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"Look," he begins, "not that I expect I'd find this convincing in your position, but -" and then the ground shimmers under them and half a second after that it's not there at all.
They fall.
The ground they hit instead is cold and muddy. The stars are exceptionally bright, and close overhead.
" - what?" says Ryan.
Alex doesn't answer him. Alex is looking out into the darkness, horrified.
That's true! It doesn't even exist yet. Maybe won't, maybe we can get a harmonious multispecies society instead.
She can do this. All the hard parts are over anyway. Doesn't matter now whether she cries or not.
She hugs herself and looks around, vaguely checking for Ryan.
That's OK. Super OK. She's decided she's going to pour a lot of effort into being OK with everything.
She'll just... watch as funeral things happen.
Elves sing. That's apparently the thing they do at funerals. It'd probably be a very sad song if she spoke Quenya.
The Elves are singing about how babies are very fragile and small and Ender Kirk Teller was very fragile and small but powerful enough that Melkor himself could be entrapped in her tiny tiny body.
That's nice.
She doesn't, actually, cry during the funeral. She mostly just feels very tired at this point. But it's - OK. Ender's OK. Everyone else is going to be - more OK, anyway. So that's all right. They'll get through it.
Being Elves they sing all night. At some point Ryan leaves.
Karen doesn't feel like leaving so much. At some point she sits down on the ground and shreds some grass between her fingers.
What're you guys gonna do now? Without the war and stuff.
Uh, dig the Silmarils out of Angband, first thing, and then I guess use them to try to end orc pain since that seems like the easiest way to end - all of the problems caused by orc stuff without hurting any orcs, and then build an awesome Quendi civilization no Valar needed thank you very much I guess. We'll stay on the lookout for humans.
That makes sense.
Ryan wanted to go and maybe find the humans, I guess. Or he did, before everything - happened.
Yeah.
Before everything happened I said I'd think about going with him, but I figure that's not really on the table anymore. Wouldn't want to right now even if it were.
Did something happen that - uh, that wasn't what we were expecting to happen?
- I don't think so. Other than, uh, the memory loss and stuff. - he just really loved her. And - I knew, when you all forgot, I knew I was gonna have to do it and I wouldn't be able to explain it to him, and -
It's OK. I just - kinda figure he probably wants to never see me again. Probably. Which is fine.
No. I mean... no.
It bites a little bit. Not more than anything else, though. Just, there's a hypothetical timeline where - where this wasn't as hard as it was, and where Ryan likes me, and I like him, and we go off and look for the humans together, and it's not good or anything but it's - something, it's a place for a story to go from here, it's a way for things to not just be over. And it's not my story. I don't have any of the pieces of that story. I don't really want it, from here, it's - it'd make me feel sick, I guess, trying to have that world now. But it was a world that could've existed. And maybe that world hurts a little less than this one. But lots of worlds hurt less than this one, you know, it's not like that one's special.
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