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Regaining a body of flesh and blood came with a certain number of adjustments. For one, G'raha Tia suddenly needed to sleep, despite the new and seemingly boundless energy he'd entirely forgotten was possible. For another, the roiling of an empty stomach plagued him. And, each morning as he stared at his own face in a mirror far better kept than the one in his Crystal Tower quarters, he said his own name aloud, and for the first time in over a century, it truly felt like his.
It had only been a matter of days, but he'd already taken to raising his right hand to the mirror as he spoke, feeling the smoothness and the way it clung to his fingertips if he tried to drag them along its surface. Had he done so at home—this was home now, he reminded himself—it would have scratched the glass to nigh unusability. Shattered and reformed, his crystal limb was rough and sharp but still of use. A mirror in such a state would not be.
He had yet to decide whether the touch of the mirror on bare skin was more or less jarring than the face that stared back at him from it. He'd forced himself to meet his own eyes each morning in the one he'd had on the First, if only so he did not forget he had a face at all. (He kept it hidden from so many. It would only take the tiniest pinch of apathy for that number to grow to include himself.) The one that looked back at him now might as well have been a painting. G'raha Tia was a relic of bygone days.
"Thou art contemplative as ever this morning, I see." Urianger's voice drifted toward him from the doorway, soft and fond.
"Ah," he said. "Yes, well, I fear the novelty will take its time to fade."
He turned to look at the man who stood in the doorway, whose golden eyes and soft, ever-sad smile he'd come to know with a quiet intimacy belying the fact they had only met in these physical forms so recently. Crystal and aether, time and stars, ephemeral and drifting on the winds of another world. An entire existence condensed into memory alone.
Urianger stepped inside.
The room itself was… coming together, G'raha would say if asked. A small bookshelf held what few tomes he'd manage to acquire since his return, some gifted from the Scions' own collection, others brought back from across the rift by the single pair of hands that could reach them, and one—a collection of old poetry, its author anonymous—that had been stored in a crate along with the sparse other belongings he'd left behind before he sealed the Tower's doors behind him. A lute with old strings coming loose, as well. A picture frame now broken, its contents long gone. But, though damaged, the wood was not weathered, the pages of the poems not yellowed. They were as much a relic as he—ancient, and not at all.
"It's… strange," he said as Urianger stepped up behind him, then shook his head. "Well, no, I mean, of course it's strange, it's just—"
He heard a soft shushing sound, and warm arms wrapped around his shoulders. Such a new sensation still, actually feeling the touch as more than the barest whisper of pressure over crystal. The problem with a body built half of stone was that until a few days ago, he'd had no idea the strength of such an embrace, like a blanket made to weigh him down and lull him straight to sleep.
How many nights had he slept with these arms draped over him, unable to know just how grounding that touch could be? Had he known this comfort, perhaps it would have been much more difficult to consign himself to a lonely death.
"Thou needst not strain thyself overmuch," Urianger whispered. G'raha simply gazed at them both in the mirror, their eyes meeting in that liminal, unreal place. A strange pair, certainly, but a comfort he could hardly even begin to explain.
"I am not," he said. But the hood came down months ago, and his long-practiced habit of lying would hopefully follow soon. "Apologies. Perhaps I am. But there is still so much to do, to practice, to learn."
While the theoretical principles of controlling aether remained, a century of practice refining that control did not translate to a new body unaccustomed to the flow of unmitigated magic. It seemed he'd left that particular skill behind, encased in crystal guarding Xande's throne. The simplest of magicks itched as they twisted through his veins—a strange and quite unwelcome feeling, to stand alone without the Tower's endless well of aether behind him.
Urianger chuckled. "Mayhap this is true. Yet I do not believe thou must needs rush. The passage of time no longer weigheth heavy upon thee."
"No," he agreed absently, studying the image of the pair of them as though he could etch it permanently behind his eyes.
"'Time floweth ever forward.' 'Twas a death knell once, but now, so too may we flow with it."
G'raha could not stop himself from smiling, and that was as unfamiliar a thing to see in the glass as his own face free of crystal and lines carved deep by the weight of destiny. One day, perhaps, he could look in this mirror and see those lines again, though this time drawn by age and laughter instead.
Optimistic, perhaps, but he'd rarely had such a cause for optimism. No clock ticked away, taking seconds of his life with it one by one. No secret promise of a death foretold loomed in the future, each day a countdown until the last.
It would take time to unwrite the part of him that refused to accept his new existence. Every night since his awakening, he'd lain awake in a secondhand bed dragged awkwardly into the room and made up for now with cheap, scratchy sheets and wondered whether all this was a dream: one last grand delusion before a monstrous light took hold.
But the only light that stirred him from his dreams now was the soft sunrise of a home he'd long thought forsaken, and the only touch that roused him from his slumber was a gentle, earnest hand. He'd once said his destiny waited for him in the future. He meant death, then, but no longer.