Prologue - Eternal Youth and Immortality
On the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom, in a forest where human feet no longer passed, there stood a laboratory so obscure that even those who knew its master were few. Unlike the gloom of its exterior, the interior was white and meticulously kept. The workbench held countless experimental records and bottles of liquids in every hue, and in a cage in the corner small animals stirred now and then. Follow the bookshelves lining the walls, and it would not have been strange to call the place a modest library.
A woman came to a stop before the shelves. Long black hair, thickly streaked with white, spilled down over her shoulders. The years had cut deep lines into her beautiful face, yet the grey eyes searching the spines had not clouded.
She drew out a single volume and sat. Finding a page she had opened more times than she could count, she laid a finger on a sentence and checked it, one last time, against the records set beside her.
Her name was Vespara. Once a magical scholar of bright promise in the Magic Kingdom, she was a woman who had shut both her renown and what remained of her life away in this laboratory, all for the sake of researching eternal youth and immortality. Some had marveled at that obsession. Others had clicked their tongues and said she was throwing her gift away. Vespara answered neither. Time spent trading words like those was time she could have spent checking a calculation once more.
"So this is the last of it."
The hand turning the pages went still. Beneath the final line of the record, there was nothing left to correct. The contradictions that had tormented her for so long, the errors that shifted with every experiment — all of it could now be accounted for.
"If even this hypothesis is wrong, then eternal youth and immortality is a divine realm no one can reach. In that case, I ought to confirm it with my own hands."
Vespara closed the book and rose. Her back was stiff from sitting so long. She straightened briefly, steadied her breath, and walked to the center of the laboratory.
In a world where gods and demons waged war, a human life was short and unstable. Vespara had no wish to accept that brevity. There were too many books unread, too many places she had never seen. The world was far too wide to grow old and die on nothing but the stories others brought home.
At first she had only wanted a little more time. The research she clung to in order to win that time had, before she knew it, swallowed nearly all the life she had left. Even so, she had no mind to regret it now.
Across the center of the laboratory a vast spell formula lay unfurled. Circles in many layers, and the lines that bound them, covered the floor without a gap. Vespara let her blood fall in the appointed place, then, with paint mixed from finely ground magic stone, drew the final emblem upon her chest. Her fingertips trembled a little. The lines did not.
"Inscribed geometry is the vessel of life, and overflowing mana the cornerstone of the undying."
A cold, solemn voice rang through the laboratory. The blood she had spilled moved along the lines of the floor and shed a red light. When the outermost circle closed, the emblems within kindled one after another, and the mana gathered in the formula surged in beneath her feet.
The moment the red lines climbed her body, Vespara set her teeth. The pain was what she had expected; enduring it was another matter entirely. As her knees threatened to buckle, she drove strength into her feet and pressed on into the next verse.
"O white flame descended from the primordial void. Temper this waning flesh, and gather the life that scatters into a vessel made whole."
Light touched the emblem at her breast. Mana spread through her whole body until her breath caught, and from her fingertips to her shoulders she trembled whether she willed it or not. Vespara forced her faltering breath back under control. Misspeak now, or lose the current of the mana, and there would be no second chance.
The inner circle of the spell formula began to turn, slowly. The pressure crushing her changed in an instant, and on the back of the hand she lifted before her eyes, the wrinkles were fading.
Vespara's eyes flew wide. She crushed down the urge to stop and look, and drew out what mana remained. It was not over. Halt here, and she could hold on to neither the body made young again nor the research of a lifetime.
"...Final deployment of the spell formula. Engrave the perfect form of this flesh; restore what has been marred, and gather again what has scattered. Death shall not claim me, nor shall time bring me to decay."
⟨ Eternal Youth and Immortality ⟩
The innermost circle closed.
The light that had filled the floor gathered upon her all at once. Even as her vision washed white, Vespara saw the last line connect. Then the force bracing her from below vanished, and her body tipped toward the floor.
In the laboratory where the light had died, only ragged breathing remained. The spell formula on the floor had lost its color, and a few sheets of records blown up onto the workbench drifted slowly down.
Vespara lay collapsed on her side and caught her breath. She tried to push herself up, but there was no strength in her arms. Not a trace of mana remained, and even the shoulder that had struck the floor ached. She was frowning when she saw her own hand, lying before her eyes.
The skin was smooth. The wrinkles that had covered her knuckles, the veins that had stood out beneath skin grown thin — none of it was there anymore. It was the hand of her youth, the one she had looked at every day long ago and never particularly noticed.
"...Ha."
At the sound that had escaped her, Vespara closed her mouth. She tried another short breath. The roughness that used to catch in her throat was gone. So was the stiffness in her joints that she had felt every morning these past few years.
"...Heh heh. Keheh! Hahaha! Success. I succeeded!"
The laughter would not stop. She laughed until she was out of breath, coughed once, and laughed again. She ought to get up and write the record first — the change in the instant the formula closed, the flow of mana left in her flesh, all of it. And yet she could not take her eyes from the hand before her.
"My research wasn't wrong. My obsession wasn't wrong. How long the years have been. How hard they have been!"
Wrong calculations and failed experiments rose in her mind. There had been nights she wrote a hypothesis through till dawn, only to tear it apart the moment morning came, and times she fell asleep after days of work, only to get up again because something had occurred to her. Through all of that time, the spell formula engraved upon her body was complete at last.
Eternal youth, she had confirmed with her own eyes. What remained were immortality and restoration. Those, too, she would confirm herself. She had no intention of leaving the final verification of a life's research in anyone else's hands.
But for the moment, even lifting a single arm was more than she could manage. Vespara stilled the hand she had been forcing to move and laid her cheek against the floor.
"Heh... Recovery first, then. It isn't as if anyone will keep the records for me just because the researcher collapsed."
She closed her eyes, slowly. Drowsiness troubled her more than the shoulder that had hurt only a moment ago. The fret of having to find the cause of a failure, the anxiety that time was running out — neither was with her now. It felt strange that, when she opened her eyes, there would be no reason to begin the calculations all over again.
"I'll just lie here a moment. How long has it been, since I was this comfortable..."
The end of the sentence loosened and faded. Breathing in the familiar smell of the laboratory as she courted sleep, she thought of an old travelogue tucked onto one side of the bookshelf. She had bought it on an errand to gather materials, along with the rest. There was a page whose corner she had folded, meaning to go there herself someday, and she had never opened it since.
If she went, what would she do first? She wanted to try the foods written of in the book, and to walk the streets and listen to what people had to say. If she found a place she liked, it would be no trouble to stay a few days longer. There would be no need to cut the journey short for an experiment waiting when she returned.
A smile lingered at the corner of Vespara's mouth. When she woke, she would record the results and finish the verification that remained.
And after that, she would have to pack.