What Happens Afterward

resolve the past with life today

resolve the past with life today

When the afterward isn't buried under multiples of itself, finding its core is incredibly easy. A collapsed bridge in a tunnel leads to the cavern it sits within, and bringing a full party its way seemed easy enough.

I didn't need to bring Em and Suzy. I didn't need to have Mark bring Tammy, but it felt necessary. It felt like symmetry. The story ends how it began, and I get to bring these characters some closure. It's how afterward should end, after all. An ending all can be happy with. Hopefully.

The cavern was drenched in Blight, the murky, vaguely sticky substance we dealt with ages before. Mark found that calcifying it worked to great effect, using the tools he had trained over the past week, give or take. "Why are we down here, again?" Suzy said.

"To purge the Blight from the afterward's core," I repeated.

"I get that, but why us? How can I help?" she replied.

I did not answer her. Truth be told, it was hard to have an answer. I pushed that thought back as deep as I could get it, and led Mark further into the core. The Blight didn't put up much of a fight, which was reassuring. We had made it with plenty of time to spare. Maybe we could come back later and finish the job, even.

Is that right of me, though, I wondered. Once more, I didn't have an answer. We approached the core, much trimmer and less over-encumbered than when I had last seen it. It didn't need numerous revisions and upgrades to keep up with the demands of the world above. Blight had pooled around many of its pumps and tubes, and with little effort it found itself petrified, any tears that Blight could escape into the waterways from cauterized beneath a concrete-like stone. And before us stood its epicenter, shriveled and writhing.

Mark hit it with a heavy blast of light, and majority of it had been destroyed, only a small black mass remained, pinned to the ground by its decimated body. "What say you? He asked, "Ready to be done with this nightmare once and for all?"

I stared at the remainder of the Blight. I thought about its corrupting powers, about what it had done to the last afterward. I thought about the Lizi, about Suzy's friends Scriff and Craggy, about my own friends Shim, Shaw, and Jev. I thought about the afters. About Kroff and Mangosteen, the only people who tried to help me what felt so long ago on that beach, about Kroff's bravery facing the end of their world. I thought about Constantine and the other Nexum circuits who occupied the Green Tower during my life, I thought about his sacrifice to reclaim this story. I thought about the Machinids, about those robots and other artificial lifeforms who tried to do so much, about the magician in the library. I thought about the Newtonians, about Flux. She really wanted to help in any way she could, and her ability to bend electricity would be helpful in the afterward's later years when the electrical grid from Oregon, from New Infinity would fall. I even thought about the Cloudbearers, feeling they deserved their own chance at redemption.

I thought about the adventure, about all the various people I had met, about the lives and characters I'd be removing from the story. Is that murder? Nephim promised them safe travels to the new iteration, but only one Lizi has arrived. Would this be what Nephim would want? If only I could ask them once more, if only I knew. It couldn't hurt to leave the Blight awake for some time longer, would it? Linus could use it as collateral, proof I could not uphold my promises, for sure, but he wouldn't understand. It's about power to him. It's not about the stories, the world, the people to him. We were pawns to Linus.

"Ma'am?" Mark asked.

"I mean..." I began.

Would letting the Blight live to return things to some sense of normalcy be wrong of me? Does that make me as bad as Linus? Is snuffing out so many characters at once wrong of me? Would I be ruining the story for someone if their favorite characters were not promised a happy ending? Would I have acted in poor judgement to let my opinions on these characters, on this world get the better of me, to obfuscate what should be done?