Epilogue
HADEOM
The room was grand, as they always were in this place, remarkable in every way yet impossible to describe. Comfortable yet minimalist, intimate yet immense. There didn’t seem to be any walls. There never did here.
At times it seemed cathedral-vast, with distances so immense that whole weather systems wandered lazily through the upper dark.
Thunderheads rolled in silence somewhere above columns large enough to have their own horizons.
Yet the room was also close enough to feel.
The scrape of hooved feet across stone carried with impossible clarity, and it seemed to echo.
Perhaps there were walls after all. Perhaps they simply chose not to remain in the same place for long.
Hadeom envied them.
Cern took his seat across from him at a table carved from a stone that remembered the stars.
Between them rested a black vessel of steaming liquid. Neither had poured it. It had appeared because reunion demanded ceremony.
Cern leaned back in his chair, one arm hanging loose.
He looked different here; different yet the same.
He wore his age lightly. Moss threaded through the seams of his dark robes, and now and then, tiny leaves opened and closed along his sleeves as though responding to distant seasons.
His face shifted subtly whenever one looked too hard at it—antlers in silhouette, then none at all; a shepherd; a king; a starving wolf beneath a winter moon.
Whereas Hadeom looked exactly like exhaustion.
Not weak. Not diminished. But the weariness in him was something far older and more terrible than fatigue. It was erosion.
He was melancholy. Morose.
He was done.
For a while neither spoke, in the way of old friends who understood the dignity of silence. The need for it.
At last Cern lifted the vessel and drank. “You’re fading at the edges, boy.”
Hadeom gave a dry smile. “You always did open with kindness.”
“I save kindness for mortals. They panic without it.”
That earned him the ghost of a laugh from Hadeom. The sound wandered away into the impossible room, echoing from places neither of them could see.
Hadeom rested both hands on the table. His fingers were long and pale, and he wasn’t sure he recognised them anymore. He didn’t recognise any part of himself.
“They do not pray to me anymore,” Hadeom said.
Cern shrugged. “They rarely pray properly to anyone.”
“No. This is different.” Hadeom stared into the steam rising from the cup between them and dancing in the shapes of memories—funeral processions, battlefields, corridors at the harrowed place he called work these days.
“Once, they feared death. They honoured it. They approached the dark with ritual. Names. Coins over the eyes. Fires on hillsides.”
“And now?”
“Now they hide it.” His voice softened. “They push it behind curtains. Into sterile rooms. They speak of fighting it, defeating it, curing it forever.”
The room dimmed sympathetically.
Cern watched his friend carefully. “You think belief sustains us.”
“It does.”
“To a point,” Cern said. “But we were old before they knew the language.”
Hadeom did not answer, and that probably worried Cern more than anything else could have. But Hadeom was tired.
A long time ago, Hadeom had argued with Cern over frivolous things with the certainty of Earth’s gravity itself. Now he sat bent slightly forward, staring into nothing. “I’m tired, Cern.”
Cern leaned in. “How long since you slept?”
“I don’t.”
“You used to.”
“I also used to dream.” Hadeom lifted his eyes that were beautiful once but now were terrible—the colour of the moonlight on dark water. Not deep, but hollow. “Now I listen.”
“To what?”
“To the monsters.”
The weight on his shoulders felt impossible. Worn down like a stone, smoothed by tides. Or like a sun cooling one terrible degree at a time.
“Have I not paid my penance?” Hadeom asked. “Have I not suffered enough?”
Cern studied him, seeing through him. Knowing someone for so long was not without its faults. His face shifted, pensive, knowing. “You found him.”
Hadeom could only nod, and for a long drawn-out moment, the confession lingered between them. “You kept him from me.”
Cern sat very still. “His mother asked me, all those years ago, to keep him from harm.”
Hadeom’s head shot up, his gaze meeting Cern’s, and... and then he understood. “That included me.”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t...,” Hadeom said, but the truth was, he already had.
The vast room tightened around them until it felt no larger than a lonely cabin in winter, like Hadeom wished it was.
“You think if you stop,” Cern said carefully, “the bounty of monsters on Earth will go unattended.”
Hadeom looked away. “He was never a monster.”
“No. Humans cannot determine the difference,” Cern said.
“They fear what they do not know, and with the rise of men comes the power to burn down anything that challenges them. They called anything other ‘monsters’ and threw around the word ‘evil’ because they learned long ago to wield religion like a weapon to keep down what may take their power from them.”
“I know.” Hadeom tasted his own regret, bitter and awful. “I helped them.”
“You saved a great many.”
“But not him.” He sighed. “I would have taken him if I’d found him sooner.”
“And now?” Cern asked, his voice the rattle of a storm, like barely restrained violence. “What did you do?”
“I walked away. I saw the water, the galaxy in that cove, and I knew he was there. But I walked away.” He met Cern’s gaze. “I’m done. I have a tiredness in my bones that I can’t describe. I feel brittle. I need...”
“You need to rest.”
“Yes. For a thousand years, it feels like.”
Cern was quiet again. He sipped his drink, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Do you remember,” he said with a laugh. “Do you remember that time you once challenged the northern wind to a duel?”
“You made it flip my cloak.”
He laughed, and somewhere nearby, leaves rustled in reply.
“You were lighter then, known by a different name,” Cern said. “Your burden has weighted you down.”
“My burden has broken me,” he replied, voice flat. “I am done, Cern. How can I protect humans from the monsters when the only monsters left are...”
“Human?”
Hadeom gave a nod and sighed. “Lusca was the last real monster.”
“And she is gone?”
“Sent back into the void she came from.” He reached over and took Cern’s cup from his hand, smiling as he sipped from it.
His only reaction was the curve of his eyebrow, a pull at his lips. “There will be more rifts, more portals. Different monsters, different religions. Different worlds, different times.”
“Then there will be another hunter, but I am not he.”
“I see you no longer fear death,” he said, eyeing his cup and snatching it back.
Hadeom laughed. Not dry this time. Real laughter, deep and rusted from disuse. “You remain insufferable, old man,” Hadeom teased.
“And yet you invited me.”
“I did no such thing.”
“The room did.”
At that, both of them glanced around.
The chamber had changed again. Now it resembled, impossibly, a small fireside cabin. Shelves curved along the walls, filled with books written in extinct alphabets. Rain tapped softly against nearby windows that absolutely had not existed before.
Hadeom stared at the rain, at the forest outside.
“I remember this place,” he said quietly.
Cern nodded. “You are welcome to stay, my friend.” Then he winked. “The honey mead is good here.”
“Oh no,” Hadeom said, shaking his head. “I’m not falling for that again.”
Cern chuckled, and then Hadeom could hear the faun children playing outside in the rain.
For a little while longer, they sat together while the rain whispered against the glass and the universe rearranged itself politely around their memories.
“I know a place,” Cern said. “Not far from here. A hut by the river, surrounded by forest. If you need to heal, it will serve you well. Go back to your roots, find yourself again.”
Hadeom’s eyes met his again, and he made no attempt to hide his tears, to hide his pain. And with a single nod, it was done.
He was free. Free of his burden, free from his past. He simply wanted to rest his weary bones, his tired mind, his heavy heart.
He would go to this hut by the river in the forest, and he would pare back the dead feathers and rot in his soul and bury himself in earth in hopes that new shoots would grow. A new life, a new start.
And for the first time in many ages, Hadeom’s shadows rested with him.
The end