For days on end everything settled into a pleasant rhythm. The Yellow Mage appreciated rhythms.
They required no decisions, only discipline.
He wasn't immortal, or long-lived, in the traditional sense. He just lived longer than most, through his own work upon himself, and the good sense to lead a healthy life.
Every morning began with the Dread Mage.
He examined him with the same careful attention he had done since the day he had been entrusted to his care.
He felt the faint magical currents sustained by the goddess's tears. They waned ever so slightly with each passing moment. There was nothing he could do about that.
Almost nothing else had changed.
He looked no better.
After the Dread Mage came his daughter, Blackbird Sonder.
She had collapsed into sleep shortly after surrendering the staff, and for nearly two days she had scarcely awakened. After that, she drifted in and out of sleep, gradually being able to stay awake for longer.
Without the shards, she looked lesser.
Not merely less burdened. They had propped her up in more ways than one, and they had also undergone a sort of metamorphosis within her.
The wings on her head had receded, and she had shrunk into a less adolescent state. Her features had become more youthful, the opposite of what was happening to the Dread Mage.
He took it for what it was.
It was evident that she was an undead, and even if if weren't obvious to him at first, after days of thorough examination, there was no room for doubt.
Maybe it had something to do with that? The Yellow Mage wasn't a necromancer. He had to ask the Dread Mage should he ever awaken.
When his daughter managed to wake and stay up, she spent long stretches sitting near one of the tower's windows.
Sometimes she watched Sireacht the featherling, a supposed dragon egg or larvae, whose energy seemed to be uneffect by the oppressive influence of the mask's shards.
Occasionally Sonder would ask after her father.
The Yellow Mage always gave the same answer.
"He still lives."
She never complained or said anything more.
The remainder of every day belonged to the mask.
Progress was painfully slow.
Each fracture demanded individual attention.
The Yellow Mage refused to hurry.
Healing was not strengthened by impatience. The mask remembered what it once had been and his task was simply to encourage that memory.
Some days, a crack shortened by no more than the width of a fingernail. Other days, nothing visible happened at all.
But those were not failures.
Some wounds needed time before they remembered how to close.
The whisperers and thoughts never ceased, if anything, they grew clearer as the fractures diminished.
More numerous and insistent.
They contained remarkably little originality, and they seemed only to grow more hostile.
The Yellow Mage assumed that the closer he came to mending it, they would come to be horrifying and abhorred, and most likely outright hostile.
The Yellow Mage recorded none of the whispers. They had no value.
Instead, he kept notes concerning the repairs themselves.
The villagers occasionally visited the tower. They wished to get some sort of treatment or advice, but he could spare little time.
No one complained that he spent so much time with strangers.
No one asked why a quiet young woman now lived in the upper rooms as they could see her staring out of the window.
The villagers had long ago accepted that the Yellow Mage's tower contained mysteries.
He had given them medicines, healthy harvests, and children who could recovered from high fevers easily.
They were content to leave the mysteries unexplained.