I wish you could see the world as I do.
I wish you could see.
Or, perhaps Etude said it best. It’s not that you don’t see it. It’s that you see it as something else. All around you. All the time. The world is always mysterious. Or at least I hope so. But that doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable. We can know the Deep. As much as we can know anything anyway. But we have no more reason to fear it than ourselves, for what evil there is in the world comes from us.
Doctor Alexander knew that. Some part of me believes his story did not end at the bottom of the Handred Keep, that after seeing the book consumed, he stepped through the vortex it created and into realms beyond, and that he is traveling them now on his eternal quest for truth. It is only a wish, but let it be true.
Cerise had her baby, a beautiful little girl. The following year, she became pregnant again, and three became four. To this day, she and Kai live with their family as people have for centuries in China—with good food and good fortune.
Ólafur went home to his father, who still believed his son had been in hospital. After the events underground, he emerged a new boy. They hugged, as only parent and child can. And then the boy showed his dad the strays he’d rescued on his journey home. He had names for all of them. Our names.
Harriet continued down the path she started. The best I can say of her is that she remains her true self, the dire hunter, and, well . . . All creatures, fair and foul, should beware she who walks with the hand of the demon.
Some months after the events that brought us together, I received a letter. I knew who it was from right away. Arranged before his death, it seems. I opened it hastily and saw two words at the top, Dearest Sister, and pushed it away in tears. It was some time before I had the strength to read, my face damp from tears.
Dearest Sister,
The sun always sets. The sun always rises. That is its way. That is how it should be. Know only that your friendship, your chastisement, your love, your guidance, were one of the nine treasures of my life. Before you, I was nothing. After me, may you be whole.
The power to break your curse was never mine, nor does it dwell in the hand or heart of any man living, or who will yet live. It rests only with you. That, I believe, was the point of it. When you are ready, that which you seek will come.
Until then, do not mourn, for wherever I go from here, in whatever realms I fly, I shall carry you with me. Always.
Your brother in eternity,
He who is called Tip of the Jaguar’s Claw
That was his name, or at least that’s what it meant. The jaguar was more than the companion of the shaman. A shaman could become the jaguar—to battle evil spirits and disease-causing demons—just as he could take the form of the plumed bird to fly between the realms and recover lost souls or the wayward rains. But my friend was not called the jaguar, which is the fiercest creature in the jungle. He was not called the jaguar’s fang, which is what devours. He was not called the jaguar’s claw. His name meant the point of it, the tip that grasps, that catches even birds on the wing escaping like ephemeral thoughts. The tip of the claw is that which lets the jaguar climb the highest tree and return to earth again. It is that which is retracted and hidden and emerges only when needed.
He could’ve spelled it phonetically in our alphabet, I suppose, and made his signature that way. But it would’ve meant nothing to me—just a collection of syllables no more or less meaningful than the Western name his adoptive parents had given him.
Tip of the Jaguar’s Claw.
I wish we had a single, strong word for it, as his people did. For I can think of no better name for my friend, my brother, who gave me the greatest gift of my life. I will die after all, it seems.
I am mortal again.
I was not cursed with immortality, as I had been told. I was cursed with my heart’s desire. In the folly of my youth, I wanted to be young and beautiful forever. And so I was.
Later, even as the years passed, even as I scoured the world for a cure, I never really wanted it to end. The adventure. And so my curse lived on.
But immortality is not a gift, just as death is not a curse. Time is not the flower but the vase. It’s not the succor of wine but the chalice. It’s not time that makes life precious. It’s what you fill it with. If you fill yours with idleness, another five centuries wouldn’t bring anything but depravity. Granny Tuesday taught me that—that there never comes a time when we don’t want another bite. And another. And another. Not that we can’t be disappointed that this, too, must end. But when we linger at the table, we never experience life as life, only as an extended disappointment, a series of half-moments that can only, necessarily, end in tragedy.
The old man of the wood, the one who sealed my fate with his sacrifice, wanted me to know what I had taken. To truly know. He wanted me to understand how special it was, how rare in the universe, that life was a gift, the greatest gift there is, and that it was not a thing to be wasted in carelessness. In learning that—in knowing it truly—my curse was lifted. And I am mortal once more.
So many talented and eccentric magicians, from Baltasar to Dr. Hunter, had turned the globe for a cure. But none of them, not even the man rightly called my husband, could grasp the truth of it. Only Etude. My very best friend. My brother. He didn’t just save the world. He saved me. My only hope, now that I look ahead, as he did, to a demise—to old age and death, to an end to my story—my only hope is that by standing with the others before the bright black, in playing my small part in the greatest spell ever cast, I paid some of the debt I incurred.
So long ago.
In a forest.
Years move like water anymore.
So little time.
And so exciting. The rush to fit it all in.
Don’t ever believe love has abandoned you. No matter how barren you feel. No matter how heartbroken.
But now it’s time to add to this record. Now it’s time to finish it. For good. For it happens that a new darkness is stirring. As it inevitably does. And a new volume will need to be opened. And so it’s right to close this one.
It was Ólafur who pointed me to it. He has turned into an extraordinary young man that the world is just beginning to notice. I was reading a story about his latest effort in a magazine when, just next to the text on the right side of the screen, I caught a list of the site’s most popular articles. Number seven was a travel essay about the search for a famed bistro in Brazil, several hours up-river from Manaus. Diners are rumored to sit on a stretch of sand, striped like a jaguar’s pelt, and to eat off broad, eye-shaped leaves. The food is said to be otherworldly, full of ingredients from the deep jungle, including some fruits and spices completely unknown to civilization.
But before you pack your bags, know that like the city of gold and the fountain of youth before it, you may find this place only to be a myth. A pair of German chefs, skeptics, flew all the way to Brazil and wandered for several days, traversing the same stretch of river until one of them contracted malaria and had to be airlifted back to the city. The article concluded it was all a rumor, circulated with the tacit approval of the local government, to lure tourists.
Ostranyo. That’s how the locals know it. The stories are fantastical. The chef is never seen, and almost nothing is known of him, which the article claimed only clinched the fraud. The chef’s apprentice, who does all of the cooking, appears only after the rains, when she steps from the forest like an apparition, her bare scalp marked with paint, her arms full of strange fruits and seeds ready to be ground to powder. Even her name, Apergunta, supposedly revealed the trick: a pergunta means “the question” in Portuguese.
Apéra, they call her. Bald and lithe, with ochre skin, piercing eyes, and a quick wit. Such a beautiful name. I knew then that his strange question to Doctor Alexander—back when we were living in New York and the book first reappeared—the question about his daughter and whether or not the doctor would sacrifice himself for her, was not intended for him. Not really. Etude was asking himself. The mushrooms were a sign. After that, he found her, the orphan of the jungle. A child of the earth mother and her estranged lover. Born some years before in the wet womb of the world. Born pregnant with the future.
He told me as much the first time we met. A successor always came, he said. His teacher had waited many years for Etude finally to be born. And so, too, him.
I’m sure he talks to her. From the other side. He would’ve seen to it. He talks to her in the wind and the gurgle of the river. He talks to her in the crackle of fire and the rustle of leaves. He talks to her in the rain. And in the thunder. And in the beating of her heart. He’s passing it on. As it was passed to him. As it’s been passed for tens of thousands of years. The knowledge of the Deep, of the throbbing sinews of the universe, of the secret slips between the realms. Of the Light. Of the Dark. Of the Others, both benevolent and malign.
Apéra, they call her.
I can see it so clear. His patient voice calling her to task on the wisp of the breeze. Her sap-stained feet stepping lightly over gnarled roots to sit cross-legged before a grand old tree, like a castle door, reaching from a mound of earth straight to the heavens. Her schoolmates: monkeys and birds and bright jumping frogs. Her textbook: all the mysteries of the sky. And keeping watch in the shadows, peering through the leaves, rarely heard and never seen, her guardian: the jaguar.
I can see it so clear. The Stranger teaching the answers to the Question.
But that is another story.
FEAST OF SHADOWS is interactive
Read about the magical origin of Etude in The Archaeology of Five.