“Leopold, I have something to tell you.”

They were eating a trout he’d caught and roasted earlier that afternoon. The two of them were cramped at the small table, but that was just fine. In fact, it was perfect. Everything was perfect in their little world, now that she knew it couldn’t last. Everything was incredible.

He set his wooden fork down and looked into her eyes. She knew then that he’d been preparing for something like this. That he’d known this whole time that she was keeping something from him. It almost broke her heart.

“I think I can close the doorway.”

He stared into her eyes, searching, but she held his gaze.

“How? What’s changed?”

“I’ve thought a lot about it, about what Sun Geon did the first time. I might be able to disrupt the essence of the portal for long enough that it destabilizes. There’s no way this is its natural state—something on the other side is keeping it open.”

Leopold nodded. “I’ve often thought about how it’s staying open. So you think it could be that easy?”

“Not easy, but possible,” she said, feeling only a little guilty. “But there are the pneumavores. And the Watcher.”

“If we have any luck, it’ll have moved away from the door.”

Willow nodded. “That’s what I hoped too. I don’t think it’s very fast, not like the pneumavores, but it’s fast enough. Hopefully we can be faster.”

“Portaling in and out will be dangerous,” he said, idly pushing his trout around. “I don’t want any one of those things coming here.”

“I’ve already got something figured for that,” Willow said, and smiled. This was the one thing she was actually proud of. “But I’ll need a few days to replenish my essence if we’re going to make a real go of it.”

“And after its over,” he asked. “Finally over?”

“Then I’d like you to read my book,” Willow said. “I’ve finished.”

“I’d love to.”

🜛

Willow cast the two capsules, made Leopold take the return one, and then did her best to replenish her essence over the next few days. They mostly sat and talked, having jerked enough meat to sustain them for such a short period. She ran her fingers through his hair and tried to memorize the smell of him. He held her close, knowing the danger they were facing but also knowing that she was compelled to enter it. He’d long ago given up on trying to dissuade her.

And then, sooner than she wanted, it was time. She inherently understood that her essence was topped up, and when she asked, Leopold said his was as well. There was no gear to bring as nothing could touch the pneumavores save concentrated psychokinetic force. Leopold had practiced a few times pulling trees apart in the forest and claimed he’d gotten the hang of it. She knew he would be fine as long as he kept up his incredible speed.

In her robe, the secreted item tucked tight against her ribs, she stood in front of the cabin hand-in-hand with Leopold. He also wore the robe they’d purchased from Bridgewater. They only had white cloth, and it wasn’t anything like a battle mage’s robe, but it put her in the mindset for casting magic again. It was sort of like she was back at the Arcanum.

Willow held out her hand, the capsule cupped in her palm. It roiled with amethyst smoke just waiting to be released. She wrapped her other arm around Leopold.

“They’ll probably be on us as soon as we appear,” she said. Leopold nodded too quickly, his acceleration already ratcheted up. She put on a layer of acceleration as well. It wouldn’t do to be intercepted before she reached her target. She’d go faster than she’d ever gone before.

She held him tight and triggered the capsule. A portal blossomed, not in front of them, but around them. It engulfed them and dropped them at the pre-programmed destination. In a split second they had gone from their cabin to the twisted battlefield before the enormous door.

The change couldn’t have been more brutal.

Things were worse than Willow had even dared to imagine. The landscape was utterly infested by the pneumavores, crawling over each other and festering in the denuded mountains. Their void spaces were like cold brands to her mind, but she had to take them in. If one got to her first…

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And of course, the Watcher. Now completely emerged from the doorway, the Watcher had somehow grown even larger. It was well over a hundred feet tall and at their arrival its giant ear began to waggle.

The pneumavores came toward them en-mass. Leopold blurred and disappeared from her side. Willow bit her lip at the final slip of contact. The earth exploded a hundred feet away as Leopold went head-to-head with a pneumavore. He yelled as the pneumavore reared up into the air, hovered for a moment, then began to tear down the middle.

There wasn’t much time. Almost no time at all, to be honest. She forced herself to look away from Leopold and the oncoming horde and sprinted with accelerated time—not to the doorway, but toward the Watcher. She stopped before it.

It was like a mountain. No doubt it would have attempted to hypnotize her into approaching again, but either she’d grown accustomed to the horror of its gaze or it hadn’t had time to effect the attack. Either way she was there, just where it wanted her to be.

Another explosion and the sickening sound of rending nothingness as Leopold killed a second pneumavore. She could feel the essence expenditure from his psychokinesis and it was terribly large. He wouldn’t last even one more minute.

Willow drew the encapsulated dagger from her robe and broke the seal. The essential sheath disintegrated and her soul was pummeled with the effect of the blade, but she held onto her body. She couldn’t leave yet.

The Watcher’s head ground as it swiveled down to look at her. It’s face was more like a crag, with only slight indentations for eyes. The most organic thing about it was its ear. Other than that, it could have been a volcanic upwelling for how alive it looked.

It gazed at her, and she gazed back. She saw the long future, its terrible destiny. She saw it trundle across the country, inexorably west. She saw it meet the dry oceanbed and cross a vast plain of hardened marine ooze. She saw it enter a deep canyon and approach the last of humanity. She saw their destruction.

Then, the vision began to change. The sky darkened. The Watcher no longer traversed the oceanbed by the light of day, but through an eternal night. Eons passed as it made excruciatingly little progress. Something was holding it back. Something had dislocated it from time.

It looked upon her and she looked upon it and she felt as it realized what was happening. The Watcher was a fixed endpoint, the endpoint for all life on earth, but the timeline could be bent. It hadn’t known that, but Willow had.

It raised its great, granite hand into the air above Willow. Its shadow encompassed her and everything around. The pneumavores which had been heading her way scattered.

“Willow!” Leopold screamed. She turned and saw him standing there in the field, mouth open in horror. Pneumavores approaching from all angles. She smiled.

“I’ll love you for ever,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear over the silent approach of the invisible beings.

“No!”

Willow plunged the dagger into her heart and the Watcher’s massive arm came down and pulped her body under its monolithic weight.

It began to raise its head toward the screaming Leopold, no doubt to ensnare him with its hypnotism, when something it did not expect happened. A luminous cloud boiled up around its arm, coalescing into a sphere thirty feet wide.

The Watcher swatted at the cloud, but it couldn’t physically touch it. The cloud migrated until it sat over the Watcher’s head, then it wove itself into a spell-form in the shape of a halo.

The Watcher’s movements slowed, slower, slower still, then stopped altogether. It halted in the middle of raising its leg to swat at the cloud again. It was as still as stone.

Leopold screamed and fell to his knees. When the Watcher had lifted its arm to bat at the cloud, he’d seen the bloodied remains of Willow’s body. There was no doubt about what had happened.

She was dead. She had become, in the end, the Wraith that Andrew had made.

The pneumavores raced toward Leopold and he held the return capsule in his hand. It was the last capsule Willow had ever made, and a part of him didn’t want to activate it. How easy it would be to let the pneumavores devour him. How easy it would be to let the hurt end.

But she had seen the future, hadn’t she? In that luminous space that came for them all upon death, was there some chance of a reunion? It was with this hope that he crushed the capsule and disappeared in a blink as the pneumavores crashed into the space where he’d collapsed.

🜛

Leopold,

I hope you’ll forgive me. You can’t know what I saw in the Watcher’s gaze, but when I saw it I also saw a thin sliver of hope. Not of stopping the end it represents, but of prolonging the time before it comes.

If I’ve managed to succeed, I’ll have pushed that end far, far into the future. Into a time when the sun has gone dark and humanity is on its last legs. There will still be destruction, terrible destruction, but doesn’t everyone deserve more time? I think so, I hope you’ll agree.

This book details everything we cobbled together from the Arcana. It includes the spell I used to slow the Watcher, which is only possible from within the effect itself. It includes the procedure Andrew used to force me to grow into a Wraith. It also includes my thoughts on how to save children who catch the Wasting, like myself.

You’ll have to guide them, Leopold. You’re the only one with enough power, now. If we’re to weather this storm, if humanity is to survive into the sunset of this world, then they’ll need the strength of conviction that only you can provide. They’ll need what I set down in here, and even more.

I’m sorry I left you. I wish there was another way, but there wasn’t. But this is not the end for us. When I gazed into god, I saw the possibility of reconciliation. I saw a future where all lovers are reunited. Wait for me in eternity, and I’ll wait for you.

I’ll love you for ever.

- Willow