He set the delicate green carpet of grass that covered Fillory to regrowing, and restored some of the trees, stepping them like the masts of ships, not all, but enough that they could reseed the forests. He spent a long time—years, maybe centuries—setting the seas to beating at the shore again, and nursing the water cycle into some kind of stable functioning state. He picked up the bodies of Ember and Umber with tender care and buried Them where They could decompose and enrich the soil around them. The ground above Them became green, and two enormous trees grew over Their graves, their branches spiraling curiously like rams’ horns.

The moon He lovingly polished and set spinning again. One by one He rehung the stars like the crystals of a chandelier. He filled in the great crater that the sun had burned in the ocean floor, and He cooled the sea, and rebuilt and remortared the wall that ran around the edge of the world. He took the sun itself in His great cupped hands, pressing and molding it back into a sphere, feeling its fading heat. He blew on it till it burned white hot. Then He placed it back on its eternal track and set it going in its orbit again.

He rested. He looked at His work, watched it tick and turn like a great watch, here and there smoothing a rough edge or roughening a smooth one, slowing a torrent or urging on a tide, till all was in balance. When there was nothing else to mend He simply gazed at it, felt its atoms circulating and combining or simply shivering in place, and He subsided into a grand peace. Fillory lived again. It wasn’t what it had been, yet, but it would be once it had healed, and that it could do without His help. He could have watched it forever.

But it was not for Him to do so. He had been given custody of this power, but He sensed that it didn’t belong to Him. Wistfully, but not regretfully, He restored time to its customary rate of speed with a wave of His right hand. As His last act, a divine whim really, He retrieved the remains of the White Stag from the gullet of the giant snapping turtle of the Northern Marsh, fused its skeleton back together, reconstituted its organs and its skin, and restored it to life. He placed it on an island far out to sea to begin its wanderings again. The next age of Fillory would have a Questing Beast too.

Then He allowed the power to leave Him. As it did so He shrank and shrank, the tiny disk of Fillory rising up to meet him and then stretching out endlessly around him, until he stood on it again as just one more of its inhabitants.