The ring the crows stole for it wasn’t just the wrong cut but apparently the wrong color as well, whatever that meant. The sight of it had made Erin cry, a fact that alarmed the fox to no end. Human women claimed to venerate love above all else but they went to pieces for the pettiest things. Still, it could have been worse. She could have rolled over, bared her belly to circumstance, and revealed herself an inadequate match.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she auctioned the offending bauble and returned with a full trousseau: silver bracelets, a necklace of white gold, and a beautifully subtle ring, a lacework of titanium with a diamond like the stolen glint of a star. Then she glared at Sean and the fox gave up its immortality in the next breath. An eternity without his—his, him, he, what a strange thing it was to define oneself as a single thing—bride suddenly seemed unthinkable.

They married in the new world. A destination wedding, she’d called it, and he’d kissed her knuckles as she listed its wonders, amused at his own predicament. This new world would indubitably be identical to the last: full of conflict, full of adventure, full of people. One day, it’d be coronated as the pinnacle of civilization. One day, some centuries after that moment, it would die, and a historian would affix it to their records, pin the memory in place with paragraphs of dry observation.

The fox had seen it all before.

But this was the last world he’d see too, the last century he’d live.

“Do you think this is too much?” She asked, worried.

“No,” said the fox, infinity dripping like amber from his fingertips.  “In fact, I’m not sure it’s enough.”

She planned all the details, of course. Sean was a scholar, an ascetic removed from the vagaries of modern life, and Erin was the one who’d travelled this new world, aide to a coven of diplomats. It made sense that she’d be the one to decide the particulars. Her family had, quite naturally, been delighted by this. So unlike those other men, her aunts chortled. Sean blushed prettily at their approval, while the fox laughed behind his tails.

The truth was that for all the knowledge that the maneki-neko had bestowed upon him, none of it explained how to strangle confectioners into submission or coerce two hotels to frothing competition, to bleed them with knives made out of sub-clauses until it became impossible to distinguish between loser and victor, their representatives mauled by words.

The wedding was small and the guest list consisted almost entirely of Erin’s relatives. Foxes did not keep many friends, at least not the sort that could present themselves at official ceremonies without being shooed away.