ONEREMINDERS AND DEFINITIONS
When last we came together, you and I, we spoke to each other of middles, which are vast and tangled and sticky. They can cling to your feet and drag you down, such that you find yourself eternally wandering in the center of a story, trapped with no way back to where you began, and even less hope of a way forward to the finish. We spoke of beginnings and their commonalities, and indeed, we had a beginning together, side by side as we set off into story, following a path that exists only for the reader, and not for those already standing inside. This is only fair. They have access to roads that we do not; the world would be out of balance if they could reach for all of ours.
But that was then, in the dark and distant country of the past, where you and I can never go again, no matter how much we might desire it. Time is a road that only runs in one direction for all save a very fortunate few, and none of us is counted in their number. We must go onward. We must leave the middle behind, as once we left the beginning, and continue toward the high, looming cliff of the conclusion. We are almost to the end, my dears, and once we reach it, there will be no further road to follow. This story will be finished. You can go back to the beginning, should you desire, and begin anew, but as time will not start over with you, you will not see the journey the same way. You will know things. You will understand things. Only be aware that knowing and understanding may change the way you feel about the beginning, the middle, and the end. Traveling through the same story a second time is a form of alchemy. The story you have already experienced will never be available to you again. That tale is ending.
As we are approaching the last time we will be able to speak together for the first time, it seems like a kindness to remind you of what has come before, what obstacles we have overcome and what wonders we have seen, all in the reaching of this place. We are still in the country of once upon a time, after all, and it would be best to remember that as clearly as we can.
So: once, on the other side of many days and many adventures, two children lived on the same street, although they did not know it, and lived plain, pleasant, parallel lives, all unaware of the companion they had yet to meet. Their names were Avery Alexander Grey and Hepzibah Laurel Jones. Avery had no nicknames, no sweet diminutives, but called himself ever and entirely “Avery,” complete in his own circle of one. Hepzibah went only and always by “Zib,” and left her given name behind her, as if it were a burden too heavy to be carried on her narrow shoulders. They were both content with the worlds that they inhabited, and unaware of the other worlds existing so close outside their own.
But those worlds did exist, as other worlds have always existed and always will, and on a day that had seemed the same as any other, the children found themselves confronted with a series of surprises. First, a broken water main, which forced them both to walk a new route to get to school. Second, each other, two strangers staring wide-eyed and bewildered at the intruder in a territory they had always viewed as theirs alone. Surely, thought Avery, I would have noticed someone so wild and unkempt where she didn’t belong! And surely, thought Zib, I would have noticed someone so pressed and polished where he didn’t belong! In this, they still paralleled each other, as they had always unknowingly done from the beginning, even as they walked toward a wall that shouldn’t have been there, blocking their passage into a forest that both of them knew, quite completely, did not and could not possibly exist.
Over the wall they went, the boy and the girl, the pressed and the rumpled, the A and the Z of our story. They did not know it, but they were already standing firmly on the improbable road, which is not always visible. This is the danger of walking a road that has opinions about where it belongs: it can move, at times, between worlds, transferring properties from one into the next, transmuting the familiar into the unforeseen. The improbable road had come to collect them, knowing them for its own, because the improbable road is one of the few things that can actually travel backward along the twisting weave of time, collecting what it needs from past and from future.
If Avery and Zib seem strange to you, only remember that they may well be children of a different time, brought backward or forward to suit the needs of a piece of opinionated pavement. If this is the thing which seems strange to you, perhaps you are not yet ready for the ending, and should go back to the beginning and make your way here to us again, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you here as long as you need me to, as I always have, as I always will.
Over the wall, into the wood, and out the other side! Through the Kingdom belonging to the King of Coins, from whose hands pour wealth of every kind, gemstones without price, minerals without measure, who can woo even the stones themselves to speak! Across the frozen river that marks the border between his domain and the Kingdom of the King of Cups, who trades in cold and consequences, all the way to the borders of the Saltwise Sea!
All along the way they traveled the improbable road, which led them true if not direct, and would have taken them to the Impossible City, where stories begin and end and go on forever, had they not taken up company with Niamh, a drowned girl, who was very possible in ways that they were not, and was thus barred from the city streets.
Ah, but what is the Impossible City? Its shadow has stretched across everything we’ve shared together, all the way back to the very first word I spoke to you. It is device and destination, something to be sought and something to be denied, the storied principality of the Queen of Wands, who has yet to make an appearance in her own skin, looking through her own eyes. It must be something very grand, this city, to be Impossible and real at the same time, and more, to be something so dearly sought after and desired! It must be something grand indeed.
But we are getting there, one step at a time, and there are still steps to be taken, still paths unfollowed yet ahead of us.
From the edges of the Saltwise Sea to the very center, from solid land to the deck of a sailing ship! Children to travelers to passengers to pirates, and finally, to the aid of the Lady of Salt and Sorrow, who had been sundered into two people for so very long that she had almost forgotten how to be herself, intact and entire. The Lady forgave them and freed them to continue onward, and so they went beneath the sea, crossing to the Kingdom of the Queen of Swords in the belly of a mosasaur, which would have seemed impossible on the other side of the woodward wall which began their entire adventure.
From there, a beach to a mountain to a mesa, winds to wishes to exchanges, and the palace of the Queen of Swords, creator of crows and thief of hearts. They learned many things while in her company, but chief among them was the name of the Crow Girl who had traveled with them almost from the beginning, who had traded her heart and her name for the freedom to fly, and had never thought to see either one of those things again. A name is a terrible, glorious thing. Once spoken, it changes everything.
Soleil, she had been called, before she gave up her heart and received a black-winged bird in exchange. Soleil, she was to be called again, as she fled the palace with Avery and Zib, with Niamh and with Jack, the son of the Queen of Swords, who wished to escape with more than just his life. So she was Soleil once more and for the first time; she was someone new, in her way, and this new person remained a mystery to all except Soleil herself, who had remembered her own identity and would now be able to chart her story by her own map once again.
From the palace to the improbable road, which now stretched like a rainbow film of oil atop the water across the heavens, bending high and carrying the fleeing children quite away. Of all their allies, the road had been the most consistent, and would remain so, at least until one of them left it for the final time.
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.
Copyright © 2023 by Seanan McGuire
