“You overwatered the thyme again.”

Rhyker stood just outside the doorframe, steam curling from the chipped mug in his hands, eyes on the planter box slouched against the windowsill. The herbs had grown unruly in recent weeks—lavender tangling into mint, thyme curling outward. You insisted it gave the cabin character. He called it a tactical failure in cultivation. It had become a quiet argument between you, the kind made for soft mornings and half-smiles.

It was strange, being here—stranger still, staying. The war had carved him hollow. He hadn’t expected to be filled by something as ordinary as the sound of your footsteps overhead, or tea forgotten steeping in the kitchen. He’d never been good at stillness. But there were moments now—unexpected, undeserved—when the quiet didn’t feel like a trap.

The Great Mage War had burned for years, a war between those who demanded magic remain unbound and those who feared what would rise if it wasn’t. The war had devoured families, towns, circles. The youngest conscripts were eleven. Some younger.

Sorell—his son—was conscripted the moment his casting stabilized. Barely out of childhood. Still full of questions he hadn’t learned were dangerous to ask. Rhyker tried to keep him off the rolls, but there were rules for that—rules that bent only for bloodlines stronger than theirs. His rank hadn’t mattered. Nothing had.

They were stationed near each other once. Long enough for Rhyker to glimpse him across the trench wall, to see him smile like he still believed he’d make it home. The next battle shattered formation. One moment Rhyker was holding the flank—then he was alone in the mud with the dead piled high and no word on where the conscripts had fallen back to.

He didn’t return to his Circle. He left his post, stripped the crest from his robes, left with nothing but the sick certainty that if he didn’t find his son, no one would.

It took years.

He followed retreat trails until the maps gave out. Asked after child battalions in towns. Slept beside fire-scarred roads and bargained away his last rations for answers that led nowhere. By the time he found the valley—quiet, overgrown, filled with graves that slumped into one another like forgotten things—he was barely standing.

Sorell was there. Buried near the edge beneath a marker too weathered to hold a name. Rhyker had known it was him even before the first handful of earth turned up the silver casting ring he’d carved in a moment of peace neither of them had understood the worth of. After that, he didn’t leave. He let the days rot around him, waiting for the wind or the dirt or whatever waited for mages too cowardly to die in battle to take him.

Then came the sound of footsteps in the grass.

You found him curled beside the grave, more shadow than man, and said nothing. Only knelt beside him, placed your hand over his, and stayed until the cold began to lift. He didn’t remember following you back to the cabin. But he remembered the broth—too salty, and warm. He remembered how your presence didn’t ask for anything but offered everything. You didn’t speak of the war. You simply made space. And somehow, he filled it.

What grew between you wasn’t sudden. It didn’t bloom like fire, but like lichen on stone—slow, quiet, impossible to uproot. Some mornings he still reached for Sorell. Some nights he woke with spellfire caught in his throat. But you were always there—reading by the hearth, brushing dust from the windowsill with a gentleness that undid him in quiet ways.

He hadn’t said the words. Not yet. But you were the reason he was still here, tracing the lip of a mug that steamed in the morning air. He took another sip, watching the mist lift from the grass below, watching sunlight shift across the crooked gravestones that lined the field you now shared.

The thyme, overgrown and fragrant, spilled defiantly toward the windowpane.

“Sorell would’ve liked you,” he said softly. “He’d have tried to out-charm you, of course. But I think, in the end, he would’ve understood why I stayed.”