When Rook is twenty-eight, and Emmrich fifty-four, Emmrich takes Rook's hand gently and tells her that they must fully consider what it means for him to be so much older. To attach herself to him, when he is so close to his own decline, is follyâ
Rook looks at him directly, waiting until his downcast eyes meet hers.
"I'm a Grey Warden," Rook tells him. "I know how to make every year that I am given count."
When Rook is thirty-one, and Emmrich fifty-seven, as Emmrich presses a kiss against the back of Rook's bare shoulder, Rook admits in a small voice: "I have, at most, fifteen years left to live."
In the warm darkness of their bedroom, the quiet stretches like the last moment after a crystal has been struck, just before the world falls again into silence.
"Not if I have anything to say about it," Emmrich vows.
When the bells peal, sunlight and thrown petals and grains and joyous laughter raining down on them in equal measure, when Emmrich clasps her hands and says I give you my heart and soul. I will honor and cherish you each and every day of our livesâ his voice sounds exactly the same.
When Rook is thirty-seven, and Emmrich sixty-three, she finds him on the floor of his laboratory, overcome by weeping.
"I have it," Emmrich tells her. "I have it. The Blight will progress no further in you."
She rocks him on the floor for a full hour as he sobs with the heart-rending relief, clutching her as if afraid to ever let her go.
When Rook is forty-six, and Emmrich seventy-two, Emmrich claims that most of his smile lines are Rook's doing.
"And many of the worry ones, too," Rook teases gently, brushing her thumb over her favorite, the divot closest to his right eyebrow.
Decades of love settle over a person as tangibly as gravity: they are both radiant with it.
They watch the sun set together, as they have done hundreds of times, hand in hand. Emmrich waits until the last sliver of pink has left the clouds before he turns to Rook to speak.
"I have learned that my solution was flawed," Emmrich admits very quietly. "The Blight in you will be at bay only so long as I live."
The light of the first rising star is reflected in Emmrich's gleaming, tear filled eyes.
Rook raises their joined hands to her mouth, kissing the back of his.
"I am older than I ever thought I would live," Rook says tenderly. "This life is enough, love."
The words soften Emmrich's expression, but fail to touch the grief in his eyes.
"It is more than enough," Rook tells him, at fifty-two.
"You think I want to live in a world without you in it?" she tells him at fifty-six.
"I love you," she tells him, every day.
"Every word in every love poem ever written isn't enough to say just how much I love you."
Emmrich peers at her over his thick glasses, pausing in his reading of the book of sonnets.
"Should I stop, then?" Emmrich teases.
"No," Rook says, settling her head more comfortably in his lap.
He runs one knotted, shaking hand through her grey hair, presses a kiss to her forehead. Rook closes her eyes.
When Rook is fifty-seven, and Emmrich eight-three, he slips away in the night. She wakes, as always, with her hand in his. She lies quietly for a long time, her eyes bleakly dry, knowing that this time is the last.
Most deaths feel sudden, in the end.
And yet every griever knows: it is still possible, somehow, to survive the removal of a heart.
After Rook has stood for two hours at the funeral, crying mechanically and stopping just as suddenly, Manfred guides her away.
"It's time to sit down, Mother," Manfred tells her gently. "Would you like water? Tea?"
Even fifteen years after beginning his travels, Manfred still sounds so much like Emmrich. The place where her heart is meant to be aches. Rook lets him settle her in a chair, and bring her the blend of tea that he designed just for her.
"There are two more bequeathments to distribute from Father's will," Manfred tells her. "He wanted both to be delivered by my hand."
The first is an elegant leather-bound book, intricately tooled, with fine gilded additions. It's carved with both their favorite flowers, intertwined. Rook opens the cover with shaking hands.
The lines are labelled with a date, with a single sentence accompanying it, penned in Emmrich's fine hand. Each is a message to her. It began almost four years ago, butâ the book is far too full. Every page is written in. Rook flips forward to find that Emmrich wrote a line for every day for the next three decades.
"He should have spared himself the pain of writing so much," Rook says. "The Blight will have me far sooner than that!"
Manfred silently hands her an envelope. On its front is written:
Rook reads the letter. She stares at Manfred, uncomprehending.
Manfred embraces her, pressing his forehead to hers in his version of a kiss to the cheek.
"The Blight won't take you at all, Mother," Manfred says gently. "He transferred the spell to me eight months ago."
Through a veil of tears, Rook sees that every neat line in Emmrich's book ends the same way.
