Epilogue
A year, or perhaps a thousand of them, later
“By the star, Willa, will you slow down?” I huff, my breaths coming in ragged puffs as I race down the beach after her. Her midnight blue skirts stream behind her as her bare feet fly down the sand, her hair a shimmering flag of gold and caramel. “I am far too old for footraces.”
Her laughter rings in the air, and then through my chest like the headiest of spirits. While it is no longer rare, it is just as precious, and I drink it like a fiend.
“Keep up, Your Decrepit Highness!” she shouts over her shoulder. “I promise it’ll be worth it!”
I roll my eyes and quicken my pace. Not to find out what surprise she holds, but to pin her to the ground and punish her for another of her ridiculous nicknames.
Your Decrepit Highness, the winter wind laughs around my head, before whisking off toward the city to sing the name repeatedly, I’m sure.
“Do I need to conjure a wheelchair to cart around your old bones?” she teases, her sing-song voice drifting back to me.
I decide immediately her punishment will be slow.
Languorous. I lick my lips, nearly able to taste the sweet nectar of the pleasured moans she’ll sing, when I crest the hill and lose hold of every thought entirely.
Every word I’ve ever possessed slips from my grasp, leaving me breathless and stunned.
Willa’s eyes glow with happiness as she watches the way I freeze—the way my death stalls in the air, like it, too, has been shocked into submission.
For there, bobbing on the horizon, is a ship.
My ship.
The lines of the Indomnitus have been imprinted in my dreams for so long, I would recognize the magnificent shape of her anywhere.
The obsidian hull, the serpentine curves.
The carved details of the figurehead and railings.
The sensuous movement of the black sails billowing softly in the wind, ready to set sail.
“Is that—is that what I think it is?”
Willa bites her lip, trapping her nervous smile. “I’m sorry it took me so long. It was in so many pieces, and so far down…it was hard to figure out what to imagine to recover them.”
My incredulous gaze moves from the ship to her. “Wait—that’s…you mean to say, that is my actual ship?”
She nods, wringing her hands in front of her. “Sam helped me get everything right. I didn’t want to mess up any of the details that make her so beautiful, and despite how terrible his paintings are, he’s actually got a good eye for that sort of thing.”
“I don’t—” Emotion overwhelms me. It stings my eyes, and floods my chest, robbing me of anything sensible. I bound myself to her for eternity with no regrets, and still, she’s found a way to give me back the freedom I lost.
I am humbled by how well she knows my heart; humbled by the way she blesses me with the generosity of hers, day after day. I know well the price she has paid for her softness; the sacrifices it took to find regain that gentleness—and I will never take the things she’s tithed for granted.
“Do you like it?” she asks, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“Do I like it?” I shake my head, a disbelieving laugh huffing from my lips. “Darling, it is…” I swallow roughly. “You dreamed for me when I could not, wove together desires of the heart, to give me something I never imagined was possible.”
Willa smiles broadly, clapping her hands together excitedly. A moment later, the most ridiculous hat I’ve ever seen appears between her fingers, complete with a flourishing peacock feather sprouting from the embroidered band. She sets it on my head with a mischievous wiggle of her brows.
“Then let’s go, Corpsey.”
My gaze snaps to hers. “What—what do you mean? What about the island?”
“Sam and Adira have agreed to run things while we’re gone.
” She inhales a deep breath, like she’s been keeping everything in for far too long.
“The island is healed. It grows larger every day with the dreams of the mainland, and the hopes of those who find it. The wards belong to everyone now…including us.”
Willa takes my hands in hers, gripping them tightly. “I feel it the balance, Niko, don’t you? Our connection is of the heart, and so long as we stay true to it, it will never be severed. No matter where we are, Letum will always be home to come back to.”
I feel her words in my anchoring to the island, but more importantly, in my anchoring to her. She is my home. And in the sprawl of the universe, in the rush of time and the current of dreams—I will always find my way back to her.
“Well, there’s only one way to test your theory, I suppose,” I reply with a slow smile, lacing my fingers through hers. Only a moment, a mere suggestion, and the rush of possibility floods through me. The promise of a new horizon, a new adventure. “Let’s go live, Darling.”
Willa throws her arms around my neck, laughter dancing between us as she kisses me with wild fervor. I am so lost in her that I hardly notice her magic squeezing around us, until the tangy brine of the sea tickles my nose.
The decks of the Indomnitus are exactly as they were. Dark, beautiful. Stained with the colors of the past, and shining with the promise of tomorrow.
To my delight, Rina stands at the helm. Though her golden hair is pulled into an impossibly tight bun, she appears more relaxed than she has in a long while.
Her collar gapes open to reveal the gnarled scar tissue at the base of her throat, and pride swells in my chest for the way she’s begun to embrace her past. She’d refused Willa’s offer to imagine her new wings with a curt nod, and though my heart broke for her, I understood it.
Every scar is a lesson earned with sacrifice and loss. She keeps them as both an homage to her past, and as a reminder never to repeat it.
Where to, Captain?
“Ah, hold that thought. I may have one more tiny surprise,” Willa says nervously.
“Always an ominous endeavor with you, Darling,” I reply with a dry laugh.
She shoots me a dirty look, before snapping her fingers briskly. A vent near the top of the mainmast springs open, and golden dust rains over the deck in a shimmering deluge of magic.
Morphellia dust.
It washes over the obsidian deck, before draining over the sides of the hull to the sea below.
Marina watches the spectacle with an expression of wonder—a wonder that sparks brighter as the ship rises from the sea. My stomach surges as we’re pulled upward into the sky, ready to set sail among the stars.
Marina may not have wanted her wings returned, but my Queen of Dreams found a way to gift her with flight—to gift us all with the infinite light of her possibility, and the dark edge of her care.
Coordinates, Captain? Rina asks from her place at the wheel.
With Willa in my arms, I need no coordinates. The way home is written in our hearts, the journey forward in our souls.
“Through the second star and to the right,” I reply. “And then straight on ‘til morning.”
The End. And The Beginning.