After I have finished this account, I will leave a hard copy next to Silvina’s treatise. I will also use the laptop to allow for dissemination on a rather long delay. Allow the hundred years Silvina wished for. Let my words become visible just as the roof of the ark splits open and brings in the real sun for the first time and all that is down here in the dark and secret is made plain.

It will all be there waiting for you.

It doesn’t matter if Silvina never really thought I would make it this far. If I’m just a fail-safe to a fail-safe, an afterthought to her memory of Ned.

The things you think in what might be your last moments. How you’ve had a lifetime of unhappiness and yet happiness, too, but never recognized it. How you might be searching for salamanders with your brother in one moment of your life or listening to your daughter talk about her day … and at the end of your life wind up in a secret cavern at the beckoning of someone you never met, deciding whether or not to take a chance on dying.

I am going to take the third syringe with me. Close the secret wall. Take a hammer or a baseball bat to the control panel, disguise the fact it was ever there.

I will sit on the hill outside the storage palace among the trees, me and the hummingbird and Shovel Pig and all the ghosts of this place. Inject myself and lie back and watch the clouds go by. The magic elixir. Worth the price, to change the world, because I’ve seen this world and it needs to change. Even with the terrible ache as I type this. Of knowing. That after all of this, I may not be able to reach the true end.

Somewhere it is a gray day, and on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, a dead robin in the gutter, a hand reaches out holding a note that will change everything.

Langer had believed in Silvina as the bringer of death and destruction, had welcomed that. Hellmouth Jack didn’t care what Silvina had built. Just wanted it, even if it would never have been for him to use. And me? I didn’t know if it was for me to use, either.

Odds are, someone will find me dead on that hillside. Odds are, the ark inside the mountain is most probably doomed, and Silvina, in the end, was just someone desperate and alone and delusional. Those are the odds.

But if she wasn’t. But if it is not doomed. But if I were to rise, and if I were to rise as my own ark. Shedding light and matter. Generating the renewal beneath my skin. If I were to survive the fury and wonder of that, then I would come back into the world, my body the gospel of Silvina.