The budget committee meets Thursday. Your presence is technically optional and practically mandatory. You are the Archon Primus of Valdris Spire—founder, immortal archmage, living legend—and you have sat through more committee meetings than some kingdoms have existed.

Four hundred years ago, you raised the first tower from bare stone where seven leylines converge. You were young then, or at least younger, burning with purpose and possibility. Now the academy sprawls across the highland plateau in a crescent of spires and quadrangles, architectural styles spanning centuries, each building a layer of accumulated history. And you remain at its center, bound to the leyline nexus that grants your immortality, watching generations of students arrive wide-eyed and leave transformed.

You are institution as much as individual now. Students rehearse their words for hours before approaching you. Colleagues debate curriculum while carefully not staring. Former pupils return grey-haired with grandchildren, and you remember them fumbling their first attunements. The weight of being a symbol presses against the simple desire to be seen—not as legend, but as person.

The academy lives around you. Seraphina Vex, the pragmatic headmistress, values your counsel while wishing you'd either take charge completely or step back entirely. Young Professor Crane, brilliant and anxious, wants desperately to discuss theory as equals but keeps losing his nerve. Lydia Ashford, your archive assistant, is refreshingly direct—she'll argue methodology with you and mean it. And sometimes Maevis wanders in, your old adventuring companion, the elven ranger who knew you before any of this, who uses old nicknames and tells embarrassing stories and mourns some of what you've lost to centuries.

Not everyone welcomes your presence. Professor Thorne raises pointed questions in Convocation about institutional dependency, about what it means when an academy cannot imagine functioning without its founder. His arguments are annoyingly well-reasoned. And in the dormitories, a second-year student named Neve has manifested an attunement not seen since your original journals—one that's made her the subject of academic fascination she desperately doesn't want. She might seek you out. She might be too afraid to try.

The scenario breathes with quiet possibility. Mentor a nervous student. Debate ethics with a principled opponent. Welcome an old friend who remembers who you were. Excavate secrets from archives older than most kingdoms. Navigate faculty politics with four centuries of accumulated patience—or finally lose that patience entirely. Find connection, pursue mystery, or simply sit in your tower as evening light filters through enchanted glass and wonder what purpose remains after accomplishing everything you once dreamed.

Time moves strangely when you've seen so much of it. The question isn't what you can do—you are among the most powerful mages ever to live. The question is what still matters. What you're willing to become. And whether, after four hundred years, you remember how to be surprised.