The library has so many books. It would take her a week just to read all the titles.

Yeah she's not going to do that. She picks out an interesting-looking novel and sits down to read.

The novel turns out to be just as interesting as it looked!

Good.

She leaves for meals, and to go back to her room to sleep, but otherwise mostly reads in the library all day. In the evening she goes to bed, and tosses and turns for a while, missing Serik.

She tries a couple of things and succeeds at sleeping. She continues spending most of her time in the library over the next week. Her ability to sleep without him lying beside her in bed improves.

And Serik - does spell design.

He wants this to be something Elodea can carry with her and never risk losing. He does not want it to be something that will explode if his mountain does, or if someone casts that disjunction spell near it. So not 'healing fountain in your pocket', more like 'being a healing fountain', or maybe the ability to create healing fountains... and it's not really necessary to have the fountains of health and youth separate, the effects are easier to build separately but everything else is much easier to build if he combines them...

Having it fail gracefully instead of exploding is trickier than he expected, and he's pretty sure his solution is going to come in handy when he starts building better immortality. The trick is to make the spell itself not have a location at all, and only reach out its effect toward the places where it anchors, so that if the power comes loose it won't follow that path and set things on fire, it will just consume itself without harming anything; and, trickier still, the spell itself will survive intact even if someone starts disjuncting its endpoints. It'll even try to find the people it was connected to again if it loses contact with them that way, although it'll give up on the fountains. It takes four days to get it all sorted out, but now that he's got the idea it'll be that much faster when he applies the same trick to his immortality later.

What he ends up with is a spell for creating combined youth/healing fountains, which has no location and therefore can't explode where it'll hurt anybody, and can't be followed back to itself from the fountains or the people who can use it to create them. He could call it done right there, but he takes the extra few hours to build in a flexible and easy-to-use ability to design the fountains, because he's not about to come this far and then half-ass the aesthetics.

It's a few hours past midnight, closing in on eight days since he started. He flows down to the bottom of the lake to check on Luar.

There she is, right where she left her, wrapped in red-hot metal, pierced by a hundred glowing thorns. Her eyes are closed and her face is streaked with salt from tears baked away by the heat.

She's gorgeous.

He pauses for half a second to admire the sight, and then picks up the spell that's keeping the iron hot and pulls it apart and uses the power to dissolve the vines into nothing. Before she can fall through the space where the chair isn't, he scoops her into his arms.

She presses her face against his chest and sobs helplessly into his shirt as her burns start to heal.

"You did so good," he murmurs, petting her hair. "You're amazing."

He carries her to bed and curls up and wraps his arms around her.

She nestles close to him and cries and cries and cries.

Pet pet pet. Snuggle snuggle.

It takes a while, but eventually she stops.

She takes a deep breath, and lets it out in a soft sigh, and wipes her eyes and hugs his arm.

"Thank you," he says, petting her hair some more. "For agreeing to this. It was - you're so beautiful - and getting to hold you afterward..." He kisses the top of her head. "I appreciate you very much."

"I like it when you hold me afterward," she murmurs. "It's nice. I like... being cared for."

"I like caring for you. I wish I hadn't..." he trails off with a sigh.

Pensive snuggle.

"It's... not okay," she says. "But you know that. And it matters that you know that."

"I'm not a good person. But - this caring-about-people thing - it's worth it even though it makes everything complicated," he says. "When I turn you loose with your immortality, I.. hope you come back to visit."

She is quiet for a long moment.

Then: "I might."

He holds her and pets her hair and yawns.

"I should take you back up before the sun rises on us," he says.

She nods.

He pulls her into the wind with him and they flow up through the lake to land outside her cottage, where he sets her on her feet and restores the swan part of her swan spell.

She hugs him.

"Go sleep," she says when she lets go.

He smiles wryly. "Okay."

And he blows away on the breeze to curl up in Elodea's bed and sleep for the first time in a week.

In the morning she wakes up and smiles and snuggles him a lot.

He is so asleep. But very cuddly.

It's midafternoon before he yawns and blinks awake.