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The winter Qifrey died, snow dusted the ground. When he came back, it was summer. Twilight stars twinkled behind the figure on the doorstep. The air was pleasantly warm. A sweet breeze curled around him. Ruffled the hem of his white robes. Years turned to dust in that wind.
Hello again, Olly, he’d breathed. Voice quiet, gentle. Barely there. It’s been a while.
And he’d smiled.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
In the years that followed the winter Qifrey died, Olruggio had to step up and raise their girls himself. Taking them away from the atelier, from their home, and separating what was left of their family would be too much while they were all still mourning him.
He never ended up thinking he was a good teacher, or as good a teacher as Qifrey was, but he always did the best he could. For them.
Enough time had passed between death and return for Olruggio to move on from him, only slightly. Or enough to pretend to himself he’d moved on when he hadn’t. Enough time had passed to really adjust to his absence in all their lives. Enough for the girls to graduate themselves.
Richeh was the first to leave the nest. Striving out on her own, buoyed by the lessons Qifrey had taught her, becoming her own kind of witch. Her determination had only grown in the years after his death.
Agott and Coco were soon to follow. Coco had given up on any hope of saving her mother by now, without him to fulfill his promise and guide her discovery together, and too scarred by the weight of Qifrey’s suffering to consider chasing the truth herself. She had to mourn twice; for Qifrey, and for the true loss of her mum. That equalled three parents she’d lost in total.
But as the others left, Tetia clung on. She was the last to graduate, just her and Olruggio in that empty house - though of course the other girls visited frequently. Tetia had the designs of her new hat and cloak pinned up in her solo room, and she talked about graduating, but never went through with the test. She never said she wasn’t ready, she just put it off. Olruggio knew she didn’t want him to be left alone. She was perceptive, she was kind, she always put others before herself.
He pushed her to graduate anyway, and then he was alone.
He would never let go of the house, of course. It was all he really had left of Qifrey. Of what they’d built together, of what they used to cherish. He didn’t think he’d take on students again. It’d just be him and the house and that tree on the hill. Maybe he’d start making contraptions again.
With an open bottle of wine he barely sipped one glass of, Olruggio ruminated on this. But not even that first evening passed before a knock came at the door.
Tetia, probably. She’d forgotten something- likely on purpose; a reason to come and check on him already. Or Agott, maybe, she sometimes came back to sit out in the fields, staring at nothing for an indeterminate time. And when she did, she always swung by to say hello.
Olruggio opened the door. A ghost stood there.
…
Let’s go back.
Olruggio’s wing of the house had stood mostly unused in the years since Qifrey died. Qifrey’s room was his now.
First he’d begun sleeping there to cling onto Qifrey; his possessions, his smell, the way he felt; like soft light filtered through windows. He hadn’t spent a night back in his own bed since. It became about practicality, too. To better hear the girls if night terrors woke them from slumber or insomnia kept them from it, to be a short trip to the kitchen to make their breakfasts, to make himself easier to reach.
They kept him busy, at least, focused on letting the girls grieve and heal and saving his own emotions for the dark, lying awake with unseeing eyes surrounded by Qifrey’s things. Curling and cording his fingers through the tassel - his tassel - that he’d taken back from Qifrey’s hat. Trying to reach Qifrey’s own delicate hands through the fabric.
Olruggio’s own room gathered dust. His projects stayed there, like a half-finished sentence, forever incomplete. A broken promise. He couldn’t bring himself to summon the warmth Qifrey had loved best in his contraptions.
His commissioners gave him sympathy, at first, gave him time, and the Wise in Friendships gave him leniency from his mandatory acts of service. When they stopped giving him time, he took it anyway. A stubborn refusal, but no one had any heart to raise complaint against the man who was fool enough to grow attached to what was destined to die. He drew spells to teach the girls, borrowing Qifrey’s style of magic, and thought of none of his own. Soon, people murmured that the torch had gone out, burned through its bright flame too quickly. They stopped making demands.
And just when he could have considered returning to it, to find that flame again, the door swung wide open for the ghost. As if there was any other option. Even after all this time.
Qifrey had been cold. Like carved marble to the touch. The spell came easy to rusty fingers, though it had been years, he couldn’t truly forget. Qifrey looked up at the snugstone, a remnant of admiration in his eyes. They looked like a different colour to the blue Olruggio remembered, more a washed out grey. But…. maybe it had always been so. Memory manufactured things to be sweeter and brighter than they were.
It was weird, staying in his own room again, the surroundings now unfamiliar to him. But he had to return what had technically been Qifrey’s, before it was his. The room was a simple matter, other things were not. Long ribbon still corded stubbornly through his fingers late at night.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
He’d spoken to Beldaruit more in the years Qifrey was dead than in all the ones since they’d moved out.
Beldaruit would call regularly, talk to Olruggio, and ask to talk to each of the girls. He thought it was merely a kindness, at first. Checking up on them and how they fared without his son, despite his own grief.
Only as it continued did he see it for what it really was. Beldaruit was their new Watchful Eye. In his own, excessively string-pulling way. He checked up on them so they didn’t have an outsider assigned to the role to scrutinise them, and had forced the other Wise to accept his leeway.
It would’ve been too much to have someone new, moving in, another adjustment, one who didn’t know him, didn’t know how to tiptoe through the patterns Qifrey had left behind that Olruggio took pains to maintain. One who would have shifted their atelier away from living in his memory.
In some ways, Olruggio had reshaped his entire life around Qifrey’s absence in much the same way he had shaped his life around his presence. Their souls had never truly been separate, ever since they were kids. He’d grown used to having a little piece of Qifrey beside him in his heart, like the tassel on his hat, never truly alone even as he’d left. They’d moved around each other like an effortlessly spinning coin, like a planet and its skittish moon.
But somehow, this Qifrey didn’t meld back into him like he used to. Maybe things had simply changed too much without his notice, even while he had fought against it. He wondered if this Qifrey missed his Olruggio. In the way he missed his Qifrey. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t either of theirs. They just didn’t fit together anymore. And maybe that was the reason why he felt so wrong.
Olruggio shied away from admitting that thought.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
There was one little solace they had had in the years of his absence, which was that he had never truly been absent. The tree out in the fields spread its boughs wide, stretching out to protect them all from everything but their grief.
They liked to have picnics there. Those began fuelled by the desperate need to see him again, to try and connect with what little they had. To reminisce, to talk to him, to share their troubles, to celebrate passing their tests or figuring out a tough spell or inventing a new contraption.
And some part of it was the guilt. That even though visiting his living grave hurt, they needed him to sense somehow that he was still loved. To ease their own conscience.
Now all that time felt unreal. That ever-present sight on the horizon, that you could see out the kitchen window, just gone as though it had never been there. The hours spent amongst its roots, talking to the susurration of its leaves, disappeared like melting snow.
All of it was a dream Olruggio could believe had never existed, aside from the way he sometimes looked at this Qifrey, and thought he could see the ripples and rivets of that beautiful bark within his features.
He was like smooth and painted wood. A mask, just a touch too symmetrical.
Olruggio wondered if he’d ripped himself back out of the tree. He dreamed about it, habitually, a dream he could trace the recursion of back to before it truly happened. Branches shed their leaves and became fingers once more, limbs pulled away from their grip on the soil, eyes formed from knots in the bark.
And he became a thing that could breathe and smile again.
Those eyes tracked Olruggio across the room as he wore down Qifrey’s familiar patterns; a cooked meal, laundry hung out to dry, the living room tidied. The responsibilities he’d picked up in careful replication now rote.
He had become Qifrey, in a way. Taken on his dreams. Taken on his home. Taken on his apprentices. Taken on his role as though he had been a mantle and not a person. Maybe that’s why his soul resisted his return; No! It complained. This is not Qifrey. I am Qifrey. This is something else. It’s just another shadow. Like me. It isn’t right.
Olruggio forcibly pushed the thought from his mind. He didn’t feel wrong, it was just time making an enemy of memory. And besides, he had no right to judge a fellow shadow.
Olruggio had asked him questions on that first night. Tentative, half afraid he’d scare him away again. Too used to his familiar volatility with the truth. Primarily, he asked if he knew what had happened to him.
I lived amongst the silverwoods, he’d said. Or rather, I died amongst them.
Olruggio didn’t point out that he had been a lone tree, separate from the comfort of a forest of others. The comfort of his own fields had been enough for him, apparently.
All that aside, Qifrey remembered he had died. That thought chilled Olruggio.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
Qifrey always woke up before Olruggio. He’d always been a freakish morning person, as Olruggio had told him when they were kids, and nothing through his death and resurrection had changed that.
But while Olruggio used to emerge in the mornings to the sound of him cooking in the kitchen, there was no need to cook for six anymore. Instead, he’d come downstairs to silence. He’d stare out through the kitchen window and Qifrey would be out there, sitting on the hill, right where the tree used to be. He’d never sit for too long before his head would turn to look at Olruggio through the window, as if he knew, could sense him watching, and he’d smile before rising to walk back down to the atelier. It felt weird to have a new morning routine for the first time since he’d left the Great Hall.
More often than not, Olruggio fell asleep on the couch. Partly because he didn’t want to go back to not-his-room again, and partly because he wondered if he could catch the moment Qifrey left the house to go to the hill. He never did. But he still found him on the hill each morning, after blinking awake far too early to unshuttered light blinding him through the living room windows.
Olruggio now spent his nights finding excuses rather than conjuring reminiscences. It was time, it was memory, it was himself, it was merely his clothes. See, the makeup of a person lay somewhat in the ways they chose to portray themselves, to showcase their identity. Those were the parts they left behind, those signals of identity. His glasses, his cloak, his hat.
Olruggio turned the glasses over in his fingers. Round and round. He’d only noticed the seal inked into the clear lens when they’d been given over to his possession. He wondered what he would’ve done if he’d seen it while Qifrey had been alive. If he could’ve helped. If anything could have been different.
Round and round.
Qifrey didn’t take back his glasses. He didn’t need them anymore. It was weird adjusting to the symmetry, to two eyes blinking at him, to bangs pushed away from his face. A habit of a lifetime broken without a word. It was eerie to look into a face you had memorised and see such a visceral, fundamental difference. It warred against his memories.
He didn’t mind that his cloak was missing. He seemed to like the idea that Coco had it, that she held his legacy and love close to herself, and Olruggio finally felt a thread of connection to him. Something that fit with who Qifrey had been.
His cloak had been left behind on its peg by the door. It had been the second sign that had stirred the anxiety sitting low in Olruggio’s gut that dreadful morning. The first had been the quiet kitchen, the empty bedroom.
Snow dusted the ground, though none sat on the tree’s great branches and boughs. Olruggio hated the winter. He hated losing people to it. But at least that was familiar.
His hat had sat neatly by the base of the sprawling roots. As though placed deliberately. As though he’d known. It sat there, along with Qifrey’s leatherbound journal, and a note that simply read;
“Thank you all, for loving me.”
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
Olruggio didn’t tell the girls of his return. Qifrey struggled to realise how long had passed since his death. He’d asked, at first, to see them, but he was lenient to Olruggio’s refusal. As though he knew they weren’t his apprentices anymore. That it was Olruggio’s job to protect them, no matter what source he deemed unsafe.
But here and then, the girls came to visit. Each time, he held in his secrets, folding back into a version of himself who had been alone all this time like they expected, one who whiled away his days, picked up a new or old hobby. One who was doing okay, who wasn’t haunted by ghosts.
Only a few days had passed after Qifrey’s return before Richeh arrived unannounced. The rapping sound of her knuckles against the door was bright and clear, and he felt as though he had risen from a dream. Maybe Qifrey had never come back at all. Maybe he was merely a specter, a manifestation of Olruggio’s own guilt for leaving him behind.
He welcomed her inside, offered her a cup of tea, and she curled her legs up on the couch.
“My project got approval. So that means I’ll be travelling all over for the next few years.”
She’d revisited the old idea she’d had as a much younger witch. Olruggio reckoned it had been ticking over in her brain the background through the years. Her plan was to use the split crystals she’d sold the Silver Eve before Qifrey left, the same as the prototypes she’d gifted to her family. But now, the idea was so much bigger; she wanted to create a map of crystals across the world, a web connecting each capital city.
“So those who find themselves lost, who stray from the path, can always find their way back to one.”
Her eyes were bright, and looked towards the future. Olruggio felt so much pride. So much hope. For how far their girls had come, how far they had yet to go. Maybe he hadn’t done a half bad job, after all.
But Richeh’s eyes eventually turned back to him, and they were sharp, discerning, and a little sad. “Are you doing alright?”
Olruggio shrugged blithely. “I’m just an old man now, with my house and my tree. Don’t worry about me.”
She said nothing further about it. Let him have leniency in his solitude. Once she finished her tea she stood, and Olruggio rose with her. “I’ll go see Master Qifrey before I go. But I’ll come back to visit again soon.”
Olruggio’s heart leapt to his throat, shaken suddenly by the remembrance of the dreamworld he’d been stuck inside. She smiled at him, and closed the door, and he rushed to the kitchen window. Qifrey sat there, on the hill as he often did, arms draped loosely around his legs, his skirt ruffling around him, and Olruggio blinked and the mirage broke into the silverwood tree that remained like it always should have.
Olruggio watched as Richeh walked up the hill to the tree. She talked for a while to its shimmering leaves, touched a gentle hand to a branch. Then she walked away and took to the skies.
Olruggio stared at the tree for a long time. Unblinking. His vision started to fuzz out. Branches just swayed softly in the breeze. When he couldn’t look any longer, he darted away from the window, out through the kitchen and threw open the front door.
Out on the hill, standing plainly in his usual robes with sunlight reflecting off his white hair, stood Qifrey. Just as he did every morning. But unlike usual, where he would sense someone watching and turn to face Olruggio, he just stayed, staring into the sky where Richeh had disappeared.
Olruggio walked up the hill towards him. Tempered fear sat low in his gut.
Qifrey had tears on his face, and Olruggio just looked at him.
She’s so beautiful, he said by way of explanation, and Olruggio’s heart broke.
When he traced back his decisions over those first few weeks, it was then, he thought, that he’d decided to let him stay.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
The weather turned slowly towards winter, and passage stars streaked across the sky. The months had passed like sand between his fingers. Olruggio sat and watched the lights cross the darkened night, and Qifrey sat beside him.
Qifrey’s silver eyes reflected the full depth of the sky as he stared upwards. It was mesmerising. A tiny smile disturbed his cheeks.
I remember these, he said. His face hadn’t aged a day since he’d left him.
Olruggio’s hands were cold. Too cold. He wanted to offer Qifrey his cloak, to wrap around them both, but he knew he wouldn’t. Qifrey wasn’t bothered by the cold anymore. Just him.
The turning weather reminded him, as it always did, of the season that had taken Qifrey away. Olruggio curled his hand into a fist at his side. “Why did you accept it when I said you couldn’t talk to the girls?”
Qifrey slowly turned his face towards him. That same wonder stayed in the way he looked at Olruggio. Because I trust you.
“But don’t you love them?”
I do, he assured. I carry that love with me always. But they are fine without me.
Olruggio frowned. “Are you implying I’m not?”
Yes.
Olruggio went quiet for a moment. He didn’t deny it. He’d never known how to be without Qifrey, and when he’d suddenly lost him, he had not been fine.
“Do you love me?” Olruggio asked instead.
Yes, Qifrey replied, without hesitation.
“No, I…” Olruggio looked away, then forced his gaze back again. “Do you love me.”
I always have.
Qifrey’s eyes kept his. Two of them, pure and silver. It was so simple. So easy. Olruggio let out a stuttering breath.
“You’re not him. Are you?”
No, Qifrey said, simply.
“Then why did you come back!” He yelled.
Because, Qifrey said. I love you. And you needed him.
“But you aren’t him,” Olruggio confirmed, and bitter tears stung at his eyes. He’d known. He’d known. He told himself it wasn’t a surprise. “Then who are you,” he hissed. His voice was ice.
Do you really want to know?
The stars streaming overhead had started to fade, their passage to the earth complete. Burying themselves in darkness and leaving only night. A time for new beginnings.
“Yes,” Olruggio said. “I can’t… do this anymore.” He wanted to bury his face in his hands like those stars in the earth, to wrack his nails across his skull, to claw the guilt and fear and pain and self-loathing out of him. That horror at himself, that he’d let this go on for as long as it had. That he’d wanted it to.
Qifrey just smiled at him, gentle and unafraid. We are the soul of the silverwood. The collective spirit of all the beings who found comfort with us.
“You’re a parasite.” Olruggio rejected. “One who kills. One who causes pain in those it infects and everyone else in their lives.”
He expected Qifrey’s expression to turn pained, for it to try and reject the label, but it merely nodded, and gave no rebuttal. It accepted the vitriol with patience, as though it was due. As though hurt was a custom fare.
“You took him from me.” Olruggio continued, voice ragged with restrained tears. “You took our entire life from us. How can you do that, and say you love me.”
Because it is true, he repeated again.
"Don't you know how cruel that is? Wearing his face?"
The creature tilted its head, as though it didn't understand. We are still him. He has been a part of us since before you both met.
"But I didn't ask for you to come back."
Do you know who you are?
“I…” Olruggio felt blindsided by the question, his anger curdling in his gut. “Who… I…”
Who was he. A shadow of who he used to be. A specter that merely tried to reflect Qifrey’s light, as much as people ascribed light to him. He was empty. Had he ever been anything else?
But the creature did not wait for an answer.
You are the lonely star who fell in love with a silverwood tree. We took that love, consumed it, feasted on it like nutrients that let us grow. His voice was soft, like the wind blew through it. Like the sussurus of leaves was contained within.
Olruggio took a moment to process this. “How did you come back?”
I'm not sure.
Olruggio raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Your love resurrected us, and now I'm merely here. Long ago, we granted your kind magic in return for love, but we worry it was not enough for all you gave us. You were so lonely. So we came instead to grant you our love back.
“No, that’s not… I was never lonely. I had Qifrey. All my life. Since we were kids.”
The mark your love made on him was not like the others who come to rest with us. It was such a lonely love, filled with such a pain. But such a dedication, too.
“I… couldn’t help but love him.” Olruggio said, but he felt a tension ease at the admission. He’d never spoken openly about his feelings, not then when it could have mattered, and not years after his death. “Loving him was easy. I think it saved me.”
In every way, he felt it saved him too, Qifrey replied. He loved you.
“He never-” Olruggio cut himself off, because that was unfair. He did tell you. In every day he spent with you. Olruggio reminded himself. In the only way he could.
“I don’t think I told him. Unless I did and I forgot-” Olruggio hung his head a little. “There’s so much I didn’t know about him. So much he made sure I didn't know.”
He knew you loved him.
At that, Olruggio did cry. He pressed his head against the weight of Qifrey’s shoulder. If he closed his eyes, it felt almost like Qifrey’s tree, the one that had held him as he’d cried so many times. He didn’t feel like Qifrey, though, but maybe that was okay. Qifrey didn’t try to reach out for him back, to dry his tears or wrap an arm around him. It would have been too much. He simply let Olruggio weep out his heartache.
He had loved Qifrey immediately, with all the care he could give, from the moment he first saved him till his final breath. And he'd loved the silverwood inside him for as long as he'd loved Qifrey, first without knowing, and then because there was nothing else left.
So strange, how that shift happened without noticing. So gradual you couldn't see it until you were surrounded by the branches. Just filling out the space that it had been carving away inside him all those years.
“What do I do,” he whispered eventually, broken and tired.
What do you want to do?
“I think I still love him. But I can't…”
I don’t expect you to love us. I don’t believe anyone has loved us, for that is why we feed off the love that is due to others. And you’ve given more than enough. But we want to love you. He wanted to love you. But we will leave, if it is what you wish.
Olruggio’s hand snaked out to clutch onto Qifrey’s arm. Just holding him there. He couldn’t promise anything; didn’t want to think about it right now. But he didn’t want to be alone again right now.
“Sometimes, I wish you were still gone, because that at least made sense,” he murmured, and didn’t meet his eyes. It was something he’d wanted to say for months, sometimes in anger, sometimes in fear, always held back by simple guilt. It would be admitting the fact that it was only Qifrey coming back that had made Olruggio realise he’d accepted that he was gone.
He fell asleep out in the fields, leaning against him, and when he awoke, he’d been carried to Qifrey’s room. It was strange to be back there, after avoiding it for the past few months. His hand stretched out across the sheets, grasping at nothing, and he could tell the room was the same as when Olruggio had left it. Everything of Qifrey’s had been undisturbed. He breathed a sigh of relief.
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
After his death, Olruggio had sorted through Qifrey’s possessions slowly, in whatever bits and pieces he could cope with, so months had passed before he had brought himself to read his journal.
He found it less an account of Qifrey’s thoughts as he’d expected and more a letter, addressed to him. An account of all the things unsaid. All the secrets.
Each separate entry started with something so undeniably damning that he wondered how much it had hurt to write, and why Qifrey had written it anyway.
I write this as you sleep beside me in the grass. I write this as I hear you humming in our kitchen. I write this as you work on one of your contraptions.
I write this to tell you that I love you. I write this because I know this love is enough for me. The love I have for our girls. The love I have for our life. It is enough for me, and should it end the way it has, given you have read this, I want you to know it is okay.
Olruggio had never known.
The pages showed him both guilt and togetherness. They held up a shattered mirror of Olruggio’s love. It showed him Qifrey’s own, buried beneath a cage of heartache, a cage made of roots and flowers and a single burning flame.
The pages showed how all his care had unknowingly twisted a knife within Qifrey. One that sunk deeper with every year that passed since childhood. That, as he had never wanted to acknowledge but always known, Qifrey had loved him.
The pages told him the truth. One fateful day beside the Tower of Tomes which had always been a mystery to him, one with echoes that underscored every bright memory of his with forgotten confrontations.
Maybe love was a knife, cutting deeper with every confession. With every enamoured word. Maybe that had been why for the last six months he’d let a known stranger into his home, a punishment to himself in the way his love had punished Qifrey.
For how could Olruggio have ever thought himself worthy of Qifrey’s love, if all he had done was doubt the ways Qifrey desperately tried to show it. To have felt sorry for himself that his life didn’t look like a romance book, to have wanted more when he had so many years living alongside him. When even their limited years could have been snuffed out as a child, if not for Qifrey’s suffering. And for Qifrey to have thought himself undeserving of Olruggio's love of all things, as if the fool didn't know Olruggio would always, always forgive him.
All of it formed an ugly web inside his head that could not be untangled. It’d be easier to let it go, to just grieve the loss of impossible wasted years.
But some part of him clung on despite it all, that maybe he could still take something for himself?
‿̩͙𖥔༻⋆✴︎⋆༺𖥔‿̩͙
When winter came proper, all four of his girls came back to the atelier. They stood together on the field, a small half-circle around the silverwood tree. They talked to him, shared their stories, laughed, hung lanterns from his branches, cried, hugged each other. They thanked him for everything he’d done for them. Everything he’d taught them. Their beautiful professor, who gave them all his courage.
They huddled inside with warm blankets, continued to share their companionship, their grief. It was lovely, a sweet commiseration of all they’d grown through together as a family.
One by one, the girls departed again, their ritual penance done. They left to continue their own lives, and left Olruggio with his.
Once he was alone, he bundled back into his winter clothes and stepped out to trudge up the hill in the snow. He offered a hand to the silverwood tree, and fingers slotted into his.
He helped Qifrey up, and walked back to the house with him.