The royal invitation remained entirely untouched. It rested quietly upon the center of Adrian's desk, its pale emerald wood gleaming softly beneath the warm afternoon light that poured through the tall office windows. Every now and then, his analytical eyes involuntarily wandered back toward the wax seal, lingering there for only a heartbeat before returning to the rapidly growing collection of local administrative reports scattered across the polished oak. There was a report on road maintenance, a ledger for guard rotations, a stack of trade requests from the southern caravans, and several construction estimates from Borin's guildhall. And right at the top of the pile sat an official petition from two neighbouring farmers arguing passionately over the exact physical position of a wooden fence that had, apparently, become a matter of great historical and territorial importance to their families.
Adrian stared deadpan at the thick parchment. "It's a fence."
Elena glanced up from the opposite side of the desk, where she had been carefully organizing and rolling several maps of the surrounding region. "What about it?"
"They've attached six full pages of testimony, Elena."
She looked toward the bulging report. "They have."
"It separates two mundane vegetable gardens."
"It does."
"They've actually included detailed architectural drawings."
"I noticed that when it was filed," she replied smoothly.
Adrian slowly and painfully turned another page of the document. "One of them apparently went out at midnight and measured it down to the exact inch."
"He did."
"And there are corrections written in an entirely different handwriting."
"The neighbour vehemently disagreed with the midnight measurements."
Adrian looked up toward the high timber ceiling as though searching for a hidden stash of divine patience tucked somewhere among the wooden beams. "I've fought ravenous monsters in the deep woods."
"You have."
"I've stood against an entire beastkin Warchief."
"Yes."
"I've nearly died on the frontier."
"Several times, if my memory serves," she noted, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
He gently and deliberately tapped the thick petition with his index finger. "This dispute over cabbage patches is somehow infinitely more exhausting."
The corner of Elena's mouth lifted ever so slightly into a rare, beautiful smile. "You'll survive the paperwork, Mayor."
"I profoundly admire your unshakeable confidence in my bureaucracy skills."
"You've successfully survived living with Lyra's daily antics," she reminded him.
Adrian paused, considering the logic. "That's entirely fair." He carefully dipped his quill into the inkwell and signed his name with a swift, decisive flourish at the very bottom of the petition before setting the heavy papers aside. "Compromise."
Elena tilted her head to the side, her curiosity piqued. "What exactly did you write down as your official verdict?"
"They each lose exactly six inches of garden space to a new neutral zone."
She blinked once, thoroughly caught off guard by the swift municipal decree. "You can actually do that?"
"I'm the Mayor," Adrian replied with a faint, cynical smirk.
"You're undeniably enjoying that title a little too much today."
"Only when stubborn fences are involved."
The office settled into another deeply comfortable, familiar silence. Outside the glass, the organic sounds of Stonehollow drifted lazily through the open window frame. Hard-working builders continued their steady, rhythmic work somewhere far beyond the central square. The distant, musical ringing of a blacksmith's iron hammer echoed rhythmically across the blocks of the town. A trade wagon rolled past directly beneath the window sill, its driver boisterously greeting a shopkeeper farther down the street with a cheerful wave. Life carried on moving forward. It was normal, and it was entirely peaceful. Adrian had once firmly believed throughout his early days in Eryndor that achieving true peace would mean doing significantly less work. Instead, he was finally realizing that it simply meant solving vastly different, more intricate kinds of problems.
A gentle knock systematically interrupted the comfortable quiet of the room. Adrian dipped his quill back into the dark inkwell, not looking up as he called out, "Come in."
The heavy office door opened on its smooth iron hinges, and one of the younger town clerks stepped tentatively inside, carrying yet another stack of neatly bound white papers. Adrian narrowed his eyes immediately, locking his jaw as he stared at the fresh cargo. "No."
The young man stopped dead in his tracks, his leather boots freezing on the polished timber floor. "Sir?"
"I reject them completely," Adrian said, deadpan.
"They're the official trade manifests from the southern merchant route, Mayor."
"I reject those too."
The clerk looked entirely uncertainly across the room toward Elena, silently pleading for administrative intervention. She calmly and gracefully held out both of her hands from her seat by the window sill. "I'll take them, Peter."
The young man visibly relaxed, a massive weight lifting from his shoulders as he eagerly passed the heavy bundle across the room to her palms. "Thank you, Elena."
As soon as his retreating form disappeared back into the hallway and the door clicked shut again, Adrian leaned back dramatically against the headrest of his heavy chair, letting out an exasperated sigh. "I really, profoundly liked fighting ravenous monsters in the deep woods."
Elena caretakingly added the fresh manifests to the top of an already towering, growing pile of papers on her table. "I remember."
"They were significantly more straightforward than merchants, Elena."
"They usually tried to violently kill you on sight, Adrian."
"Exactly. They announced their lethal intentions transparently. You knew exactly where you stood with a Dread Wolf."
She gave a slow, thoughtful nod of agreement as she picked up her ruler. "That was undeniably considerate of them."
He laughed out loud, the dry edge of his cadence returning. "I know, right?"
For another full hour, the two of them worked quietly together in the fading afternoon light. There was something oddly satisfying and grounded about the shared routine. Elena meticulously reviewed the latest town patrol routes and structural margins, while Adrian systematically signed off on construction approvals for Borin's inner district. Occasionally, one of them would voice a quiet question about a resource allocation, but most of the time, they simply worked. The deeply comfortable silence between them had long since become one of the things Adrian appreciated most about his new life in Stonehollow. Neither of them ever felt the desperate need to fill every quiet moment with meaningless conversation. Some friendships he smiled softly to himself at the thought, then corrected the ledger no, some partnerships simply didn't require constant words to be real.
Eventually, the very final report of the afternoon vanished into its proper file folder with a crisp slide. Adrian stretched both of his broad arms high above his head, twisting his torso until several highly satisfying cracks echoed clearly through the quiet timber walls of the office. "Done."
Elena glanced sideways toward the remaining corner of the desk, her dark eyes flashing. "No."
He followed her gaze, his heart sinking slightly as he spotted three more thick, neatly tied bundles waiting patiently in the shadows. "You are completely, ruthlessly ruining my moment of triumph, Elena."
"They're tomorrow's files."
"Oh." He immediately relaxed his posture again, letting his shoulders drop as he capped his inkwell. "Then tomorrow Adrian can deal with those horrors. Tomorrow Adrian has a great schedule."
"And today?"
"Today, Adrian is officially finished with municipal governance."
She stood up from her chair, collecting the rolled maps she'd been organizing throughout the afternoon. "You should go."
He looked up at her, confused. "Go where, exactly?"
"Home," she said simply.
Adrian's brow furrowed, gesturing faintly to the building around them. "I am home, Elena."
Elena was entirely quiet for a long moment, the ambient ticking of the desk clock filling the space between them. Then, she took a slow step forward and looked directly into his eyes, her expression soft but unyielding. "I know you are, Adrian. But you haven't actually been back to Earth in nine full days."
The words struck him significantly harder than he ever could have expected, the reality of the timeline hitting him like a physical blow. Nine days. He blinked once, staring blankly at the parchment. "Has it really been that long?"
She nodded firmly. "You are still getting used to the clocks, but that means more than a single day has passed over there, yes?"
His stomach tightened slightly into a cold pit as his analytical mind instinctively began counting backwards, running the math of the parallel realities. Seven days in Eryndor usually equated to a single day on Earth. But since it had been nine full days in Stonehollow, that meant it had been a bit longer than a day back in his old world.
Grandma Lilly would probably assume her quiet grandson had simply taken on another brutal back-to-back double shift at the landscaping company. His light novel editor was almost certainly staring at an empty inbox right now, furiously wondering why another completed manuscript chapter hadn't arrived on schedule. And the unwashed dinner dishes he had absentmindedly forgotten in his apartment sink were almost certainly beginning to stage a full-scale microscopic rebellion against his lease. He still desperately needed to figure out how to sell that apartment and tie up the loose ends of his human existence, but the unyielding weight of two worlds was a dangerous thing to balance on a single ledger.