chapter seventeen
425 Words
The boy woke up on the floor beneath Wilume.
Meere was beside him.
He immediately sat up.
“Where is she?”
Meere didn't answer.
He looked toward the portal.
It was gone.
Completely gone.
“No.”
He stood.
“No, no, no.”
Meere held him back.
“She chose.”
“She shouldn't have had to!”
“I know.”
He stared at the empty space.
For the first time, he understood what she had meant when she told him to go.
She had known.
She had known she might not return.
And still, she had gone.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
Wilume became quiet.
The mysterious symbols faded from the walls.
The strange object disappeared.
And the portal never opened again.
But the boy refused to believe that she was gone.
Because there was one thing he remembered.
Her final words.
I'll try.
He returned to the place where they had first found the puzzle.
There, beneath the old structure, he discovered something.
A small piece of stone.
He picked it up.
There was a symbol carved into it.
Not the old symbol.
A new one.
His heart stopped.
It was shaped like the missing piece.
He turned it over.
There were three words.
NOT THE END.
He stared at them.
Then, behind him, something moved.
He turned.
Nothing.
Only wind.
He looked back at the stone.
The symbol began glowing.
Far away, somewhere beyond the world he knew, a girl opened her eyes.
She stood beneath a sky filled with unfamiliar stars.
She looked around.
She was alone.
But she was alive.
And in her hand was the mysterious object.
It had changed.
The old symbol was gone.
In its place was a new mark.
One she had never seen before.
She smiled faintly.
Her grandmother's secrets had brought her here.
The portal had separated her from the people she loved.
But it had also revealed the truth.
She finally knew that she was not ordinary.
She finally knew why her grandmother had protected her.
She finally knew that the story had never truly been about an object.
It had always been about her.
She looked toward the distant lights of the strange realm.
Then she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“You took your time.”
She froze.
Slowly, she turned.
And there, standing beneath the strange sky, was someone she never expected to see again.
Her grandmother.
The girl couldn't speak.
Her grandmother smiled.
“Welcome to where it all began.”
THE END.
Or is it?
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