Chapter 1: Flowers in the Spellbook
The air in Rolan’s shop always tasted of stories. Not the pleasant kind, but the ones with bent spines and ink-smeared margins, steeped in ozone and yesterday’s failed experiments. Felicity moved through the labyrinth of towering shelves with a silence that had nothing to do with stealth and everything to do with absence. Her fingers, pale and slender, trailed along the spines of spellbooks, stirring little puffs of glittering dust into the sunbeams cutting through the grimy window.
In her other hand, she held a clutch of starbloom and creeping ivy, plucked from the alleyway where the cobbles cracked. She didn’t remember picking them.
A fat, aging raven named Ponder watched her from a perch atop a tottering stack of almanacs, his head cocked. She whispered to him in Elvish, the words soft and liquid. “He used to say the ivy was too persistent. A nuisance.”
Ponder rustled his feathers but offered no wisdom.
Felicity’s gaze was fixed on something Rolan couldn’t see, somewhere beyond the bottled lightning and jars of crystallized memory. Her tall frame, usually so full of a restless, dancing energy, was still. Still as a deep wood in winter. The wildflowers woven haphazardly into her long, tangled silver hair were beginning to wilt.
Rolan watched her from behind the scarred oak counter, a twist of something sharp and familiar in his chest. He’d been polishing the same brass astrolabe for ten minutes. His own crimson hands, marked with their swirling patterns, looked oddly vivid against the dull metal. Just say something. Anything. You’ve known her for a century. Talk about the weather. The damned raven. Anything.
“If you’re going to redecorate,” he said, and his voice came out easier than he felt, a practiced, dry tone, “at least use the books I don’t need. The index on planar geometries, maybe. It’s useless anyway.”
Felicity didn’t startle. She simply turned her head, her pale blue eyes finding him slowly, as if surfacing from deep water. A faint, confused smile touched her lips. “The ivy likes the geometry,” she said, her voice a little raspy from disuse. She lifted the hand holding the flowers. “See? It’s already climbing.”
She wasn’t wrong. As Rolan looked, he saw the delicate green tendril had indeed begun to curl itself around the gilded spine of the spellbook, as if claiming it.
Felicity Meadowlight didn’t seem to notice. Her long, pale fingers moved with a life of their own, plucking another cornflower from the tangled silver cascade of her hair and tucking it between the pages of Arcanic Thaumaturgy, Vol. III. A daisy followed, its white petals stark against the faded leather.
From behind the counter, Rolan watched her. The usual witty remark about defacing priceless texts died on his tongue. He just watched the sad, silent ballet of her hands. She’d been like this for an hour, a ghost drifting through the cramped aisles of his shop, leaving a trail of blossoms in her wake. It was a new quirk. The grief, a year old now, kept reshaping her.
“You know,” he said, his voice softer than he intended. “Master Therin wrote that particular volume while suffering from a rather aggressive case of pixie pox. I’m not sure it deserves flowers.”
Felicity paused, her head tilting. Her pale blue eyes focused on him, but he could tell it took a second for the words to settle. “All suffering deserves kindness,” she said, her voice a little faint, like it was coming from far away. “Even a book’s.”
Then she went back to weaving a stem of witch’s hazel into the book’s hinge.
Rolan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He nudged a bowl of moonwater toward her. “At least hydrate while you commit botanical heresy.”
A flicker of a smile touched her lips. “Thank you, Rolan.”
She drifted closer to the counter, her fingers tracing the edge of a stack of parchment where his own frantic script battled with her elegant, looping calligraphy on old labels. Mermaid’s Sigh. Foxfire. Tears of the Moon. Her handwriting was on half the jars in this place. A lifetime of collaboration.
He busied himself with uncorking a vial of glowing liquid, the azure light washing over his crimson hands. “Old Man Hamish was in. His prize sheep are levitating again. Apparently, they’re eating the lichen off the north side of the standing stones.”
“The lichen is phosphorescent this time of year,” Felicity murmured, not looking up. “It’s full of latent astral energy. The sheep are just… resonating.” She picked up a quill from his desk, twirling it absently. “It’s quite beautiful, if you think about it. Floating sheep under the stars.”
“It’s a nightmare for sheepdog training,” Rolan countered, but he was grinning. This was good. This was almost normal. Her mind, always running down its own unique paths.
He reached across the counter to slide the moonwater bowl definitively into her space. His fingers, marked with their dark swirling patterns, brushed against hers.
The contact was static, a tiny shock.
And he heard it.
A low, soft hum, barely more than a vibration in her chest. A tune. Three repeating notes, falling like leaves.
He knew that song. Astarion used to whistle it while he gardened. A silly, simple melody from some human tavern he’d frequented in his youth. Felicity had always hated it, said it was repetitive and grating. She’d cover her ears, laughing, until Astarion would sweep her up to dance just to annoy her further.
Now, she was humming it. Absently. Automatically. While putting flowers in books.
The realization hit Rolan like a physical weight in his gut. His hand froze atop hers. The shop seemed to contract, the hum of latent magic suddenly deafening.
Felicity stopped humming. She looked down at their hands, then up at his face. Her eyes were wide, guileless, confused by his sudden stillness. “Did I… do it wrong?” she asked, her voice small. “The flowers?”
She had no idea. No idea she’d been humming. No idea that the ghost of her husband had just walked through the room, using her voice.
Rolan’s heart hammered against his ribs. A hundred words piled up behind his teeth. Confessions he’d practiced for decades. Comfort he ached to give. Anger, stupid and selfish, at a dead man for still having this hold on her.
He swallowed it all. The wizard’s facade, the sarcasm, the easy charm—it slammed back into place like a shield.
He pulled his hand back, making a show of examining his fingers for thorns. “No, no damage done. My epidermis is intact. You just surprised me is all. Thought I felt a spark of actual productivity for a second there.” He forced a chuckle. It sounded brittle to his own ears.
Felicity’s brow furrowed, just slightly. She was studying him now, trying to parse the shift in tone, the sudden crackle in the air. Social cues were a language she often misheard.
“I should go,” she said abruptly, taking a step back from the counter. “The evening primroses by the creek will be opening. They get anxious if I’m late.”
“Right. Of course.” Rolan nodded, his tail giving an involuntary, anxious flick behind him. “Say hello to the anxious flowers for me.”
She was already gliding toward the door, a tall, slender wraith trailed by the scent of damp earth and petals. She paused at the threshold, the dimming light from the street outlining her tangled, flower-crowned silhouette.
“Rolan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for letting me be here. It’s… quiet.”
The door closed with a gentle chime.
He stood there in the sudden, crushing silence of his crowded shop. The silence she had just filled. He looked at the spellbook on the counter, now blooming with misplaced wildflowers. He looked at the spot where their hands had touched.
With a slow, deliberate motion, he pulled the book toward him. He didn’t clear the flowers away. Instead, he traced the edge of a daisy petal with a single crimson fingertip.
Then he closed the heavy cover, gently, as if putting something very fragile to bed.
Then he closed the heavy cover, gently, as if putting something very fragile to bed.
The silence she left behind was a different kind of noise. It was the sound of his own failure, echoing off the jars of foxfire and mermaid’s sigh. He stared at the closed book, at the rebellious ivy already seeking a new hold on the wood-grained leather.
It was the humming. It clawed at him.
She was forgetting to eat, talking to flowers as if they answered, weaving grief into the very pages of his life. And she was humming his song. The ghost was right here, in the shop, and Rolan couldn’t compete with a ghost. He never could.
He’d been at the Arcane Symposium in Silverymoon when it happened. Presenting a paper on stabilizing temporal currents in minor potions. A vanity project. A chance to show off.
The message had arrived three days late, a charred scrap from a sending spell gone awry, relayed by a harried city messenger: Astarion dead. Felicity safe. Come home.
He’d left that instant. Teleported until his magic reserves screamed, then rode until the horse gave out. He arrived at her forest cabin under a bleeding sunset to find the door splintered, the windows shattered. Dark, rust-colored stains bloomed on the porch wood like violent roses. The wards he’d personally laid on the lintel were scorched away, their power drained.
The local rangers had filled in the blanks. Drifters. Not random. They’d been asking in town about the “elf witch with starlight in her hair.” They wanted her. For what, no one would say aloud, but the implication curdled the stomach. They’d come at dusk, when Astarion’s vampiric nature would have been at its weakest, just risen and disoriented.
He fought them anyway. Of course he did. The rangers found two of the men outside, necks broken. A third inside, near the hearth, with a fireplace poker driven through his chest. Astarion was at the foot of the loft ladder, where Felicity would have been sleeping. He was holding the fourth man’s wrists, the skin of his own arms shredded down to bone in places, his body between the intruder and the steps. The final blow was a hawthorn stake, delivered upward through the back. He’d been pinned to the floorboards, but his hands never let go.
Felicity had been found in the root cellar, curled between sacks of potatoes, unharmed. She hadn’t made a sound.
Rolan’s wards had failed. He hadn’t been there. He’d been across the continent, talking about potions.
A cold, metallic knot of sage-ash grief tightened in his throat. He slammed his fist down on the counter, not hard enough to break anything, just enough to make the vials shiver. Ponder the raven squawked in protest.
“I know,” Rolan muttered, his voice rough.
He could still see the exact placement of every bloodstain. He could see the delicate, perfect arc of Felicity’s handwriting on the label of a jar of dried chamomile next to his register. For calming, it read. Her kindness, even now, catalogued on his shelf.
He couldn’t fix the past. He couldn’t resurrect the dead. But this shop, this messy, humming, alive place, was his. And she kept coming back to it.
He moved from behind the counter, his tail snapping with decisive energy. He went to a high shelf at the back, dustier than the rest, and pulled down a small, iron-banded chest. The lock clicked open at a touch of his thumb. Inside, nestled in black velvet, was a smooth river stone, etched with interlocking rings of protection. It was warm to the touch, pulsing with a slow, amber light. A ward-stone. One of his earliest, most powerful works. He’d been too proud to give it to her before, thinking it wasn’t perfect enough, that he could make something better.
Pride was stupid.
He pocketed the stone. Then he grabbed his heavy, wool-lined cloak from a hook. He’d walk her home tonight. Not because she asked. Not because she needed an escort. But because he needed to see her to her door. He needed to place this warm stone on her new windowsill, where the old wards had failed, and hope it was enough.
Ponder cawed, a question in the sound.
“Mind the shop,” Rolan said, pushing the door open into the twilight. The chill air was a slap. “I’ve got some primroses to apologize to.”