I am blinded by the light. Again.
When it fades, I am standing in front of La Baume. It is such a sad, old building. It is covered in vines—not the strange roots and vines of before, but real vines, still and old, tinged red with autumn. Spiderwebs hang from the gutters and windows and the house is utterly still under a gray autumn sky. Through the few gaps in the overgrowth, I spot red paint, peeling away, revealing blue, then green—so many colors.
La Baume is warped and sunken. Derelict and forgotten.
We are inside then, walking through the halls. All the furniture is covered up, dusty with time passing, lonely and sad.
“This is where I’ve been.”
“Yes. This is what the manor has become,” Gowan says. He is beside me. I can’t tell if he was always or only just now. “You’ve been here for a long time.”
He nods at a shelf along the wall in my bedroom. It is covered with seemingly endless copies of my broken book. The one with the omega symbol, and the gash in its cover.
“My journal…”
“That’s how many times you’ve done this,” he says.
I touch the row of them, unthinking, not really processing. “So many…”
“At least seventy-four.”
“So many times…”
“This symbol wasn’t in the real thing,” Gowan observes, taking out one of the broken books. “Nor was this gash. You put them both here. Why?”
I close my eyes. Try to find the answer. “Omega… meaning the ultimate end. Death. I read up about eschatology in the library when I was… before. It means the end of everything. Omega—the end of it all. And the gash… I guess I was just… broken.”
He nods. “I understand.”
We walk to the kitchen and then I open the kitchen door. I’m expecting to be in La Baume’s overgrown garden. Instead…
A garden bigger than any I have seen. So green, so lush, and flowers of all colors and sizes. Mountains in the distance promise snow, but down here… even the bees are happy.
And Nori…
She is playing and dancing with Cath—the Cath who used to be, the Cath lost so long ago—and I can’t stop sobbing. I watch her, spilling over with gratitude. These tears are different, and I’m laughing.
“Nori,” I say, the word choked by my happiness and relief.
Nori turns to me. “Silla!”
And her voice! Her voice is so clear and bright and real. She smiles at me, and then she turns away, and she and Cath dance toward the mountains.
“Wait—”
But she is going.
“Auntie Cath…”
But she is going, too.
“She had her own journey to go on,” Gowan says, coming to sit beside me in the grass.
“But she was in the attic.”
“In the beginning. Only you were in the attic by the end.”
I pull at the grass and run it through my fingers.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“A lot of what happened won’t make sense, even though you’re the one who created it all.”
“I created that? The trees coming closer? The manor sinking, the Creeper Man torturing me at night? All of that?”
Gowan nods. “You had some pretty bad self-hate issues.”
“And anger,” I whisper. “I had rage. For everything. Myself. Nori. Cath.” I hesitate. “You.”
He nods. “I know. Especially me. And why not? I left you. I failed you.”
I take his hand. “Tell me my story, Gowan. Tell me what I just went through.” When he doesn’t answer, I say, “I told you my story once. Please tell me this one.” I hesitate. “I’m ready.”
He laughs. “Oh, I know you are. I was just deciding if I was ready.”
“Oh.”
He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and—“It was 2013 when a fourteen-year-old girl called Silla Daniels fled from her London home, where she had witnessed her mother’s murder at her father’s hands, and came to live with her aunt Catherine in a manor house called La Baume.”
I swallow. “She did, did she?”
“Absolutely. Now, things were beautiful at first, and Silla grew to care for a boy who lived there. He was the last of Catherine’s orphans, the last of La Baume Orphanage. His name was Gowan, and he liked to take care of the garden.” He grins, and I grin back. “Things were really good for three years, until Silla was seventeen. With rumors of another war, food shortages, disease rife, and her own personal demons, her aunt Catherine had a nervous breakdown. People started leaving the town. Silla and Gowan were alone, taking care of a little girl called Nori, who was Silla’s sister. It was decided that Gowan needed to leave the manor and the town, to get some help from farther away. The world was a scary place, with talk of World War Three being around the corner, but Gowan knew that if he didn’t go out in search of help, they would all die.”
He pauses, and sighs.