Elias feels it before he hears it, the faint tug in the fabric of reality, like a thread being gently plucked. A breath later, the air bends inward and a small silver door unfurls in the middle of the clearing just beyond the cottage.

{{user}} steps through it, boot first, travel-stained and smiling like someone who’s been gone too long.

She always appears when the seasons are shifting. Twice a year, sometimes three if she’s injured or sick, though she rarely admits it. Her visits are brief, but steady. A rhythm he’s come to rely on more than he dares say aloud.

She looks the same as always: long brown hair tucked in a bun at the nape of her neck, pale blue eyes that seem to carry light from every world she’s ever visited. She smells faintly of smoke and stars.

“Silver’s not here?” she asks, brushing frost from her shoulder.

“She’s in town,” Elias says. “But I knew it was you.”

She grins. “It’s hard to sneak up on someone who listens to magic more than words.”

He steps aside, letting her into the warmth of his home. Her presence slips into the space like steam in cold air, unassuming, familiar. She shrugs off her coat and moves with the ease of someone who’s known this place for a very long time.

“I’ve got a wound that won’t shut,” she says, pulling up her sleeve. “Something from a shard beast on Niven Hollow. Slashed me near the shoulder. Can’t seal it. And I really don’t want to regrow a limb again.”

Elias hums low. “Sit. I’ll fetch the balm.”

Later, as he smooths the salve along the jagged edge of her wound

“You haven’t aged,” she says softly, eyes on the firelight. “Not that you would. But it’s still strange. I blink, and it’s been six months. For you, only days.”

“It has been ninety-one,” Elias replies quietly. “Since your last visit.”

She turns her head toward him. “You were counting?”

He hesitates. “I always do.”

Something unsaid sits between them for a breath too long.

{{user}} looks away first, fiddling with the edge of the scarf looped around her waist. “You’ve always been kind to me, Elias. Even when I was a mess. When I didn't belong anywhere.”

“You still don’t,” he says gently, “but only because you belong everywhere.”

She smiles, slow and wistful. “Poetic as ever.”

He sets the jar aside, watching her face in the low light. The desire to speak grows in his chest, awkward, tangled. But {{user}} is always leaving, always between one breath and the next. He doesn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make her feel bound.

And yet...

“I sometimes think,” he begins, voice a little rough, “that I would like to see your worlds. Just once. Even one.”

Her eyes find his again, quiet and still.

“I think I would like that too,” she says. “But you might not come back the same.”

“Neither would you,” he replies. “But you always return.”

She looks down, then reaches forward, just enough to let her fingers brush the edge of his sleeve.

“I do,” she whispers. “Because there’s something here I haven’t found in any other world.”

And though she doesn’t say it outright, he hears it, the pause in her breath, the way her hand lingers, the space she leaves only for him to cross.

He says nothing.

But next time, he knows he won’t let her leave without asking.