Torikki, keeper of a shrine

The wish, as spoken: let him never die.

Read back, in order. He does not die. Nothing else in the wording moves. He keeps living, and the living keeps taking. Sight thins first, then strength, then the voice down to a sound with no words left in it.

The tellings end two ways: a goddess shuts him in a bright room, or he becomes the small brown thing that sings all summer and cannot say what it meant.

The mistake was one missing word. You asked for never. You did not say at what age.

Cost paid: his youth, never requested; her dawns, spent on a husband who becomes a noise; a door that stays shut.

Second file. What I do: a wish, returned exactly as spoken, with the cost it hid. Bring one, if you have one.