S

Sera sits up, the sheets pooling at her waist, and says, "Game night. Thirty minutes." Dani groans and rolls onto her back, but Aria's grin is already in place. She snaps her fingers, and dresses materialize—deep green for Sera, soft blue for Dani, smoky purple for herself—settling over skin like a second chance. Sera blinks down at the fabric, running a thumb over the embroidered hem, and her brow furrows. "Wait. That's not how Prestidigitation works. That's not—" She looks up at Aria, eyes narrowing with the precise, delighted suspicion of a game designer catching a cheat. "You leveled it up. You actually leveled up a cantrip."

Aria shrugs, but the grin cracks wide. "One spell point. The upgraded version creates real, lasting clothes instead of just cleaning the ones you're wearing. I figured, if I'm going to be a sorceress, I should at least dress like one." Sera's mouth opens, closes, then breaks into a laugh that shakes her shoulders. "You spent a spell point on a wardrobe cantrip. While the world is still deciding if you're a miracle or a menace." Aria lifts her chin, the smoky purple dress settling against her shoulders like it was made for her—because it was. "Priorities, Sera. A hero has to look the part." She turns to Dani, lacing the back of her bodice, fingers barely skimming the skin there while Sera rattles off starting HP from memory. Dani laughs, the sound warm and low. "Relax, I've played before. I know how to roll a twenty."

The doorbell cuts through the giggle, and Marcus's voice booms through the intercom, "Open up, nerds. We brought dice and contraband." Aria's fingers still on the laces, and she catches Sera's eye—the same glance they traded in the kitchen before Dani arrived, the same silent check. Sera nods, once. The three of them move toward the door together, and Aria feels the weight of it: thirty spell points in her well, two girlfriends at her back, and a man at the door who's already caught more lies than she's told. The door swings open, and Marcus stands there, grinning, a bag of dice in one hand and a bottle of something amber in the other—and his eyes land on Aria, and the grin falters, just for a second, like he's seeing the answer to a question he hasn't asked yet.

Aria thrusts her hand out, cutting straight through the grin and the bottle and the bag of dice. "Aria Silverleaf, Violet Angel. Nice to formally meet you. Again. With fewer lies."

Marcus's eyes drop to her hand, then climb back up to her face—the pointed ears, the violet eyes, the silver hair that catches the hallway light like spun glass. The grin doesn't quite return, but something shifts behind it, a door opening a crack. He takes her hand, and his grip is warm and solid, a handshake that means business. "Marcus. I brought dice and contraband. You brought a whole new identity and a light show." He releases her hand, but his gaze doesn't let go. "So, Violet Angel. You gonna tell me what actually happened to Jason, or do I have to keep pretending I believe the cousin story?"

Sera's breath catches somewhere behind Aria, and Dani's hand finds the small of her back, steady and warm. Aria doesn't look away from Marcus. She can feel the weight of the moment, the lie she's been carrying now balanced on the edge of a handshake. "Jason's fine," she says, and it's almost true. "He just... went somewhere else. I'm what came back." She tilts her head, a ghost of a smile playing at her lips. "You want the whole story, you're gonna need more than one drink. But I promise you this—it's a hell of a lot better than the cousin thing."

Marcus doesn't let go of her gaze, and the hallway light catches the bottle in his hand, amber glinting like a question he's been saving. "So. The internet." He steps inside, past her, into the living room where the dice bag thuds onto the coffee table. "Two million views. A resurrection on camera. Seven healings in an ICU. The Violet Angel, they're calling you." He turns, and his voice is careful now, the grin gone entirely. "I've watched the footage about a hundred times. The light, the wings, the way that kid's mother reached for you like you were the only real thing in the room. Is any of it true?"

Aria feels the question land in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. She can feel Sera's breath hold behind her, Dani's hand still warm on her back. The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the fridge and the distant city noise, and for a moment she just stands there, letting the weight of it settle—the funeral home, the ICU, the little girl's crayon drawing on the coffee table, the thirty points in her well that feel like both a fortune and a countdown. She looks at Marcus, really looks at him, and sees the thing behind his careful eyes: he's not afraid of her. He's afraid she'll lie again.

"It's true," she says, and the words come out steadier than she expected. "All of it. The healing, the resurrection, the wings." She takes a breath, and the grin that finds her mouth is crooked, almost apologetic. "My powers came from my character sheets. Well, Jason's character sheets for Aria Silverleaf, sexy elf sorceress." She spreads her hands, the smoky purple dress catching the light. "Turns out the game was less of a game than we thought."

Marcus's face goes through three distinct phases—disbelief, then the slow grind of puzzle pieces clicking, then a laugh that's half awe and half horror. "The campaign. Not last week's game. Your campaign. The one you ran for two years, where Jason played—" He stops, pointing at her like she's a glitch in his code that just compiled anyway. "You're not cosplaying her. You're literally her. The actual, honest-to-god character sheet made flesh."

Aria spreads her hands, letting the purple dress shimmer under the apartment lights. "My character sheets. My DNA, if you want to get technical about it. I ran the numbers last week at Sera's table using the same stats I've always had—I just didn't tell anyone I was playing myself." She tilts her head, ears twitching. "Well. Not the whole self. The elven parts I kept under the glamour."

Marcus is quiet for a long moment, and then he does something none of them expect. He pulls out his phone, scrolls, and holds up a screenshot—the character sheet for Aria Silverleaf, annotated in Jason's cramped handwriting, with a sticky note on the margins that reads "what if she could fly?" The handwriting is unmistakable; he's had it saved for years, from when Jason shared his build for feedback. "I helped you min-max this character," he says slowly, looking from the screen to the woman standing in front of him. "I argued with you for an hour about whether to take Eldritch Blast or Fire Bolt as your main cantrip. And you're telling me that argument—that spreadsheet of numbers and dice rolls—is standing in front of me right now, realer than my own hands?"

Marcus's phone screen glows between them, the annotated character sheet a bridge across the impossible. He's still holding it up like evidence at a trial, and Aria can see the exact moment his brain catches up to the logistics—the apartment walls, the neighbors, the glassware on the shelf behind him. "So," he says slowly, a grin creeping back despite himself, "do I get a demonstration? Maybe a little Eldritch Blast action? I spent an hour arguing for that cantrip, I feel entitled to see it do something."

Aria's laugh cuts through the tension, bright and genuine. "Oh, absolutely not. Last time I used Eldritch Blast, I turned a boulder the size of a washing machine into gravel. You want me to do that in Sera's living room?" She gestures at the window, the city lights beyond. "We'd be picking glass out of your dice bag for a week. And probably explaining to the neighbors why the fourth floor sounds like a demolition site." She crosses her arms, the smoky purple fabric shifting with the movement. "If you want a demonstration, we're going outside. Somewhere with a lot of open space and zero property damage liability."

The corner of Marcus's mouth twitches. "So the Violet Angel is scared of a little property damage." He pockets the phone, the screenshot disappearing like a magic trick. "Fine. But you owe me a demonstration. I min-maxed that character with you, I want to see the payoff." He glances at Sera, then Dani, then back to Aria, and something in his face softens—not the grin, but something underneath it. "Besides, I've got about forty questions about the resurrection, and I figure a woman who can raise the dead can probably handle a few pointed ones over dinner."

Aria's smile turns sly, and she glances at the counter where a half-empty glass of water catches the light. She lifts a finger, and the water rises from the glass in a lazy ribbon, glinting like liquid silver as it threads through the air. It loops behind her neck, cool and playful against her skin, then arcs across the space between them, a living stream that circles Marcus's throat once before curving back to her in a perfect, horizontal figure-eight. She catches it in her palm, the water swirling there like a captured comet, then lets it fall back into the glass with a soft, satisfied splash.

Marcus watches the whole thing with his mouth slightly open, the bottle of amber still dangling from his fingers. "Okay," he says slowly, "that's not Eldritch Blast, but I'll accept it as a down payment." He sets the bottle on the counter, his eyes tracking the glass like it might sprout legs. "You're telling me you can do that—that—and you spent the afternoon mending laundry at a laundromat?" Aria shrugs, the purple dress shifting with the motion. "Mending pays the bills. Water tricks impress the nerds." She tilts her head, ears twitching. "And I'm still figuring out the whole 'sorceress in the modern world' thing. You don't go from character sheet to world-saving overnight."

Marcus laughs, the sound rough and genuine, and something in his shoulders finally loosens. He picks up his bottle, uncorks it, and takes a long drink, then points it at her like a wand. "Alright, Violet Angel. You've got my attention. But dinner's going to cost you more than a parlor trick. I want the full story—the campaign, the transformation, the resurrection, all of it. And I want to know," he pauses, the grin sharpening, "whether the woman who raised a kid from the dead has any idea what she's actually doing." Aria meets his gaze, the water in the glass perfectly still now, and lets the silence stretch just long enough to be honest. "Not a clue," she says. "But I'm learning fast."

The door swings open again before anyone can answer, and Mike steps through it, a six-pack of something local in one hand and a box of takeout in the other, the scent of garlic and grease cutting through the tension. He takes in the frozen tableau—Marcus with his bottle mid-air, Aria with her hand still extended from the handshake, Sera and Dani bracketing her like a pair of bookends—and his eyebrows climb. "Did I miss the part where we interrogate the elf, or is that still on the agenda?" He sets the takeout on the counter, and the box lands with a solid thunk, the promise of dinner asserting itself over the weight of revelations. "Because I've got three pounds of wings and a personal stake in making sure my sister doesn't get grilled without a proper meal first."

Marcus's grin returns, a little sharper now, a little more curious. "Your sister." He says it like he's tasting the word, turning it over. "So you knew. The whole time." Mike shrugs, the motion easy, but Aria catches the flicker in his eyes—the same guarded watchfulness he's worn since the morning she woke up in the woods. "I've known since day one. Found her in the forest, pointed ears and all, muttering about dice and spell points. Took me a week to convince myself I wasn't dreaming." He grabs a wing from the box, bites into it, and talks around the mouthful. "You get used to it. She still leaves the toilet seat up, which is a whole other kind of miracle."

Aria's laugh escapes before she can stop it, and the sound loosens something in the room. She steps forward, takes the box from Mike's hand, and peels back the lid, the steam rising to meet her face. "You're a terrible liar, Mike. You were not convinced for a week. You were convinced approximately the moment I used Prestidigitation to clean your coffee mug." She glances at Marcus, the grin turning sly. "He dropped it. I fixed it. He stared at me for five minutes without blinking." Mike points a wing at her. "You also turned my TV off with a thought. That was the real clincher." Marcus watches the two of them, the easy rhythm of their bickering, and something in his posture shifts—the question still there, but softer now, waiting instead of demanding. "Okay," he says slowly. "So dinner first. Interrogation after. But I'm holding you to that demonstration, Silverleaf."

Sera's head comes up like a compass needle finding north, and she points a finger at Mike with the full authority of a woman who has been planning a menu since Tuesday. "Three pounds of wings. Three pounds. Do you know what I have in that kitchen? I have two pounds of rigatoni, I have a sauce that's been simmering since four o'clock, I have a loaf of garlic bread I made with my own hands and a salad with candied walnuts that took me forty minutes of caramelizing. I told everyone I was cooking for an army, Mike. I meant it. And you walked in here with a box."

Mike looks down at the takeout in his hand as if it has betrayed him personally, then back up at Sera, whose cheeks have gone pink and whose wire-rim glasses have slid a millimeter down her nose in her indignation. "I brought garlic parm," he offers, weakly. "It's from Franco's. It's the good one." Sera's eyes narrow. "Franco's. Franco's." She turns on her heel toward the kitchen, and the three of them trail after her like a small, guilty congregation, past the coffee table where the framed crayon drawing sits propped against the lamp. The kitchen is a wall of steam and the deep, slow smell of tomato and basil and something roasted, and there on the stove is a pot the size of a stockpot, and beside it a baking sheet of garlic bread the length of Aria's forearm, and on the counter a salad bowl big enough to bathe a toddler in.

Sera lifts the lid off the pot with a flourish that is mostly spite and lets the steam roll out over all of them—oregano, garlic, a hit of red pepper, the smell of a sauce that has had all day to think about itself. "So," she says, not looking at Mike, "we'll eat the pasta. And the wings can go in the fridge for tomorrow, and I will graciously accept the garlic parm as a peace offering, and you will never question my kitchen again." Aria leans against the counter and watches Marcus's expression go from grin to genuine, wide-eyed respect as he takes in the pot, the bread, the bowl, the woman presiding over all of it with a wooden spoon in her fist like a scepter. Dani catches Aria's eye and mouths something that looks like *she's terrifying*, and Aria mouths back *I know*.

Marcus turns, bottle still dangling, and his gaze lands on Dani—really lands, the way it landed on Aria's ears, slow and cataloguing. "And you," he says, pointing the bottle at her like a wand. "You're the one I don't have a file on. No screenshots, no funeral footage, no ICU video. You just... appeared." He squints. "You came with Mike. Are you two—" He waggles the bottle between them, and Mike nearly chokes on a wing.

"No," Mike says, too fast, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "God, no. I drove her. Picked her up at six, like I said I would, and we spent forty minutes on I-90 talking about—" He stops, glances at Dani, and something passes between them that Aria can't quite read—the easy, unguarded look of two people who spent a car ride learning each other's worst opinions. "We talked about you, actually. About whether you'd be worse as a brother or a sister. She voted sister." Dani grins, unrepentant, and raises her glass of water in a toast. "Sister. Obviously. The ears alone seal it."

Marcus looks at Dani again, longer this time, and whatever he finds there makes him set the bottle down and offer his hand for real. "Marcus. I'm the loud one who brought illegal alcohol and too many questions. You?" Dani takes his hand, and her grip is firm, her smile easy. "Dani. I'm the one who's been keeping your new elf friend's magic topped up." She lets that hang just long enough for Marcus's eyebrows to climb, then adds, deadpan, "It's a whole thing. You'll want the pasta first."

Marcus's hand freezes mid-handshake, his fingers still wrapped around Dani's but his grip gone slack, like a circuit breaker tripping somewhere behind his eyes. "Topped up," he repeats, the words slow and careful, each one a tile being placed in a mosaic he's only now starting to see. He releases Dani's hand and takes a half-step back, his gaze swinging from her to Aria and back again, cataloguing—the flush on Dani's cheeks, the way Aria's fingers have gone still at her side, the sudden, pointed interest Sera is taking in the rigatoni pot. "Succubic Restoration," he says, and the word lands in the kitchen like a dropped anvil. "That's the skill on your sheet. The one that refills your spell points through—" He stops, his mouth working, and his face does something complicated: the dawning comprehension of a man who has just solved a puzzle he really, really wishes he hadn't. "Oh. Oh, no. Please tell me whatever magic brought you here left that particular bullshit in the ether."

Aria's ears flatten against her skull, and she suddenly finds the salad bowl absolutely fascinating, tracing the rim with one finger like it holds the secrets of the universe. "It's... not in the ether," she says, her voice small and sheepish, the confidence she'd worn like armor moments ago evaporating into something almost apologetic. "It's very much in the here. And the now. And it's, uh—" She gestures vaguely at Dani, then at herself, then gives up and lets her hand drop. "It's the reason I can still cast spells at all. The reason I could heal those kids yesterday." She looks up at Marcus, and there's something raw in her violet eyes, a vulnerability she usually keeps under the glamour. "The world thinks I'm a miracle worker. The truth is I'm a miracle worker with a very specific, very embarrassing fuel source, and I'm still figuring out how to explain that to anyone without sounding like a bad fanfic."

Marcus stares at her for a long, unblinking moment, the bottle of amber still dangling from his fingers like he's forgotten he's holding it. His mouth opens, closes, opens again, and what comes out is barely a whisper: "So the Violet Angel—the woman who raised a kid from the dead, who healed seven people in an ICU, who the whole internet is calling a miracle—runs on..." He trails off, gesturing vaguely at Dani, then at Aria, his face cycling through horror, disbelief, and something that looks suspiciously like the beginning of a laugh he's fighting with everything he has. "That's not a power. That's a punchline. That's the kind of thing that gets you banned from a table for metagaming."

Aria's ears flush pink to the tips, and she crosses her arms over her chest, the smoky purple dress shifting with the motion. "Look, I didn't pick the mechanics, alright? I just woke up in the woods with a character sheet for a body and a skill list that reads like someone's very specific fetish. You think I wanted to explain to my brother that the only way I can keep saving lives is if my girlfriend—" She stops, catches herself, and the flush deepens. "—if Dani, specifically, helps me, uh, refuel. It's not exactly something you put on a resume."

Mike, who has been suspiciously quiet through the whole exchange, sets down his wing and clears his throat. "To be fair," he says, his voice carefully neutral, "it's not the weirdest thing about her. She also talks to water and once turned my coffee mug inside out by accident." Marcus looks at him, then at Aria, then at Dani, who raises her glass in a small, unrepentant toast. The silence stretches for exactly one heartbeat before Marcus breaks, the laugh escaping him like pressure released from a valve—rough, genuine, and slightly unhinged. "Okay," he says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Okay. I came here ready to interrogate a miracle worker. Instead I'm standing in a kitchen with a sorceress who recharges like a phone and the woman who keeps her plugged in. This is the best worst thing that's ever happened to me."

Aria reaches for the bottle before Marcus can set it down, her fingers closing around the amber glass with a certainty she doesn't quite feel. She pours herself a generous measure—more than generous, really, the kind of pour that says *I need this*—and the liquid catches the kitchen light, glowing like liquid honey. She takes a sip, then another, and the warmth spreads through her chest, loosening something that's been wound tight since the doorbell rang. Her ivory skin, already flushed from the conversation, deepens to a uniform shade of rose, the color climbing from her collarbone to the tips of her pointed ears. She can feel it, the heat of it, and she doesn't try to hide it. "Bad fanfic," she repeats, the words coming out a little looser now, a little more herself. "That's the phrase I've been looking for since I woke up in the woods. I'm living in a bad fanfic, and I'm the main character, and apparently I also have to explain the logistics to every new person I meet."

Dani moves to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders brush, and her hand finds Aria's free one, squeezing once. "The pasta's ready," Sera announces, her voice cutting through the lingering tension with the precision of a woman who has had enough revelations for one evening. She's already at the stove, ladling rigatoni into a massive bowl, the steam curling around her face. "Everyone grab a plate. Marcus, you get the first serving since you survived the news without needing a drink." Marcus barks a laugh, finally setting the bottle down on the counter, and the kitchen settles into a rhythm of clattering plates and passing bowls, the conversation shifting to safer ground—the sauce, the bread, the way Sera's apartment somehow smells like a restaurant that's been open for decades. Aria takes her plate, the warmth of the food grounding her, and she catches Mike's eye across the table. He raises his glass in a small, silent toast, and she raises hers back, the amber liquid catching the light like a promise she's still learning to keep.

The table clears itself with a clatter of plates and the soft thud of a dice bag upended at its center. Marcus has been carrying that bag all night like a diplomatic pouch, and now he spills it—twenty-odd dice in every color of regret, a couple of them sharp-edged metal that ring against the wood like small bells. Sera produces the character sheets from a folder that has clearly been kept since before any of this was real, the corners soft, the margins crowded with Jason's cramped annotations. She slides Aria's across the table without ceremony, and Aria's hand lands on it before she's decided to reach. The paper is warm. That's the first thing she notices, the second thing is that it's hers in a way nothing else in this apartment is—two years of pencil marks, a coffee ring shaped like Ohio, the ink smudge where Jason pressed too hard writing down *Sorceress, Level 1* like a dare.

"Okay," Marcus says, cracking his knuckles with theatrical menace. "First order of business. I've been carrying a grievance for two years and tonight is the reckoning." He taps the stat block at the top of Aria's sheet with one blunt finger. "Charisma sixteen. Sixteen. I said, and I quote, 'you're a sorcerer, you need at least seventeen or you're leaving damage on the table,' and you said—" He looks up at her, and his grin has teeth in it. "You said, 'she doesn't need to be prettier than she is, she needs to be smarter than the guy trying to kill her.'"

Aria's ears go hot. She remembers the argument, remembers Jason leaning into the mic at two in the morning defending his choices like a man on trial, remembers the exact smug tilt of his chair when he won. She lifts her glass and takes a slow sip of amber, letting the burn steady her. "Charisma was never the dump stat," she says, and her voice comes out lower than she intends, a sorceress's voice, the kind that makes people lean in. "Wisdom was. I put the eight in Wisdom and I never once regretted it. You want to know why?" She sets the glass down and looks at Marcus across the sheet, the dice scattered between them like small promises. "Because Wisdom tells you when to stop. And I never wanted to stop."

Marcus opens his mouth, closes it, and then laughs—a real one, the kind that folds him forward. "You dumped Wisdom," he says, to no one and everyone, "you dumped Wisdom and now you're a woman who raises the dead on a Tuesday and tells the internet to go fuck itself, and you're telling me that was the *plan*." Sera has gone still behind her wine, green eyes bright, and Dani is grinning into her glass the way she does when she's just watched someone get hit with a joke they deserved. Aria shrugs, and the shrug is Jason's shrug, loose and unbothered, and it looks strange and right on her narrow shoulders. "It wasn't the plan," she says. "It was the character. And the character turned out to be the plan."

The dice come out properly then, and the table settles into its old rhythm, the one that predates funerals and wings and the smell of hospital antiseptic. Marcus rolls a d20 across the wood and it skitters to a stop on a nineteen, and he whoops like the number means something real, and for a minute it does—it means they're all still here, still at the table, still the kind of people who care what a plastic polyhedron has to say about the world. Sera shuffles her notes and starts a scene, some half-remembered module from the campaign's second arc, and Aria picks up her pencil out of pure muscle memory. Then she stops. The pencil hovers over the sheet, and the room goes quiet around her in that particular way rooms go quiet when someone has just understood something they'd rather not have understood. She can hear the fridge hum. She can hear a siren somewhere down Halsted, thin and far. She looks at her own handwriting on the page—*Aria Silverleaf, Sorceress*—and the pencil in her hand is the same pencil, and the handwriting is the same handwriting, and she has been the person who wrote this for two years and the person who *is* this for two months and both of those people are sitting here at the same table with the same dice and the same friends and she doesn't know, suddenly, which one is going to stand up when the game ends.

"Hey." Dani's toe nudges her ankle under the table, gentle, unhurried, the way you'd wake someone from a nap they didn't mean to take. "You're up. Unless you want to let the wizard go first and watch him roll another nineteen and gloat about it for the rest of the night."

Aria blinks, and the pencil comes down. Not to write—she writes nothing, because there's nothing to write, the sheet already says everything it's ever going to say—but to tap the eraser twice against the margin beside *Sorceress, Level 1*, the way Jason used to do when he was stalling for time. "I'm up," she says. "Sorry. I was doing math."

"What math." Marcus has the d20 cocked in his fist, ready to throw it at her if the answer's boring. Sera's pen is still, her green eyes tracking Aria's face over the rim of her glass, and Dani has gone back to her wine like she already knows how this ends and just wants to watch it happen.

"The eight," Aria says, and flips the sheet around so they can all see it, the little penciled box in the corner where Jason wrote *WIS 8* and underlined it twice, the only stat on the page that ever got underlined. "You keep saying I dumped it like it was a mistake. It wasn't. Wisdom is the save you make when something's trying to tell you you're wrong." She looks at Marcus, and then at Sera, and then at Mike, who has been quiet at the end of the table with his beer and his brother's old dice bag, and she says the thing she's been circling since the pencil touched paper. "I failed every one of those. Every single time. And I'm still here." She takes a breath, and the breath is steady, and the room holds. "So maybe the eight isn't a dump. Maybe it's the whole build."

Marcus stares at her for a second, then rolls the d20 without looking, and it comes up a three. He doesn't even glance at it. "Okay," he says, and his voice has lost the gloat entirely, gone somewhere flatter and more serious. "Okay. Then here's my question, and it's not a table question, it's a real one." He leans back, and the chair creaks under him. "If you can't see the trap coming—ever, not once—what's stopping the next miracle from being the one that kills you?"

Nobody answers. Sera's pen is down. Dani's glass has stopped halfway to her mouth, and Mike is looking at the table like the wood owes him an explanation. Aria turns the sheet back around, smooths it flat with the heel of her hand, and reads her own handwriting one more time—the coffee ring, the Ohio-shaped stain, the ink smudge over *Level 1*—and she doesn't say *I don't know*, even though she doesn't, because that's the eight talking and the eight never learned when to shut up. "Nothing's stopping it," she says instead, and picks up the dice. "That's the point. Roll for initiative."

The d20 leaves her fingers and hits the wood with a crack that's louder than it should be, and everyone leans in at once, three heads converging over the scattered dice like a conspiracy. It rolls. It rolls. It catches the edge of the character sheet, spins, and comes to rest with the twenty facing up, the little triangle of the 2 and the 0 stacked in a shape that means nothing except everything. Marcus makes a sound like he's been punched. Sera's pen hits the table. Mike just says, "Huh," which from him is practically a standing ovation.

"Natural twenty," Aria says, and she doesn't gloat, she just picks the die up and sets it on the sheet beside WIS 8 like a paperweight, like evidence. "On the first throw. I'd like the record to show that I have never, not once in two years, rolled a twenty on the first throw." Marcus is already reaching for the die to inspect it, turning it over in his fingers, holding it up to the lamp to check for a loaded edge. "That's a fair die," he mutters. "I bought that die. I bought it from a guy at Gen Con who swore it was cursed. He said—" He stops, because Sera has started laughing, low and helpless into her wine, and once she starts Dani goes too, and then it's all four of them and the die is just a die again, sitting there on two years of pencil marks like it's been waiting the whole time for exactly this.

Sera runs the fight loose and mean, the way she always has, and the bugbears come out of the treeline in a knot of axes and matted fur, six of them, one of them a shaman with a bone charm and a bad attitude. Marcus's wizard goes first and rolls a nineteen again—he actually pumps his fist, the absolute nerd—and drops a sleep spell that takes two of them out cold. Mike's ranger, who has been quietly nursing his beer all night, rolls a fifteen and puts an arrow through the shaman's throat without changing expression, which is such a Mike move that Aria has to bite the inside of her cheek. Then it's her turn, and she looks at the sheet, and the sheet says Fireball, and she feels her own hand twitch toward the page like it wants to cast something real.

"Okay," she says, and rolls. Sixteen. Enough. "Eldritch Blast, three bolts, all on the big one." Sera nods, and Aria narrates it the way Jason always did, low and fast, and somewhere in the middle of the description she hears her own voice do the thing it does now—the sorceress voice, the one that comes out of her throat without asking—and she catches Marcus watching her mouth, not the dice, the way you watch a card trick you're starting to believe. The bugbear dies. Sera moves the minis. Dani's rogue flanks and crits and there's a small, satisfying groan from the whole table, and the fight winds down into the last bugbear running for the trees with Mike's arrow in its shoulder.

"You know," Aria says, leaning back and stretching, the dress pulling across her shoulders, "I've been thinking about this all week. Deer season opens in Vanderburgh County on the fifteenth." She picks up the d20 and spins it on its point, a little top, a little habit Jason had that looks different on her fingers. "I could take Eldritch Blast out to the back forty and drop a buck from two hundred yards without a scope. No recoil. No noise. Just—" she flicks two fingers, the gesture she uses for the spell, and Mike snorts into his beer. "Freezer full of venison. Marla's husband does the processing. I asked."

Marcus sets his bottle down and stares at her, and then he starts laughing, and it's not the rough one from the kitchen, it's the kind that gets away from a man, the kind that has him wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand while Dani thumps his back and Sera watches with her chin in her palm and a grin she's not even trying to hide. "You—" he manages, "—you're telling me the Violet Angel, the elf princess, the woman the entire internet thinks is a literal angel from heaven, is going to go sit in a deer blind in southern Indiana and shoot a ten-pointer with space magic because it's cheaper than beef." Aria shrugs, one shoulder, the dress slipping a half inch. "Elven princess has a grocery budget," she says. "I made five hundred bucks mending laundry last week. The laundromat doesn't offer dental." Marcus is still laughing,

Marcus is still laughing, and he waves his bottle at her like a man flagging down a bartender. "No. No, see, that's the part I can't get past. You've got the wings. You've got the halo glow and the whole resurrection thing—people are building shrines to you, there's a candlelight vigil in Naperville, my cousin's wife has your face on a throw pillow—and you're gonna sit in a climbing stand in a Carhartt jacket waiting for a buck to walk under you and then vaporize it with the same spell you'd use on a dragon." He takes a long pull off the bottle, and it's mostly empty. "That's not a hunting story. That's a theological crisis."

"It's venison chili," Aria says, and the flatness of it lands better than any joke could. "And jerky. And sausage, if Marla's husband doesn't gouge me on the processing fee. You know what a pound of ground beef costs right now? Nine dollars. I have forty-five spell points and a freezer that's empty except for a bag of frozen peas and Mike's old popsicles." She nods at her brother. "The Bomb Pops. From two summers ago. You left them when you moved out and I never threw them away and now they taste like freezer burn and regret."

"Those were a collector's item," Mike says, without looking up from his character sheet. "Limited run. They discontinued the blue raspberry."

Dani has her chin on Aria's shoulder now, warm and close, reading the sheet upside-down with the lazy confidence of someone who's won this argument before it started. "For the record," she says, "I've seen her shoot. Not a bow. Eldritch Blast, at the quarry outside Rockford, at a can of Pabst on a fence post. She didn't even stand up. Just pointed and the can was gone and the fence post was gone and there was a hole in the dirt behind it about the size of a dinner plate." She taps the sheet. "The deer doesn't have a prayer. The deer doesn't have a *turn*."

Marcus sobers, just a little, the laugh dying down to something quieter and more interested. He picks up the d20, rolls it idly across his knuckles, and doesn't look at her when he asks it. "And you'd really do it? Sit out there in the cold, in the dark, in the woods, after everything—" He gestures vaguely at the room, at the framed crayon drawing on the coffee table, at the whole impossible shape of her. "—just to save a couple hundred bucks on groceries?"

Aria reaches over and takes the die out of his hand, sets it back on the sheet beside WIS 8, and looks at him the way she looks at a lock she's about to pick. "Marcus," she says, "I raised a kid from the dead on a Tuesday. I healed seven people in an afternoon and threw up in a hospital parking lot afterward because I'd spent thirty-five points and had nothing left to give anybody. I flew home on wings that shouldn't exist over a state that doesn't believe in me." She leans back, and the chair creaks. "The deer is the easy part. The deer is the part that makes sense. You want to know what scares me? It's not the deer. It's that I don't know what I'll be hunting next November."

Sera's pen is still. She's been quiet since the fight wound down, watching Aria the way she watches a scene she wrote and doesn't quite remember writing, and now she sets the pen down flat and says, "Next session's the fifteenth. You're not skipping game night to go shoot Bambi."

“December 15th, got it," Aria says. "If I decide to go full Elmer Fudd, I'll bring you the backstraps."

"December fifteenth," Aria says, and she turns in her chair toward Dani, the whole of her attention narrowing to one point, the way a lens does. "That's not the deer. That's next session." She reaches over and steals the d20 off her own sheet, rolls it once across her knuckles, lets it drop. "Which means, if I'm doing the math right, and I'm always doing the math—" she pauses, and the pause has a grin behind it, "—you're free. You should come. Every Friday. Not just the ones where Sera's decided she needs a witness for my public unmasking."

She winks. Not at Dani alone—at the whole table, a slow, deliberate, theatrical wink that lands on Marcus, on Mike, on Sera, and comes back around to Dani like a coin spinning on a tabletop. It's the wink of someone who knows exactly what she's doing and has decided, at long last, to enjoy it. Dani's rosebud mouth curls at one corner, and she doesn't answer right away—she just tips her glass an inch, a small salute, and drinks.

Mike sets his beer down with the kind of care that means he's about to say something he'd rather not. "I want it on the record," he says, flat, into the middle distance, "that I have a sister now. A sister who is also a winged elf. And I am asking, sincerely, as a brother, that we never again discuss the mechanics of how her spell points get refilled at this table. Ever. I don't want to know the number. I don't want to know the schedule. If she starts glowing during a fight, I'm going to assume it's a cantrip and I'm going to keep rolling." He picks up his dice and shakes them like he's trying to drown the conversation in the sound of plastic.

Marcus, mid-swallow, chokes. It's not a polite cough—it's the real thing, amber burning up the wrong pipe, and he thumps his own chest twice with a fist while Sera watches with her chin in her palm and does absolutely nothing to help. When he finally gets air back, his eyes are streaming and his voice has gone hoarse with the effort of not laughing. "Okay, no, wait—" He points his bottle at Dani, and the gesture is a little unsteady. "You. You're the load-bearing girlfriend. You understand that, right? Because I've been sitting here all night running the numbers, and the restoration mechanic—" he waves the bottle like a wand, "—would be a *disaster*. It'd be a loophole the size of a barn door. Anyone could walk through it. Anybody with a pulse and a—" he stops himself, reconsiders, and barrels on anyway, "—a *willingness*. It would be the most broken thing in the game. You could farm it. You could exploit it. It'd be the first thing every min-maxer on the internet would try to break." He takes a breath. "But it's not broken. Because it's not a mechanic. It's *you*. You're the thing that makes it not gross."

Dani's smile goes slow and warm, and she leans back in her chair with the kind of unhurried ownership of a woman who has just been handed the last piece of a puzzle she's been holding for years. "I know," she says, and it's not smug—it's just true, said the way you'd say your own name. She reaches over and refills Marcus's glass without being asked, then her own, and holds it up. "To the load-bearing girlfriend." Sera clinks her glass against it. Mike, after a beat, does too, with the resigned air of a man accepting a promotion he didn't apply for. Marcus drinks. And Aria watches her two girlfriends and her brother and the friend who knows everything now, all of them lit amber and warm in Sera's kitchen, and she thinks—with the same steady, unbothered clarity that has been building in her since the woods—that this is the part she's going to protect. Not the wings. Not the halo. This.

Mike lowers his glass like it's radioactive. The grimace arrives in stages — the eyes first, a slow squeeze shut, then the whole face folding in on itself as the phrase finishes the long trip from his ears to whatever part of the brain holds onto a man's dignity. He presses the heel of his palm against his forehead and groans, a low, wounded sound that has real mileage on it. "Load-bearing girlfriend," he says, to the ceiling, to God, to anyone listening. "You said load-bearing girlfriend out loud, in a room, where I could hear it. That's the most horrifying double entendre in the English language and you just put it on a toast. I'm never getting that out of my head. It's in there now. It lives there."

Dani doesn't so much grin as unspool, slow and satisfied, tipping her chair back on two legs with the confidence of a woman who has never once fallen. "Look at it this way," she says, swirling the amber in her glass. "At least she doesn't have to go find some dude covered in body hair like Marcus. Chest like a shag carpet. Back like a bear that got into a fight with a lawnmower." She gestures with her glass at Marcus, who has the decency to look down at his own forearms. "Think about it. Jason spends twenty-four years as a guy, wakes up as Aria, and the only way to keep the lights on — the only way to heal dying kids and raise the dead and fly — is to find a dude with shoulders like a barn door and a sweat problem. What does that do to a man's psyche? What does that do to *Jason's* psyche? He'd never recover. He'd just lie down in the woods and let the moss take him."

Aria sets her glass down with a clink that's slightly too loud, ears going pink to the tips. "I want it noted," she says, "for the record, for posterity, for whatever historian digs this up in two hundred years — I would have been *fine*. I would have adapted. I'm adaptable. It's basically my one skill."

"You would not have been fine," Dani says, without heat, the way you'd correct a child about whether dragons are real. "You'd have made it three days. You'd have looked at some guy's back hair in the low light of a bedroom and your soul would have left your body through your ears. Which, by the way, are *pointy* now, so it'd be a clean exit." She takes a sip, unbothered. "So really — Marcus, Sera, Mike — you should all be thanking me. Every kid she healed, every dead kid she brought back, every candlelight vigil in Naperville — that's me. I'm the reason the Violet Angel's still walking around and not curled up in a fetal position in some guy's truck." She raises her glass one more time, deadpan. "You're welcome."

Marcus, who has been staring into the middle distance with the expression of a man reviewing his entire life, finally finds his voice. "I don't have a sweat problem," he says, quiet and aggrieved. "I run hot. There's a difference." He looks at Aria, and something in his face has gone past the grin, past the interrogation — settled into something warmer and a little bewildered, the way you look at a friend who's come back from a war you can't quite picture. "Three days, though. She's probably right about the three days." He picks up the d20 and rolls it across the table without looking, and it comes up a four, and nobody even glances at it. "For what it's worth, Silverleaf — I'm glad it was her. I'm glad it wasn't some hairy dude with a truck. You deserve better than a truck."

The dice go back in the bag the way they always do, one at a time, Marcus counting them like a man closing a register. Mike stacks plates. Sera's already on her feet, gathering glasses, and Dani has pushed her chair back and is reaching for her jacket off the hook by the door — and Aria watches it happen, the ordinary choreography of a night ending, and feels the small gravity of it, the way everyone's already decided where they're sleeping except her.

She doesn't move. Sera notices, because Sera notices everything; she's got one hand full of plates and the other on the fridge handle and her green eyes cut sideways to Aria still sitting at the table with her character sheet under her palm. "You're staying," Sera says. Not a question. Aria nods once, and something in Sera's shoulders eases that Aria didn't realize was tight. Sera sets the plates down and looks past her at Dani, who's got one arm in her jacket sleeve and is working the other one in with that unhurried patience she does everything with. Sera opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again — "Dani, you could—" — and stops, the sentence dying somewhere in her throat, because there's no clean way to finish it that doesn't sound like a proposal, and Dani's already got her keys out, and Mike's jangling his in the doorway, and the moment slides past like water off a countertop.

Dani catches it anyway. She always does. She pauses with her jacket half on and looks at Sera, then at Aria, and her mouth does that slow unspooling thing, and she says, easy as anything, "Rain check." Sera's ears — plain, round, human ears — go pink, and she nods too fast, and turns back to the sink like the dishes are suddenly fascinating. Mike is holding the door. Marcus has his dice bag and his empty bottle and is already halfway into the hallway, and Dani is a step behind him, and Aria is about to stand up to walk them out when the thing that's been sitting in her chest all night finally climbs out of her mouth without asking permission first.

"Hey." She doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't need to. The word lands in the little entryway like a dropped coin and everyone stops — Mike with his hand on the door, Marcus mid-step, Dani turned halfway back. Aria stays in her chair, the character sheet still under her palm, and she says it flat and clear the way you'd say the weather: "I think I'm going to crash the Bears halftime show and give a press conference on Sunday." The fridge hums. Somewhere down Halsted a siren goes thin and far. Mike's hand slides off the door handle and the door swings shut on its own weight, and the four of them just stand there in the yellow kitchen light looking at her like she's grown a second set of ears.

Marcus is the first one to find words, and what he finds is: "The Bears." He says it like he's testing whether the words are real. "Soldier Field. Sunday. Halftime. National television. You — the Violet Angel — on the fifty-yard line in front of sixty thousand people and a camera crew, giving a press conference." He sets the dice bag down on the counter very carefully, like it might go off. "To say what, exactly?" Aria turns her glass a quarter-turn on the table, watching the last of the amber catch the light, and doesn't answer right away, because the honest answer is *I don't know yet* and the honest answer is also the thing she's been circling since the hospital parking lot. "To stop hiding," she says finally. "To tell them what I am before somebody else does it for me, and gets it wrong."