She hangs up.

Lorica sags against her boyfriend.

"Thirty million." 

"'s a few years of regular attacks. That had better be it."

"We could've - we could've - I don't know what we could've done -"

"I am going to take over all the walled cities with little robots."

Nod.

"And, and turn Behemoth into an electrical generator."

Squeeze. "Yeah. Sounds good. And if Dragon'll help I'll make everyone immortal and less fragile and safe from mental manipulation and maybe there's a way to do resurrection and if there is we will somehow find it."

"Yeah. Just fuck with time enough and it should be easy, right."

"Yeah. Unsimurghing people might be harder than resurrecting them. We've - we've got the time, now. It's over."

Deep breath. "Yeah." She kisses his cheek.

Lean. Hug. 

"I want to sing, do you mind -"

"Not at all please do."

Elves have a song for people dying. He doesn't sing it much, because he heard it once when his mother died and it's a horrible horrible memory and anyway wouldn't he be singing it constantly, here? Every second of every day, these people die, irrecoverably and forever. 

He sings.

Lorica snuggles him and sighs.

And starts working on a way to get the walled cities run well.

He pulls up his old notes on mortality. He's gotten better at algorithm design since then. He ends up throwing most of it out because he can do better. He sends things to Rete.

Rete can help them both at the same time.

Yep. They work. On the side he tries eidetic memory implants, to make sure enchantments work fine in a form less straightforwardly removed than jewelry. They do. 

He takes drones out flying over the water, or over the mountains, or over vast expanses of forest, and he designs a fix to death. 

And he takes breaks, and kisses Lorica.

She's so kissable.

The public story is that Eidolon found and confronted the Master who operated the Endbringers and that they fought to the death.

There is mixed rejoicing.

Dragon turned over her magic item making magic item when all effects downstream of Library Elf were being destroyed but as soon as she has another she can mass produce swag and give him most of the money for it.

He makes her another. He came up with that before he was even Simurghed, and he grumbles about this to anyone who will listen which is mostly Rete. He'll take money for eidetic memories and not needing sleep and he'll keep a pretty tight hold on sales of artifacts that let you make your own artifacts but immortality's gonna be free.  

He gets something. Tests it on an elderly mouse, in case he messed up spectacularly. Asks Dragon to start mass production, because he's pretty sure he didn't.

The mouse gets younger. He names it Vána. 

Hey, humanity, would you like to live forever. 

Humanity would love to live forever. (Mostly. There are religious protests and bioethicist protests and such.)

He's not insisting. Some of the resource-scarcity concerns should really be alleviated by a couple decent biotinkers focused on crops and so forth. And by universal perfectly effective birth control which is his next project.