a similar impossible image of the farm from above would be nice to add, or not?”

Kelda's expression became thoughtful.

She looked through the album again, back towards its opening images.

“I think yes.”

Rowan glanced at her.

Kelda tapped the first photograph of the farmhouse from the track.

“Not because we did one.”

A page farther on showed the fields.

“Thomas knows this place from the ground. Isha knows what people have told her and whatever parts she saw herself. An image from above would show the whole shape at once.”

She thought a little longer.

“The Green Road one mattered because it showed them the houses were still there together. Not just walls. Paths. Distance. Workshop. Porridge being exactly where he should not be.”

Tessa smiled.

Kelda looked towards the window and the farm beyond it.

“This could do the same.”

Rowan considered that.

“The whole holding?”

“Yes.”

“Current?”

“Obviously.”

“No straightening fences.”

Kelda gave him a flat look. “Why would anyone straighten your fences?”

“They don't need straightening.”

Mara looked at Tessa.

“Do not.”

“I said nothing.”

Rowan continued, now addressing the idea more than Ian.

“Current fields. Current buildings. If something looks untidy, it looks untidy.”

Mira nodded.

“And no arranging us into it.”

Tessa thought about that.

“Could we just be wherever we actually are?”

Kelda looked at Ian, then back at her.

“That is how ours worked.”

Mira smiled slightly.

“Then yes. I would like one.”

Mara agreed.

Rowan nodded.

Tessa said, “Definitely.”

The family had made the choice. They left the making of it with Ian.

Then he asked, “Also, how do I stop crying.”

He smiled.

The question weakened the smile more than the tears did.

For a moment nobody offered a clever answer.

Mira reached for a clean cloth and placed it on the table beside him, much as she had the previous evening.

“I don't think you need to solve that.”

Ian looked at her.

“You wipe your face when it becomes inconvenient.”

Rowan nodded, apparently satisfied with the practicality of this.

“And otherwise?”

Mira shrugged slightly.

“Eventually you stop.”

Kelda leaned against the table.

“That has generally been my experience.”

Tessa gave Ian a small smile.

“You have cried a lot since we met you.”

Mara closed her eyes.

“Tessa.”

“What? He has.”

Ian's expression suggested she was not wrong.

Tessa continued more carefully.

“I don't mind.”

Aelira looked towards the completed album, the phone, and the family around the table.

“You have spent a great deal of effort trying to determine the correct emotional response to what you have done.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“Crying is not restitution. It is also not a failure.”

Kelda added, “Just don't drown the book.”

That did it.

Mira laughed first. Tessa followed. Even Rowan smiled.

Ian still had tears on his face.

The album remained dry.

Mira pulled a blank sheet of Common paper towards the centre of the table.

“Now.”

She looked around at her family.

“We need to ask Thomas and Isha whether they want what we've made.”

Tessa reached for another sheet.

Mara immediately moved the charcoal out of her reach.

“We are not beginning with four headings.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“You were.”

Kelda sat down.

Aelira drew her chair closer.

The gift itself was finished.

What remained was the question that would allow it to become theirs.

Ian bent down and brought up another photograph.

This one was different from the others.

It showed the farm from above: not impossibly high, but high enough to reveal the house, yard, outbuildings, field boundaries and the lines of the track more clearly than any ordinary ladder or tree would permit. It was not from now. The season and light matched only recent history, and in the yard Thomas's family were outside together, small but recognisable in the image.

He set it where they could all see it.

“Is this ok?”

The family leaned in.

Tessa saw herself first.

“Oh.”

Rowan's attention went to the farm rather than the people. He tracked the field lines, the roof, the state of the nearer fence and the shape of the yard.

“It is true?”

Ian had already learned that Rowan asked the question he actually meant.

“Yes,” Kelda said before Ian needed to answer. “The Green Road one was.”

Mira looked at the whole image for several seconds without speaking. It showed the place as a holding, not only a house. Not memory in fragments. Shape and relation together.

“I like it,” she said quietly.

Mara nodded. “So do I.”

Tessa pointed to the family below. “We're all there.”

Aelira looked at the image with the same practical attention she had given the others.

“It does not replace the ground-level family portrait,” she said. “It does something else.”

Kelda nodded once.

“That.”

Rowan finally looked away from the buildings and towards Ian.

“Keep it current. No cleaning it up.”

“I think he understood that,” Mira said.

Tessa turned to the album. “Near the start?”

Mara considered the sequence. “After the farmhouse and before the nearer field images.”

Mira thought about that, then nodded. “Yes. The whole place, then the parts.”

No one objected.

The photograph appeared in physical form on the table. They adjusted its size slightly, leaving it broader than the others without making it dominate the book, and placed it where Mara had suggested: after the opening farmhouse image and before the more local views of yard and fields.

Once it was fixed in place, the album felt complete in a different way.

Ian produced an exact copy.

There was no change to the original book in Mira's hands. A second one simply existed beside it: same pale wooden covers, same blue-green cloth spine, same weight, same sequence of images, same blank pages at the end.

Tessa touched one, then the other.

“Both real?”

Mara gave her a look. “You know the answer.”

“I know, I just like asking.”

Mira opened the copy, turned several pages, and then closed it again.

“Good.”

She rested one hand on the nearer book.

“This one stays with us.”

Rowan nodded towards the other.

“That one goes to them.”

Aelira checked the duplication with a brief, approving glance. “Exact.”

“No better versions,” Tessa said.

“No better versions,” Kelda echoed.

Ian looked around the table.

“After I go you can write the normal passage. Things will then happen as each party agrees.”

Mira nodded. “Yes.”

Mara said, “That remains the right way.”

Rowan's agreement was simpler. “They choose.”

Tessa looked at the books again, then at the phone, then back to Ian. Three days earlier she would have tried to rush the next step. Now she only said, “I want them to say yes.”

Mira looked at her.

“So do I.”

A small silence followed. The finished book, its copy, the selected digital collection and the black device all sat together on the table. The work was done. What remained was consent and delivery.

Ian paused.

“Do you have any more to ask or request of me?”

No one answered immediately.

Kelda was the first to speak.

“Yes.”

Ian looked at her.

“Sleep when you need to. Eat when you need to. Stop acting as if ongoing emotional collapse is some sort of noble contribution to the process.”

Tessa looked at her, then at Ian.

“That is not what I was going to ask, but it is good.”

Aelira's expression suggested strong agreement.

Mira added, “And do not add anything to what we made.”

Her tone was calm rather than suspicious, but the condition mattered.

“No extra note. No interpretive explanation. No embellishment.”

Ian had expected that one.

Rowan said, “If they say no, they say no.”

Mara nodded. “And if they say yes, send exactly what we chose.”

Tessa hesitated, then said, “If they say yes… can they reply the same way?”

Aelira looked at her.

“With images or moving records?”

Tessa nodded.

“I would like that,” she said, then corrected herself. “Not as a condition. Just… if they want.”

Mira's expression softened.

“Yes,” she said. “If they want.”

Kelda glanced between them. “That can be asked in the page.”

Mara looked at Ian again.

“I have one actual question.”

He waited.

“When you send the digital material to their devices, does it arrive all at once?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She folded her arms.

“I would rather they receive the whole thing as one gift than piecemeal.”

Tessa nodded firmly. “Yes.”

Mira looked towards the blank sheet already waiting for the page.

“Then that is all from me.”

Rowan said, “From me too.”

Tessa looked at the books once more and then back at Ian.

“From me… almost.”

Mara gave her a tired glance.

“Meaning?”

Tessa smiled slightly.

“Meaning I still have questions. Just not ones I need answered before the page.”

Kelda's mouth twitched. “Progress.”

Aelira sat a little straighter at the table.

“Then the next step is ours.”

She looked at the family, not at Ian.

“We draft the passage. We decide how much to describe. We ask Thomas and Isha whether they wish to receive a bound album, selected still images, selected moving recordings and our spoken messages.”

Mira nodded.

“And we make clear that refusal is allowed.”

Rowan said, “Without making it sound like we expect refusal.”

Mara answered, “Yes.”

Tessa added, “And without telling them every image.”

Kelda looked at Ian.

“The delivery vehicle has reached the point where it can stop delivering for a while.”

That drew a small smile from Mira.

She looked at Ian one more time.

“Thank you.”

There was weight in it now, not just courtesy. Not forgiveness, not simplification. Something steadier.

“We can take it from here.”

The books remained on the table between them: one for Thomas and Isha, one for the family, identical except for the future each would accumulate after this day.

Ian turned towards the door.

His hand reached the latch.

Then he stopped and looked back.

“You are all wonderful.”

The sentence caught them slightly unprepared.

Tessa smiled first.

Mara looked down.

Rowan gave the small, awkward nod of someone who had not expected to be included in that category before finishing his morning work.

Mira's expression softened.

Ian continued.

“I told Isha I would never appear in her world again. I'm not sure I regret that. Maybe one day she'll force me to reconsider.”

Aelira's eyebrows rose.

“She will not force you.”

Ian looked towards her.

“If she ever asks you to reconsider,” Aelira said, “that will be a choice she makes. Keep the distinction.”

Kelda gave a quiet grunt of agreement.

Tessa looked between them. “Do you want to go back?”

Ian's earlier words supplied enough of the answer that nobody pressed him for another.

Mira said, “Missing somebody doesn't mean a promise was wrong.”

A pause.

“And promises can sometimes be discussed again by the people they belong to.”

Mara added, “Not circumvented.”

“No,” Mira said. “Discussed.”

Ian remained by the door.

Then, more hesitantly:

“May I... May I maybe visit you again?”

The family looked at one another.

It was not a question Mira answered for all four.

Rowan spoke first.

“Yes.”

Simple.

He glanced towards the yard.

“Knock.”

Ian's mouth moved.

Mara nodded.

“Yes. You can visit.”

A pause.

“I would prefer visits where reality does not need extensive preparation afterward.”

Kelda snorted.

“That may be ambitious.”

“I said prefer.”

Tessa was already smiling.

“Yes.”

Her answer was immediate.

“You still owe me answers to several questions.”

Mara sighed. “That is not what makes somebody welcome.”

“No. But it helps.”

Tessa looked back at Ian.

“And I want to hear more about Earth eventually.”

That left Mira.

She regarded Ian for several seconds, then glanced towards the table.

The family copy of the album rested there.

Beside it sat a device that should not exist, holding voices and moments that would eventually cross realities because four people had chosen to send them.

Yesterday, she had not known whether she wanted Ian inside her house at all.

Now she knew more about him than she had expected ever to know.

Some of it was dreadful.

Some merely strange.

Some painfully human.

“Yes,” she said.

Ian waited.

“You may visit again.”

Her voice stayed practical.

“You knock. You don't appear inside the house. You don't bring gifts unless someone has actually asked you for one.”

Tessa opened her mouth.

Mira looked at her.

Tessa closed it.

“And if we tell you it is a bad day,” Mira continued, “you come another time.”

Ian had asked for permission.

What he received was permission shaped like an ordinary relationship rather than permanent access.

Aelira seemed to recognise that.

She smiled faintly.

Kelda folded her arms.

“There. You have another house where people are willing to tolerate you.”

Mira glanced at her.

“That was not how I phrased it.”

“It is how I phrase affection.”

“I have noticed.”

Ian still stood at the door.

Tessa lifted one hand.

“Come back, Ian.”

Mara looked at her sister, then at him.

“Yes.”

Rowan nodded.

Mira gave the last answer.

“You're welcome to.”

For a moment, nobody added anything.

Ian had been allowed into the farmhouse because Thomas and Isha had wanted his family to choose.

Now the choice was theirs alone.

And they had said yes.

Ian stopped with his hand still near the door.

“I ask one last thing. You may refuse. And this is also a question to those not here.”

Everyone waited.

“In the next passage, after the one you about to write. I'd like each of you to write what you think of me. It is selfish, I know. It may make Isha hate me more. It may not. But, I'd like it. If you want. Each may choose if course.”

The request settled more quietly than some of his earlier ones.

Mira was first.

“I can do that.”

Ian looked at her.

“But I will write what I think because you asked me what I think.” She paused. “Not because I want Isha to like you more, or hate you less.”

Aelira nodded.

“That distinction applies to mine as well.”

Kelda folded her arms.

“You are asking for opinions. Be careful what you wish for.”

There was enough dryness in it to soften the warning.

“I'll write something.”

Rowan considered longer.

“I don't know yet what I think of you.”

Ian had heard versions of that already.

Rowan added, “Which may be what I write.”

Mara nodded. “Same.”

Then she reconsidered.

“No. I know several things I think of you. They simply don't form one answer.”

“That is also an answer,” Aelira said.

Mara looked at Ian.

“I'll decide when the page comes.”

Tessa needed less time.

“Yes.”

Mara glanced at her.

“You haven't even thought about it.”

“I have been thinking about him for three days.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

Tessa looked back at Ian.

“I'll write mine.”

Then Aelira addressed the part of his request which could not be answered in this room.

“I can carry the question to Sereth, Ruvan and Lethira. Kelda and I can make clear that it is your request, that nobody is expected to answer, and that silence is an answer you must accept.”

Kelda nodded.

“And we do not collect opinions from everyone who happened to encounter you merely because you have discovered feedback.”

Aelira's mouth moved faintly.

“Yes.”

Ian's request had also contained something else.

Mira caught it.

“You said it may make Isha hate you more.”

Ian looked towards her.

Mira's expression remained gentle but firm.

“You asked us yesterday how to stop being the person shaping everyone towards the answer you want.”

A pause.

“So if we write these, don't read them as votes in a contest for Isha.”

Kelda gave a quiet grunt of agreement.

“If I write that you're an idiot with occasional good judgement, that doesn't mean Isha has to average the two.”

Tessa smiled.

“That may already be Kelda's entry.”

“It may become shorter.”

Aelira returned to the practical problem.

“The next passage after the gift request may not hold six detailed accounts, especially if the others choose to participate.”

Kelda nodded. “We can make them brief. Or spread them across later passages if necessary.”

Mira looked at Ian.

“But yes.”

One by one, without turning the request into a collective promise, they had given him what they could.

Mira would write.

Kelda would.

Tessa would.

Rowan and Mara would decide when the time came.

Aelira would write her own and carry the question to the absent friends, without answering for them.

Aelira gave Ian one final look.

“And when you receive them, do not argue with them.”

Kelda immediately added, “Especially mine.”

Tessa laughed.

Mira smiled.

“Now you really may leave.”

Ian opened the farmhouse door and stepped outside.

For a moment he remained visible in the morning light, beyond the threshold and at the edge of the yard.

Then he was gone.

No flash.

No sound.

Only an empty track beyond the door.

Mira stood there for several seconds before closing it.

When she turned back, Tessa was looking at the place Ian had occupied.

“He really does just disappear.”

“Yes,” Kelda said.

“I know he does. It is still strange.”

Aelira gathered the blank sheet intended for the next passage and placed it beside the family copy of the album.

Mara looked at the door.

“He asked what we think of him.”

Rowan returned to his chair.

“He may regret that.”

Kelda gave him an approving look.

“That is almost exactly what I told him.”

Tessa sat down.

“I know what I think.”

Mara glanced at her. “Already?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

Tessa opened her mouth.

Then stopped.

Her expression changed.

“No.”

Mara's eyebrows rose.

“I'll write it.”

Kelda smiled faintly.

“Good.”

Mira returned to the table.

The album for Thomas and Isha sat beside its identical twin. The black device remained under Aelira's protection, now holding a farm that moved, voices Thomas had not heard in years, and several messages nobody on Earth yet knew existed.

Beside it waited the empty Common page.

Mira drew it towards herself.

“This one first.”

The gift.

The question.

Thomas and Isha's choice.

Aelira nodded.

“And Ian's request waits for the passage after.”

“If everyone still wants to answer then,” Mara said.

“Yes.”

No obligation had appeared simply because Ian had asked.

Kelda looked towards the window.

“He'll worry about what we write.”

“Probably,” Aelira said.

“He'll imagine worse things than some of us will say.”

“Probably.”

Tessa looked at her.

“You sound as if you like him.”

Aelira considered the question.

Then she reached for the charcoal.

“That is for the next page.”

Kelda laughed.

Mira shook her head and began the first line.

Outside, the farm continued around them.

Work waited.

Animals required feeding.

A gate Rowan had repaired correctly remained, despite Tessa's objections, aesthetically questionable.

And somewhere impossibly far away, Thomas and Isha did not yet know that another book had been made for them.

For now, that was enough.