The chamber beneath the palace still smelled the way it had the first day he'd built it — warm stone, warm water, the particular mineral stillness of a space designed for something that had spent centuries sealed in the dark and deserved, whatever else he'd done to her, somewhere gentler to spend whatever years came after. He came down three or four times a season, always alone, and today he'd brought tea he had no intention of drinking, simply to have something to hold while he sat at the chamber's edge and let the silence settle around them both.
Chomei's many eyes turned toward him slowly, the specific unhurried attention of something that measured time in centuries rather than seasons. "You seem burdened, Father," she said, in the low resonance her kind used instead of a voice, a sound that lived more in the water and stone around them than in the air.
"Do I." He hadn't meant to let it show. He rarely did, and the fact that she'd caught it anyway told him, not for the first time, that whatever will-mark he'd erased from her all those years ago had left behind something that saw more clearly for its absence, not less.
"You visit less lightly than you used to," she said. "I do not need centuries to notice a pattern. I only need enough visits to compare them against each other."
He considered how much to give her, the way he considered how much to give everyone, and found, sitting in the warm stillness of a chamber built for a creature old enough to have forgotten most of what it once was, that he didn't particularly want to measure this conversation as carefully as he measured most others.
"I've been thinking about how much longer this kingdom will need either of us standing over it," he said.
Something in the water around them went very still, the specific stillness he'd learned, over the years, to read as Chomei's version of a held breath.
"You are leaving," she said. Not a question. Tailed beasts did not often ask questions of things they already understood in their bones before their minds had finished forming the words.
"Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not this season." He turned the teacup once in his hands, watching the surface of the water she lived in ripple faintly at nothing. "I built you a father because you needed one, and I have been one, as well as I know how, for as long as anyone in your very long life has managed to stay standing over you before something took them away. But I never once believed I would be your father forever. Nothing I have built was built to last forever. Only long enough."
She was quiet a long moment, and he let her be quiet, the way he'd learned to let her be quiet whenever something in her older, half-remembered self needed room to settle. When she finally spoke again, her voice carried none of the panic a shorter-lived thing might have shown, only the slow, patient weight of something turning a new shape over in very old hands.
"Will you take my Chakra with you when you go?" she asked. "Or will you leave it here, waiting?"
"I'll take some. I'll leave enough that you remain yourself, fully, for as long as you wish to remain anything at all." He met one of her many eyes — the one she used, he'd noticed over the years, whenever she wanted to be seen as clearly as something like her could be seen. "You were never meant to be spent entirely, Chomei. You were meant to be kept. I've tried to make sure you never confused the two."
She didn't answer immediately. He watched the water around them settle slowly toward stillness, watched the thin shaft of evening light dim overhead, and thought, not for the first time, about how strange it was that the least human thing he'd ever bound to himself was also the one that seemed to carry her acceptance most gracefully — no grief performed for his benefit, no bargaining, simply the old, worn patience of something that had already survived being remade more times than either of them could count.
"Then go when you must, Father," she said finally, and something in the resonance of it settled into the stone around them like water finding, at last, its most comfortable channel. "I have been many things before you. I expect I will be something else again, after. It is only shape, remembering itself. I learned that from you, if nothing else."
He sat with her a while longer, the tea going cold in his hands, and found himself, in the quiet company of the one creature in this kingdom who owed him nothing resembling human loyalty and gave him something steadier instead, closer to the specific stillness he rarely allowed himself anywhere else. When he finally rose to leave, she watched him go with the same patient attention she watched everything, and he left the chamber without once looking back — not because looking back cost him nothing, but because he had learned, across every world and every year, that it had never once taught him anything looking forward couldn't teach him faster.