Suddenly, Marcus beside me, I was yanked up into the sky and pulled through a hole in the center of the fabric. Now I was on the other side, the top side. I looked down and saw a beautiful work of art, like needlepoint or cross-stitching, a magnificent tapestry more exquisite than any I’d ever seen. The yarn and threads had been perfectly knitted together in elaborate design by the hands of a master craftsman. I saw in the center of the tapestry the Woodsman on a tree. I saw how a senseless murder, history’s worst act of betrayal, was the centerpiece of a glorious design. Surrounding it I saw other tragedies, other absurd and incomprehensible events that now had clear meaning and purpose.

“It’s stunning,” I said to Marcus. “Before I saw only the underside of the tapestry, the knots and frays. I never saw the design, the beauty.”

“No wonder,” Marcus said. “You have always lived on the wrong side of the tapestry.”

“Charis and Erebus were both at my elbows every day,” I said to Marcus. “My choices cast a vote for one or the other. And even in what seemed like chaos, there was purpose. How clear it all is now. How cloudy it all was then.”

I stood back on Thuros again and saw a dying cosmos hold out its weak right arm, longing for a transfusion, a cure for its cancerous chasm. I saw the Woodsman, holding what appeared to be a tiny lump of coal, the same size as the blue-green marble he’d held before. The Woodsman squeezed his hand, and the world around me darkened. I fell to my knees and grasped my throat with my hands, felt the squeeze against my right temple. Just as I felt I would scream from unbearable pressure, the crushed world emerged from his grip a diamond and I gasped air in relief.

All around me I saw soldiers drop their weapons, the crippled toss their crutches and run, the blind open their eyes and see and point and shout and dance, throwing their arms around each other and me. I saw children sit on the King’s lap and watched him wipe away their tears while his own fell upon them. I saw a new world, once more a life-filled blue-green, the old black coal delivered from its curse and pain and shame, wondrously remade.

It looked so easy for the Woodsman to do all this. But then I saw his scars and remembered it was not.