After almost eight thousand years of searching, he found her sitting in a rose garden, in front of a small, stoop-shouldered cottage.

The cottage had slate shingles and a red brick chimney, with moss growing up one side, and it sat at the crest of a grassy bluff, where its little garden faced out towards a distant, amethyst sea. She was seated on an old cane chair, with her hands folded neatly in her lap, and her face bore a quiet expression as she stared silently out across the rolling purple waves.

As he approached, she did not look up, or even make any move to acknowledge his presence.

That was unexpected.

He had assumed that, when she saw him coming, she might try to escape, so he had prepared a binding ritual in advance. But, as he drew closer, and she made no effort to repel him, he let the spell slip away, like grains of sand through his fingertips.

He was starting to believe that their reunion might turn out to be more civil than he had anticipated, and, as a reciprocal gesture of respect, he made no effort to hide the faintly-glowing blade that he carried in his left hand.

She did not rise as he drew up next to her, nor offer him any words of greeting. Instead, with a little wave from her hand, a second cane chair appeared on the grass, just a few paces to the side of her own.

After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded his thanks, and he sat.

For a while, they just sat there together in silence, each waiting for the other to make the first move.

Finally, she cleared her throat, and she spoke.

“The sun’s going to set in just about an hour,” she said, gesturing out towards the darkening horizon. “If you can resist the impulse to kill me for that long, then I would suggest doing so, because it really is a remarkable sunset – maybe the best I’ve seen, in fact. It’s like fire on the water.”

Her voice was dry, he thought. Dry, and quiet, and full of cobwebs.

It was the voice of someone who had not spoken in a long, long time.

Smiling, he crossed his arms in front of his chest. He could feel the vibrations from his blade where it rested against his skin.

“I’ve waited this long,” he said. “I suppose I can wait just a little bit longer.”

She did not turn to face him, but he could hear her sigh.

“I was starting to wonder if, maybe, you weren’t ever going to come,” she said. “I was starting to wonder if, maybe, you were dead.”

He grunted in reply.

“You were a lot harder to find that I was expecting,” he said.

From the corner of his eye, he thought he could see her smile. It was faint, but it was there.

“Really?” she said. “I don’t know why that would be. I haven’t been hiding.”

“Maybe not. But I hardly expected to find you here.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“And why is that? I was always very fond of this world. You knew as much.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Only, I seem to recall that we broke this plane.” He slapped his free hand against his thigh for emphasis. “Smashed it, from the inside out.”

Slowly, she nodded her head.

“We did,” she said. “Just like so many others.”

“So, what, then? You put it back together?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I do.”

He scoffed at that.

“That’s not what I recall,” he said. “Really, though – why?”

She looked across at him. Her face was still impossibly young, but her eyes were sad.

“I already told you,” she said. “I always did like it here.”

Then she turned back to face the water again, where the sun was growing deeper and redder as it sank towards the distant horizon.

“Did you ever once stop to think about why we did what we did?” she eventually asked him, albeit without waiting for him to reply. “Did you ever once think to question the rightness of our cause, as we broke whole worlds in two, all in the name of peace, or order?”

There was no point in lying to her. Not anymore, anyway. So he didn’t.

“No,” he said.

“I didn’t think so,” she said, and, for the first time, he detected emotion in her voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before.

“The multiverse needed order,” he said. “It still does.”

“Does it?” she asked. “Look over there.” She pointed towards a nearby rose trellis, where only a few white blooms remained visible beneath a tangle of red and purple vines. “That’s creeping thornbriar – it used to grow wild around here, before I pulled it up to plant my roses. I thought I had gotten rid of it all, but, maybe a year or so back, it started growing on that trellis. Just a runner or two, to begin with, and, at first, I thought that I would pull it up again. Thornbriar is a weed, after all.” She glanced over at him, then back out at the amethyst sea. “Then I asked myself: why? Why is thornbriar a weed? It’s only a ‘weed’ because I didn’t plant it. But it has as much right to be here as my roses do – as I do, for that matter. So I let it grow, and I’m actually coming to like it. It blooms twice each year, you know? Once in the spring, and once after the first frost. Its flowers have these tiny, almost-gold petals, and they’re actually quite lovely.”

He sighed, and shook his head.

“Am I supposed to take something away from all that?” he said, and he could hear the frustration creeping into his own voice.

“Not really,” she said. “It’s just an observation. The multiverse is a disorderly place. That’s its nature. Order was our conceit. We weren’t mending a broken reality. We were flattering ourselves, indulging our own vanities, making believe that we could fix worlds that didn’t need fixing.”

Just listening to her speak, he could feel an old pain returning, just about an inch above his left eye. He kneaded his forehead.

Eight thousand years, and it was still the same old argument.

His patience was remarkable, but it was not infinite. So he decided to come to the point.

“You know what I want,” he said.

“I don’t have it,” she said.

He could feel his fingers tighten around the hilt of his blade.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I know that he broke the codex into six pieces, that he hid them inside the six volumes. I know that he gave one to you.” He shifted his grip on the blade. “Are you trying to deny it?”

“No,” she said. Then she laughed, and the sound startled him. “But I still don’t have it.”

“Where is it, then?” he demanded. Then his mind raced ahead, and he felt his heart skip a beat. “Who did you give it to?”

“No one,” she said. “I burned my copy years ago.”

He had to close his eyes, and take a deep breath. That helped him to resist the sudden impulse to kill her – but only just.

“You’re lying,” he said. “You wouldn’t have.”

“And why not?” She laughed again. “I gave up any interest in that sort of power long ago. I’m wise enough now to know that I would not be fit to wield it.” She shot him a barbed look. “I’m wise enough to know that no one is – least of all, you.”

He stood up, knocking his chair over in the process. His blade was at the ready – the time for civility had passed.

“Are you even going to try to fight me?” he asked, as he pressed the blade’s glowing edge against her neck. “Or are you wise enough to see that there’s no point in trying?”

“I’m not going to fight you,” she said. “But, before you kill me, there’s something you ought to know.”

And, suddenly, before his very eyes, she began to glow. In the gathering twilight, he could see her mana – he could see it in the air all around her, like a faint, green aura, and he could see it flowing through her body, like sap in a tree. More than that, though, he could see it flowing out from her body, and down into the land all around her, where it ran like roots through the once-broken ground, before flowing back up into her again.

“There was a time when I could have mended this world, well and truly,” she said. “Now, the best I can do is to hold it together, to keep it from sinking even deeper into the chaos of the Eternities. The land sustains me, and I sustain it. If I die, this plane dies with me, and you die with it.” She looked up at him, and she smiled. “You might be able to escape, before the world collapses. You always were fast – I’ll give you that much. But there’s really only one way to find out. After all these years, do you want to take that chance?”

For what felt like the longest time, he stood over her, with his blade against her throat, while she stared up at him with her sad, sad eyes. Then, slowly, he lowered his arm, and he took a step away.

“I can’t even remember why we broke this world in the first place,” he grumbled, his voice bitter. “Can you?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

“I suppose it hardly matters, now.”

“It didn’t matter then, either.”

“Of course it did,” he said. “We always had a reason.”

“We always had a reason,” she agreed, before shooting him look of reproach. “Just never a good one.”

He gave one last thought to killing her, then, but, instead, he sheathed his blade. The bond between her and the land which meant that he could not kill her also meant that she could not follow him without dooming the world that she professed to care about. And he did not think she would do that.

Besides, she had no copy of the Arcanum anymore. He, on the other hand, had three.

If he could acquire the remaining two, he might still be able to reconstruct the codex, even without the sixth volume. Especially if he could find the Translator – assuming that the Translator wasn't already dead, anyway.

“Enjoy your sunset,” he said to her at last, before ‘walking away.

“I will,” she said, just a little too late for him to catch her reply.

Now, there's a pretty huge problem with all this, which, sure enough, I didn't realize until after I'd written the darn thing. Namely, in my mind, I was picturing the unnamed female character as The Mender, whom I've grown fond of ever since Barinellos wrote the story in which she is described as wearing an outfit with a lot of pockets. (Which is, maybe, the single dumbest reason on record for liking a character, but I think the fact that women's clothing typically has so few pockets is the most insidious trick that patriarchal society has pulled on the women of the world, and, therefore, I'm instantly a fan of any female character with suitable access to pockets.

Of course, as I was reminded when I checked the Cabal archive page after the fact... The Mender is dead.

Whoops...

At which point, I didn't even bother trying to decide who the male character might be.

But, having acknowledged these little screw-ups , I hope that people can just enjoy the story as a story, and we won't have to worry about how it does or doesn't affect canon, since it's already so busted that all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be putting this one back together again.

I like it! And I like the deeper implications of the Arcanum and what that might imply for the future of a couple of our friends who currently have a copy of it...

I also find it VERY interesting that said Arcanum has, in canon, a description of Aubedore card readings. Hmm...

As to the question of the Mender being alive or dead, do remember that with a few exceptions, the life and death of the members of the Cabal are based on most common attestations, which are not necessarily accurate. We know the Master is dead, and the Historian's suicide is canon. But it IS possible that the Mender merely vanished in the closing days of the war and was attested as killed. Also, because we do not have a direct story featuring the Mender's death, we could probably vote as a community to alter her status away from "Dead."

I know Tevish wrote parts of the tragic poem "Mender and Sunder," but I don't think we ever voted on it, unless I'm mistaken.

Hara could feel the eyes of every sister on her as she scrubbed dirt from her hands.

Each tiny movement sent waves of pain scorching through her body. Her fingertips burned where she had dug splinters from them. Her back ached from turning earth. She had performed the rite of burial so many times that her throat was raw from chanting.

But those discomforts paled before the knife-like stares of her priory sisters, whom she could hear whispering her name in hushed tones.

Ritual held that the Goddess of the Fields welcomed the souls of the departed only if their bodies were buried beneath good earth, with a shock of winter wheat in one hand, and a heart of barley in the other. That was how the dead had been hallowed since time out of mind. It was how their souls returned home to the fields.

But the storm which had blown through the night before had carried away much of the sleeping village like a scythe harvests wheat, and it had claimed the bodies of the dead along with their spirits. So, as the soul-deadening day wore on, the priory had filled with weeping mourners, who had nothing left of their loved ones to bury, save for their memories and names.

Hara could not accept that the Goddess would abandon her flock. She could not believe that the Goddess would condemn those who had tilled her earth to such a fate.

So Hara had spent the day digging empty graves, and hallowing the names – if not the bodies – of those whom the storm had claimed.

For her kindness, she had earned her sisters’ scorn, and been denounced by the prioress, who accused her of further tormenting the grief-stricken survivors by promising them false comfort.

The prioress’s words had stung. But Hara had not stopped. She would not stop until all the dead were buried, so that their souls could return to the fields.

From behind her, Hara heard the door to the priory open. She turned around to see a man, red-eyed and stoop-shouldered, step into the Hall of the Hallowed with his head held low, and a small, burlap bag clutched between his hands. Trembling, he made his way to kneel before the sister nearest to the entrance, before holding the burlap sack open for her to see, and offering her a single, solitary word by way of explanation:

“Please?”

A moment passed in leaden silence. Then the sister shook her head, and turned her back on the pleading man.

Undaunted, the man knelt before every sister in turn. To each woman, he offered the tiny sack, and to each woman, he uttered the same desperate word:

“Please?”

Each sister shook her head. Each sister turned her back.

Finally, the man came to Hara. She could see the tears welling in his eyes as he sank to his knees before her. He held the burlap sack up to her, and she could hear the raw emotion in his voice as he begged her:

“Please?”

Hara took the sack from him. With trembling fingers, she opened it, and studied its contents.

Inside was a single, tiny shoe.

“Please?” the man repeated, his voice on the edge of breaking. “I couldn’t find her.”

Hara placed the shoe carefully back inside the sack, which she returned to the shaking man. Then she simply held him, and she patted his back as he wept into her shoulder, until he had no tears left to cry.

Then, kneeling briefly before the altar, Hara gathered a shock of winter wheat in one hand, and a heart of barley in the other.

“Let’s find a quiet place for her,” she said to the shattered man, as she led him gently towards the door. “A place where the earth is good.”

The man clutched Hara’s dirt-caked hand as they walked.

“Thank you for bringing her home,” he said.