Time moves differently now.

You feel it in the way seasons shift—too fast, like pages turning in a book someone else is reading. One month becomes two. Two becomes twelve. And you… you remain unchanged.

You watch from the gem.

Not trapped inside it—not like the founders were—but connected to it in a way that defies explanation. You can leave when you choose, walk the streets, interact with the living. But always, part of you is here. In the light. In the stone. In the eternal, unchanging heart of Eldermoor.

“You don’t age,” Neve says one day. She’s older now—a year? Five years?—and there are lines on her face that weren’t there before. “You look exactly the same.”

“I feel exactly the same,” you admit. “That’s the strange part. I thought it would hurt. But it doesn’t. It just… is.”

You watch the city rebuild.

Stone by stone, the damage from the siege is repaired. New buildings rise. Children grow up never knowing what it was like to live under shadow. The founders are remembered now—truly remembered, their story told correctly for the first time in three centuries.

And you’re there for all of it.

The first generation passes. People you knew as children become adults, then elders, then memories. It should hurt more than it does. But the gem tempers everything, smoothing the edges of grief into something almost peaceful.

You attend Mira’s funeral. She died as she lived—hunting, fighting, never surrendering. Her last words were about finally being able to rest.

You stand beside Theron when his hair turns gray, when his merchant empire becomes the foundation of Eldermoor’s prosperity. He thanks you for giving him the chance to become something better than he was.

You sit with Wren in her final days, the Thornwood singing its goodbye as its last guardian passes. She tells you the forest will remember, and you know it’s true.

Elder Corvus—long dead now—left you a letter.

You read it on the anniversary of the Binding’s breaking. The fifty-year anniversary, or the hundredth, or the two-hundredth. Time blurs.

“Guard them,” Seraphine told me, “and when the time comes, trust them.”

I guarded you. I trusted you. And you became something I could never have imagined—a guardian yourself. Eternal, unchanging, but somehow still growing.

The city is yours now. Not to rule, but to protect. I know you’ll do it well.

Thank you. For everything.

You fold the letter. Set it aside. And return to watching.

The eternal watch continues.