No longer wanting to think about Irial, Croi gets out of bed and takes one step toward the door leading to the living room when pain, more intense than anything she has ever felt before, tears through her. Her vision fails and she falls forward, her head hitting the sharp edge of a table by the door. She throws her hands forward to break her fall, but her bones seem to have softened. She can feel the stone floor against her cheek and a sting on her lips telling her they were cut on impact. A sticky wetness against her forehead tells tales of blood. The pain deepens into agony, and her consciousness succumbs.

Croi doesn’t feel the Caisleán quake when the first drops of her blood come in contact with the wooden part of the floor. She doesn’t hear it wail when she stops breathing for a moment. The door to her room is smashed open, and the Fire Princess, with Tinder following behind her, enters the room. Tinder cries out when she sees Croi’s unconscious form. Ceara freezes for a second before she whirls around and runs up a flight of stairs to call the Tine King, who is already opening the doors to his rooms.

Croi is unaware of the fire that lights her form just as she doesn’t see the flowers that suddenly bloom in her hair. She is like a broken doll with uncoordinated limbs when Aodh picks her up from the floor and moves her to the bed. She is oblivious of the people who enter and leave the room, checking on her, talking about her. She doesn’t see the anguish in Aodh’s eyes when the healers all shake their heads and pronounce her rapidly approaching death. She doesn’t see Tinder’s red eyes or Ceara’s clenched fists.

A sliver of moonlight hits the magnolia flowers on its way through the window into the room, turning them luminescent. Croi opens her eyes to the greeting of the moon-drunk blooms. Her body is racked with fever, but her mind is sharp and clear.

“Are you there?”

Yes.

“What has happened?”

The final breaking of the Glamour has begun.

“How long do we have? Do you know?”

Enough time to get the SoulSeed to Uaine’s sister.

Croi sits on the bed and looks down at her hands. Her fingers are swollen, the joints misbehaving. “The end is coming soon, isn’t it?”

The most difficult thing to accept is that the world is so much more than us. A long minute passes without either of them speaking. Then Croi’s other self whispers. Remember what Uaine said about everyone and everything being words that come together to form sentences that eventually tell stories?

“Yes.”

Perhaps even though we will no longer be here, the words we are will have helped to construct sentences that tell other stories. Many other stories. The stories of the trees, the land, the flowers. Kin that will continue living, and we will be a reason they are able to do so. Our story will end, but theirs won’t. Because of us. Perhaps as long as their stories continue, so will we.