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Stelle Abelard had lived so many places and so many years that her surroundings mattered little to her. She noticed that her room was small, and that the faucet leaked, and that the quilt that her sister had made for her decades ago was patched, and faded, and threadbare. She saw that the sink needed a desperate de-scaling and that all her paperback books, her friends through a thousand lonely hours, were yellowed and coming unbound.
But it did not touch her, because today was the day for tea with Lou.
In the olden days, she'd done it on an appropriate day. Samhain, sometimes. Or the vernal equinox. Or New Years Eve, depending on which story she was feeling, which history she was borrowing from.
After seventy-five years, North America's oldest living wizard simply did what felt right. When the day came, once a year, for tea with Lou, it was time for tea with Lou.
She used to use fancy tea. Some of that gunpowder green her husband had cherished so, bitter as uranium tailings. Sometimes the jasmine tea they sold at the market that smelled like flowers and tasted like perfume. But she realized over the years that he wouldn't drink or eat, whatever she offered, so the tea was Lipton's and the cookies were Chips Ahoy. She was, like most wizards, nothing if not practical.
Amanda the Saintly Teenage Volunteer was in the room with her, fourteen and beautiful as a ripe peach and cheerfully oblivious to the point of self-cannibalistic frustration that Stelle, though she was one hundred and two years old, was not deaf, blind, or an imbecile. One does not reach Stelle's age, or even four decades younger, without becoming very used to young people who believed everyone over twenty-five was made of spun glass, farts and mechanical ineptitude.
“Oh!” Amanda said, her voice syrupy, her mouth smiling, five foot eight of American calcium and casual entitlement. She made Stelle's head hurt, frankly. “Is it tea time today?”
Amanda hadn't been helping at the nursing home long enough to know, but it was no secret. Every year crazy Stelle had tea with Lou. Tee hee, tee hee.
Stelle heard the whispers, of course. There was nothing wrong with her ears, whether she could still hear the hushed whispers of the stars as they made love to one another through beta or gamma or not. Crazy Stelle. Lou was her dead son, her dead husband. Her dead someone. The ghost of Lou Gherig, one candystriper had spread around a few years back.
“Yes dear,” Stelle said, smiling back. It cost her nothing to be pleasant, after all. Even if this smiling kewpie doll of a girl was annoying the hell out of her. Though she hardly ever used wizardry anymore, she rattled off a few clipped syllables of the Speech that fuzzed over Amanda's brain enough that she forgot she wanted to see the crazy old lady have tea with nobody.
“Come along deary,” Stelle said, grabbing Amanda by the elbow and steering her towards the door. The One, but her hips hurt! “It's time for you to go!”
“It's time for me to go,” Amanda said dreamily, not objecting at all as Stelle shut the door behind her.
“Thank all the intangible gods for that,” Stelle said, rolling her eyes. She made her slow and shuffling way to the little table by the window. It overlooked the garden, which was mostly weeds this far into summer. Much too hot to do any gardening during the day. It was also much too hot for tea, but things were tradition at this point. She'd had tea on Mercury, after all.
The dark side. But it still counted.
The tray, just so. The single white rose stolen from the garden in the tiny bud vase, perfect. The plate of cookies, right where they ought to be.
She and her husband had once heard a performance, when they were young and newly partnered as wizards and madly, stupidly in love. It was by these...weird sort of glittery bivalve things in a soupy gas giant of a planet that had twelve times normal earth gravity and an atmosphere of pure sulfur. But it had seas and cliffs overlooking them and giant sentient space clams who loved to sing. It was wild and unearthly, and nothing that could be replicated by a human throat.
She hummed it anyway as a shadow loomed over the table, as a pent and smoking presence curdled out of thin air on the flimsy plastic chair across from hers.
“Hail, Fairest and Fallen,” she said, the oldest of the wizard's courtesies. “Greetings and Defiance.”
The Lone Power said nothing.
“And tea,” she said, pouring.
He cocked His head at her, examined her with glittering black eyes.
“And cookies,” she said, pushing the plate towards him.
<><><>
The first time, she'd been twenty-eight. John had just died, in a car wreck of all the stupid, pointless things (John who had smote Fenrir before he could devour the sun, John who had, simply by the force of his will and the eloquence of his Speech, kept the Mariana Trench from splitting anew while the whale wizards sang the tectonic plates to calm) and she'd been alone, so damned alone.
Then the miscarriage, John's baby, her baby. The only one, it turned out. She remembered the numbness in a way she remembered very little else, remembered the doctor's detached and perfunctory kindness being so much worse than simple boredom or rudeness would have been. Explaining that her baby had died, and that she couldn't have any more babies. Ectopic pregnancy, he said. Deformation of the fallopian tombs. Uterine hemorrhage. Death.
Death.
She wasn't seeking it. She knew, even as she did what no wizard would do, that she did not want to die. Not even to be with John. Not even to follow her little son or little daughter's soul to Timeheart. (Would it be there? What is loved survives, but what is not known is not loved. Little child, little seed, I never even named you in my heart).
Sometimes she wondered if that's why she never went to Timeheart, never even dreamed about it. Because what would she say to John, if he was there and the baby wasn't?
She'd been perfectly blank as she worked in her kitchen, very pointedly not thinking about how John had loved to cook or how badly she'd bungled things the few times she tried. She could boil water well enough, damn it, and that was what counted.
She did what a wizard would never do, and called out the name in the Speech, the name that shouldn't be named, and asked for Him to appear. Demanded, in fact, His appearance.
He appeared, of course. The bastard.
“So,” He said, his voice rich and bored. “So this is how you're brought low at last. Have you called me to make a bargain, little wizard?”
“Sit down,” she'd said, pointing at her couch.
She'd seen Him in so many forms. As He was now, blazing with unearthly beauty, as seductive as a nightmare, red gold hair and black fire for eyes. She'd seen Him as a sun-eating wolf, as a gargantuan crab, as a grinning cat, as a blob of carnivorous fungus the size of a continent. She had never seen Him...
Puzzled.
“What is it you want?” He asked, clearly put off but playing it beautifully. “Your child? Your husband?”
“I want you to sit down, shut up,” she said, not quite daring to touch Him, but in a state where she considered it anyway “and drink some Goddamned tea.”
He had sat down, at least. That was how it started.
<><><>
“You've grown old, Stelle Abelard.”
That won a little chuckle from her as she took a tiny sip of her tea. Her hand shook, as it always did.
“Where have you been, Lou?” She said, wishing she had a slice of lemon. “I've been old.”
“You will die soon.”
“You've been telling me that for eighty-eight years.”
“Time means nothing to Me.”
Sometimes when He appeared to her, He had wings. Thankfully, He'd foregone them this manifestation. She was quite allergic to down and she always sneezed for weeks if He brought his black feathered wings.
“Oh, Lou.” She sighed. “Time means everything to You. It's all You have.”
She knew what was coming, of course. He never changed. He could not, in fact, change. Next would be the sales pitch.
Instead He looked at her with His starry black eyes and said nothing. She detected the most minuscule fraction of a sigh.
For the first time in decades of tea with the Adversary, the Wolf Who Devours, The Black Beast Who is Unending, Stelle felt the slightest touch of uncertainty.
<><><>
“You cannot say I didn't warn you. Warn you both.”
The first meeting, the first tea that was, to be frank, mostly scotch from the bottle John fondly believed she hadn't known about. Silly man. Even a non-wizardly wife always knows everything.
She said nothing in response, merely took another belt of scalding 'tea'.
“If you'd given it up, forsaken the wizardry...why, perhaps he'd still be here. Perhaps that nursery down the hall wouldn't be so empty. Who painted the mural? Amateurish but heartfelt. A nice gesture...”
The twenty-seven syllables of the Speech that took living tissue and smashed it into a bee-bee sized singularity (and hurt the entire time) flashed through her mind, etched in fire. He smirked, as though He saw it.
Sweet Stelle, they'd always called her. Her parents who had never had the time to learn much of anything about her, third among seven siblings. The girls at school because she never fought or argued. The first boys who had come sniffing around.
John had known, though. John had understood her rage, even before he'd seen her bloody and half-broken but screaming like a berserker while she wielded a 4,000 ton magical space hammer against an army of swartelfa . The very, very few remaining Dark Elves still referred to her as something that translated approximately to 'The Skull Smasher'.
“Talk to me,” she said, around her anger.
“Excuse me?”
“Talk. To. Me.”
He raised his perfect brows. “Why on earth would I do that?”
“Because you need to talk to someone.”
<><><>
Stelle, old Stelle, crazy Stelle, stared at the young man across from her.
“You've changed.”
“I am change. I do not change.”
“You've...” she cast a minor revealing, something any wizard could use to catch...the flavor, sort of, of something's true name. Only a few glimmering characters of the Speech flashed into being around Him, but it was enough to taste an unfamiliar flavor.
Hope.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, sudden tears in her eyes. “Someone's done it. Someone has changed You.”
He looked annoyed, in a weary sort of way. “Don't be ridiculous.”
“Why aren't You trying, then? Trying to win me over, like You always do?”
He smiled then, and God help her, there was something glorious in it. Something more than malice, something warmer than hate.
“I don't change. I never said I don't learn. ”
<><><>
Their talks were always the same. He--Lou--would come for an hour, sometimes for two. He wouldn't touch the cookies, or the tea. He would begin, always, with the assumption that she'd come to bargain. For her life, for her soul, for her husband, for her child, for her womb. For her magic.
Instead, she'd talk to Him. About work (court stenographer; good paying work for a woman alone) about her incidental little tasks of wizardry, about her family. And she would, very occasionally, and very gently, ask him questions.
Not the questions He expected. Not for power or knowledge or why He was the way He was. Nothing like that. Just small questions, about Him.
For years, decades, He'd simply fume at her for wasting His time, and disappear, usually having caused some form of minor mischief in retaliation. A burst pipe or a suddenly recalcitrant sink.
Sometime in the 1970's, though, it had begun, slowly, to change. She'd asked Him what was the last beautiful thing He'd seen. She was too old by then to travel the galaxy without reason, and she missed it terribly.
“A sun going cold,” He had said, eyes distant. She'd gone cold as well.
“You killed it?”
He was wearily amused, but shook His head. “No. She was old, it was her time and past her time. She sang...she sang, and it was beautiful.”
“Why did she sing?”
“Because for the first time she realized death could be a gift,” He replied, voice soft.
<><><>
“Who managed it?”
He groaned aloud, by far the most human-sounding noise He'd ever made. He rubbed the bridge of His nose.
“Some absolutely pestilential brat of a thirteen-year-old, if you must know. She reminded me somewhat of you.”
Stelle found herself grinning. “She sounds like a real piece of work.”
“You should meet her sister.”
“I'm sorry I couldn't.”
“Meet her sister? She's in the manual, but she's busy. Look her up.”
“No, you idiot. I'm sorry I couldn't be the one to change you.”
The Lone Power stared for a moment, musing.
“Do you know,” He said, after a long pause. “There are worlds where parts of me are imprisoned. Held captive as tourist attractions. There are worlds that made me king, the silly twits. Where they worship me and sacrifice to me. There is nobody else in the Universe who simply invited me over for a chat every so often. You are a singular woman, Stelle Abelard.”
“I can't take all the credit. Someone else gave me the idea.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. A talking parrot in a pet store in Albuquerque.”
The Lone Power laughed. He laughed. Untinged by malice or rage, or even irony. It was like silver bells.
“This is you, isn't it? This isn't one of your shades. This is you, and they've...”
Welcomed you back.
“Yes, and yes,” He said, the last tatters of darkness falling away from him. He was still dark, but glorious with it. She blinked, her old eyes filled once more with tears. He held out a hand to her, across the table.
“Are you ready for my Gift?” He asked, one eyebrow raised, a smile that was sardonic and yet sweet, unbearably sweet, all at once.
She smiled back at Him, tears running down her cheeks. “Of course I am, you silly man.”
She reached out and took His hand.
<><><>
Amanda found her later, slumped over the table, smiling still. The table held two empty tea cups, a plate of crumbs, a white rose, and a worn, framed black-and-white picture of a young woman, a handsome young man, and a baby girl, sitting in the grass.
A pretty little family, Amanda thought, tears in her eyes as the orderlies took Old Stelle away. It must be Lou or whoever. And what a pretty little girl.
There was a battered old book on the bedstand. Amanda glanced at it. A worn red binding, faded gilt letters.
A Young Lady's Guide to the Art and Practice of Wizardry.
Without quite knowing why, she took it.
Stelle would have wanted her to have it.