Reflections
Despite their darkness, the woods are brimming with life as you and your family — your whole family — pick a path through them. Ahead, you can hear flames gently crackling, and smoke wafts towards you on the breeze. Leopold and Maxwell.
Bee.
The seven of you are gathering together to celebrate. The Heretic — Ninapis, to give him the name he chose, the name he deserves — has been restored. Maxwell is real. It’s taken time, conversations, tears and shouting alike for both you and Leopold to get this far, but you’ve done it. You’ve done it. The fire leaps light in the clearing where, once, hundreds died, and you laugh and talk and marvel at the way everything has resolved. Your brother is here — and, when your hand knocks against his as you pass a bowl of rich stew around the fire, towards Elya, he does not snap, does not immediately reach for the dagger he still carries in his belt, but brushes it off with a shrug.
He’s real, now, too.
The light in the Temple shines a different shade of red every time you visit. Though still reeling somewhat from Baba’s death, it’s begun to grow lively again, full of colour. You bring more colour, more stories, with you each and every time, handing them over to Falza like jewel-wrapped gifts. You bring the mirror, too — which never, no matter how many times you look deep into it, searching beyond the glass, seems to lead to Mirabel. Its twisted, broken form burns a hole in your pocket.
In the end, you do it all at once. It takes a long while before Falza is ready to venture into the city again, but when he does, you leave the Temple into a golden sunset, light sparkling off the windows and waterways and turning the city itself into a shimmering haze. Another kaleidoscope.
When you hand Falza the mirror, he stops. It is a long, heart-swallowing moment before he turns to you, eyes brilliant with unsheddable tears. And you and your friend, your former god, release your unspent grief together in a street suffused with a dying, beautiful light.
Years later, the people will tell a story. Of a heroine, a Protagonist, who burnt so much larger than life that life itself stretched out a hand to her, gave her one last hour of reprieve before the End snatched her from its grasp. Of a god, who spoke in nothing but riddles, and whose simple gifts made far more difference than a thousand angry Words, killed at the last by a daughter fractured and broken in two. Of Ahmed, an Antagonist, a mirror-man who dazzled the truth out of sight but still gave himself up for the sake of the world. And of a mission, to ensure that their story was shared. A confidence that arced up and out of the rubble of another tale, that united four disparate, damaged souls in a project to preserve the past.
Years later, that story will be told.