"Yes."

The Queen nods.

"When a visitor tells me they want to leave, I suggest that they travel to the edge of the world," she says. "I tell them that if they reach the right spot at the right time, they will see a doorway there, and the door will lead them home. And then I give them an escort and send them on their way, and I arrange for daunting but surmountable obstacles between them and their goal. It has worked every time but twice. The doorway does not otherwise exist. What creates it is their sustained, focused, directed effort to reach it, and their expectation that it will be there if they succeed. Once, I failed to stop a storm in time and it sank their boat. The other failure was when someone dawdled on the way and arrived a day late. He knew he was too late to find the door, so it wasn't there; and he was so upset that he impulsively ran out past the edge of the world."

"...that doesn't even sound like a difficult self-editing project."

She smiles a small silver smile. "Good. That simplifies things."

The smile fades.

"I think you might be able to help me end the war the right way," she says. "But it is going to be complicated and difficult and involve trusting you with some very weighty secrets. I think I can trust you with those secrets; do you agree?"

"I mean, that depends on what you mean by that, presumably."

"I think if I tell you that acting rashly in this matter might destroy this world, you will take that warning seriously and listen to the full explanation and not take any sudden drastic actions even if some of the things you hear are upsetting and sound like they might urgently require drastic intervention," she says.

"Yes."

The Queen nods again. She spends a moment regarding May thoughtfully.

"Perhaps... the best place to start would be the diary," she says. "A moment."

And she gets up out of her throne and goes around behind it, and there is a very secret-compartmental-sounding click, and she comes back around holding a notebook with a black-and-white patterned cover that will look familiar to anyone who has seen a certain film, although this one does not have anything written on the front. It looks very small in her hand. She crosses the room in long strides and bends down to offer it to May.

May is a spiral notebook person, herself, but composition books are okay too. She takes it. She opens it.

I should write this down before I forget any more details.

My name is Elizabeth Ann Kirsch. I was born on October 13, 1983.

In December 1996, when I was thirteen, I was on my way to a friend's house after school and I fell through the world.

I landed in a green field at dawn. It was beautiful in a way I don't think I can describe. It was like photographs of Ireland. I could see a town nearby, so I went there. I met a lion named Dancer (I have bitten back so many reindeer jokes, you don't even know) and a dryad named Morning, and they told me I was in the Kingdom of Day, and that I should travel to Bright River right away to meet with the Sun King.

Having provisionally accepted that I was in a children's fantasy adventure novel now and should probably roll with it, I agreed. Dancer and Morning and I set off for the capital immediately.

It was early spring and everything was indescribably picturesque. The only notable obstacle we encountered along the way was an ominous-looking opening in the ground that Dancer and Morning wouldn't let me get near. At the distance I saw it, it just looked like a long dark gouge in the middle of a field, like somebody had crashed a small alien spaceship or taken a really big knife to the place or something. There was a hasty-looking fence around it and a sign I wasn't close enough to read.

They tried, badly, to convince me that everything was fine and it was just a big ugly hole in the ground that we were in too much of a hurry to stop and gawk at. I didn't try very hard to go get a closer look, but I did keep asking questions (as innocently as possible) until they admitted that the hole had appeared last week and people who went near it tended to be sucked in and disappear with a horrible scream.

This was obviously fairly concerning.

"Are there still those holes."

"There are not," says the Queen.

"Did you found this kingdom or usurp it or other."

She smiles slightly, tilting her head to one side. "I am the Moon Queen, whose hands shaped the world. But yes, I am also Elizabeth Kirsch. It's complicated."

"I'll just read it shall I." Page turn. "It's summer 2004 now."

Dancer and Morning rushed to get me tucked away in the palace before sundown. We got there with maybe an hour to spare. And before I could extract a coherent explanation of the rush, they introduced me to the King.

He was about twenty feet tall, wearing white, and made entirely of gold. Apart from that he looked fairly normal. In structure if not material, I wouldn't have been surprised to see his face on a movie screen.

He explained to me that he had been at war with the Moon Queen since the beginning of time, and neither of them could ever defeat the other, but that as an outworlder I had the power to tip the balance. I asked him about the hole in the ground, and he said that it was the Moon Queen's fault, that she was attacking him with everything she had and killing his people in the process. He asked me to help him defeat her.

I had a strong intuition that something was up. It seemed wildly implausible that I had actually just landed by accident on the Good side of a perfectly straightforward Good vs Evil conflict, and I kept having the feeling that there was something sketchy about the Sun King. But it also seemed like it would be a bad idea to try to call him out on it when I still mostly had no idea what was going on, so I agreed. He set me up with a room in the palace and warned me never to pass within sight of the sky at night, because the Moon Queen sees what the Moon sees, just as the Sun King sees what the Sun sees. Then, half an hour after sunset, he sat on his throne and turned into a statue. That's apparently how he sleeps.

I went to my windowless room and tried to sleep and ended up reading my algebra textbook all night because I have an odd notion of comfort. In the morning the King wanted to see me again. I kept getting the impression from him that he was dancing around some horrible secret, but while I'm pretty good at reading people I wasn't confident about how well that skill would transfer to giant golden fairy-tale kings, so I kept my observations to myself and acted like I was fully on board with the 'defeat the Moon Queen' plan, because for all I knew maybe it really was the right thing to do.

The next few weeks are a little muddled because I was sleeping badly and having trouble figuring out what to keep track of. I have quick personality profiles of everyone I met, and memories of the first time I tried this or that local food (toasted nuts with dandelion jelly: yes, dandelion salad: no), and notes about the way the translation effect works that I'm going to write up separately, but I don't have a clear sequence of events.

I spent a lot of time with the King, discussing the war. He was a surprisingly bad tactician for someone who claimed to have been at war for millennia. I entertained the hypothesis that maybe the power of outworlders was just a dash of cynicism with a garnish of common sense. It would've seemed funny, except that people kept dying.

When I'd been there for about three weeks, helping the King overhaul his approach to the war and trying to figure out how best to deploy me as a secret weapon while also privately trying to figure out whether I really wanted to be his secret weapon after all, another hole opened up just outside the city. I was up early and out for a walk, because the never going outside at night was starting to wear on me. I saw the ground open up, and I saw a tiger cub playing nearby, and she scampered over to see what all the fuss was about, and I yelled and bolted for her but I didn't quite make it in time.

Dancer and Morning had not been kidding about the horrible screams. They hadn't mentioned the part where it looks like the person is dissolving and unraveling and turning inside-out all at the same time, like they're moving toward a place where concepts like 'place' and 'moving' and 'being a particular shape' no longer apply. I still remember the image, rather more vividly than I would strictly prefer, but I have no words adequate to describe it.

Logically speaking it shouldn't have mattered more than the casualty lists, but it got to me a lot harder. I was tempted to start feeling very personal about this conflict. Except that one of the big questions I still had was whether the ominous holes were actually the Moon Queen's fault. The Sun King kept saying so, but then he also said she had no capacity to act during the day, and I'd seen that hole appear in broad daylight.

I asked the Sun King more about the holes. He let me spend a day in his library looking up historical accounts, and I did some amateur statistics. Something definitely didn't add up. Fighting between the Kingdoms was always heaviest in spring and autumn, and when the holes appeared, it was usually in spring or autumn, but sometimes there would be a few in summer or winter if the war got unusually intense. And there were plenty of times when things got really nasty and no holes appeared at all. They tended to come in waves, and go away on their own after a few months but then return unpredictably.

If they were a weapon of the Moon Queen, I could not for the life of me figure out how she was doing it or what she hoped to achieve. If they were a tool the Sun King used to manipulate the mood of his populace, he was using it really clumsily and, again, to no useful end I could see. If they were just a natural phenomenon, I couldn't explain their obvious connection to the war. And when the King talked about them, I got the definite impression that he knew more than he was telling.

Eventually he decided to take me on campaign. I'd been advising him for some time, but having me in the field seemed to make everything easier. It's hard to notice a pattern you're in the middle of; I didn't think there was anything odd about things going more smoothly when I put more personal attention into them, especially since it was obvious that I had a much better head for strategy than the King and a significant edge over his top generals.

As soon as our army crossed the borderlands and held a piece of land in the north for one night, reports started coming in from all over the Kingdom of Day that the holes were closing. The Sun King told me I was doing well, that I'd saved the kingdom. We threw a little party. I still had no idea what the holes were, but at that point I was very confident that he knew the truth and wasn't telling me.

We pressed on.

When we came within sight of Silver Falls, a hole opened up right in front of us, the first we'd seen since we crossed the border. I could see it pulling at the Sun King before he stepped away. He held together much better than that tiger cub; he looked a little shaken but still in one piece. He invented some transparent excuse about how the Queen must have laid one final trap for us.

That night, I woke up an hour after sunset, told the camp guards that I was on a secret mission from the King, and walked into the Moon Queen's palace.

In retrospect it was a little stupid, but it seemed like the only place left I could go for answers, and I was right about that much. When I told her I thought the Sun King had been lying to me, she laughed and said she was sure he had, and when I explained about the holes in the ground, she told me what they were.

The story goes like this: Before the world, there was the void. By itself it was nothing, but it could be shaped by minds. The minds that eventually became the Sun King and the Moon Queen agreed that they wanted a world, but disagreed on everything else. They created themselves and their world, inspired by scattered glimpses of a world they could sometimes see next to the void, fighting each other every step of the way. He wanted things warm and bright and peaceful and stable. She wanted things cold and dark and violent and chaotic. Their war became entangled with the cycle of the seasons.

And because they had been fighting since the very beginning, that cyclic conflict became part of the structure of reality itself.

It finally made sense of the data I'd seen in the Sun King's library: the holes in the ground appeared exactly when the war got out of step with the cycle of the seasons. It was especially bad when I showed up because the Queen was making a solid push in early spring, when the cycle expected the King to be reclaiming the upper hand as winter ended. And once we started winning again, the problems stopped, until we got as far as the Queen's palace and threw the balance too far the other way. The holes were a symptom of a much deeper problem; reality was tearing itself apart, and they were its surface wounds.

It didn't escape me that it was awfully convenient for the Queen if killing her would literally destroy the world, but the theory fit the evidence.

I asked her what I should do.

She said that I could kill the King and take his power and maintain the balance with her, have a scripted war that flowed with the seasons and never got out of step, and rule an entire half of the world, which she didn't want anyway because it was much too bright and peaceful there. He wanted to destroy her and everything she stood for, but all she wanted was to be left alone.

In much the same way that I'd known the King was lying about the void holes, I knew the Queen was planning to betray me. But she did sound like she meant it about killing the King and stealing his power, and somebody clearly had to do something about this nonsense.

She gave me something which she said was a magic knife made of moonlight, and told me to go back to the King's camp, and that she would challenge him to single combat at dawn during the hour when they were both awake, and I was supposed to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back during the fight.

I went back to the camp and read my algebra textbook for the rest of the night, because I had no idea how I was going to get out of this alive and with the world intact, except maybe by stabbing both of them, which seemed chancy if the Queen was misrepresenting what would happen when I stabbed the king or if she had very sensibly given me a knife that didn't work on her, and also kind of evil if I'd misjudged her somehow and she wasn't planning to betray me after all.

She so obviously was, though. She talked about the Kingdom of Day with such contempt, and when she'd said all that about not wanting to destroy the Sun King the way he wanted to destroy her, she sounded... maybe the best way to put it is, she sounded like she lacked a basic understanding of what not wanting to destroy the Sun King would be like.

Dawn came, and with it the Queen. She was very impressively theatrical about it. I had a hard time appreciating the grandeur of the moment, because I had slept for about one of the preceding twenty-four hours and was under a lot of stress and mostly just focused on figuring out how to make sure both I and the world survived the fight. Although if it came down to it, the world was the higher priority.

They fought. He had a huge golden sword and she had a much thinner silver one. It was terrifying to watch. I had no idea how I was going to get close enough to stab either of them without being crushed. I was just starting to think about maybe climbing a tree when the Queen knocked the King to the ground and stunned him for a second. I ran up and stabbed him in the neck.

Stealing his power worked. It also gave me an understanding of why it had worked. All those times during the war when I put a lot of effort into something and it turned out miraculously well, the reason why the Sun King wanted me on his side, it was all because I was an outworlder. The world is... malleable to us.

And in taking the Sun King's power, I was trading in mine. The King and Queen made the world; they have an instinctive understanding of how it works, and they can reshape its surface details, but they can't push it around on a fundamental level the way an outworlder can, because they are ultimately still a part of the system.

It was all very disorienting. One second I was a thirteen-year-old girl with no discernible magic powers, the next I was that plus a twenty-foot-tall golden god who could definitely discern her/my magic powers with his/my magic connection to the underlying structure of the world. One of those things was on the way out, the other was on the way in.

The Queen tried to cut the King's head off while I/he was distracted, and I/Elizabeth jumped up and stabbed her with the moon knife. I could tell very directly that the knife had never been the important part; it was my mind, my outworlder's power, that let me do what I did to the King. But the knife made for a convenient mental shorthand, and I was in a hurry.

It worked. And it was the last action I took as an outworlder. I watched that power fade while the Queen's came in. It was like the whole world had been sort of subtly leaning in toward me, and now it was relaxing and losing interest, and at the same time my awareness of it was being intensely expanded.

Running three bodies at once was... an experience. Having to pretend to be both of the people I had just murdered did not make it any easier. I made a lot of mistakes over the next few days, of which the biggest was trying to explain the truth to too many people. I'm still dealing with the repercussions of that now, a year and a half later. Orchestrating this war from both ends is hard, and I'm getting the sinking feeling that I'm not going to be able to deescalate it nearly as much as I'd like. But if I'm going to be in crisis mode for the next decade, then I need to take the time to write this out now.

This might be one of the last things I do with this body. It's coming time for Elizabeth Kirsch to 'go home'. It's just too exhausting to be two people at once most of the time. And of the three people I am, Elizabeth is the only one who's expendable.

If I had more time, I'd rewrite this from the beginning, make it more polished, organize the hazy parts, try to find other sources and make the details more accurate. But I don't. The few hours of distraction that went into this have already cost me, and those are just the slipups I noticed. I am not letting the void take any more of my people if I can help it.

The Queen waits for May to collect her thoughts.

"Wow," is May's thoughts.

"Time runs approximately one thousand times faster here than on Earth," she says. "That's one of the two major omissions from that account; I didn't find it out until later. The other, I was still verifying. There is... a sense in which people who die in the Kingdoms are not entirely gone. It's subtle and hard to track, but I'm very confident in my conclusions at this point. Sometimes they reincarnate without memory of their previous life, sometimes they just linger as faint impressions with no continued awareness, but anyone who has ever died in this world is still here... unless they went to the void, either through one of those holes or past the edge of the world. It's the same result either way: it destroys them completely. Once I was sure of that I became much more conservative in my experiments with deescalation."

"I'm not sure reincarnating without memory - counts?"

"It is not impossible that one day those memories could be restored somehow. I am much less optimistic about getting anyone back from the void."

"Okay."

"I want to find a way to use your outworlder's power to end the world's dependence on the war, so that I can deescalate the rest of the way without the world tearing itself apart and throwing all its inhabitants into the void. I have some thoughts for what to do after that, but the crucial thing is not having to be at carefully managed war with myself any longer."

"Mm-hm. Uh, if I have to work in the standard fairytale framework options include 'third party enemy' or 'Romeo and Juliet plot'... respectively costly and awkward to implement..."