EPILOGUE
The Elder’s Diary
I was the last person to see Dianna Wilson
alive.
Since she asked, and I saw no other way, I carried her up.
We went higher than dragons can, higher than helicopters or jet
fighters, higher than satellites.
She whispered the sorceries I needed for speed and
survival, though the words she spoke did horrible things to her own
withering face and limbs.
My mother has asked me several times what it was like, up
there. I find that all I can tell her was that it was cold and
quiet. That’s what everyone expects to hear, and so that’s all I
say.
The truth was, I have never felt more heat or heard more
noise than I have when the earth and we raced through the sky
together.
The white-streaked stone beneath us was powered by an
engine more ancient, slow, and sure than ours; but the short sprint
to the moon was ours to win, and the heavens roared and the stars
cheered. The more I think about it, the more I realize the heat and
noise came from within—Dianna’s magic was no longer what kept us
alive.
She held her own head close to mine, and I began to hear
her voice in my head. At first it was stuff I could
understand—mostly things about her daughter, and the travels they
had shared together in dimensions that existed only in
dreams.
But her words made less and less sense, the farther we
went. Things she said had happened, couldn’t possibly have yet: a
river town vanishing under a billowing cloud of fire, a dark twist
of a creature obliterating herself in the midst of a holocaust, a
faceless figure hunting ceaselessly for blood, a world without
dragons or spiders or beaststalkers. Maybe she was hallucinating,
or peering into the future.
When the crescent moon was so large I thought its lower
end would pierce us, I heard her thoughts return to me:
please stop here.
Are you sure?
I asked her.
I’m sure. You should
go now. Thank you, Jennifer. Give Evangelina my love. Help your
mother look after her. Help your mother . . .
I tried to hold on to her, but with one last wink and wry
smile, she forced distance between us. Without my heat, her skin
began to glisten with blue frost.
You’ve got about ten
seconds, child. Move it.
I moved it, still unable to tell for sure if my newfound
speed and fire came from within, from her grace, or both. By the
time a cloud of emerald fire consumed the night sky, I was already
piercing the atmosphere.
According to my mother, it initially looked as though
Dianna had failed, and that the moon and everything had been lost.
It wasn’t until her last sorcery faded enough to let the slim,
white crescent shine through that she relaxed and realized all was
well.
But I knew all along that Dad’s first wife would do fine.
That woman had no clue how to lose. Turns out, though, she did know
how to die in style.
The shimmering curtain that lay over Minnesota for the
next fifty nights let only two lights through: the sun, which
washed out most of the aurora’s colors; and the cleansed moon,
which kept its crescent shape the entire time.
It turns out this was the beginning of something even
bigger for all of us—but for those fifty days, it was amazing
enough to see the universe bow to that martyred
sorceress.
As for me, I landed safely in Pinegrove. Of course. I’m
always safe. It’s the people around me who seem to
die.
Mom was waiting for me, holding the bundle in her arms
tightly against the chill. Fog formations slipped over the river
behind them, and one of them was shaped like a large bird. I
thought of Sonakshi, and Xavier, and the hundreds of dragons who
had followed me to the end.
I poked at the bundle and lifted the cloth from her face.
Evangelina’s eyes reflected all the shifting colors from the
mourning heavens, until I let the blanket drop a bit. Then they
were gray, just like Dad’s.