But what a broken world had been entrusted to Him! He shook His great head disapprovingly. Even now it continued to disintegrate before Him, its connective tissue weakening, its edges crumbling. This would never do. It must be mended. Mending was something Quentin understood well, and with the power that was in Him now there was nothing broken that He could not fix.

With a wave of His left hand He slowed the passage of time to a crawl, so that to everyone but Him the work of a millennium would pass in a fraction of a second. Then slowly, deliberately, and with inexhaustible patience, He began to gather up the pieces from where they hung and drifted in space. He collected the clods and clumps and grains of soil and stone that had been the flesh of Fillory, sorted them like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and one by one fitted them together and knitted them back into a single whole, running His huge spectral fingertips along the seams until they vanished as if they had never been.

He worked with great care. The dirt of Fillory was marbled like a great side of beef, and He took pains to position its veins of ore so that they lined up just as they once had. He rethreaded Fillory’s silver rivers and streams, or where it pleased Him He allowed them to find new paths, and He gently shepherded the shattered lakes and seas back into their basins. He swept up the air and the winds and heaped them up in invisible masses above Fillory so that the land could breathe again.

As He worked He rolled and sifted between His divine fingertips the remains of various objects He remembered from His human life. Odd little things, from long ago. The bones of the gentle bay He rode when He left the centaurs. The fragments of the Watcherwoman’s shattered watch, which had been trodden into the earth over the years and dispersed and forgotten. The pistol Janet had brought into Fillory and then dropped on her way out of Ember’s Tomb. The head of the arrow that killed Benedict. The last rotting remnants of the Muntjac, scattered in the shallows of the far Eastern Ocean.

Those animals and humans who had died in the apocalypse He allowed to rest where they were, but He moved among the survivors, healing them, rebuilding damaged organs, repairing and resewing skin and bones. He bade the great turtle return to its place in the tower of turtles that held up Fillory, and take up its burden again, and it did—it really wasn’t suited for a more active lifestyle anyway. He rounded up the escaped dead and returned them to their gymnasium Hell and then, feeling divinely troubled by their plight, He bade them sleep, peacefully and forever. Their games were over for good.