Inkpot Gods
Because that is the thing about endings, my dears, the thing you must all remember, and keep close and secret next to your own hearts, which have not been replaced with black-winged birds, but still beat strong and true: that is the thing you must hold to as the improbable road bends toward the burning Kingdom of the Queen of Wands, which has smoldered endlessly in the absence of its Queen, and would burn eternally waiting for her.
Endings are where we suffer the deepest losses, where we look with critical eyes upon the toys with which we play and cast some of them aside forevermore, no longer to be pieces in our games.
Endings are where we can afford to let them go. Keep this close and foremost in your mind, and when the moment arrives, remember that I warned you: remember that I told you from the very start that this would be so.
We have walked with Avery and Zib since the beginning.
We have seen them tested and tried, seen them succeed and seen them fail, and soon, we may see one of them fall.
There are many ways into the Up-and-Under.
There are almost as many ways out again, and not all of them run in both directions.
I will tell you this much now, to set your jangled nerves at ease: they came via the same path, and they traveled the divided, elemental lands via the same road.
When they leave, however, they will each of them go alone.
Will knowing this now change how you see the story? Will it shift a part of you into the future, into the time when you have been here before and cannot see this all with fresh and open eyes? I do not know. That, my dears, is up to you.
But here and now, we have traveled past the borderless beginning and through the murky middle.
We must now approach the inescapable ending, which has always been coming for us, which has always been here.
We will go as Avery and Zib did, side by side and hand in hand, and I will not let you go.
Unlike the children we accompany, we will return by the same road, you and I, and I will bid you a fond farewell before you turn toward other stories, other storytellers, and leave me consigned to the kingdom of the past, where I may rest a little while.
Only know that I will always have been here, and you will always have been here, and although time divides us in all other ways, we will have been here together.
Hold that knowledge fast, and trust in me now, and let me lead you onward toward the final counting of our quarters.
Now is where we join them, five children walking on a soap bubble passage stretched across the sky, moving closer and closer to the burning land below.
And the children walked on.…
—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker