CHAPTER 20 — “Unanimous”
EPILOGUE — THREE MONTHS LATER
The tomatoes came up beautifully.
Big, red, practically glowing with health. Best crop the village has ever seen, which isn’t saying much because the village is terrible at farming, but still. I’ll take the win.
“You’re staring at tomatoes again,” Mariella says from the porch.
“I’m admiring my work.”
“You’ve been admiring your work for twenty minutes.”
“They’re very good tomatoes.”
She walks down to join me, wrapping her arms around my waist from behind. “You know what normal people do when they have free time? They relax. They read books. They don’t have intense emotional relationships with vegetables.”
“These aren’t just vegetables. These are symbols.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Growth? Renewal? The fundamental resilience of life in the face of adversity?”
“They’re tomatoes, Velthar.”
“Symbolic tomatoes.”
She sighs. But I can feel her smiling against my shoulder.
The world’s different now.
Not entirely—empires don’t collapse overnight, even when their emperors are disgraced. But different enough.
Dario’s alive, technically. Stripped of his power, publicly exposed as a fraud, aged into an old man in a matter of weeks. Last I heard, he’s in some kind of house arrest, surrounded by guards who are supposedly protecting him but are actually making sure he doesn’t run.
He sends me letters sometimes. Begging for forgiveness. Begging for help. Begging for me to restore what I took.
I burn them without reading past the first line.
Persephone’s in a temple somewhere. Took vows. Became a nun. I’m told she spends her days praying and crying and refusing to speak to anyone who isn’t divine.
Good for her, I guess. At least she found a coping mechanism.
Gorath… actually, I don’t know what happened to Gorath. He wandered off after the battle and nobody’s seen him since. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he found some small village where nobody knows his name and he can pretend to be someone else.
I hope it’s the second one. Not because I’ve forgiven him, but because death would be too easy.
Sylva’s the interesting one. She wrote a book. Published it under a pen name. It’s called “The Fraud: A Confession” and it details everything—the Mary Harvest, the betrayal, two hundred years of stolen credit. It’s become a bestseller.
I’ve read it three times.
She gets some things wrong—misremembers certain details, softens her own role in places—but the core of it is true. The world knows now. The world knows what they did.
That matters.
And Anton?
Anton’s still out there.
“You’re thinking about him again,” Mariella says.
We’re in bed. Late night. The kind of hour where thoughts get too loud and sleep feels like a foreign concept.
“He’s the only one who got away,” I say. “The only one who isn’t suffering.”
“He’s spent three months running. Never staying anywhere more than a few days. Looking over his shoulder constantly, waiting for you to appear.” She props herself up on one elbow. “That sounds like suffering to me.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s never going to be enough.” She runs her fingers through my hair. “That’s the thing about revenge. It doesn’t fill the hole. It just gives you something to do while the hole heals on its own.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“I read a book once.”
I snort. “Stealing my lines now?”
“What’s yours is mine. That’s how relationships work.”
She settles back down. We lie in silence for a while, listening to the night sounds—insects, wind, Johnson snoring in the corner because he’s decided our bedroom is his bedroom and we haven’t figured out how to evict a Tier 4 apex predator.
“I’m happy,” I say eventually.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think I would be. After everything. I thought I’d get my revenge and feel… I don’t know. Empty. Hollow. Like there was nothing left.”
“And instead?”
“Instead there’s this.” I gesture vaguely at the room, the house, the village outside, all of it. “There’s you. There’s Mira calling me Mr. Flower Man. There’s Granny Thorn’s terrible soup and Garrett’s war stories and Johnson’s ongoing taxation of our bread supply.”
“There’s tomatoes.”
“There’s tomatoes.” I smile in the dark. “I spent two hundred years wanting revenge. Turns out what I actually wanted was a reason to stop.”
She doesn’t say anything.
Just holds me tighter.
THE NEXT MORNING
Mira finds me in the field.
“Mr. Flower Man!”
“Yeah, kid?”
“There’s a lady at the gate. She says she knows you.”
I frown. “What kind of lady?”
“Old lady. Really old. She smells like temples.”
My stomach drops.
Persephone looks like death.
Not a metaphor. She actually looks like she’s been dead for a while and forgot to lie down. Skin like paper. Hair like cobwebs. Eyes sunken so deep they’re barely visible.
Three months of rapid aging. Three months without the stolen power that kept her young.
She’s dying.
“Vel.” Her voice is a whisper. “I had to see you. One more time.”
I don’t respond. Just stand there. Watching.
“I know you hate me. I know what I did was unforgivable. But before I—” She coughs. Long, wet, ugly. “Before I go, I needed you to know. I never stopped loving you. Even when I was holding your hand. Even when I was watching you die. I loved you every second.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“I know. I know it doesn’t.” Tears are streaming down her face. “But I needed to say it. I needed you to hear it from me, one more time, while I still can.”
I stare at her.
This woman I loved. This woman I married. This woman who destroyed me so completely that it took two hundred years and a new body to put myself back together.
She’s begging for absolution.
She’s not going to get it.
“I don’t forgive you,” I say. “I’m never going to forgive you. What you did—what all of you did—it broke something in me that can never be fully fixed.”
She closes her eyes. Accepts it.
“But,” I continue, and she looks up. “I don’t hate you anymore. I’m tired of hating you. I’m tired of carrying you around like a weight I can’t put down.”
“Vel—”
“So here’s what I’ll give you, Persephone.
Not forgiveness. Not absolution. But this: I hope you find peace.
I hope whatever’s waiting for you on the other side is kinder than what you deserve.
And I hope—” My voice catches. Damn it. “I hope the version of you who loved me, the real one, the one I remember from before everything went wrong—I hope that version finds what she’s looking for. ”
She’s sobbing now. Full body sobs. The kind that come from somewhere deep, somewhere real.
“Thank you,” she manages. “Thank you, Vel.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry. Velthar.” She smiles through the tears. “You were always better than us. Better than me. I knew it the moment I met you.”
She turns to leave.
Stops.
“The woman,” she says, not looking back. “The one you found. She’s good. I can tell. She looks at you the way I used to. Before I forgot how.”
“She’s better than you.”
“I know.” A wet laugh. “Everyone’s better than me. That’s sort of the point.”
She walks away.
I watch her go.
And something—some last, lingering piece of the old wound—finally closes.
Mariella finds me an hour later.
I’m sitting on the porch, staring at nothing, processing whatever the hell that conversation was.
“I saw her leave,” she says, sitting down beside me. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. I think so?”
“What did she want?”
“To say goodbye, I think. She’s dying. The aging caught up to her.”
“Are you sad about that?”
I consider the question. Really consider it.
“No,” I say finally. “But I’m not happy about it either. I’m just… done. She was this huge thing in my life for so long, this weight I carried everywhere, and now she’s just… a dying old woman I used to know.”
“That sounds healthy, actually.”
“Does it?”
“Comparatively.” She takes my hand. “You could have killed her. You didn’t. You could have turned her away. You didn’t. You let her have her goodbye, even though you didn’t owe her anything.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s human.” She squeezes my hand. “That’s all any of us can be.”
THAT NIGHT
Dinner at the farmhouse.
It’s become a tradition—every few days, the whole weird extended family gathers around our table.
Mira’s there, obviously. Garrett’s there, telling stories nobody asked for.
Granny Thorn’s there, criticizing everyone’s cooking while contributing nothing edible.
Even Bram shows up sometimes, still asking about sword lessons I keep refusing to give.
Johnson presides over the whole thing from the corner, accepting tribute in the form of bread.
“I have an announcement,” Mariella says, standing up.
Everyone looks at her.
“We’re getting married.”
Chaos.
Mira’s screaming—happy screaming, but still screaming.
Garrett’s laughing and pounding the table.
Granny Thorn’s saying something that might be congratulations but sounds like a threat.
Bram’s confused because apparently he didn’t know we were together, which says something about his observation skills.
Johnson steals an entire loaf of bread during the confusion. Taxes, probably.
Mariella sits back down, grinning at the mayhem she’s caused.
“You could have warned me,” I mutter.
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“I don’t even have a ring.”
“You’re the Archmage. Make one.”
She’s right. I am. I could.
I flick my fingers under the table, shaping mana into matter, and when I bring my hand up there’s a ring sitting in my palm. Simple gold band. Single sapphire. Nothing fancy, but nothing fraudulent either.
Real gold. Real gem. Real magic.
Real love.
I take her hand. Slide the ring onto her finger.
“Marry me?” I ask, which is stupid because she already announced it, but it feels important to ask anyway.
“Obviously,” she says. “You think I’d announce it without checking first?”
“You literally just announced it without checking.”
“I knew you’d say yes.”
“How?”
“Because you look at me like I invented sunlight.” She kisses me, quick and soft. “You’re very obvious, remember?”
The chaos continues around us.
But for a moment, it’s just us.
Just two runaways who found each other.
Just the beginning of something new.