He still remembered the childish love he’d felt for the two rams, back before he’d known Fillory was real. It hadn’t lasted: he’d met Ember in person, and He wasn’t anything like as strong or as kind or as wise as Plover had made Him out to be. Then when Ember had thrown Quentin out of Fillory his disillusionment had tipped over into anger. But since then he’d learned a few things about acceptance, and his anger had cooled, even if the love hadn’t quite returned. Now he saw the rams as They were: strange, inhuman, somewhat ridiculous beings, as limited by their godhead as They were empowered by it. But They were divine, and There was a majesty to Them that was undeniable.

Even as Quentin felt Umber’s strength beneath him, Fillory was losing the last of its own strength. Its glorious greenery was withering away before their eyes. They passed men and animals bunched together in shivering packs, no longer even fighting, like the remnants of a party that had got out of control and been shut down and broken up by the police, leaving the celebrants suddenly sober and chagrined. Acres of trees lay knocked down and uprooted. Overhead the stars were beginning to fall, one by one, some in rapid arcs like meteors, others more slowly and gracefully, twirling and sparking and pinwheeling down.

Alice hugged him tight. A series of deep booming cracks sounded, like distant artillery fire, signaling that the land itself had begun to disintegrate. It was losing cohesion, losing even the strength to hold on to itself. Great crevasses opened in Fillory’s surface, and widened into canyons, and in the depths of the deepest of them Quentin could see all the way down to the pale struggling dead of the Underworld, writhing in a mass like larvae inside a rotten log. Now Umber’s great gallop found them hurdling enormous gaps in the land, which grew wider and wider until in places nothing connected the component shards of Fillory at all, and Quentin began to see stars between them. They were leaping from island to island in the dark of space, flying as much as jumping, soaring through the void.

He saw where they were heading. A single fragment of land lay dead ahead of them, an uprooted divot of enchanted turf with just a field and a pond and a tree, orphaned in the disaster, no longer linked to anything at all. On it, alone, stood Ember.

Umber touched down lightly and trotted away His excess speed. Quentin and Alice slid off. Quentin was just thankful that Alice was with him. She believed in him, or she once had anyway. That would make it easier to believe in himself during what was coming next.