Grosse Douzaine

October 2025
Novandria, Eisen
Terra
 
“I've always wondered why it's called a gross.”
 
Muse looks up from their cell phone, Nita's latest update still bright on the screen, and blinks. “What?”
 
“A gross,” Harper says patiently. “One hundred and forty-four. It's a weirdly specific number to give a name to. I've always wondered why.”
 
They give him an odd look. “It's from Elvish. You cannot tell me you've forgotten Elvish.”
 
“Sue me, I haven't had a real conversation in Elvish in fifty years. I'm a little rusty.”
 
Muse snorts and covers their mouth with one hand to hide a laugh. They leave Harper to pout and instead stand up on their tipoes, looking over the crowd. The station is busy - buses roll in and out, and on the tracks behind them, trains whirl by. Not everyone they are waiting for will come by public transit, of course. Some of them have more magical means of conveyance. Still, a bus station is a perfect meeting spot, and it is where Harper and Muse wait for their friends to arrive.
 
Not all of them will be here. It's an ache Muse has sat with for a very long time, one that will never fade completely. After all, the longest-lived races of Terra only lived a hundred and twenty years, if they were lucky. It has been a good many years longer even than that.
 
Their eyes dart across the bus station. It's a microcosm of travel, and in it, even though the world has changed in more ways than they will ever be able to describe, they can still see the echoes. Every new piece of technology, helpful and brilliant and maybe a little bit sassy and alive, that still bears Hayden's fingerprints. The ROOKs walking their beats - beats that haven't changed all that much since Nel first established them. She'd expanded them significantly, rerouting them to include Nevermore's patrol routes, and with his practiced eye to assist her, they'd made sure fewer fell victim to dark alleys and winter's bite again. A woman is busking nearby, singing lustily and juggling knives, dancing with a fake blade - and Violet's swordplay is in her technique, Violet's joy is in her smirk and the wink she throws their way.
 
There will be more, they know, once their friends arrive. The walk to the theater will be a long and circuitous one, half nostalgia trip, half pilgrimage. They will pass a library opened in Arinelle's honor, one with private rooms and quiet floors for shutting the world out and scheduled book clubs for letting it in, with shelves full of James’ wildest stories. They'll walk through Central Park and rest their hands on trees grown from cuttings brought from Katja's home forest. They'll stop in at Refined Tastes for Mara and the Skybound for Lukas, they'll drop by The Original Karstadt's for Ottilie and The Adventurer's Feast for Gregor. They'll pass soup kitchens spun off the ones first established by Zayn and their mother in the time after the ashfall, still hard at work keeping the hungry fed. They'll visit a café - a tiny hole in the wall Aralia worked hard for, a place for novices to practice and for people to meet and find love. They'll visit Kevan, his statue still rising high over the market square, a presence of protection and love.
 
They're all still there, of course - still thriving exactly where they began. Their historic locations are protected under laws Scarlet and Miranda drafted together, with Pnackeles’ help peering forward and backward and crossward over time to foresee anything that might threaten their continued existence.
 
They'll pass a white marble statue with a brassy mask kept polished to gold, raised long ago by the Sisters of the Sun over what used to be the temple of Akmon. Veronika might come today, they muse, or she might not, depending on how busy her designs are keeping her. Seraphina certainly will, and Bella wouldn't have missed this for all the worlds beyond. Jearyn is damn near contractually obligated to come, as a celestial being of music, and wherever he goes, Valistad will, too - the mischief in the shadow of all music, a place where nothing will separate them again. Nita and Thom will come dressed to the nines, tailed by however many of their ever-widening family choose to follow along. And Emilia and Echo are wherever anyone are, always the gentle whisper of comfort and love in the back of the mind. They'll be listening, too.
 
They wonder for a moment if Aloysius and Margarete will be there. They aren't called that any more, of course. Those were names left behind in a past life, one both brighter and darker by several measures. But they are back. Harper spotted them across the market square, once - a flash of red hair and a gold-buttoned shirt, eyes that had no room for anyone but each other, an ardent gale and a burning rose. They might wind up at the theater completely by coincidence. What a thing that would be.
 
It's a symphony, of course, that they're all heading to. There always is one, at this time of year, as the autumn leaves are bursting into manifold brilliance. Once upon a time, a little red bird had composed herself out of darkness and into light. Sareena Loralen's work had never been intended to chronicle the Ashen Wars. They'd only been meant to free her from her own pain, to help her express what words alone could not. Still, scholars and historians for years to come would agree that a battle of such a scope could only be comprehended in the truest sense through personal eyes. It is thus that every year, on the anniversary of the end of the Ashfall and the beginning of the new world, the Celestial Theater organizes a festival - to play the music of one Master Cardinal and to celebrate the world the heroes of the Ashen Wars left to them to inherit.
 
Zeff had thought it was a grand idea. Cardinal had hated every second of it.
 
Muse's fingers find the ring on their left ring finger and turn it slowly, around and around, remembering.
 
Harper's voice breaks them out of their reverie. They blink up at him, then shake their head. “Sorry. What?”
 
Harper shakes his head. His smile is half wry, half fond. He takes Muse’s hand, gently lacing their fingers together. “I was asking if you remembered enough Elvish to explain it to me.”
 
They squeeze his hand. He’s always been good at this. Catching them mid-melancholy and bringing them back to the present. He’s lived more lifetimes than they have - he understands what it feels like to fall into the past, and the weight of having to come back.
 
“It was a baking term,” they say. “It means ‘large dozen’. Twelve sets of twelve.”
 
“Why couldn’t they have just said ‘a dozen dozens’?” Harper grumbles good-naturedly. “It’s alliterative. It’s got a delightful meter. It’d work well in a poem.”
 
“People are more complicated than poetry, Harper.”
 
“I don’t know that I’d go that far. You’ve never tried to write a sestina.”
 
Muse snorts and turns to bury a laugh in Harper’s shoulder. His shirt is warm with sunlight and body heat. Even after a hundred and forty years - nearly a gross, nearly a dozen dozens - it still knocks them over, the breadth and depth of sensation the warforged had been missing.
 
They no longer have to miss it, now. They no longer have to miss anything except for the things time leaves behind.
 
And even then, what is remembered, survives.
 
What is loved, lives.