Chương 45: Epilogue

Something that confused me about humans, when we first found you, is how many of your stories end with "and they lived happily ever after." Ever after. It's reprinted and repeated enough times that its meaning has leached away. You read those words and you don't think of their true meanings.

"Happily ever after" just means the same thing as a fancy-fonted Fin or The End. You draw the curtain over the rest of the story when you say "happily ever after." You don't want to think about the sad and strange ways that love and time and mortality and eternity interlink. You don't grasp their import. Try it out for me. Divorce these words from the shibboleth you know them as, and take each, when you read them, with the truth of that which they represent: Caspar and I live happily ever after.

At some point, you make it to Heaven. By this I mean you, humanity in totality, but also you, reader. You die and we meet. Hi, there. I hope it was a long, fulfilling life and a short, comfortable death. My condolences and salutations. Like I told Rebecca, I didn't sign up to be the psychopomp of the pantheon. It just ended up being delegated to me because I have the most experience and I enjoy meeting new people.

If you were a worshipper of the Goddess of Love and Death, then it's such a pleasure to finally say hello, and I hope I don't disappoint. If you weren't, no hard feelings. Welcome to Heaven. Humanity lasts another ten thousand years. We don't need to dwell on how it ends; it's a sad, boring story. Don't feel too put out, okay? None of our mortal races lasted all that long, once we split the atom. It's the species-level equivalent of smelling burnt toast before a stroke.

It gets funnier and funnier to see people show up with a cavalcade of newfangled religions only to realize that post-pastornism was right the whole time. Tough to break it to the reincarnation guys that they'll never go back as a mole or a fish or what have you, although a greater transformation awaits, and then you'll look however the hell you like. As agreed, Saoirse is given rein over the remains. A different species inherits the world.

Probably not the one you're thinking of, but that's time's little surprises for you. Maybe some day they'll get far enough along that they'll form their own heaven. It would be nice, but we won't stick around to see it. Maybe some day we'll be back, but that's deep time. And we've got shit to do. Me, my sisters, and our warlocks have enough misadventures rebuilding the place and clearing out the old relicts and anomalies that I could probably fill an encyclopedia set's worth of pages with them.

Distance gets as odd as time does, in a dimension like the one you and I now share, but Caspar and Jordan still insist on driving to every job in a Temple Cruiser, and Peat Moss quickly grows to love that garish automobile as much as they do.

"My car made it to Heaven, too," Jordan says, and it's great credit to Bina's continually growing understanding of humanity that she doesn't correct her. It takes longer than expected for you to tire of paradise. Longer than my sisters expected, anyway. I've spent a good amount of time replicating those pretty meat automata you steer. So wonderful, the sensations you can get from such a simple little construct. Caspar and I spend every second of those millennia together.

All the time he lost and all the lives he never led. All the promises I made. He gets them all, and he gets them with me, and I get them with him. I convince him to adopt a "try anything once" rule, but unlike most of you we don't extend that to other partners. At all the ecstatic orgies he and I are off in a corner, making love and trying not to laugh. And when the novelty wears off, we mostly stay away from the golden pleasure palaces and the swimming pools full of sangria. We have simpler delights.

We settle in a valley not unlike the one I made for his dead guys (many of whom become our neighbors). We call it New Rogarth owing to Caspar's sentimentality for the yokels who hanged him. Don't ask me, I don't get the dude either. Harvest festivals, barn raisings, dance halls, county fairs. Mr. Cartwright is a fixture at them. As is Mrs. Cartwright, who everyone agrees is quite beautiful in an alien sort of way, in her violet sundress, arm linked in his, a laugh on her shadowy lips.

Not to say we don't have our champagne tastes. It turns out Caspar absolutely adores Tabarkan Sturgeon caviar. We first try it at one of Adaire's weekly salons, and he ends up eating enough of it within a month to equate every crown he ever earned on Diamante.

"You know," I tell him.

"Back when I was the hwuarch, we had roe. I bet I can remember how to make it if you really want to follow through on the anything once rule." To my lovely husband's credit he does give this his sincere consideration before he says "No, thank you, baby." The first time he takes me on an aerostat ride, I have something of a freakout.

"You're telling me you're the size of a mountain and you're afraid of heights?" he asks, when I finally allow myself to be untangled from him.

"I'm not, but I am." He chuckles.

"Every time I think you finally make sense to me, you pitch a curveball."

"I'm an Old One. We don't have to make sense." I peep through the cabin and squirm further into his lap when I see the rainforest stretching out below us.

"I'm ineffable, okay?" Sometimes, late at night, when he holds me close in a cocoon of my tendrils, I think about the families we see together, some dozens of generations deep. And I feel a niggling sorrow for my man. He never bothers seeking out the parents he forgot. No descendants of his ever arrive in Heaven for the joyful reunions we witness so often. Every time, he sees the thread of melancholy in my golden eyes. And every time he kisses my forehead and tells me: "You are everything I will ever need."

And every time, I know he means it. Besides, he has Peat. He and Jordan spend a month teaching that kid how to orienteer, a skill I didn't realize mostly meant hiking in big circles, eating chocolate chips, and calling it "trail mix." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Little by little, the parties and the orgies and the feasts and celebrations and dream vacations blend together for you. The beauty, the bacchanalia.

At some point, each of you becomes the self you'd always dreamt of. You finally read all those novels you swore you'd read. You finally make the magnum opus you were sure you'd be able to with unlimited time and unlimited freedom. You have that talk with that friend you fell out of touch with. You forgive each other. You are, all of you, perfected. My sisters watch your progress with the awe of a first sunrise. I resist telling Salome I told you so. You are not fundamentally flawed, reader.

You are not ontologically evil. All you needed was love. Love and time. Saoirse loosens her grip on her human garden and the tough nuts are released. We keep them isolated and observed at first, but the loopiness of being a mushroom farm has taken a lot of the sting out of their tails. After a lifetime or so of remonstration and repentance, they're let back into the larger whole. We need all of you, after all. All of you to be ready.

Except for Jordan, who flips the rest of her species the double birds and merges with Bina after a few thousand years. They have a cute little ceremony for it. She fits in seamlessly, and spends most of her time as a manifestation, the better to make out with the rest of her, though Jordan and Bina sharing one conscious mind makes my little sister even harder to corral. I always know which jokes are Jordan's because the rest of Bina can't help but giggle at herself when she tells them.

I tell her that she's her own girlfriend now, which makes her relationship masturbation. She tells me to stop being nasty. It takes a while after the last human crosses over for the idea to truly take hold across the collective, but even after the first millennium, some of you are asking yourselves what's next? And that's okay. That's normal. Nothing lasts forever. To the human mind, anything stretched out for eternity becomes its own kind of Hell. Even Heaven.

You reach the saturation point of your lovely, limited minds. You obtain the most perfect bliss that a human, freed from the strictures of mortality and time, can countenance. It's time to be born. Caspar is ready, like, way ahead of schedule. I have to preach patience. It's a big change, going from the singular "you" to, well, You. And not everyone's as into tentacles as I've inadvertently made him.

We talk about him merging his consciousness into mine instead, the way Jordan and Bina did, but he's worried we'd end up missing each other, which is the sort of limited perspective that I've always found so cute and irresistible. Besides, you're going to need him. He's too good a boy to deny you his presence in your gestalt. Oh, that reminds me—Peat Moss was hoping he could come along, too. He's as human as you, at this point; he just happens to be a deer. I hope you don't mind.

One day, your final holdout awakens from a lonely night surrounded by flower petals and champagne, and says: I'm ready. And that's the story of you, my sister. There's an ugly duckling phase for sure. The first century, I gotta say. Woof. It's tough. You take a while to shed the illusion of the self. To recognize yourself as you. Whole and one. It's a long and painful adolescence. It's a tough young adulthood, too, sometimes.

Sometimes, on the ego-quake days you can barely hold your gestalt together, you ask me if this was all a mistake, if you're deficient somehow. Never, I tell you. Never ever. But you get through it. You do so good. You become one of us. Diamante, you call yourself, in memory of your mortal home. Sister Diamante. But I can't help calling the whole collective entity Cas every now and again. You're beautiful, from your crown to your claws. But Caspar is still my favorite part.

And the only part I love like a human loves. I promised him that, and even though now he's you, I keep that promise. Illogical, maybe, but I enjoy being illogical. It makes me feel human. Even Salome begrudgingly admits that you've turned out beautifully. Bina helps you design your prime form, and it's the perfect combination, in my mind, of adorable and eldritch. Eventually, you find your void-legs.

And eventually we finally convince Saoirse to stop fucking around with the overgrown world you left in your mortality, though she insists on taking so many species and samples that we all spend a harried century collecting them for her. The world's served its purpose, and the kingdom of Heaven has too. As I swore I would, I take you with me, into the void. We go to explore the endless yawning existence beyond Heaven, its myriad dimensions. It's going to be boring, a lot of it. The void's a void, after all.

Whole lotta nothing between the somethings out there. But you'll find that boredom is different when you're like me. More optional. There are other worlds, other realities not even an Old One could imagine. Maybe we'll find another ruined Heaven out there somewhere, another little sister in the throes of her cradle. Or some other new experience, something beyond anything I could put to paper here. I mean, I didn't know what making love was before you, and now that's half of what me and Cas do all day.

And until we find the next place, I've got you. And you've got me. And we have eternity. You're ready for that now. I think Bina is a little jealous that she's not the baby anymore. And throughout our voyage, our sisters make fun of us, how inseparable you and I are. But they're used to it by now, after I stuck to you like glue all throughout your Old One education. It's like I told the little piece of you that's Caspar. I love you. I love you so fucking much.

The bit of you that's Caspar and the bit of me that's Irene Cartwright stay untethered. Unlike most of humanity, his lover isn't in the new gestalt being. I'm on the outside, and so (mostly) is he. We prefer it this way. It's quieter. More private. And we get to have humanoid sex, which has never, ever gotten boring. We've gone back and forth with all kinds of configurations and physiologies, from simple swaps to weird experiments I won't scandalize my poor husband by expounding on.

But after each one, we always drift back to what worked for us from the start. Big gentle Caspar and perky little Irene. Everything changes. But the secret I'm finding out about eternity is that some things are just perfect the way they are. We have a cottage on an extraordinarily pretty ridge of your spine, outside a town of fellow manifestations who, now and then, miss their own egos enough to untether with us. It varies in size as people come and go and return again.

Even now, in your newly completed form, you're still so charmingly human when you dither in this way. We regularly convince Jordan Darius to manifest back out of Bina, though she forbids us from calling her either Jina or Bordan, both of which I thought were clever. Oh well. It's very cute how impatient she always is to re-merge with her girlfriend/self.

"You give a bitch a body the size of a city and fill it with sexy werewolves," she says, "you can't get tight when she's itchy to get back to it. Everything looks too fuckin' big from here." Jordan doesn't find comfort in feeling small and out-of-the-way. Caspar does. And okay, he still takes some coaching to get used to the fact that he's my "sister" but we're still lovers. It's metaphorical, I keep telling him.

He acclimates, but he asks me politely not to call him sister to his face whenever we're using your old language (which we often do, for kicks). That's fine by me. I lay my shadowy head on your shoulder, Caspar, and you rest your hand on my thigh. And from our front porch, we watch Heaven shrink into a static-channel mist below us.

"All that work getting it and fixing it," you say.

"And now we're leaving."

"Yeah, well." I let the smell of the strudel you've baked lift me to my feet.

"All the important parts we're taking with us."

"You're talking awful confident that wherever we end up is gonna have gelato."

"Like you can't just manifest gelato, dude. I've seen you and Peat. Eating yourself. You ever think you'd be so comfortable doing that?" You shrug.

"I'm delicious." I kiss your cheek.

"I know."

"Still." You breathe the sigh of a craftsman watching his tools rust as I pull you up with me.

"Took forever to fix the place up." And I laugh and I kiss you, Caspar, as we climb the steps to the little home we share. Because for all your new knowledge, and all that you have become, you still don't know what forever means. Neither do I, to tell the truth. We'll find out together.