It should have been exciting—bunnies! A magic clipper ship! That goes on land!—but all it provoked in Janet was exhaustion. What next? Sir Hotspots? Fuck all this, she said, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a minute. There was no end to Fillory, no end to the beauty and strangeness, except that there was, and this was it. She had to force herself to let go of it, and it felt like tearing off a piece of her own flesh. It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.

The chaos itself was momentarily, unfairly beautiful. The thrashing sun, the spinning, looping moon, Fillory half light and half shadow, dotted with flashes of fire, lava and flame and magical strikes from magical beings. Ignorant armies clashing by night. And way off in the distance, but still visible to her far-sighted eyes, came the glow of the Clock Barrens going up in flames and fireworks, all at once. So at least she’d seen that after all.

Then Janet saw maybe the most flat-out marvelous thing she had ever seen or ever would see in her life. Overhead a constellation in the shape of a lanky, loose-jointed person detached itself from the night sky, hung by one stellar hand for a second and then dropped, falling for a long minute and sending up a shower of sparks when it hit on its back, its component orbs embedding themselves in the turf of a meadow. It was immediately engaged there by the only other two-dimensional combatant on the field, the Chalk Man, who had recovered his spirits and repaired his staff. Puffs of limestone flew, and motes of light.

It’s like Revelation, she thought. It’s Revelation, and I’m the Scarlet Woman.

“Winterwing,” Janet said. “Back to Whitespire. It’s time.”

The hippogriff set them down on top of the broad wall of Whitespire, which looked like it was going to finally see the battle it was presumably built to withstand, because the humans and the talking animals were giving ground now, falling back toward the great gates, which even Janet had never seen opened.

She dismounted and walked over to where Poppy stood. Neither of them said anything. The last queens of Fillory.

An almost infrasonic bass rumble had been building for a while, down beneath the general din, and now it rose into the realm of the audible, and they could feel it too. The fighters on the battlefield lost some of their interest in fighting and looked around for the source. Then it became really obvious, because the ground in front of the castle began to hump up and anybody who was caught out in the open on the hump began to run full out, and just in time too.