I close my eyes, throw myself into the void, and come out on the other side.
The first thing I see is my grave.
The name Skye Dilano stares back at me from cold stone, and for a moment I just stand there, reading it. My own name, waiting for me.
I should find it frightening, I suppose, but I don’t. There’s something almost peaceful about this. There will be no more running, no more calculating the odds on borrowed time.
I simply reached the end of a very long road, and I’m about to find a place to finally lie down.
So that’s what I do.
I sit on the stone first, then let myself lean back until I’m flat against it. The cold seeps through my clothes immediately, spreading up my spine. The sky above is the same pale nothing as it was on the hillside. I stare up at it and breathe, and try not to think about Nathaniel’s face as I disappeared.
The wraiths will change direction and leave them there. They will be safe. And knowing them, wherever that hillside was, they’ll find their way back home. Or perhaps they’ll make a new one. Who knows.
Minutes pass before I hear the roar again. This time, I welcome it.
I turn my head toward the sound and see the first wraith at the edge of the woods. Then another. Then I stop counting. In an instant they are everywhere.
I wait, defenceless, until they are all within arm’s reach of me, close enough that I can almost feel their fangs against my skin. Only then do I reach down into myself, past the layers I keep so carefully managed, to all the pain I’ve always carried, and bring it out.
I touch it.
I think of Mark. Of every version of myself he made smaller.
I think of Cassian saying no in that quiet voice of his.
I think of Nathaniel’s face.
I think of Talon’s hand on Nathaniel’s arm, holding him back, and how much that cost him.
I think of how glad I am that I got to know what real love feels like.
All of it mixed together, the pain, the hate, the love, I feel all of it. And then, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, I let it go.
The light bursts out of me so fast and so total that one moment it isn’t there, and the next it is everywhere. White and absolute, without edge or source. It fills the grey world from ground to sky and takes me with it.
As it does to me, so it does to the wraiths. One by one and then all at once, we are unmade by my power.
I watch it happen from somewhere already growing very far away.
The last thing I feel is the cold of the stone.
The last thing I think is that it was all worth it.
Every bit of it. The whole long, difficult, beautiful, terrible road.
Worth it.
And then I let myself become nothing, once and for all.
“What a story that was…” A voice echoes all around me. “I believe I shall applaud you.”
It takes me a moment to understand where I am and what is happening.
Only after a while do I recognise who’s talking to me.
Death.
