"Nope!"

"Well, humans and one elf now, I guess."

"Guess so."

They've reached the castle by now and are navigating the corridors; they pass by a dining hall, which has a huge window with a stunning view of the lake.

"Your castle's really pretty, by the way."

"Thank you! I'm proud of it."

"Oh, did you make it?"

"Yep. And have been improving it ever since."

"Ooh, how long ago?"

"I was twenty-six when I moved up here."

"Wow."

"Hmm?"

"Mostly the fact that this place makes way more sense as the product of three millennia of development but with a dash of curiosity about things that're probably none of my business."

"Hm?"

"Which things?"

"Why'd you move, is that when you became immortal, how are you immortal..."

"The story of my misspent youth! I was an imperial prince, my prospects of ever inheriting weren't looking good, I tried to take over, fucked it up very badly, realized standing in the mageblasted ruins of the imperial capital that I hadn't really wanted an empire to begin with, and decided to find out what I really wanted and do that instead, and it turned out to be this."

"That's pretty impressively disastrous! Why were your prospects bad, least favored of the proverbial three sons?"

"Nope, only child, but in those days we had fountains of youth and healing all over the place and my father didn't have any exciting hobbies."

"...Fountains of youth?"

"Mm? Yeah, why?"

"Most forms of birth control aren't very reliable when you have a lot of partners not interested in cooperating with them and my immortality isn't heritable."

"I can almost always catch it before--before it's really a baby--and the immortality doesn't cover them while they're in the womb, either, but--

I've carried to term six times in my life and given the child up each time because I couldn't bear to raise a son or daughter and then watch them wither and die."

"—the original fountains still work, in the old capital—mind you, the old capital is a clusterfuck of ancient magical hazards—"