[Here we are, then. The last chapter. I'd like to thank everyone for sticking with me this whole time ... I know the installments haven't always posted as regularly as readers would have liked. There are plenty more places to take these characters, so I'm not saying this is the end forever, but the story I envisioned comes to its dramatic conclusion here. Hopefully that conclusion is a satisfying one and will tide you over until I find the time to return to Phaeland.
The story so far: (Let's see how quickly I can sum up the preceding 100,000 words.) Fantasy writer. Trip to England. Heirloom fountain pen received as a gift - turns out to be magical. A sudden storm. Simon finds himself in the world of his novels. A steamy encounter with the main heroine, Juliette Ravendark. Then - realization that his presence has doomed Juliette and her adventuring companions, leaving no one to stop the evil wizard Necromanata. Certain doom at the hands of an undead army if Simon can't figure something out. A series of letters to various highly placed persons. Every attempt at summoning help, foiled by unexpected chaos and disaster. A beautiful serving maid/prostitute named Leyna whom Simon falls in love with. Sudden realization that Leyna is Necromanata's daughter. A journey through the swamp to find the coffin of Leyna's mother, buried long ago with Necromanata's stolen power source. The coffin opens. The body inside wakes.]
*****
Leyna screamed and leapt back from the coffin, crashing into me and nearly spilling us both into the mud. I grabbed her and wrapped her up in my arms - I'd like to say because I was calmer, but really, I had no more control over myself than she did. I just caught her out of pure reflex and then held her in place because my brain had frozen. It probably
shouldn't
have surprised me that the body would come to life - the Mistress of the Bog had told us she wasn't resting - but it did anyway. So I just stood there with my girlfriend struggling and freaking in my arms.
You kind of expect that if someone's eyes pop open after you take the lid off their casket, they'll follow up by sitting ramrod straight and turning to you to hiss, or eerily floating to their feet. But as Leyna settled from frantic to merely trembling, her mother rolled weakly onto one side and pried herself up so one elbow hung over the coffin wall. Once there, she looked at us, her breath rapid and shallow as if the effort taxed her to her limit.
"Oh, my little treasure." Her welling eyes fixed on Leyna and Leyna alone. Yilma and I and the entirety of Beadle's Bog might as well have not existed. The words - or maybe just the sound of her voice - rushed through her daughter like a wave. I could feel it: grief and raw need bursting Leyna's panic apart. She elbowed loose from my grasp and pitched forward to seize hold of the woman in the coffin, crying incoherently as the pale but clearly living hands settled to her shoulders and back.
"Shh," said Dwinvara, one hand smoothing Leyna's hair and the other holding tight around her. "It's all right, darling. I'm sorry - so sorry for leaving you."
Panting, Leyna struggled for words. "What - you were dead, but -"
"No, not dead. I was stopped."
My peripheral vision caught Yilma Greenwarden nodding - mostly by the sway of her antlers. When I glanced over, her expression said the words made sense to her.
"Stopped?" Leyna pulled back enough to look her mother in the face. "What does that mean?"
Sadly, she put a hand to Leyna's cheek. "Stopped. Held in place. Not moving forward to my death. And now I've done even worse than leaving you all those years ago, because I see hope in your eyes, and it is not deserved. I stopped myself one day short of death, in case anyone came looking for this."
Her eyes flicked down to the brooch.
"One day short? You mean - you're not ..."
"I'm sorry. I'm dying now, just as I was the last time you saw me, when you were a little girl. My beautiful little girl, and now a woman, and grown -"
"
No
," Leyna cried, gripping her fiercely. "No, you can't be here and talking and - you
can't
go again."
The older woman's head shook. "It isn't my choice to make. Not anymore."
"Why not? I don't understand."
Yilma spoke up. "She's a greenwarden, like I am. We have our ways of checking the tides of life and death, but we are also bound by oaths and balances."
"Greenw -? No, that's got all the sense of fish fur. You're not a magician - I never saw you work a bit of magic my whole life."
"That's because I used it all up, or almost all of it, having you."
Leyna's hands trailed loose from her mother's shoulders. She sat back.
"Me?"
Dwinvara nodded and sighed. Leaning forward against her knees, she told us her story.
* * *
Your father and I both wanted children - very much. But a sickness had left me barren, in my early days as a greenwarden. I had the skill and the magic to prevent it killing me, but not to undo its damage, which shriveled everything inside me needed to conceive a babe. Natam said from the start, before we ever married, that the world had plenty of children for us to give one a home without bearing it ourselves. I knew it was true ... yet, however I tried to console myself with the idea of those children already in need, I hungered within me to create life. "We're wizards," I told him. "We don't need to be in a hurry. Maybe there's something, a spell or a rite that I haven't found yet." He simmered with impatience, but he swallowed it because he loved me more than anything he'd ever touched.
Days and months and years of searching left us both frustrated, each in our own way. I sensed the strain in Natam, felt the distance when I encountered a gleam of possibility in my research and withdrew into obsessed experiments and study. Desperate, and neglected, my husband turned to lines of inquiry that wouldn't occur to me. If the needed parts had died inside me, then perhaps the magic of death and undeath might hold an answer. I took heart when he told me that he was working on a solution even as I was. And when it occasionally nagged at me that he would not discuss his ideas, I ignored my worries instead of confronting them.
And at some point, something changed. The space between us opened wider and wider. Natam became withdrawn, secretive. The vigor and strength of his body ebbed until one day I saw what a shell he had become and I knew I was destroying us both. But that moment of understanding only occurred because I had discovered something, a hint, a possibility. And when I rushed to him to share it, my hope gave me the clarity to see - but not the clarity to stop myself, as I should have. "This will be my last attempt," I swore. "If it leads to nothing, I will turn back to him and we'll find some needful child or children and bring them into our lives and be happy."
But it didn't lead to nothing. It led to a way, and a way with a terrible price. I - that need in me, that hunger in me, and the exhaustion of working days on end, and the cold that had come to dwell where our love had once been heated and vibrant - it all left me in a state beyond reason. I should have kept to my oath. I should have shut that discovery away and never brought it out again. But I was weak and at my wits' end and full of anguish. So I went to him with it.
"I've found something that will work," I told him. And I explained. How we could funnel our magic into a spell to heal me - our magic and a portion of our lives. If we both gave equally of ourselves, it would work. We could have a child - many children. And then we would have thirty years to enjoy them. Thirty years before the spell took the rest of our lives as its cost.
Natam was furious. He led me to his workshop and he showed me this jewel. "I have learned secrets of life beyond life," he said. "I can have you, and you can have me, forever. And you want me to give you up? After only thirty years? When the world flows over with orphans and foundlings that we could have our pick of? And we'd lose our magic in the process? It's madness!"
Of course, any greenwarden would be struck mute with horror at the darknesses he had probed in making that gem. I told him I had lost him, that he was a stranger to me. And at that, he broke down and begged me to return to him, to find our passion again, together. "You want us to put aside our magic?" he said. "Fine. Let us put aside magic for tonight, and be man and woman. And in the morning we can talk again and find a path forward."
I shuddered to do it, but I agreed. And the whole night moved forward as a demon's dream. Every touch of his passion felt like a caress from the grave. Not only had I lost him, but I saw in his eyes that he would never let me go. I sensed in his aura that his power had outstripped mine beyond any chance that I could defeat it. He would keep me from having the child I wanted in order to keep me for himself.
So ... I was his woman for one last night, and then while he slept, I took his gem and fled.
I left him a note and nothing else. It said that if he ever tried to find me, I would destroy the gem and leave him powerless. And once I had found a place far away, I felt his seed still within me, and I - I did what he would never let me do. I made my womb a vessel. Poured all the magic that I had into that nest of life. And then I bled years off of my own mortal span until I had given up enough of them to make my withered garden bloom again and produce what I needed.
And then I had you. And you were so perfect, and precious, and my time with you was going to be so short, that I could not let myself feel regret. I had to be for you the joy you were for me, because you deserved it, and you would not have me for long.
* * *
By the time the story finished, Leyna was fucking bawling - face in her hands, whole body shaking. And I was down on my knees with her, holding her, with a big fat knot in my throat and my cheeks wet from more than just swamp mist. Even Yilma Greenwarden looked shaken.
Dwinvara was the most wrecked of us all, though. If she'd managed to bite down on her guilt the whole time she raised Leyna, it came back in spades now, closing off her throat in some parts of the story and pushing sobs out of her at others. I've never seen a more miserable face in my life than hers as she got to the end of telling us.
"I can't ask you to forgive me," she said. "And I wouldn't deserve it anyway. I was so selfish and prideful. Even now - I can say I was wrong, but I can't say I made a mistake. Because my choice created the most perfect thing I've ever seen in all the world. I'm so proud to look at you."
My arms tightened around Leyna involuntarily. I couldn't help it. Her mother's words rang so true to me - I knew I was holding perfection, and I didn't ever want to let it go.
But Leyna didn't agree. Lifting her tear-streaked face from her hands, she said, "Oh ... Mama, you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be proud at all. I'm not anything like perfect. You raised me and taught me so well, and all I did with it was turn into the town whore."
She meant it as her own failure, but her words struck Dwinvara like a slap. Anguish and horror etched themselves even deeper into the woman's haunted features. I felt awful for her. Without thinking, I took one arm from around Leyna and reached out to grasp her mother's hand.
"Don't listen to her," I said, squeezing that hand and pulling the woman's stricken eyes momentarily to my own. "You're right - she's perfect. The most perfect thing I've ever seen too, and I've seen
two
worlds."
Leyna wriggled as if to pull loose, but I didn't let her. "Simon ..."
"Hush," I told her. "I'm not going to let you feel bad about doing the best you could. Your mother's right, or I wouldn't love you the way I do. She deserves to be proud. You do too. You're amazing. You're talented and kind and good-hearted and caring - smart, beautiful, generous -"
"And a complete slattern," she choked out.
"So what? You're
incredible
at what you do. Not just in bed, but in the common room too, waiting tables, making people laugh. You brighten the world with it - just like you do with anything you try. And when you've got the money saved up, you're going to go to the capital and become a playwright and give
