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It started with a bit of stiffness in his joints. He didn’t think much of it at first: it’s just some lingering effect of the fever; it will dissipate in time. But the stiffness didn’t go away. It only got worse, until eventually he could barely move his elbows and knees, and his shoulders and hips were also severely restricted in their movements. That was when he sought out old Thig.

The Druid rapped his knuckles on his own elbow, producing the wooden knocking noise of bone hitting bone. Then he rapped on his own bicep, producing only a fleshy slapping sound. Then he rapped on Tikir’s bicep. “Sounds more like my elbow than my bicep, doesn’t it?”

Tikir nodded.

“Heterotopic ossification,” Thig said. “It must have started with the cartilage of your joints, but the effect has begun to spread to your muscles and tendons as well: they’re turning to bone.”

Tikir hardly knew what to say. “What? Why?”

“The causes are unknown. The condition is exceedingly rare and thus simply cannot be studied with anything like scientific rigor. There is some speculation about a connection with brain trauma or other damage to the nervous system, but this has never been confirmed. Did you suffer any blows to the head or spine before the stiffness began?”

“No. But… I had a fever,” Tikir replied. “A bad one. Had me laid up for weeks. It came on very suddenly. I was in the Eastern Woods, cutting wood, and I felt a sharp pain on the back of my neck. Like a wasp sting. I lost consciousness almost immediately. I still don’t know how I wound up back in Vanima.”

“Are you allergic to wasps?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm….” The Druid stroked his earlobe as he mulled over Tikir’s story. “I suspect the sting you felt was no insect but a dart, tipped with a potent poison that works its effects on nerves and brain. Were you in troll territory?”

“Yes, I suppose I was. At the edge of it anyway.”

Thig nodded solemnly. “There’s nothing I can do to help you, Tikir. I don’t know how to reverse the ossification process. I don’t think anyone does. Normal healing potions won’t work, nor would a mage’s healing spells. These things increase the body’s life force, stimulating tissue repair or replacement. But your tissues aren’t damaged or missing. They’re just the wrong kind of tissues.”

Tikir felt as though all his innards had imploded, leaving a painful vacuum in his gut. “So eventually I’ll be completely immobilized, trapped in a bony shell until someone finds a way to reverse the process.”

“No, my friend,” Thig interjected, his dark, deep-set eyes glistening sadly from under his low, shaggy brows. “Your heart too is made of muscle, as is the diaphragm that pumps air in and out of your lungs. When the ossification reaches one of these two organs, you will die.

“I am… so sorry, Tikir.”

Someone must have carried Tikir out to the Garden. That is where Thig found him, propped up in a chair, eyes closed, enjoying the soft, early summer sunshine on his face. The face that was once a rich, dark brown and now looked almost charcoal-gray. Everything about the once lively and good-humored elf seemed to be turning gray, turning to dust. Tikir opened his eyes at the soft scuffing of Thig’s shoes on the cobbles. At least those gold-green eyes had not lost their color or brightness.

His mind is still as alive and alert as ever in there, Thig thought with a pang of pity.

“You’ve come,” Tikir said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. The ossification must have reached his diaphragm. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Thig replied, taking a seat beside the dying elf.

“I must look awful, half a ghost already,” Tikir said with the weakest of laughs. “Since my jaw muscles have started to ossify, I haven’t really been able to eat. Been living off of broth for weeks. I think it may be malnutrition that kills me in the end, unless….”

Thig sat silently, waiting for Tikir to catch his breath and gather up the strength to continue.

“I turned 300 in Elos,” the elf finally said. “I forgot to celebrate. Hard to think about my birth with my death so imminent. But that’s a good long life by the standards of any other race, no?”

“I suppose it would be,” Thig replied warily.

“Well, it’ll have to be enough for me. I’m done. I need…. I need this to end.”

Please don’t ask this of me, Thig thought. I am sworn to protect and preserve life. I can’t….

Tikir interrupted Thig’s silent pleas. “I know you can help me. Something quick and painless. And dignified. Please, for pity’s sake, I just want to go out with a bit of dignity intact.”

Thig swallowed hard. “My Codex doesn’t allow….”

Tikir was prepared for this objection. “Isn’t Justice part of the Codex? And Helpfulness? Where is the justice in letting me suffer like this? Whom are you helping?”

Thig ran through a dozen replies in his mind, but they all seemed so puny and contrived. Life may be the most valuable thing in the world, but its value is not infinite, and it can be outweighed.

“Very well,” he finally said. “I can concoct something.”

Tikir let out the shallowest of sighs. “Thank you.” The two sat in solemn silence for a while until Tikir put in, “So this is the end of me.”

“Only the death of the body. The Spirit lives on.”

Tikir turned those gold-green eyes on Thig with a cynical look. “I don’t think you believe that any more than I do. The Spirit may persist without the body for a while, inhering directly in the free mana. But, without a physical structure to support it, it must eventually dissolve. We are not gods. There is no hidden realm where Cherga leads disembodied souls after death. There is only oblivion, non-existence.” Tikir turned his face back toward the sun and closed his eyes, letting the sunlight warm his ashen eyelids. “But so be it. I just hope I’ve managed to do some lasting good in the world.”

Thig administered the poison that evening. They had carried Tikir down to the bedchambers off the tailoring workshop and endeavored to make him as comfortable as they could. The only elf among them who managed to muster any good cheer was Tikir himself, who cracked jokes and took advantage of his predicament, as he put it, to dispense unsolicited advice.

“Just let this be a lesson to you all,” he said, as loudly as he could, after Thig had helped him to drink down a cup of poisoned wine. “Even elves should not take their lives for granted. The world is full of traps for the unwary. It’s no use trying to prepare for every eventuality. Just take advantage of what you’ve got.”

The poison worked fast. His gold-green eyes grew glazed and distant. “Farewell, elves of Vanima,” he continued, his voice softer now and dreamier. “May the Five protect this place, the only place I’ve ever truly considered my home.”

As a grasslander, Tikir was a creature of Findari, and so they burned his body and let Findari’s wind carry his ashes away. Thig kept the charred skull, though. He needed it, he said, to remind him of a lesson learned: that no code is perfect, that every rule has its exceptions, and that sometimes wisdom consists in reacting to one’s circumstances as one’s heart directs.