Epilogue
It was not always easy, this happily ever after.
Not for anyone.
Eisalaan’s history was a treasured storybook ripped apart, the pages crumpled and creased in the cold hands of someone so desperate to own the fairytale she hardly cared if it could be enjoyed by anyone else.
But the people of the Silver Kingdom had always understood that stories belong to us all.
They shift and change the more they are told, their meanings varying from person to person, but they are always there.
Familiar tales woven into the very fabric of humanity over and over and over.
To share our stories is the most human practice there is.
So, over the months and years that followed, that is what Eisalaan did.
They told the story of their kingdom. They glued the pieces of their history back together in a new volume, the margins black with notes and observations and truths.
There were new tales to tell now, too. The story of a leader who had turned the coldest, bleakest place in all of Adhlas to a land of magic and promise.
The tale of a family made and broken, and pieced back together; different now, and not without its fissures, but no less whole.
Of a Sorceress who snared a kingdom with her web of desires, only to lose herself in that same tangled trap.
Of a boy who had grown with fear in his heart, yet sworn himself to protect the fearful.
Of a man who had waited half a millenia for the dawn, only to fall in love with the sunrise.
Of a queen who chose, every day, to lead with love and laughter.
Of the true Saviours, and the quiet lives they’d chosen.
These new stories went by so very many titles; The First Frost and the Last, The Drown’d Clan, The Silver Dawn, Lady Snow and the Golden Saviour, The Gard and the Fire Mouse.
Different tales, and different storytellers, but they shared one common thread, as all stories do—each of them, in every iteration, was about love.
Every story is a love story, after all.