One Last Trick

Senaris 29

Tullups lingered on the threshold of the Wizard's Tower, looking for the fault lines in his own resolve. Even after all these years, the place still sang with the echo of his footfalls, the corridors still haunted by the laughter and argument of vanished students. The outer atrium was unchanged: sunlight sluiced down through the prismatic dome, pooling on the chequered marble like molten glass; the scent of old vellum and lemon-oil polish drifted from the archives; somewhere in the upper spires, a bell tolled the hour with funereal precision. But the Tower's heart beat with a new urgency, the air charged with the restless promise of violence and siege.

He had told his wife he might never come back. Marida, with her unyielding patience and hands that smelled always of sage and wet dough, had only nodded, kissed his cheek, and pressed a hand-written recipe into his coat pocket as if it were a talisman against the inevitable. When the letter from Lightfoot arrived—delivered by a trembling second-year, as if the ink itself might combust—he did not hesitate, only insisted that Marida and her sisters be among the first wave of evacuees. It was the only term on which he would return, and Lightfoot had not argued.

His old robes no longer fit; too tight at the shoulders, the hem dragging at his calves. He was fatter, now, than in the days when he had mentored a generation of arcanists, a fact he wore with a species of pride—proof that, despite everything, he had made something of a life outside these stone walls. Still, as he climbed the spiral stair towards the Masters’ meeting chamber, he felt the old instinctive nervousness. It was like going home after running away: nothing had changed, but every shadow seemed to know what you’d done.

He paused outside the familiar blue-lacquered door, brushing pastry crumbs from his lapel, and breathed in deeply through his nose. “All right, Tullups,” he muttered. “One last trick.”

Inside, the room was as he remembered it: a long conference table of storm-struck oak, the lacquer cracked and pitted by centuries of spilled reagents and heated argument. At the far end sat his old friends Kerrowyn Lightfoot and Alistar Pembroke. Next to Alistar was Master Zephyrus Evanton, mouth set in his usual scowl. Pembroke and Evanton looked older than he remembered, but then again, so did he. Kerrowyn, with her gnomish blood, as always looked young and ancient at the same time. Beyond them, seated in strict order, were the younger generation: Lavan Edor, hair, he noted, a startling shock of white instead of dark brown; Isemay Misendris, half-elven, wringing her hands so violently that the air above them shimmered with accidental magic.

And there—at the seat reserved for the absent, the disgraced, or the irreplaceable—sat Ophelia.

He nearly did not recognize her. The last time he’d seen his former apprentice, she was little more than a tangle of ambition and unresolved trauma. Now, she was a presence. Older by two decades, the lines at the corners of her eyes etched in acid and midnight oil, the skin of her arms a palimpsest of old wounds. Her horns arched higher, lacquered and polished, and her mouth was set in a line so hard it could have served as a siege weapon.

She saw him. She did not smile, nor did she look away. There was, instead, a stillness—an animal wariness, as if she were bracing for a blow that might never come.

Lightfoot broke the silence. “Tullups!” she called, her voice as bright and brittle as ever. “We’re so pleased you answered the call. I’d say take a seat, but—well, you look like you could use a whole sofa.”

He snorted, grateful for the old familiar needling. “That’s rich coming from someone who weighs less than a wand of feather fall,” he shot back. The exchange cost him nothing and bought a little time to recalibrate.

Pembroke inclined his head in greeting. “It is…good to see you, old friend.” His smile was gentle, but the circles beneath his eyes were the color of rotting plums.

“Master Tullups,” said Isemay, her words half-choked with awe or anxiety or both. “We…we’re very honored.”

“Please, just Tullups,” he said, waving a hand. He glanced around, counting the faces. “Is this it? I’d expected a full house.”

Lightfoot gave a soft, bitter laugh. “Some of us fell, some ran, some are holding the dome so the rest of us can strategize in peace. Consider yourself the guest of honor.”

He set his satchel down, took a chair at the middle of the table, and let the silence settle again. No one said what they were all thinking: that the Tower’s greatest hope now rested on a few exhausted, half-traumatized magi and the rapidly thinning membrane of the abjuration dome.

After a moment, Lightfoot cleared her throat. “Before we get into the dire logistics of our collective annihilation,” she said, “I should mention we have a…surprise.” She turned, just slightly, toward Ophelia. “I wanted to tell you in person, but things have been—” she fluttered her hand, as if the appropriate adjective might manifest in the air.

“Busy,” supplied Pembroke, with a faint smile.

Tullups studied Ophelia. She did not meet his gaze, her attention fixed on the scattering of enchanted stones at the center of the table—a warding array, he recognized, designed to repel scrying. Her fingers drummed a nervous, syncopated rhythm on the lacquer.

“Ophelia,” Lightfoot continued, “is not a ghost, nor an imposter, nor a revenant. She’s here. The real thing.”

He felt the words land somewhere deep in his chest, where they seemed to dissolve without meaning. He fumbled for a reply, his mind stumbling over every possible permutation of What are you doing here? and Why did you leave me? and How dare you show your face, and found none of them adequate to the moment. Instead, he said: “You look well.”

She snorted. “You don’t.”

He laughed, a sharp bark, more real than anything he’d managed in months. The old patterns, still there, worn deeper by years apart.

They stared at each other, mentor and apprentice, neither willing to blink first.

Lightfoot exhaled, a sigh that sounded like it had been chambered for a year. “We wanted you to have a chance to reconcile before…you know. Endgame.” She looked at Ophelia, eyes pleading. “We didn’t want to spring it on you, but time is—”

“Short,” finished Pembroke.

A minute passed. Someone in the Tower above dropped a book, the thud reverberating through the stone like a detonation.

Ophelia broke first. She rose, chair scraping the floor with a teeth-gritting screech, and strode to the window, where she stood with her back to the room, arms folded across her chest. “You want me to apologize,” she said. Her voice was low, the old baritone worn rougher by years of chain-smoking or argument. “But I won’t.”

He shook his head, refusing to accept the script she was trying to force on him. “Don’t,” he said. “I don’t need you to.”

She turned, the gold of the setting sun outlining her in something like sanctity. Her eyes were red, but dry. “You could have come after me.”

He shrugged. “And what would I have found? A corpse? A villain?” He let the silence stretch, then: “Or maybe a survivor. Maybe that’s enough.”

She stared at him, then looked away, lips pressed so tightly together they blanched white. “I thought you’d hate me,” she whispered.

He shook his head, and for a moment the old pain returned; the guilt that had driven him from the Tower, the sleepless nights spent wondering if he’d failed her, the relief and self-loathing that came when he finally let himself move on. “Never,” he said, voice breaking. “I’m just glad you made it home.”

He pushed himself to his feet. The movement was awkward, but he managed, and crossed the room to her. He stopped at a careful distance, close enough to be vulnerable, not so close as to crowd her. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words heavy as lead. “I’m sorry I wasn’t enough. I’m sorry I let you go.”

She stood, frozen, for three breaths. Then she closed the gap and hugged him, hard. It was not the delicate, decorous embrace of the gentry; it was desperate, a collision of two bodies that had lost too much and found too little in the interim. Tullups felt her shaking, and it was only then he realized he was crying too.

They stood like that for a long time, until the sun slipped behind the horizon and the room filled with the soft blue of the dome outside.

When they finally separated, Ophelia managed a wan smile. “You’ve gotten old,” she said, her voice thick.

“So have you,” he replied, and they both laughed.

The others looked on, not with pity but with the solemnity of witnesses to something sacred. Lavan and Isemay shared a glance—one of those silent, involuntary smiles that only survived in the presence of genuine reconciliation.

Lightfoot dabbed at her eye, then said, “If you two are finished with the heartstrings, we do have a war to win.”

“Not yet we don’t,” said Tullups, “but ask again in the morning.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the room filled with the quiet, tired laughter of people who understood that tomorrow might never come, but who would fight for it anyway.

Outside, the sky above the Capitol shimmered; an abjuration dome of impossible scale, the city inside shining like the heart of a lantern.

Within the Tower, hope flickered, faint but indelible, as the Masters prepared to face the end together.