Epilogue
Years later, in a valley on the warm border of Elvard, there was a garden of scarlet flowers.
It was said those flowers grew where the dead had fallen. In the valley below the Tree, they grew where a man had chosen to keep living.
The man had white hair and quiet eyes, and every morning he read a letter gone soft as cloth from rereading. He could no longer see her face — he had spent it, at the end, to drive a blade through a god's mouth. But he kept her words, and words, unlike faces, do not burn. Some mornings, when the wind moved through the garden, he almost saw her anyway — the set of her shoulders, a shape of light at the corner of the day. The Tree was merciful that way. Or memory was. He never asked which.
He taught the elven children the way of wood — the grain, the patience, the craft his mother had learned from her mother before her. Some inheritances survive everything. The children were terrible at it and loved him anyway.
His wife was mortal now, and proud of it — silver threading her black hair, laugh lines deepening every year like rings in a happy tree. Time had finally noticed her, she said, and she called every grey hair a gift, and when he laughed at that, she reminded him that he had given her eternity once, in a burning throne room, without being asked.
They had a daughter, with dark hair and her father's old stubbornness, and a name that had waited through two graves and one war to be used again.
"Diana," he called her in from the garden, "lunch."
The children came with her, as always, and while they ate, the littlest one pointed at the scarlet field and asked the question they all asked eventually.
"They say those flowers grow where the dead fell. But no one's dead here."
"Not anymore," said Shizui. "Not anymore."
When they had gone, he walked the rows alone, down to the old stone he had carried from the King's Road and set where the sun set latest. He took the letter from his pocket, unfolded it along its soft old folds, and read the last line, as he did every morning.
Come back to me.
The wind moved through ten thousand flowers. Bees kept the old hum of the world. Somewhere above, the Tree held up the sky like a hand holding water.
"I came back," Shizui told her.
And in the world above the world — where justice had never once held ground — a garden did.
THE END
Thank you for staying until the end. I'm sorry the journey took so long — some stories refuse to be rushed, and this one made me wait years to learn how it ended. I hope, in the end, it was worth the wait for you too.
— Xavi 123