The Long Farewell is a period of somber reflection, a widely recognized stage of life that can afflict many immortal arcanists. It most typically occurs between 30 to 50 years after the end of their adventuring days, when the mortal companions of their youth have begun to show their age and die. The wizard is left, immortal and ageless, facing the long eons ahead, alone.

It is a transitional stage, and there are many schools of thought for how a wizard should navigate it healthily, without sinking into ennui or falling into the dangerous traps of necromancy or chronomancy, with their promises of maintaining mortal things in a changeless state.

Many Colleges advocate for a wizard to spend the latter years of his first century breeding. He is encouraged to breed thoroughly and productively with the companions he spent his formative years with, producing plentiful offspring via which he may maintain their memory. By nurturing these progeny, an immortal's horizons are naturally broadened, transitioning his limited, blinkered view of individual lives, which are so fleeting, to the broader scope of great destinies and bloodlines.

I can still remember reading about The Long Farewell as a boyish adventurer. Me and Gimzle Cogsocket, our young gnome artificer, had pissed ourselves laughing at the thought.

I wasn't laughing, thirty years later, when he showed up on my doorstep, chugging vials of goliath blood like it was going out of style. Not that it was ever in. He had a manic air about him, even for a gnome, as his spine began to telescope upwards and a pair of muscular, grey-skinned breasts tore through his robes.

"Well, what are you waiting for?! Pants off!" he squeaked. "You could drop dead any decade!"

"For gods' sakes, man, you can't be serious! I don't need any more children! I have two sons!"

"Wonderful, you made a start without me!" he crowed in delight. "I'll take them too! The more the merrier!" As his robes gave way entirely, he patted his broad midriff. "Did you know goliaths have three wombs? It'll be a family reunion in my belly!"

"My wife will be back any minute," I growled.

"Even better! Is she fertile?" he smiled, stooping to fit his vast female body through my door.