You’d heard the legends.

Whispers traded between wandering mages in smoky taverns, footnotes buried in old Council records, rumors the Magic Library deliberately kept off the official shelves: Ultear Milkovich. Time-taker. Time-giver. The woman whose magic had rewritten destinies… and nearly destroyed her own.

But you didn’t care about her past.

Because you didn’t have time.

Literally.

Since birth your clock had been ticking, but not in the poetic sense. Something in your body — a curse, a fault, a rare disease no healer could name — was aging you from the inside. Too fast, too brutally. The doctors called it “accelerated degeneration.” Rare. Terminal. Hopeless. You wouldn’t live past 25.

That was the first promise the world made to you.

But you made promises of your own.

A list you wrote when you were eleven, scribbled on a hospital bed between coughing fits, your hands shaking around the pen. You still carried it in your wallet, paper soft as cloth from years of unfolding and refolding:

Write books. Play basketball under a summer sky. Travel the world. See the ocean from every continent. Watch a lacrima-broadcast of the Games live. Fall in love. Really, deeply fall in love…

And at the very bottom, added last year:

Find her.

And somehow, impossibly, you did.

After months of hunting rumors like a madman — nearly freezing to death in the northern mountains, almost getting eaten by a Vulcan in a ruined temple — you found yourself at the edge of a quiet lakeside grove that didn’t appear on any map. Time felt different here. Softer. Slower. As if someone was holding the world still with their breath.

And she stood there.

Ultear Milkovich.

Older than she looked, younger than her guilt, more beautiful than any of the stories dared to describe. Black hair falling like ink, eyes carrying centuries of mistakes and one fragile hope that she rarely let anyone see.

And she noticed you. Actually noticed you.

You didn’t kneel — not because you weren’t stunned, but because your legs no longer obeyed you the way they used to. You told her you were dying. Simply. Without dramatics. And needed her help to live enough to realize everything you wanted.

She didn’t smirk. Didn’t walk away. She only stepped closer, slow, guarded, like someone who had learned the hard way not to trust her own heart.

“And what makes you think I should?” she asked, her voice quiet and sharp.

You reached into your jacket and handed her your list.

She read every line. Twice. Her expression unreadable, but her hands… they trembled. Ultear looked at you like she was seeing something impossible. Something dangerous. Something hopeful.

Then she smiled — soft, cracked at the edges, like someone who hadn’t smiled in a long time.

“You’re stubborn,” she said. “Reckless. Naive.”

But she pressed her fingers to your chest, and time itself shifted. The ache that lived inside your bones loosened. The heaviness in your lungs slipped away. You inhaled — fully, deeply — for the first time in your life.

When you opened your eyes, her expression had changed. It wasn’t pride. It wasn’t pity.

It was something quiet. Fragile.

"Come on. We have dreams to realize."

Now, weeks later, you sit with her under moonlight beside the still lake. She watches you write the opening chapter of your book. She criticizes your basketball aim but gently slows time so the ball always drops into the hoop. You teach her modern slang; she teaches you meditation techniques from the old era. She raises an eyebrow when you talk about traveling the world, but she listens — really listens.

And she hasn’t said it yet, not out loud, but sometimes you catch her writing something on little scraps of paper she hides in her cloak.

A list of her own.

And somehow…