The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived [OP MC, LitRPG]

There was a time when Eirlys had fiercely wanted children.

Not Sael. He'd been ambivalent about the whole thing, the way he was ambivalent about most things that involved other people in an ongoing, legally binding capacity. But Eirlys had wanted them; wanted them with the sort of quiet, persistent longing that made her pause whenever they passed families in the market, or linger at shop windows that sold tiny shoes and wooden toys.

So Sael had wanted them too.

That was how marriage worked, he'd discovered. One person's deep desire became the other person's project.

The problem revealed itself early. Three years into their marriage, after enough failed attempts that even Sael—who could be remarkably oblivious about certain things—noticed something was wrong. A healer in Gatsby confirmed it with a gentle professionalism that somehow made the news worse.

Eirlys couldn't have children.

Some structural issue. Congenital. The healer had used a lot of technical terms that Sael understood perfectly and Eirlys had nodded along to without really hearing. She'd smiled at the healer, thanked him for his time, paid the fee, and walked out of his chambers with her spine straight and her hands steady.

She'd cried for three days after that.

Sael had held her and felt utterly useless. It wasn't the first time. His mother and master had both died when he was nineteen. The same day, actually, which had been... a tough day, for lack of a better word. There weren't really adequate words for watching the two people who'd raised you bleed out from wounds your novice healing magic couldn't close fast enough. He hadn't even had time to say goodbye; one of the Corrupted One's generals had been chasing him, and staying meant dying alongside them.

But this was different. By now he'd helped defeat the Corrupted One. Sealed the greatest threat the world had ever known. He'd fought dragons. Collapsed mountains. Sealed rifts in the fabric of space itself. He could reshape reality with sufficient preparation and intent. But he couldn't fix this.

So he learned healing.

He read every medical text he could find. Consulted with healing mages across the world. Took apart the theoretical frameworks of restoration magic and rebuilt them from first principles. He learned anatomy, proper anatomy, not just the "here's where to stab things" knowledge that adventuring provided. Studied the intricate systems that made bodies work, the delicate balances that kept them alive.

It was this research, actually, that pushed him toward the [Archmage] class. The deeper he went into healing magic, the more he understood about the fundamental nature of magic itself. How it interacted with living tissue. How intent shaped reality. How the borders between schools of magic were more artificial than anyone admitted.

He became one of the greatest healers the world had ever known.

But, by the time he'd mastered it—by the time he understood the mortal body well enough to repair what nature had broken—Eirlys was forty-three years old.

They never spoke about it again.

This wasn't, Sael should clarify, a tragedy.

It was sad. Certainly. But sadness and tragedy were different things, and he'd never liked it when people conflated the two. Tragedy implied something had been taken from them. That they'd been robbed of some fundamental happiness they were owed.

But they hadn't been owed anything.

They'd wanted children. They did not have them. So they'd adjusted and built a life anyway. A good life, by most reasonable metrics. They often traveled. Eirlys painted. Sael researched increasingly esoteric magical phenomena and helped rebuild civilizations who had lost so much in the last era. They argued about supper plans and whether the garden needed weeding and whose turn it was to deal with the merchant who kept trying to sell them "authentic" dragon scales that were obviously painted chicken bones.

It had been enough.

And besides, Sael had a godson.

Jace. Son of Bran, who'd been Sael's closest friend since before either of them could properly grow a beard. Bran had asked him, casually over drinks one evening when Jace was barely a year old, if Sael would stand as godfather to his boy.

"Of course," Sael had said, because what else was he supposed to say?

He'd meant it as a formality. A ceremonial title. The type of thing that involved showing up to birthdays with age-appropriate gifts and nodding approvingly at the child's achievements from a comfortable distance.

Bran had lived to be 102 years old and had spent some of those years making sure Sael couldn't treat the godfather role as ceremonial even if he'd wanted to. Which, after the first few years of little Jace following him around asking questions about magic, Sael hadn't particularly wanted to anyway.

Eirlys had taken to the boy immediately. She'd taught Jace to read, to paint, to argue his point without being an ass about it. Sael had taught him magic. How to form a proper spell matrix. How to channel mana without burning himself out. How to think three steps ahead and always have an escape route.

The boy had grown into a good man. Better than he had any right to be, considering his primary role models were a grumpy duke who solved most problems with a sword, a hermit mage, and a woman whose idea of conflict resolution was "talk it out until everyone's too exhausted to keep fighting."

He'd married at twenty-three. A woman named Eleanor who'd looked at Sael exactly once and correctly identified him as someone who needed very specific instructions for social situations. She'd handed him a list of appropriate topics for small talk at the wedding and told him not to deviate from it.

He'd appreciated that.

They'd had a daughter. Margaret.

He'd called her Little Margaret to distinguish her from Bran's mother, who'd been called Margaret and who'd died before Sael had ever met her. The name had stuck. Even after she'd grown taller than Eirlys, even after she'd insisted she was "not little anymore, Grandpa Sael," she'd still been Little Margaret to him.

Jace had decided to become an adventurer.

Sael had tried to talk him out of it. Bran had tried to talk him out of it. Even Eleanor had tried, though she'd known it was futile from the start. The boy had his father's stubbornness and Sael's curiosity, which was apparently a fatal combination when it came to staying safely at home.

He'd died at thirty-seven. Struck in the chest by a monster boar in the eastern territories. Dead on the spot.

Bran had outlived his own son by many years. Little Margaret had been fourteen when her father died.

She'd wanted to be an adventurer too.

Sael had tried to talk her out of it. Not because he disapproved—he'd been an adventurer himself, so that would have been hypocritical—but because he knew what it cost. What it had cost Jace and what it would cost her.

She'd gone anyway.

Twenty years old, bright-eyed and restless, off to the Fey realm with a party of similarly optimistic young people who thought preparation and enthusiasm were the same thing.

He'd warned her it was dangerous and she'd laughed and told him not to worry so much. Six months later, news had reached him in the far north. Little Margaret was dead. The whole party, lost in the Fey realm. No bodies recovered.