As Seil Kor said “We are here,” the crown began to slow. Its clockwork motors unwinding for the last time. The only luminescence it was catching came from their eyes, and the reflections swam like lazy plankton around them. Marais’s last crippling fear was unfounded. It had not inflicted Cyrena with the same vision that had seared his soul. She never saw Essenwald and Pretoria and every other city in the world become empty desolate husks, with all traces of humanity vanished forever. She had not witnessed the rotting books and the entire archive and memory of Homo sapiens disappear. Without a single smut or particle of the smoke of its extinction remaining. Her vision was seated before and after mankind in a world without human malice and invention.
“Here?” she asked as if remembering the meaning of words for the last time. Her vision had sealed her origin and her outcome into one. The words and meaning of her last questions sounded far off and made only for a ritual of leaving.
“Yes, the shelf of our embedding, where we become the long time of the plural. The Vorrh will grow and cover the world. The Rumour will vanish and we will return to the garden of beginnings.”
“Like Adam and Eve?” she said absently.
“No, my lady, they were a mistake, we will start again and another couple will guide us in God’s good ways,” said Seil Kor, gently removing the crown, which became silent and dark.
“I can see nothing now,” she said and waited for his response that never came. Instead a great warm satisfaction rose up inside her body. A tide of all-embracing blindness, guided by the invisible from the foliage of the distant tree of her trance. She understood everything. It had always been so clear. She laughed without sound as she dissolved in it. Nothing more was said and he helped her climb into its recess and began to fold her breathing, guiding her in farther where she stretched out and he snuggled in beside her. It was pitch black and the hewn stone felt warm and impossibly soft. There was no barrier of self or body between the inner and outer darkness, and everything settled to the same temperature. He put his arms around her as they drifted into what would become the longest sleep of containment, while above all manner of human conflict raged in all manner of violent light and heat in a growing open land of ignorance.