His nails sprouted into claws. His vertebrae threw up a ridge of spines—it was like his back being scratched only even better. He was made of power, and there was a furnace in his belly. He opened his mouth and roared a word, and the word was made of fire. He was a dragon, and he was ready. He was going to blast the immortal living shit out of Ember.
The fire bent and flowed around Ember’s horns, but it scorched Him too—Quentin smelled the burning wool. Maybe as His world crumbled the god was losing some of His imperviousness. Well, bad luck. Quentin bounded forward, and Ember bolted, but it was all slow motion to Quentin’s draconian reflexes. He pinned Ember to the ground with one massive taloned forefoot—none of your puny T. rex arms for this dragon—and tried to get his jaws around Ember’s thick muscled neck while the god writhed frantically in his grip. Quentin’s scales, he couldn’t help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin’ muscle car.
He was a dragon, not a god, but he was huge and tough and strong, and this body was made for epic scrapping. Whereas Ember, for whatever divine reason, was a god with the body of an animal that occasionally took part in ritualized male dominance contests but spent most of its time grazing. Ember rolled and flipped Quentin over Him, Quentin lashing his tail crazily, hoping Alice was well clear. Then he was on top again.
“Enough!” Ember roared, and Quentin was blown back into the air.
Spreading his wings—his wings!—like an angry angel Quentin checked his flight and power-dived back at the god, who dodged before Quentin could crush Him. They circled for a minute, pacing, the pond spouting steam whenever Quentin’s overheated tail touched it, then he darted forward again and had Ember in his teeth. Lightning struck his back, once and then three, four, five times, jangling his nerves and blowing off half a dozen scales, and probably crippling his delicate bat-wings, but pain was something a dragon noted only in passing and then dismissed with contempt.
Any love or pity he might have felt for Ember was a human thing. There was no room in his dragon-heart for any such feelings. This was a job for a monster, and that’s what he was now. Die, he thought. Die, you selfish bastard, you miserable coward, you old goat. Die and give us life.
Now he had a proper grip, and he held on and ground Ember between his molars like a cheap cigar, and the air bleated out of Him. He held on for Alice, for Eliot, for Julia, for Benedict, for his useless hopeless father, for everyone he’d ever loved or disappointed or betrayed. He held on out of pride and anger and hope and stubbornness, and he felt what was left of Fillory holding on too and waiting to see if it would be enough. Quentin blew white-hot fire between his teeth, and his saliva was toxic acid. The ram’s ribs bent and groaned, and Quentin felt Him try to inflate His lungs, felt Him fail. He tasted burned skin, and he felt the skin tear.
Quentin held Him there, and when the ram had gone five minutes without a breath he spat Him out onto the ground. He’d done all a dragon could do.
Suddenly Quentin was human again, standing over the steaming, smoking body of the ram, flopped out on the grass like a sleeping dog the size of a bull. But it wasn’t over. Ember’s foreleg stirred. He was beaten, but some tenacious spark of life was refusing to leave His body. If Fillory was going to live Quentin would have to tear that spark out of Him and quench it.
This was what the knife was for, he realized, the one Asmodeus had gotten away with. Shit. Fate had practically shoved it into his damn hands, and he’d fumbled it away! He was in a fight with a god and he had no weapon.
Except that he did have one. Sometimes when you finally figure out what you have to do, you discover that you already have what you need. He’d always had it. Quentin felt around in his pocket, and his fingers found a thick round coin. Mayakovsky’s last coin.
This was the last of his inheritance. He felt a twinge of sadness, just a twinge, at the knowledge that he would never make his land now. That would have been nice. But he felt no bitterness.
What Quentin did now he’d already done once, a long time ago, but then he’d done it in anger and confusion. Now he did it calmly, with a full sense of who he was and what he was doing. He still had some nickels in his pockets, the ones he’d brought back from the mirror-house. He went to one knee and made a little stack of them on a patch of bare ground, and on top of it he balanced the golden coin, goose-side up. Then he gripped the stack in his fist and it became the hilt of a burning silver sword, which he drew up out of the ground as if it had been embedded there all along, placed there for him centuries ago.
He held it up in front of him. The last time he’d held it had been on the day he arrived at Brakebills.
“It’s good to see you again,” he whispered.
Pale, almost transparent fire played along its length, surprisingly bright in the eerie half-darkness, as if the sword had been dipped in brandy and touched with a match. He adjusted his grip on the hilt. He tried to remember something, anything, from his fencing lessons with Bingle.
Ember’s eye half opened, but He didn’t stir. Maybe He couldn’t. But if Quentin had had to put a name to what he saw in Ember’s eye it would have been not fear, or rage, but relief. Quentin felt it too.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The sword cut almost all the way through Ember’s thick neck in one stroke. The wound opened wide instantly, red and wet, the skin snapping back like taut rubber. The god’s legs went stiff and sprang apart like a marionette with its strings pulled. Blood sprayed and then pumped from the stump.
Quentin felt Alice’s hand on his shoulder. He took a shaky breath. It was done, Ember was dead. An age had ended; Quentin had ended it. It didn’t feel like an exalted business—there was nothing grand about it. It hadn’t felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all. Quentin stepped back from the god’s corpse.
Something big rocketed across the sky, and he looked up in time to spot a fat, stubby spacecraft already dwindling in the distance, an iron fireplug riding an inverted cone of blue flame. The dwarfs, if he had to guess. Always full of surprises. There were only three or four stars left, and even as he watched one of them lost its grip on the heavens and fell. Behind him a throat was delicately cleared, as if to alert an inattentive waiter.
“Everyone forgets about Me,” Umber said. “As I said, you’ll need to kill Us both. We were only ever really one god, between the two of Us.”
He trotted over to Quentin, as meek as you like, sniffed fastidiously at His brother’s corpse, and then stretched out His neck. He even waggled His shoulders a little, in anticipation, as if the operation were going to give Him pleasure. What a perverse creature. Quentin steadied himself and tried to think of all the good that Umber could have done but hadn’t. Maybe the next god would do better. This time the sword stroked cleanly, all the way through.
The instant Umber died, Quentin exploded. He dropped the sword. He felt himself racing upward and outward—he was blowing out in all directions. His arms and legs stretched out—a hundred miles, a thousand. His view expanded to take in all of Fillory: he saw it hanging there in space in front of him like a shattered saucer. He was a phantasmal giant, a cosmic blue whale times a billion.
He wasn’t disconcerted, but only because gods don’t disconcert easily. The logic was clear to him, because the logic of everything was clear now. There was nothing that was not self-evident. A god could die, but a god’s power did not, and without Ember and Umber to wield it their power had flowed into the one who sacrificed them. Therefore he, Quentin, was a god now, a living god, the god of Fillory. He was no longer Fillory’s reader; he had become its author.
But what a broken world had been entrusted to Him! He shook His great head disapprovingly. Even now it continued to disintegrate before Him, its connective tissue weakening, its edges crumbling. This would never do. It must be mended. Mending was something Quentin understood well, and with the po
wer that was in Him now there was nothing broken that He could not fix.
With a wave of His left hand He slowed the passage of time to a crawl, so that to everyone but Him the work of a millennium would pass in a fraction of a second. Then slowly, deliberately, and with inexhaustible patience, He began to gather up the pieces from where they hung and drifted in space. He collected the clods and clumps and grains of soil and stone that had been the flesh of Fillory, sorted them like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and one by one fitted them together and knitted them back into a single whole, running His huge spectral fingertips along the seams until they vanished as if they had never been.
He worked with great care. The dirt of Fillory was marbled like a great side of beef, and He took pains to position its veins of ore so that they lined up just as they once had. He rethreaded Fillory’s silver rivers and streams, or where it pleased Him He allowed them to find new paths, and He gently shepherded the shattered lakes and seas back into their basins. He swept up the air and the winds and heaped them up in invisible masses above Fillory so that the land could breathe again.
As He worked He rolled and sifted between His divine fingertips the remains of various objects He remembered from His human life. Odd little things, from long ago. The bones of the gentle bay He rode when He left the centaurs. The fragments of the Watcherwoman’s shattered watch, which had been trodden into the earth over the years and dispersed and forgotten. The pistol Janet had brought into Fillory and then dropped on her way out of Ember’s Tomb. The head of the arrow that killed Benedict. The last rotting remnants of the Muntjac, scattered in the shallows of the far Eastern Ocean.
Those animals and humans who had died in the apocalypse He allowed to rest where they were, but He moved among the survivors, healing them, rebuilding damaged organs, repairing and resewing skin and bones. He bade the great turtle return to its place in the tower of turtles that held up Fillory, and take up its burden again, and it did—it really wasn’t suited for a more active lifestyle anyway. He rounded up the escaped dead and returned them to their gymnasium Hell and then, feeling divinely troubled by their plight, He bade them sleep, peacefully and forever. Their games were over for good.
He set the delicate green carpet of grass that covered Fillory to regrowing, and restored some of the trees, stepping them like the masts of ships, not all, but enough that they could reseed the forests. He spent a long time—years, maybe centuries—setting the seas to beating at the shore again, and nursing the water cycle into some kind of stable functioning state. He picked up the bodies of Ember and Umber with tender care and buried Them where They could decompose and enrich the soil around them. The ground above Them became green, and two enormous trees grew over Their graves, their branches spiraling curiously like rams’ horns.
The moon He lovingly polished and set spinning again. One by one He rehung the stars like the crystals of a chandelier. He filled in the great crater that the sun had burned in the ocean floor, and He cooled the sea, and rebuilt and remortared the wall that ran around the edge of the world. He took the sun itself in His great cupped hands, pressing and molding it back into a sphere, feeling its fading heat. He blew on it till it burned white hot. Then He placed it back on its eternal track and set it going in its orbit again.
He rested. He looked at His work, watched it tick and turn like a great watch, here and there smoothing a rough edge or roughening a smooth one, slowing a torrent or urging on a tide, till all was in balance. When there was nothing else to mend He simply gazed at it, felt its atoms circulating and combining or simply shivering in place, and He subsided into a grand peace. Fillory lived again. It wasn’t what it had been, yet, but it would be once it had healed, and that it could do without His help. He could have watched it forever.
But it was not for Him to do so. He had been given custody of this power, but He sensed that it didn’t belong to Him. Wistfully, but not regretfully, He restored time to its customary rate of speed with a wave of His right hand. As His last act, a divine whim really, He retrieved the remains of the White Stag from the gullet of the giant snapping turtle of the Northern Marsh, fused its skeleton back together, reconstituted its organs and its skin, and restored it to life. He placed it on an island far out to sea to begin its wanderings again. The next age of Fillory would have a Questing Beast too.
Then He allowed the power to leave Him. As it did so He shrank and shrank, the tiny disk of Fillory rising up to meet him and then stretching out endlessly around him, until he stood on it again as just one more of its inhabitants.
He wasn’t alone. When he was a god the particular names of Fillory’s many inhabitants hadn’t greatly concerned him, but now he was in the company of a woman and a demigoddess, and after a few seconds their names came back to him. They were Alice and Julia.
CHAPTER 30
You let go of the power,” Julia said.
Dawn was breaking over the raw, ragged, still-healing horizon, and he was losing it all already, everything but the faintest, most transparent memory of what it had meant to be a god. He savored the very last of it—the certainty, the power, that sense of total knowledge and well-being and control, forever and ever. It evaporated from his mind and was gone. It wasn’t the kind of memory that a mortal brain could hang on to.
He was just Quentin again, nothing more. But he would always know that it had happened, that he’d known what it was like, both for a few seconds and, in the life of a god, a thousand years.
“I let it go,” he said. “It wasn’t mine.”
Julia nodded thoughtfully.
“You’re right, it wasn’t yours. A more jealous god, or a more jealous man, might have tried to keep it, though I think the outcome would have been the same. Thank you for doing that, Quentin, for mending Fillory. I might have done it myself, but the fiddly stuff like coastlines always takes me ages. I don’t have the knack for it. Also I thought you might enjoy it.”
“Thank you. I did. Or I think I did.” Already he wasn’t crystal clear on what exactly he’d enjoyed.
She was recognizably her old self, still the Julia of Brooklyn, or directly descended from her, with her freckly face and her long black hair. But at the same time she was unmistakably divine: her height had been somewhat variable in the past, but at the moment she was seven feet tall. She wore a rather dramatic dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a presidential inauguration, even though it was made of equal parts bark and green leaves.
“Walk with me,” Julia said.
They walked, the three of them together. Fillory was Fillory again, though it was a wan and wasted Fillory, waking again piece by piece after its catastrophic illness. The meadow was still brown, the ground still dry and cracked. The new age was still in its first minutes.
Quentin was light-headed. He still had the blood of Ember and Umber on his shoes. It was hard to connect the brutal, bloody thing he’d just done with the renewal of Fillory. But this world was rudely, potently alive again, you could feel it.
“I have a question,” Alice said. “Julia, why didn’t you kill Ember yourself? I mean, it all worked out fine in the end, but you would have done a quicker job than we did.”
“I might have. But there would have been no power in it. A demigod slaying a god . . . even if I could have managed it, those are not the terms of the ritual.”
“Still, you seem more godly now than you did when I last saw you,” Quentin said. “More divine. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong. I was made queen of the dryads. I’m a bit more than a demigod now—more of a three-quarters god. There ought to be a word for it.”
Now and then Julia would brush a dead plant with her fingers, absentmindedly, and it would straighten up and become green. When she pointed at a fallen tree its roots would come to life and grip the ground again, and it would pull itself up hastily as if it had been caught napping on the job. Quentin couldn’t figure out how she deci
ded which ones to revive. Maybe it was random; maybe some trees were more deserving than others.
“I’d like to do something for you, Quentin,” she said. “On behalf of Fillory. You did us a great service today, and you’ve always served us well. Is there something here that you’ve never seen or done, that you’ve always wanted to?”
Quentin thought for a minute. He’d picked up the silver sword and was carrying it, but a little awkwardly since for whatever reason he hadn’t managed to summon a sheath to go with it, and he was leery of touching the pale flames that licked along its blade. He stuck it in the ground and left it there. Probably he’d be able to summon it again, if he ever needed it.
What did he want? It was a lovely gesture, but as far as he knew he’d been everywhere in Fillory, or everywhere that was worth going. He didn’t feel especially interested in the dwarf tunnels, or the Fingerling Islands, or in the tourist attractions of greater Loria.
But wait. There was one thing.
“Can you show me the Far Side of the World? Show us? Alice should come too, if she wants.”
“Of course.”
“It’s not like I haven’t already been there,” Alice said. “As a niffin.”
“True,” Quentin said. “I forgot. You should get a different reward.”
“I’ll save mine. This is for you. I’ll stay here for a while.”
So Julia took Quentin’s hand, and they rose up together and flew west out over the coast of Fillory, faster and faster, across the sea and then over the wall at the rim of the world and down, head down, in a great curving roller-coaster swoop. Soon Quentin became aware that his point of view had changed, that without having turned around they were rising up rather than diving down. Gravity had turned around. They surmounted another wall and then they were looking out over the Far Side.
Julia paused, hovering. For him it would have been exhausting, but for Julia flying was nothing, and as long as he was with her it was nothing for him too. Her large hand encased his completely; the feeling reminded Quentin of being a child. It was twilight on the Far Side; the sun had just set there as it rose on Fillory. He couldn’t see much, just hushed fields and valleys. The difference was subtle, but even from this distance it was quieter and more intense than Fillory—richer in whatever made Fillory magical, more densely infused. There was an air of excited expectation. Curious little motes of light sparkled in the dusk, like tiny glowing gnats.