The ocean sang a lullaby.
An old woman—how she thought of herself, even if it wasn't true—who should have been up and about napped in a shady alcove on a tropical island far from the place she called home. She was awoken by a boy—her son—gently stroking her graying hair, having known just where to find her, as he always did.
"It's time to go," whispered Silas, the boy.
Jessamine said nothing in return, but she rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She hadn't been out that long, had she? No, the sun was still high in the sky. Had the others decided they were ready to go back to the lodge? Was she the only one who really enjoyed being out here, away from it all? They'd all come at her insistence, despite some protest—there was always so much going on—but she'd thought it would be good for them. She'd thought they had agreed.
The child laid his small hand on his mother's cheek, breaking her free from her mental trap.
"Come on," he encouraged. "Follow me."
He wasn't oriented back towards the beach. He seemed to want her to go with him into the woods that hid this place from the rest of the island. They seemed sparse enough, but there was a kind of murk that hung about them, something low and misty and ephemeral.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"You'll see," said Silas. "Trust me."
She did trust him. He was hers.
Silas had never been what one might call a normal boy, always much too bright and much too calm and much too unafraid to let the world see how much of everything he understood, but she hadn't exactly been a normal mother. It had always been easier with him than it was with Lucia.
Jessamine's daughter reminded her of herself, all headstrong determination wrapped up in a brittle shell, but she had no interest in the weird and the wonderful. At her age, Jessamine had spent her free time chasing forbidden thrills and playing dangerous games, but Lucia wanted none of that. She took after her father, perhaps. Or maybe she just didn't want to end up like Elias.
If she was honest with herself, Jessamine didn't really know what her son wanted out of life, either. He seemed always somehow only halfway there, living on the periphery of his humanity, present but unaccounted for. But he was still so very young. He had time to find his way. She could help him, if she tried.
They had been walking through the woods for only a few minutes, wending between scraggly trees with sparse foliage, when she felt something change. A new pressure hung in the air, clinging to her breath, weighing down her lungs. It wasn't the first time she had felt this, but she'd been too young to notice it, back then. It hadn't hit her body this way.
Jessamine yawned as her ears popped, adjusting to the sudden change in atmosphere, and then some deeper wavelength of the world around them rippled and she and Silas were no longer in the forest, but somewhere else entirely.
Rolling plains of silver grass, high as her ankles, spread out in every direction as far as she could see. She couldn't see far—the world was suffused with a kind of stagnant twilight, just bright enough to see but not enough that you could ever be quite sure of what you were seeing. And then there was the moon.
It hung over their heads, so close that it filled half the sky, but it was much too dim, lacking the brilliant glow of the moon she knew. She struggled to trace familiar features, those same bright-edged hollows that she'd looked up at her whole life, only magnified.
"A spirit moon," described Silas, "illuminated by earthlight in a land with no sun."
"That was a passage," Jessamine gasped, her words finally catching up with her thoughts. "We're on the other side."
"In a sense," said Silas, with half a nod. "All the spirits that were are gone, those you knew and those you did not, every one incinerated along with the wishing tree. Their domain, too, was reduced to ash, but from that dust formed a new land and a new firmament and now, days on, new life has taken root."
He crouched in the grass, running his fingers through its tufts.
"This place is still young, like me," he continued. "Our boundaries are not so well-defined. That's why it was a strange crossing. That is why our next crossings will be stranger still. Some day soon, I hope, it will come into its own. When it does, it may be like it was before or it may be something entirely new and different. Only time will see."
Jessamine stared at her son, open-mouthed.
"How do you know all this?" she breathed.
Silas looked up at her, meeting her gaze fully for the first time since he'd roused her from her nap. There was a quiet sadness in his eyes that made her want to run and hide, but there was no fear there, no anger. Whatever had happened and whatever was still to come, he did not blame her. He loved her just the same and he always would.
"I've always known it, in one way or another," he explained. "You passed between when I was in utero. This place—or its like—has been a part of me since before my birth and, in some manner, I have always been a part of it."
"Why didn't you say something before?" she pushed, holding her panic at bay.
"It wasn't my time," he said, with a shrug. "And you wouldn't have believed me. You've never been so quick to trust mortals as you have spirits. Here, with proof before you, you'll make no argument. Back there, it would only have made you worry."
She slammed her eyes shut, seeking the comfort of the searing white gaze and its brethren beyond. They were there. They had not left her. Thusia and Escuz and the wishing tree were still a part of her. Nothing that had happened to her was a lie.
Which meant that Silas was telling the truth, too. All of it.
Jessamine fell to her knees in the grass beside the boy and wrapped him in her arms. He sank into her, for this moment—and maybe never again—just a little boy, just her child. The hug was as warm and bright as the passage that had first brought them close. They lingered together for a long time, perhaps too long, but it could never have been long enough.
Silas pulled away first.
"We need to move," he said. "There are no spirits in this place, not yet, but there is life. Where there is life there is also danger."
He set off at a quick walk, cutting through the grassy hills, and his mother followed after.
It was impossible to say how long they walked. The grasslands stretched to every horizon, rising and falling in waves but shifting little otherwise, as if this one plain was the whole world. One thing was changing: the grass was growing taller—or perhaps the ground was falling deeper. Where it had only been as high as her ankles before, now the sea of silver grass tickled the backs of her knees.
The moon above them had not moved from its oppressive place in the sky, further deepening the unsettling sensation of stillness in motion. It did seem to flicker from time to time. The dim light that shone across its peaks and valleys vaguely scintillated, twinkling in what could conceivably be a reflection of mortal civilization. She considered that Silas's description might have been literal, that the moon here reflected the light of the her Earth, an anchor in both domains, eternally bridging the gap between them.
"Are the spirits really all gone?" she asked.
Silas glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes falling across Jessamine's in a quick flash of motion.
"They are," he confirmed. "You burned them, through and through. All that linger are their echoes, housed in the minds of children of the light and the dark, but those are not spirits any more than the recording of a song is the singer. They are frozen, out of time, never changing, never making anything new."
Nothing about that made Jessamine feel even a little bit better.
"I'm sorry," said Silas, after a while. "It's easy for me to forget that it's you I'm talking about. You're not just a child of the light, you're a person."
"I'm your mother," she grunted.
"And that," he agreed. "And I'm glad for it, because you are a fighter and we are found."
Silas stopped dead at the crest of a mound that was somewhat larger than those that surrounded it. Jessamine pulled up close behind him and saw what had arrested their forward progress. In the middle distance, several shapes had begun to form, rising up from the dirt between the tall grass, made of mud and clay. They seemed to have arms and legs and maybe even misshapen heads, but they were utterly inhuman, squashed together at bizarre angles, both recognizably organic and wholly alien.
The mud creatures—golems, Jessamine decided, borrowing the name—weren't just ahead of them, either. They'd begun to spring up all around them, forming a loose circle, a lasso drawing ever tighter. If they didn't find a way to break free of the loop, they would be swallowed by the lumbering earth.
"I'll make a hole, then we run," suggested Jessamine.
She balled her fists and began to size up which of the golems seemed smallest and most vulnerable. It wasn't clear if they even could be hurt, but just about anything could be knocked down if you hit it hard enough. Maybe that would be enough.
"I think you will find your fists insufficient," said Silas, "but look around you. What is a blade of grass but another kind of sword?"
Jessamine narrowed her eyes in disbelief. He couldn't be serious. Except that belief was precisely the heart of the matter. When she'd hoisted a wooden blade and believed it to be a sword of cold steel, that had been easy enough—a slight translation of materials. But to believe a piece of grass to be a deadly weapon, that was something else entirely.
Could she even believe in things the way she had thirty years ago?
Of course she could. Her imagination had done nothing but grow in the years since she had the mind and experience of a child. She was so much more herself, now. She had known so much more of what could be. To imagine a sword in a blade of grass was hardly a challenge at all.
Jessamine plucked a particularly long and straight leaf from the ground at her toes and drew forth a blade that sparkled in the dim moonlight. She charged down the hill and cut clean through the nearest two golems in a single stroke. They made no sound, having no mouths, but sharp protrusions rippled along the surface of their skin, radiating out from their sudden division, turning them briefly into ungainly masses of clay spikes before they collapsed into puddles of silt.
Silas moved behind her like a shadow, staying in the wake of her sword as it flew. She carved through golems as they sprouted from the terrain ahead of them, drenching the ground with muck but keeping their way clear. In spite of her fear that one or the other of them would slip on the golems' slick remains, they kept their balance and maintained their speed as they tore across the grasslands. Soon, her only fear was that her arm would tire before the golems gave up their chase. But then, as quickly as they had first appeared, they fell away, sinking back into the dirt.
"Keep going," Silas shouted, from just behind her. "We're nearly there."
"Nearly where?" Jessamine inquired.
"The stone forest," her son replied, as if that were explanation enough.
Jessamine searched the horizon for any signs of this new formation, anything that could resemble either stone or forest, but the grass and the hills went on and on, the grass growing ever higher—now she waded through it like the ocean just off the shore, swallowing the land in a sudden drop, making her fight to keep her head just above the surface of its swaying swells.
It didn't occur to Jessamine until she slipped below that she was looking in the wrong place for their destination. In no more than a moment, the ground beneath her feet turned liquid, stealing her momentum and drawing her down, swallowing her in immense and deepest darkness. She tried to scream, but there was no air in which to make a sound.
She thought of Silas. He was with her, wherever she was now. If this was their end, then it was her fault that they ended here. She hoped it wouldn't be. She still wasn't ready. Maybe she would never be. The eyes behind her eyes illuminated her strangled thoughts in the endless, choking darkness, until they, too, were snuffed out like candles and nothing of her remained.
////
Jessamine spit the dirt out of her mouth and vomited the mud from her lungs. Someone was rubbing her back. Silas. That was Silas's hand. He was still alive. They both were.
Struggling to pull the air back into her lungs, she kept her eyes wrenched closed, watching the spinning colors of asphyxiation pass in front of her inner eyes like a curtain. Silas had said they were a copy, a simulacrum, something that looked real but could never truly replace the real thing, and never did she feel that more than now. They would know how to guide her through this darkness, towards the light. She didn't want to be alone.
"You're not alone," soothed her son. "I'm here with you."
She opened her eyes, turning them sharply on him. He didn't flinch, but he did grant her a soft, sad smile.
"Sorry," he acknowledged. "Don't worry; I can't read your thoughts, not in the way you'd imagine. It's just that sometimes you feel so much that it's hard not to get the gist. You've felt so much for so long. It isn't fair. I've always wished that I could do more."
Jessamine flushed, suddenly reconsidering all her interactions with her child across the short years of his childhood. She'd lived with few regrets and without shame, but something about this revelation of the breadth of his understanding felt invasive if not outright violating. No child should know the depths of their parent's heart. It wasn't for them.
She wondered if he knew what she was feeling now. If he did, he didn't show it.
"We should get moving, as soon as you can," said Silas. "We need to find the library keeper."
They had traded one stone sky for another, only unlike the half-occluding moon, the cavernous ceiling of the cave structure above hid all hints of the would-be sky. Somehow, she could still see, but that was the way of things, here: light—and darkness—was everywhere and nowhere all at once. She couldn't make out just where they'd fallen down from, but it didn't much matter: there was no way up. The span of the cave was no less expansive than the span of the grassland had been before. Everywhere she looked, vast stalactites and towering stalagmites met at their previous ends, forming funnel-ended columns that stretched from above to below in a manner not unlike the sweeping arcs of aboveground trees. They were in a forest, as Silas had said.
She had thought that the dim light that suffused the cavern came from nowhere, but as her eyes adjusted, she realized that wasn't entirely true. It was brighter in one direction than in all the others. A second, more singular light source waited there. If they had one, that must be their destination. So it was in a place like this.
Jessamine scraped off what she could of the dirt and the mud and lifted herself off the ground. She was battered, but nothing seemed broken. It seemed impossible, what with the apparent height of their fall, but again: so it was in a place like this.
"Lead the way," she instructed Silas.
He went off without another word and she followed after, quick as her tired legs would allow.
When they had been walking for some time, she began to notice that not all the columns they wove between were entirely natural. Some, at first, and then many of them had been carved away—not by time or weather but by tools. The lines were too straight, the shapes too intentional, for anything but a conscious hand to have inscribed them. They were shallow, at first, as if the work was not yet complete, but as they drew nearer to the second source of light, towards the center of this place, the work became more refined and its purpose more obvious. Each carving formed a squarish hole in the body of the column, one hole per column, as little or as large as the size of the column would allow, and in each of those holes was a book, or three, or twelve, as many or few as the size of the hole (and the size of the books) would allow.
Jessamine stopped by one such bookshelf and extracted its contents, a lonely folio bound in thick, leathery material but unmarked on its spine or cover. It was filled with words and no pictures, but the words were in some language she could not comprehend. The script appeared handwritten, not pressed, and flowed in a way that she might expect, as if it had been written in a human tongue, but its characters were as unfamiliar to her as the words they formed. Stranger still, in a world so newly formed, it seemed incredibly old, the pages stained, fragmented, and filled with the heady, mouldering scent of decomposition.
"Where did these come from?" she wondered out loud.
"Who can say?" offered Silas. "But for there to be a library keeper, there must be a library to keep."
She sighed and put the strange book back on its shelf. A third time, she counseled herself that so it was in a place like this—but every time she said the words in her mind, they rang more hollow than the last. On that Halloween, she had questioned nothing, believing only in the chase, pursuing Thusia through horror and violence until her bloody end. If her imagination had expanded as much as she believed, why was she still so compliant?
Movement among the columns drew her attention like a knife. Silas held out a hand, urging for calm, but her fists clenched. She wished her blade of grass hadn't been lost somewhere in the sinkhole.
The thing that stepped into the pale cast of their awareness took all the fight out of her, as quickly as it had filled her up. It appeared to be a child, almost Silas's double, similar in size and stature and indeterminate in gender. At the same time, it was clearly not a child. Though clothed in layers of heaped-upon rags, where its skin was exposed, she could see that it was covered in fine, overlapping scales, like a snake's. Its features were ill-defined, as if they were afraid of prominence, with only three fingers on one hand and four on the other and a flat nose that seemed barely to serve a purpose between two large and cloudy eyes.
"Hello," said Silas, graciously. "Are you the library keeper?"
"Strangers," grunted the creature. "I don't know you."
Its voice was tight and shrill and held the distinct timbre of omnipresent anxiety.
"I am Silas," said her son. "This is Jessamine Less."
He said her name like he was casting a spell, but it had no effect on the other.
"I am Patulcius," said the thing. "I am the library keeper, but I have no library to keep. A villain has absconded with its heart. There is nothing for you here."
"Perhaps we can help," suggested Silas. "We are excellent at finding things."
"Hm," said the creature, unconvinced. "I suppose there is no one else. You can do no worse than no one at all. Come along then, you must be hungry."
Silas took his mother's hand, giving her a gentle squeeze. If there was any way forward, this was it. They would be fools not to follow.
The library keeper went ahead of them. It walked with a limp, ponderously swaying with every other footfall, despite the fact that, from what Jessamine could see, the leg was whole and unharmed, if scaly like the rest of it. As uncomfortable as it had been with their sudden appearance, it seemed to have no compunctions about exposing its whole hindquarters to its sudden guests.
"Is it a spirit?" Jessamine hissed at Silas.
"Not a spirit," Silas corrected. "Not by half. But easy enough to call it a gloaming beast, just the same. It is a fragment of the old world, embedded in the new—not unlike us, in that way."
They entered into a clearing in the stone forest, a low, wide basin, that featured the makings of a little camp. There was what appeared to be a natural well, full to its brim with cold, dark water—Jessamine realized quite suddenly how thirsty she was, especially after swallowing and then regurgitating all that muck—a meager bedroll, and some stone benches, all gathered around a flickering cook-fire, their second source of light, found at last.
"You, stoke the fire," Patulcius directed, pointing at Silas. "You, come with me. We must gather mushrooms, for soup."
"Would it be all right if I had a drink of water, first?" asked Jessamine.
The creature crossed its little arms and narrowed its big eyes.
"If you must," it assented. "But we have no cups."
That didn't bother Jessamine. She knelt at the edge of the well and dipped in both her hands, bringing them together to form a little bowl. The first handful she splashed across her face, sluicing away some of the lingering grime, careful not to let any of the runoff go back into the pristine well. The water was frigid, but all the more refreshing for it. The second handful she swished around in her cheeks and then spat out on the stone, ridding herself of most of the awful tastes that lingered in her mouth. The third handful she drank and it was sweet and beautiful, tasting of no more than the minerals that retained it, the taste of life itself.
Strange that it would be here, entombed below the earth in a fathomless mausoleum, that she would feel the most alive.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," she apologized, drawing beside the creature.
It winced at these words of hers, an act so involuntary that it seemed itself confused by the face it had made. Saying nothing, perhaps unable to process what it might say, it spun around and went off into dark. She followed close behind.
Not far away from the library keeper's camp, the air grew noticeably warmer and damper and the tree-like columns spread out into hollow burrows, apertures to tunnels that led who knew where, perhaps into the very deepest parts of this world—perhaps even back to her own. The mushrooms appeared not long after, growing out of furrows in the bare rock.
"Those," said Patulcius, "and those."
He pointed to a small brown mushroom with an especially round cap, and then to a lacy white mushroom with a long head.
"Not those," he added, pointing at a vibrantly red, flat-capped mushroom.
It was easy enough work, and before long she had collected a hefty mass of mushrooms, cradled within the hem of her blouse, for want of a proper basket.
"Tell me about yourself," requested Jessamine, as they worked.
"About myself?" repeated Patulcius. "What do you mean? I am the library keeper. I keep the library. Or I would do, had a villain not stolen its heart."
"That's not what I mean," sighed Jessamine. "All the spirits I've known—even the gloaming beasts—were something, someone, before they were this. I only figured most of them out after the fact, but since we have this chance to speak, I wondered if you knew."
It plucked mushrooms off the walls of the cavern in silence for several long-held breaths.
"If I were anyone before I was this, it must have been no one," Patulcius concluded. "I have no memory of anything before."
"How long have you been here?" she asked. "How many days?"
"I do not know," the library keeper stated. "There are no days without a sun. There is no time without a sky. The library is timeless and I am its keeper."
"Okay, then," said Jessamine, trying not to let her exasperation show. "There must be something you do know. Tell me about this heart. Tell me about this villain."
"The heart of a library is always a book," said Patulcius, as if that was obvious, "and the villain is always a thief. The book is my book, the only one that really matters, the one that without which there is no me. The thief is the lighthouse keeper, the one who lives at the peak of the red mountain, overlooking the black sea."
It looked at her, assessing her collection of mushrooms and thereby appraising her value.
"Your companion says you are excellent at finding things," it reminded her. "Do they lie?"
"My son is telling the truth," she insisted. "I found the way to the White Stag, and the fastest route through the Labyrinth, and the wishing tree at Christmas. I find things. It's what I do."
The library keeper blinked. If her references had at all resonated with its supposedly absent memory, there was no sign.
"If you say so," it relented. "Let us eat, and then I will show you the way. You will bring my book back to me. Or, you will not. The library will be lost and I will no longer keep it. I will be nothing at all."
"It won't come to that," she assured it. "I won't let you disappear. But how will I know which book it is, when I find it?"
It flinched again at her words, strongly enough that it dropped a few mushrooms from its small clutch. Noticeably confused by this turn of events, it picked them up and dusted them off before it answered, simply and uncharitably.
"You will know," it declared.
That seemed to be the limit of what she could hope to get out of the poor thing, so she made do with silence until they got back to the little basin. Silas had rendered the fire a bit brighter and larger than before, enough to set a pot of well-water bubbling, filling the space with new light and new sound.
Jessamine caught him up to speed while Patulcius stirred the mushrooms into the pot, rendering them gradually into soup. These new revelations, meager and vague as they were, left the boy looking as pensive as the library keeper.
"What's wrong?" she prodded. "Are you afraid?"
Silas laughed ominously, but shook his head.
"I am," he conceded, "but it's not that. I had such a clear vision of this place when we first arrived. I knew where we needed to go. I had a sense of our purpose. But as the day waxes, my understanding wanes. I'm less sure now than I was before. I don't like that."
"Are we still on the right path?" she asked. "Is finding this book what we're supposed to do?"
He nodded, but he wouldn't say the words out loud.
She opened her arms, offering him her embrace, but he waved her away as Patulcius approached, bearing two bowls of soup.
"There are no spoons," said the library keeper. "You will have to make do."
They thanked it and took their bowls. For being made of no more than mushrooms and spring water, the broth was unusually piquant. It occurred to Jessamine that she'd never actually eaten on this side of the divide—her forays had always been much too purposeful and too brief. They had shared tea with Escuz, but she'd never probably broken bread with a spirit. She thought, as she so often did, of Thusia on that first morning, sipping broth from a bottle. The soup was lovely, but a few apples would really bring the meal together.
She finished her portion eagerly, but stopped short of asking for a second helping. Patulcius was so small. It looked like it could use all the nourishment it could get.
There was something about the creature that made her think again of her cousin. The last time they were close, he had been that small, but then he grew up and they grew apart. He'd been gone seven years, now, disappeared out from under his sister's watchful eye, leaving no trace and never to be seen again. If she had been one to indulge in cliche, she'd lament that they'd parted on bad terms, but that just wasn't true.
Had they shared more than three or four words in the years after his abduction and retrieval? Surely not. Jessamine had heard stories through their extended family, rumors of his downward spiral, but she never reached out, certain that he wouldn't want her to. She was a constant reminder of all he'd wanted that couldn't ever be his. He didn't want her in his life—and Rebecca was far better suited to being his keeper, anyway. Everyone agreed.
That was why no one fussed when Rebecca refused to hold a funeral.
That was why Elias had no grave.
She and Silas stacked their empty bowls and set them by the edge of the cook-fire. The library keeper sat on the edge of its bedroll, sipping at its own soup, far from finished.
"You're going, then?" asked Patulcius.
There was a touch of petulance in its tone, like it didn't want them to go, even though its existence depended on their departure.
"We are," said Jessamine, "unless there's more we can do for you here."
The library keeper's strange little face tightened, then relaxed again.
"There is not," it concluded.
Patulcius stood, directing their attention with a wave of its bowl.
"Go that way," it directed, "between those columns and onward. When the way forks, take the righteous path and you will rise, as you have ever risen. You will see the red mountain when you emerge from underground. You will not be able to miss it. Approach it from the oceanside. It will not seem possible, but any other road will run to ruin."
Jessamine looked at her son. Maybe they'd simply been underground too long, or maybe it was his clouded sense of purpose, but all the glow had gone out of him. He resembled Patulcius now more than he had before: two tiny, glum figures in the wavering firelight.
"Come on," she offered. "I'll lead the way, this time."
////
They could not miss the red mountain, as the library keeper had said. No one could have. It was a looming colossus in the middle distance, a jagged peak twisted around a cone of belching flame, the lash of its hot tongue reaching so high that one might believe it could scorch the surface of the low-hanging moon. The volcano wholly dominated the landscape onto which they emerged, the lot of it one vast sweep of pyroclastic slag, only barely kept in check on the one side by a violently churning ocean.
That egregious landform was made all the more unwelcoming by the fact that they did not inhabit it alone. Clusters of golems wandered about, dotting the rocky hills and valleys wherever Jessamine looked. She called them golems, again, but they were distinctly of this place and not the other, their bulbous forms now made not of bubbling mud but of boiling lava. They moved with a halting gait, their surfaces cooling to glossy stone as the ocean breeze caressed their surface, gradually slowing them until they stopped dead, only to lurch back to life a minute or two later as the heat inside them shattered their obsidian shells.
"I don't think a blade of grass is going to cut it," Jessamine remarked. "The tide might do the trick, but I don't think we can afford to wait that long. Plus, Patulcius told us to approach from the oceanside, and I don't think we can do that if everything is underwater."
She expected Silas to offer his own insight, but he remained silent. He'd grown more and more reticent as they made their way up through the tunnels and his paced had slowed enough that on more than one occasion she had to take him by the hand and pull him along, lest he be left behind on the wrong side of a narrow bend.
His eyes were on the moon, entranced by its subtly flickering reflections, the idea of the memory of the world they'd once occupied. A reminder of home.
"The sooner we find this book," said Jessamine, "the sooner we get back. If we're lucky, time will be kind to us and they won't even know we've been gone."
"They will know," Silas murmured.
Her son blinked away a tear and set a hard stare at the nearest bluff.
"I think we can get down, there," he suggested.
When she offered him her hand, he did not take it.
This was where Jessamine's failures as a parent revealed themselves most plainly. She had no trouble scaling mountains for her children, of that there was no doubt, but when it came to their hearts, she found herself adrift. That was Will's area of expertise. He understood people in a way she never had, even—especially—within her family. Perhaps that was why she secretly preferred the company of spirits: they either told you exactly what they wanted or they left you well enough alone.
"What do we know about the lighthouse keeper?" she asked as they made their crossing.
The ground beneath their feet was unstable, hard on the surface but squishy just below, as if it hadn't yet settled properly into solid rock. With the recent experience of sinking through the earth fresh in her mind, Jessamine stepped lightly, ready to hurl herself onto safer ground the moment her heels went in too deep.
"Nothing," Silas grumbled. "Both the lighthouse and its keeper are unknown to me. I felt the pull of the stone forest, but now I am unmoored."
"Are we still on the right path?" she checked.
He nodded, only half-minding her as he jumped across a steaming fissure between two uneasy clumps of stone.
"One can be lost and still be moving in the right direction," he confirmed, when he was safely on the other side. "There is no other way for us to go but forward."
The cliffs along the shore were stepped in rugged tiers, each one dropping three or four times her own height—too much to jump down without injury—before jutting out into a new shelf.
They reminded her strangely of the carved nooks of the stone forest. In a moment of madness, she imagined a giant Patulcius rising out of the sea and plucking them off the ground like mushrooms, depositing each of them in their proper place among the stacks. It would be a faster way down, that much was certain, and there would be so much less risk of scuffing her knees. It was also a mixed metaphor.
"Hold on," said Silas.
He grabbed her by the arm, stopping her before she could go over the next ledge.
They had made it four layers down and still had at least a dozen to go before they reached the shore. The air had only gotten heavier, hotter, and wetter the lower they went, enough so that it was hard to believe they wouldn't boil by the time they hit the bottom. That would have been the least of their worries, though, if she'd kept going headlong, barely present outside of her spiraling thoughts: there were golems on the shelf below.
It was only three of them, but that was enough. Even when two of them were frozen in stone, one still lumbered about. Worse, one of them was exceptionally large, as if it had absorbed several of its kin. If it could move, it could reach anywhere on the rock shelf in the span of a heartbeat. They could try to go down while the big one was frozen, but there was no way to anticipate just when it would stop moving and unless they threw caution to the wind—which was as good as throwing their lives away—they'd never make it down the cliff quickly enough to capitalize on the opportunity.
"We can't get past them," she concluded out loud.
"It wouldn't matter if we could," Silas groused. "Do you see the ripples of heat through the air? There are golems on the stratum below that one, too. More of them."
"Back up the way we came?" Jessamine offered. "We can go along the bluff and find another route down."
Silas just shook his head.
As if on cue, the hot red-white arm of a golem stretched out above their heads from the shelf above, dimming rapidly to glossy black, but hanging over them just the same. Where there was one, there were others.
"We are trapped," said Silas.
"On land, maybe," Jessamine countered. "But what about air and sea?"
"What?" her son spat, all his odd composure suddenly gone. "No, no way."
Jessamine leaned out over the edge of their beleaguered shelf. With enough of a running start and the right angle of trajectory, they could clear the shelf below without too much trouble. The cliff turned inward here, each ledge curving closer to the base of the mountain, which left nothing but space between here and the ocean far below. It was a risk—any fall from this height could easily be fatal, even dropping into water—but it was the clearest and likely the only way out they had.
"I taught your sister to cliff-dive when she was younger than you," said Jessamine. "She took to it like a pelican."
"I am not my sister," muttered Silas. "I can barely swim. You've watched me all week, mama. I've been on the beach with a book."
"You don't need to swim," she insisted. "You just need to float. The current will take care of the rest. Look: the tide is coming in."
Silas growled a curse under his breath, something old and raw. Jessamine did not begrudge him his profanity. She was pretty sure she'd be saying worse things the moment her feet left the ground. Instead, she took his hand in hers, gripping it so tightly that he could not pull away, walked him back to the rocky wall, and aligned him with the wind.
"This isn't how we die," she said, half a prayer.
"It isn't," he agreed, "but it's one step closer."
Together, they bolted to the cliff's edge and sprang, jumping as far as their legs could take them, whirling, wheeling, tumbling until they crashed feet first into the waves. The impact stole her breath and her equilibrium, sending her so reeling that not even the searing eyes could offer an anchor in the raging storm. Spray cracked like thunder in her ears as her head broke above the surface, only to be yanked down again into a vortex of force and motion.
And then, just as quickly as it began, it was over. Her body beached upon the black sand as the ocean released her from its thrashing grip. It tickled at her ankles, yes. The tide was still coming in. But the swell had had its way with her and now she was free to go, if only she could find the strength to move.
The sound of a giggling child filled her heart with sudden joy.
Jessamine sat up on her knees and saw her son, a stone's throw away, soaked through, bedraggled, and more obviously excited to be alive than he'd been in all the years she had known him. He whooped and cheered, dancing like a flame, jeering at the moon for the hubris to look down on him. Silas beat his chest and roared at the earth beneath his toes and then, not unlike the golems above, he went still and silent as the grave.
"I'd like to do that again," he said, when she came within earshot. "I think I'd enjoy it even more the second time. But we don't get that. That isn't for us. All we get is this."
He pointed along the beach, to the point where the red mountain met the black sea. Even from this distance, there was a clear path up the mountain's otherwise sheer backside. It switched back and forth in a tight zig-zag line, somehow appearing to be a natural formation but just as effective as a hand-laid stair. The climb would take them hours, but it featured no obvious obstruction. All they had to do was walk. The lighthouse keeper and its stolen heart were waiting.
"Are you sure we can't stay a while longer on the beach?" Jessamine asked.
She knew what the answer was, but that didn't stop her from asking.
"Most of them won't forgive you," said Silas, answering a question she didn't yet know to ask. "But some of them will, eventually. A few of them will understand. I hope that will be enough. I cannot offer you more."
With that, he started walking, down the beach and up the mountain path.
////
Jessamine first heard the screams over an hour before they reached the peak. They were singular in origin, the cries of just one creature, although they were as loud and cacophonous as a whole host. Without a doubt, they were screams of pain, but also of anguish. Most of all, they were screams of rage.
The lighthouse keeper, whoever and whatever it was, was angry.
"Do you think it's already lost the book it stole?" Jessamine quipped.
Silas apparently didn't find that funny. He just kept climbing, three steps ahead of her on the long stair. That was fine. They'd find out, soon enough.
There was little preamble to summiting the mountain, no celebratory prelude or warning sign. After more flights than they could possibly count, the stairs simply stopped. When next they stepped up, they emerged onto a wide, flat ring of stone, which fell away precipitously at its center down to what Jessamine suspected—and would soon confirm—was the molten mouth of the volcano. Suspended directly over the vent, hung from a strange apparatus of lashed-together bars of scabby steel and trapped within a glass cage, was a book.
"Welcome, travelers," roared the ring's other occupant. "You have made it to the top of the world—and your journey's end."
The thing was monstrous both in size and demeanor, spanning at least twice her height—thrice Silas's—to the tips of its ears with arms so long that their clawed hands scraped along the ground. Its hide was hairless but leathery, its hue mottled and patchily blackened, as if it had spent much too long in close company with fire. The creature's eyes, if it had them at all, were so sunken behind a heavy brow that they reflected no light, though its long fangs glistened with spittle or venom, possibly both. It was largely symmetrical, but for one feature: one of its legs ended just below the knee and only a pale spike of bone carried its weight from there on down.
"We mean you neither offense nor harm," announced Jessamine, "but we have come to retrieve the library's heart. Are you the lighthouse keeper?"
She had to shout to make her voice heard over the constant howl of the wind at this height, but the creature on the other side of ring seemed not to suffer from such an inconvenience. Perhaps that was why its screams had carried so far.
"I am Clusivius," it boomed. "I have what you seek, but I question your purpose. Did Patulcius tell you that the book belong to it? By your face, I see that it did. It told you that I was a thief."
"It called you a villain, more specifically," Jessamine corrected. "Was it wrong?"
She suspected it was unwise to goad anyone that could easily rip her in two, but somehow the banter felt right. This wasn't a thing to be addressed politely.
"Hm," said Clusivius, considering. "Wrong on the one count, right on the other."
It did not specify which count was which.
"Come," the lighthouse keeper commanded. "If we are to discuss terms, it must be done over a meal. Follow me down to the garden. No one eats without a share of the labor."
It beckoned towards her, large hand swimming through the air, but it did not wait for her to move before it turned and went over the back edge of the ring, on its way to some lower part of the mountain.
Jessamine glanced at Silas for some kind of reassurance.
"Go," he insisted. "It'll be safe for you. I'll see what I can do about the book while you're away."
She thought about giving him another hug, but the lighthouse keeper had already dipped out of view and she didn't want to fall too far behind, so she flashed her son an awkward thumbs-up and jogged after the mountain's host.
For all its heft, the thing moved quickly and seemed only to pick up speed as their course took them off of the bare face of the mountain and into a smooth tunnel that she supposed had once served as a lava tube. She had to fight the urge to strip down to her underclothes as the already-thick air grew immediately and intensely hotter, drenching her in a sudden layer of sweat. Then again, that sweat might be the only thing keeping her garments from burning right off of her in the volcanic heat, so she counted herself lucky, if horribly uncomfortable.
"If you did not steal the book," Jessamine wondered aloud, as much to distract herself as out of curiosity, "why would Patulcius say that you had? I've never known a spirit to lie."
"I am not a spirit, though, am I," reasoned Clusivius.
Its voice was rough, like sandpaper on gravel, but though it exploded, gratuitously filling the space within the tunnel, she found it oddly un-oppressive. The lighthouse keeper had a voice that made you listen, but that was just how it was. It couldn't help that its lungs moved so much air.
"Nor is that coward Patulcius," it continued. "Nor for that matter are you, Jessamine Less. I am less certain about your companion."
"My son is not a spirit," stammered Jessamine.
"No?" questioned the lighthouse keeper. "Well, maybe not yet. Give him time."
She could muster no argument against that, but neither did she give it much consideration. It wasn't a possibility she wanted to entertain. The spirits were gone and all that remained were their ghosts. Their time was over. There was no future in being a spirit and Silas had to have a future, otherwise what was the point of any of it?
Clusivius ducked into a side passage, moving briefly beyond her awareness. When she followed after, she felt the climate shift again, just as rapidly as before. The temperature plummeted and a welcome humidity returned to the air. It was less dark in this space than it had been in the tunnel, too, and by that lilting amber light she could see how much of the little, round room was incongruously and vibrantly alive.
Leafy plants and creeping vines sprouted along every wall, some in the guise of recognizable herbs and grasses, others weirder in shape but no less obviously vegetable in nature. Many of the plants sprouted directly from drilled gaps in the rock, but many more flourished in a series of orderly troughs and basins, each filled to their lips with clear, clean water.
The lighthouse keeper ran a claw through each reservoir as it passed, gently agitating its contents without disturbing its prize. There was a practiced ease to the ritual, as if this were its primary preoccupation. For its own sake, she hoped that was true.
"If you are not a thief," Jessamine considered aloud, "then you must be a villain."
"Indeed," Clusivius agreed.
"How so?" she challenged.
It hunched its shoulders and ostensibly checked one of the small aqueducts that fed water to the garden from some source deeper within the red mountain. The way its fluttering fingers stilled, dallying overlong on the sculpted edge of one such waterway, made her think that perhaps it did not know the answer to the question—or, even worse, that it knew but was disinclined to share that knowledge with her.
"Villainy takes many forms," it expounded, at last. "Most are as simple as a lack of imagination. My crimes were of a similar nature, I am sure."
"That's hardly an answer," she complained. "Do you not remember who you were before, either?"
"No," grunted Clusivius, a bit too quickly. "I was no one before. I am even less now."
"If that's the case," she sighed, "then why were you screaming?"
It turned fully to face her in response, but she felt no threat behind its menacing bulk. Whether because of Silas's reassurance or something innate that lurked beneath this poor creature's surface, she knew that it would cause her no harm. For just a moment, its eyes were unshaded by its brow. She thought she saw kindness in them, but maybe it was just a trick of the light.
"Go through that door," it instructed, pointing. "Gather forks and cups and bowls and bring me a basket. I will harvest."
Jessamine half expected it to be playing a trick on her, but on the other side of the narrow opening was a shallow closet, stacked high with an expansive assortment of dishes and cutlery. She selected three broad bowls, each one formed of obsidian glass, a matching set of sandstone cups, and a trio of two-tined, wrought iron forks. Several baskets hung on hooks along the near wall, each woven from dried broadleaf grasses, possibly the very same from which she'd drawn a sword that morning. She chose one that seemed a good fit for greens for three and tried not to think too obviously about how she might extract a blade from it in an emergency.
"Good," Clusivius assessed. "These will do."
The lighthouse keeper had already collected two fistfuls of leaves, so it unloaded them into the basket before it took it from her, careful not to let its claws even so much as brush the skin of her fingers.
"Go on ahead," it suggested, turning back to its work. "You and your boy can set the table. I won't be long."
Jessamine didn't know how to process this eerie sense of domesticity.
"Clusivius," she addressed it. "Why go to all this trouble? We represent as much a threat to you as you do to us. Why indulge us with any hospitality. I am the literal destroyer of this world. You don't invite me to lunch!"
She didn't need to shout to be heard in the garden, but she found herself shouting just the same. Maybe it was the duplication of the ritual that had put her over the edge. She'd had the same thoughts when Patulcius had offered them soup, but she'd been too dazed by her escape from near-death to put the thoughts to words.
"Do you really think I am a threat to you?" rasped the lighthouse keeper. "My rage has never been anything but impotent. You asked before why I scream. I scream because I know not what else to do. I am a prisoner on this mountain—in this body. I am pitiful, incomplete, and will never be more than I am for so long as I live. What would harm upon you grant me but another reason to scream?"
It crushed the stalk of leaves that was presently held in its hand, grinding them to pulp, making her watch as good food went pointlessly to waste. The water once held within the leaves, so carefully cultivated and preserved and guided to make its growth possible, ran over its palm in little droplets, like nothing more than spilled blood.
"Violence is easy," it observed. "I care not for your history of destruction. It does not impress me. I want nothing of it. Go, now, or the salad will spoil."
She did as it told her, fleeing the garden and running back up the tube. It wasn't a complicated route to retrace, which suited her fine. The less she had to think right now, the better.
"Have you seen a table?" she asked Silas when she returned to the summit.
Her son sat at the edge of the crater, his legs dangling over the fiery drop. He nodded and pointed to an alcove halfway around the perimeter of the ring, where a low slab of masoned stone lay partially concealed by the otherwise natural formations that surrounded it. It was too low for chairs and too long and narrow for them to be arranged equidistantly, so she set one place on either end, one for Clusivius and one for Silas, and put herself on the broad side, nearer to her child.
"What about the book?" she asked, once the places were set.
"I have it," said Silas.
She hadn't noticed that the glass cage was empty. There it was, resting on his lap, the heart of Patulcius's library—or whatever it was that Clusivius claimed it was, if it wasn't that.
"Should we make a run for it?" asked Jessamine. "I don't know how long we have before it returns."
"No, I don't think so," said Silas. "I think this is where we need to be. I have questions for the lighthouse keeper. Best to ask them at the table."
He rose and moved quickly, brushing past her without letting her see more than a flash of the book before he could settle himself at table. Silas placed the book in the crook of his crossed legs, carefully hiding it behind the occlusion of the table, such that unless Clusivius intended to serve them individually, it would be unlikely to notice the object of her son's perfidy.
Jessamine resisted the urge to ask him to show her the book. She had seen that it was thick, that it was bound in something like leather, and that it had words embossed on its cover in gold foil, but she hadn't been able to make out more than one word in passing: tree. Of all the things the book could be about, she didn't want it to be that.
The lighthouse keeper reappeared a few seconds thereafter. It carried the basket in one hand, piled high with greens, an iron pitcher in the other, and it slammed both down on the table before it slumped in an ungainly heap. In spite of the contents of its garden pantry, it appeared uncomfortable with the idea of hosting guests. Then again, the mountain golems hardly seemed like sparkling conversationalists, so perhaps it was simply out of practice.
"Tell me, Clusivius," said Silas, "what do you think of the light?"
The boy did not raise his voice, but his words cut easily through the noise of the wind.
The creature made a great show of staring up at the moon as it filled its bowl and its cup and then slid both pitcher and basket down the length of the table.
"It is dim," it announced.
"Do not play the fool," her son chided. "You know of which light I speak."
"I do," Clusivius agreed, "and my answer is unchanged. The light is dim and dull, lacking both tenacity and conviction. It shines from above, self-righteously clinging to its unchallenged ideals. The light leaves no room for doubt and thus it is blind to its own malfeasance."
Jessamine filled her bowl with greens and passed the basket to Silas, who left it on the table, undisturbed.
"That is a child's understanding," said Silas, incongruously. "That is a child's resentment. You wished to hold the sun to your breast and hated it for staying so far away. You concluded it must be wrong for refusing to love you in the way you desired."
The lighthouse keeper threw back its head and laughed, though the sound was barely distinguishable from a scream.
"Tell me, then," Silas continued on, "what do you think of the dark?"
Clusivius stopped laughing.
"I try not to think of the dark," it spat.
"Indulge me," the boy countered. "If you wish me gone, these are my terms."
"You speak of terms, but you have neglected your meal," the creature challenged.
Silas took a bare handful of salad and dropped it into his bowl.
"You make to eat, but you have offered no labor," the monster snarled.
"That you remain unaware of my labor does not mean it has gone unperformed," the child snarled back.
The lighthouse keeper's hidden eyes darted to the cage that hung above the mouth of the volcano and saw for the first time that it was empty.
"Betrayer!" it shrieked.
Silas had considered Jessamine both a fighter and a mother, but neither instinct—martial or maternal—was quick enough to check Clusivius's furious advance.
It smashed its obsidian bowl, scattering the uneaten greens to the wind, and snatched up the largest, sharpest piece. Brandishing that black dagger, it crossed the table in a single bound, and drew its unforgiving blade across Silas's tender throat. A gout of hot blood splashed upon the stone table.
Jessamine began to scream and the world went white.
////
She was falling again, tumbling, only not through the earth nor through the air, but through space and time. On second thought, maybe she wasn't falling at all. Maybe the world was falling around her. Maybe only she was still. She and the boy in her arms. Her child. Her dying child.
White eyes seared her dulled thoughts, but they failed to spark a new flame. Gold eyes dazzled her dimmed hopes, but they failed to secure a new call. Orange eyes, deepest and brightest, gleamed against the all-devouring darkness, filling her again with endless light.
The world around Jessamine came back into stuttering focus. She was no longer at the top of the red mountain. There was no more red mountain, nor black sea. There was no more stone forest, nor grassy hills. There was nothing left at all but a boundless plane of glittering white sand beneath a moon so dark and large and low that it had made itself the whole sky.
There was nothing left at all, that was, except for the other three.
Clusivius, the lighthouse keeper, cast down from above. Patulcius, the library keeper, raised up from below. Silas, his mother's keeper, birthed only to die. All tumbled and scattered, all strewn upon the sand, all just out of her reach.
"Silas?" she whimpered. "Silas, hold on."
Movement was agony. Maybe she hadn't moved in any physical sense, but every bone in her body felt like it was broken. Crawling across the meager distance between her and her child was like being incinerated, but it wasn't the first time she'd willingly chosen to be burned alive—and that time for a far lesser cause than this.
She pressed both hands down hard on Silas's throat, less afraid of closing his airway than she was of his blood escaping out the arterial gash. He turned onto his side, overpowering her efforts to hold him in place, and spit up a puddle of foul liquid, clearing enough space between his lungs and his lips to manage a few faltering words.
"Bring them together," he gurgled. "It's not too late."
What wasn't too late? She couldn't save him, not by herself, and she couldn't imagine any scenario where a cripple and a monster would make better nurses than she. It was, by any definition she could think of, entirely too late.
Silas glared at his mother, showing a ferocity of temperament she'd never seen in his eyes until today. For just a moment, he reminded her of Thusia. Perhaps that was why when he tapped his bloody fingers on that damned book, she paid attention.
She could read the cover, now, clear as anything.
THE BURNING OF A WISHING TREE AND ALL THAT CAME BEFORE
Jessamine didn't need to part its cover to know who had authored this lost tome, but she did, anyway, if only to banish all doubt.
"By Elias Cooper," she read aloud.
Silas batted his mother away, clamping all his fingers over his wound. It would not hold him for long and they both knew it, but it set her free.
"Do not lose hope," Silas managed, before his eyes fell closed and his pulse went slack.
Joshua had said the same thing, ten years ago. It had been a gift.
"He need not be lost forever," she repeated to herself.
Hope briefly mended Jessamine's broken heart. She hauled herself to her feet and lifted the book in both hands, holding it to her chest, as much a sword as a shield and equally stained with blood. There was only one way through this nightmare. This had to work.
"Patulcius and Clusivius," she shouted into the void. "Attend me for a lesson. I know now who you were before."
The gloaming beasts—for that was, rightly and truly, what they were—gathered themselves slowly. She thought it would take Clusivius longer—there was so much more of him to pull together—but he moved with anger's perilous speed. Patulcius was far slower to reach his place at her feet, for he labored under the crushing weight of fear. Side by side, they could be brothers, though one was large and one was small. It was something in the way they held themselves, or maybe it was that neither one of them could look her in the eye.
"Who was I?" asked Patulcius. "I do not remember myself."
"Who was I?" repeated Clusivius. "I do not believe you."
"You were both my cousin," she declared. "You were one. You were human. You were Elias."
Patulcius shut his eyes even tighter, as if that could keep her words out.
"How can that be?" roared Clusivius, beating his fists upon the ground.
"Clusivius," Jessamine addressed him, "why do you try not to think of the dark?"
"Because the dark feels like home," Patulcius answered for him. "But that can't be right. The dark is evil. The dark is everything I spent my life rejecting, everything he spent his life hating. The dark can't be where I belong."
"Patulcius," Jessamine continued, "why do you seek out books for the library?"
"Because without knowledge, I have nothing at all," Clusivius explained. "I have never been anything but adjacent to history. My actions will not turn the wheels of fate. But maybe, if I keep the record of what happened before, I will matter to those who come after."
"When Rebecca brought you back, she left a part of you behind," said Jessamine. "A part of you stayed in this place, and a part of this place stayed in you. It was the same for Silas. The same as him, you eventually crossed back over, looking for your missing piece. Unlike him, you went alone. When you found it, when you really understood what the future held for you, the truth of it tore you apart."
"I was so angry," said Clusivius.
"And I was so afraid," said Patulcius.
"And that is okay," said Jessamine. "That's only human."
"Maybe it's time to let go," said the one.
"Maybe it is time to go forward," said the other.
"Maybe there can be light in the dark," said Elias, whole again.
He looked old. But then, so did she. Time had had its way with both of them. Only Jessamine would keep on getting more old, and she had a feeling that Elias was about to become something entirely new. She offered him her arm, giving him a chance to catch his breath before he fell off his one remaining leg.
"Hello, Ellie," she said. "I've missed you."
"I've missed you, too," he replied, "but I don't have long."
"Please save him," she begged. "Please save my child."
"I need to know that you understand what you're asking for," Elias checked. "Saving him means losing him. He won't be mortal, anymore. Neither of us will."
"I understand," Jessamine vowed. "So did Silas—and better and sooner than I did. This place is growing, but it can't be left to grow wild. There's too much chance for antipathy to take root and then it all ends the same as it has every time before: in fire. We have to choose to build a better future. You have to make room for compassion to blossom."
"A light in the dark," Elias repeated.
"And a dark in the light," she added. "Not transition against inertia. Not a battle, but a balance. Stability and instability in equilibrium. A cycle. A wave."
"The sunlit side of the hill in winter," he echoed, "and the shaded side of the hill in summer."
She laughed, though it felt like crying.
"Are we really saying that the Green Lady had it right?" she crowed.
"No, we are not," he said, cackling along with her. "But she could have been, were she not the product of systemic oppression and retributive violence. Endless war only brought more war, as all wars do. You gave us a chance to be better, this time around. We will steward the seeds already planted in this fertile soil. We will give them the opportunity to grow in mutual prosperity, not futile competition. We will be light and dark, not the light and the dark."
She smiled at him, otherwise at a loss for words.
"I wish I'd had the chance to know the person you became," she lamented.
He wrapped his arms around her, giving her a long, warm hug.
"I wouldn't have let you," he said into her shoulder. "I was too concerned with the person I thought I was supposed to be. But I don't need to pretend, anymore."
Her cousin pulled away. Something had gone fuzzy around his fringes as his mortal form began to blur. If he was going to do what had to be done, it had to be done now.
"Are you ready?" he asked, as a final, familiar courtesy.
She shook her head, but he knew what that meant. It didn't matter if she was ready.
He did it anyway.
Elias knelt by Silas and put his hands over the boy's, covering his wound. The moment he did, their bodies vanished into stardust. In their place rose two somethings new. They emerged together, stepping out from the space between the moon and the sand, each one the other's negative, opposite but equally beautiful and strange.
"Thank you, Jessamine," said the spirit of dark. "Now that we are here, your role is ended."
"I am proud that you were my mother," said the spirit of light. "I am glad to have been your child."
"Will you be all right?" asked Jessamine. "Will both of you be all right?"
The world was changing rapidly, now, growing simultaneously dimmer and brighter, like a supernova of the senses. She couldn't tell if the spirits were causing the disorienting miasma that washed over the domain in which she very much no longer belonged, or if reality was merely recentering around their twinned presence.
"Of course we will," said one of them, she didn't know which. "We're here because of you."
Nothing about that made Jessamine feel even a little bit better—and maybe that was for the best.
"Now," whispered someone, right into her ear, "it's time to go."
Jessamine did not hide her tears. She did not try for silence. She wailed as the world parted and left her back in the woods, beyond the alcove, by the beach. She was still crying when they found her and she cried a long while after that.