The End?

No, a beginning.

I always thought it would end in darkness. I thought it would end with grief and unanswered questions and the unbearable emptiness of staring down the rest of your days, knowing you’ll have to endure them without the one person who should have been there to share them with you.

But I should have known—some people are too strong, too resilient, too clever, too resolute to be constrained by something as trivial as fate. Their stories are wild and changeable, like new rivers, carving channels on their way to the sea, altering the very geography from which they first sprang.

Sefia and Archer didn’t beat the Book.

They broke the world.

They shattered the barrier between life and death, and now Kelanna is filled with the souls of the departed, full of ghosts and calming spirits that walk by your side after your friend or your sister or your father has died.

The living don’t know it yet, but they will, soon enough. The dead are all around—on the air and in the water; in reflections, half-seen, by candlelight. They’re frequenting the places they used to love; haunting the people who did them wrong; whispering through trees and dune grasses; bringing good fortune, or ruin, to the ones they left behind.

When the Kelannans finally figure it out, I suspect customs will change. Maybe one day, when you die, they’ll mark your resting place with a stone. Maybe every year, on the anniversary of your death, they’ll visit you there, bearing overflowing bunches of white flowers, and they’ll speak to your grave, because they’ll believe you’ll hear them.

Maybe one day, to send you to rest, they’ll burn stacks of paper inked with your fondest memories like a long, true bedtime story.

Maybe one day, they’ll get messages from the dead.

Who knows? It’s a new world, with new rules.

Once there was a world called Kelanna, a wonderful and terrible world of grief and magic and ghosts . . .