Epilogue
Rasdekina.
After a year of co-authoring together, Talik Thanin and Thila Taryan, also known as the Lord and Lady of Stormhill, decided it was time to make well-earned changes to their home.
They knocked out the north wall of the estate to extend their ever-growing library and add on to their small private study, making room enough for two.
Construction was timed to coincide with their annual trip to Summer Cottage, the one they’d had to cancel the year before.
Nesrina found his family’s—their family’s—vacation home wasn’t a cottage at all.
The manor was built from smooth hewn tan stone, was larger than Stormhill, and was honestly, comparable to a small castle.
“What an insane name,” she scoffed when they first pulled up.
Kas laughed and kissed his beautiful, perfect wife. She wasn’t wrong.
At the end of their weeklong stay, when the royals had returned to Serkath, and Summer Cottage was quiet, Nes coaxed him onto a large patio off the library, and fed him a healthy serving of mushrooms, taking twice as many herself.
“Do you feel it yet?” she whispered, over an hour after he’d eaten them.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kas had his eyes closed, legs propped up on an otherwise empty chair across from him.
“Open your eyes, you won’t know unless you look,” she scolded, the rustle of fabric letting him know she was on the move.
He cracked a lid and found her close, one arm extended as she reached for him. Snatching her wrist from the air, Kas tugged her toward him as his other eye flew open in time to catch a fantastic glimpse of her luscious breasts.
She pulled back, freeing her hand to prop it on her hip. “Look,” she commanded, like the tutor she’d always be.
He peered out at the garden, and at first, the world was no different. But then, he saw something new, something more.
Reality shimmered. It was as if everything had been curtained.
Common objects were wearing draperies of themselves that floated on a breeze.
The formerly straight grout lines on the patio wavered atop an ocean of terra cotta.
Reality flickered. Shadows he’d never noticed pulsated from the dips and divots in the stones of the walls.
His eyes landed on the vines wrapping the terrace.
The heartbeat of the earth itself pulsed through the greenery.
He could practically hear it as each of the thousands of tiny leaves writhed at him. Thump thump. Thump thump.
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
She laughed, and it was the most ethereal noise he’d ever heard, like ten-thousand windchimes dancing in the air around him.
“Come here,” Nes commanded, and he did, rising from his wicker chair before resting one palm atop his duchess’s head to ground himself in the reality that warbled around him.
“You’re very tiny, you know that?” He chuckled.
She tipped her head back, forcing his hand off of her hair. “I’ve been told, thank you.” Her voice was dry, and when he looked down to apologize, he couldn’t help but notice the way she glowed, literally.
Nesrina bade him follow her to the edge of the terrace where they gazed at the garden. Lost in thought, they stood like that in happy silence for another hour or more, both enjoying the journey the gods were taking them on that sunny afternoon.
Eventually, she asked him something that drew him from his reverie.
With several slow blinks and a rather delayed turn of the head, Kas laid eyes on Nes, then followed her line of sight to the clouds billowing through the summer sky.
He waited to learn what he was supposed to do next. He hadn’t heard the question.
“Do you see it?” she asked—again, he assumed.
“See what, exactly? Everything looks . . . weird.” He held a hand up in front of his face, studying the tangle of lines pulsing across his palm, begging to be read, although he knew there were no words there.
“Look at the clouds.”
He did.
“Now watch them.”
He did.
“Look into them.”
He tried.
“Look deeper, Kas. See the chaos.”
“Oh.” Finally, he saw it: Threads of shimmering gold, finer than a spider’s silk, stretched and flowed through—or as—every bit of motion in the atmosphere.
Setting his sights on Nes’s profile, he saw chaos whirling about in the air, reaching and grasping for her curls, being the strands of her hair as it twisted in the breeze. “Ohhh . . .”
“Yes.” Beside him, she sighed through a smile that grew twenty-times its original size as she turned to face him. “I can’t believe it worked.”
Her pupils were blown wide, her rosy red lips caressed by a shimmering string of chaos that coiled up around her wayward tresses. His hand followed the thread, brushing a lock of hair from her face as he tried in vain to capture the fleeting glimmer of gold.
“Gods, Nes, I love you so much.”
“I love you too, you wonderful man.”
His eyes dropped from her lips and caught on one of the large paisleys on her dress.
The teardrop stretched and unfurled before curling back in on itself.
He didn’t think it had behaved like that before.
Bringing his index finger to her neckline, he traced the outline of the writhing shape for a moment.
She giggled; as gone as he was, it seemed. In return, Nes grasped the front of his shirt, and tugged him to her. Ever desperate, even a year into their marriage, he thought for a second that she was going to kiss him, but it turned out she wanted to play with his hair.
Kas sat upon the tiled floor and pulled her onto him. For gods only knew how long, he watched the print of her dress ebb and flow, occasionally tracing a beguiling part of the pattern while Nes busied herself with the top of his head. In that way, they wiled away their final day at Summer Cottage.
Three academic papers were spurred by his new insights, and honed to perfection by his lovely wife, his muse, his personal tutor, his co-author, and favorite distraction. By the time the next year rolled around, they were expecting their first child.
Over the decades, Nes and Kas found enough inspiration from life to produce a whopping sixty-three research papers. A hiccup with Isahn necessitated finding a new spokesperson for their efforts, but overall, it was a delightful secret career.
They welcomed three children into the world, two chaosweavers—not twins—and a windshifter. One of their children was born abroad in the northern Kingdom of Domos, another was lost at sea, for a short time—and it wasn’t too terrible in the grand scheme of things.
As far as traumatic experiences and tortured existences went, Nes and Kas kept that to a minimum. They were blissfully fulfilled, and Nesrina found she only had to climb on furniture in a panic on the rarest of occasions over the course of their long and happy lives.