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Ember’s eye half opened, but He didn’t stir Maybe He couldn’t But if Quentin had had to put a name to what he saw in Ee, but relief Quentin felt it too

“I’m sorry,” he said

The sword cut alh Ember’s thick neck in one stroke The wound opened wide instantly, red and wet, the skin snapping back like taut rubber The god’s legs went stiff and sprang apart like a s pulled Blood sprayed and then pumped from the stump

Quentin felt Alice’s hand on his shoulder He took a shaky breath It was done, Ee had ended; Quentin had ended it It didn’t feel like an exalted business—there was nothing grand about it It hadn’t felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel It as necessary, that was all Quentin stepped back frood’s corpse

So rocketed across the sky, and he looked up in ti in the distance, an iron fireplug riding an inverted cone of blue flauess Always full of surprises There were only three or four stars left, and even as he watched one of therip on the heavens and fell Behind him a throat was delicately cleared, as if to alert an inattentive waiter

“Everyone forgets about Me,” Umber said “As I said, you’ll need to kill Us both We were only ever really one god, between the two of Us”

He trotted over to Quentin, as meek as you like, sniffed fastidiously at His brother’s corpse, and then stretched out His neck He even waggled His shoulders a little, in anticipation, as if the operation were going to give Him pleasure What a perverse creature Quentin steadied hiood that Uod would do better This tih

The instant Umber died, Quentin exploded He dropped the sword He felt hi out in all directions His ars stretched out—a hundred miles, a thousand His view expanded to take in all of Fillory: he saw it hanging there in space in front of hiiant, a cosmic blue whale times a billion

He wasn’t disconcerted, but only because gods don’t disconcert easily The logic was clear to hi was clear now There was nothing that was not self-evident A god could die, but a god’s power did not, and without Ember and Umber to wield it their power had flowed into the one who sacrificed theod of Fillory He was no longer Fillory’s reader; he had become its author

But what a broken world had been entrusted to Hily Even now it continued to disintegrate before Hi This would never do ItQuentin understood well, and with the power that was in Hi broken that He could not fix

With a wave of His left hand He slowed the passage of time to a crawl, so that to everyone but Him the work of a millennium would pass in a fraction of a second Then slowly, deliberately, and with inexhaustible patience, He began to gather up the pieces fro and drifted in space He collected the clods and clurains of soil and stone that had been the flesh of Fillory, sorted thesaw puzzle, and one by one fitted the His huge spectral fingertips along the seams until they vanished as if they had never been

He worked with great care The dirt of Fillory was reat side of beef, and He took pains to position its veins of ore so that they lined up just as they once had He rethreaded Fillory’s silver rivers and streams, or where it pleased Hiently shepherded the shattered lakes and seas back into their basins He swept up the air and the winds and heaped them up in invisible ain

As He worked He rolled and sifted between His divine fingertips the remains of various objects He reo The bones of the gentle bay He rode when He left the centaurs The fragments of the Watcherwoman’s shattered watch, which had been trodden into the earth over the years and dispersed and forgotten The pistol Janet had brought into Fillory and then dropped on her way out of Ember’s Tomb The head of the arrow that killed Benedict The last rotting remnants of the Muntjac, scattered in the shallows of the far Eastern Ocean

Those animals and humans who had died in the apocalypse He allowed to rest where they were, but He ed organs, repairing and resewing skin and bones He bade the great turtle return to its place in the tower of turtles that held up Fillory, and take up its burden again, and it did—it really wasn’t suited for a more active lifestyle anyway He rounded up the escaped dead and returned the divinely troubled by their plight, He bade theood

He set the delicate green carpet of grass that covered Fillory to regrowing, and restored so theh that they could reseed the forests He spent a long ti at the shore again, and nursing the water cycle into so state He picked up the bodies of Ember and Umber with tender care and buried Them where They could decoround above Theraves, their branches spiraling curiously like rams’ horns

The ain One by one He rehung the stars like the crystals of a chandelier He filled in the great crater that the sun had burned in the ocean floor, and He cooled the sea, and rebuilt and ree of the world He took the sun itself in His great cupped hands, pressing andheat He blew on it till it burned white hot Then He placed it back on its eternal track and set it going in its orbit again

He rested He looked at His work, watched it tick and turn like a great watch, here and there s a torrent or urging on a tide, till all was in balance When there was nothing else toand corand peace Fillory lived again It wasn’t what it had been, yet, but it would be once it had healed, and that it could do without His help He could have watched it forever

But it was not for Hiiven custody of this power, but He sensed that it didn’t belong to Hiretfully, He restored tiht hand As His last act, a divine whi fro turtle of the Northern Marsh, fused its skeleton back together, reconstituted its organs and its skin, and restored it to life He placed it on an island far out to sea to begin its wanderings again The next age of Fillory would have a Questing Beast too

Then He allowed the power to leave Him As it did so He shrank and shrank, the tiny disk of Fillory rising up toout endlessly around hiain as just one more of its inhabitants

He wasn’t alone When he was a god the particular nareatly concerned hioddess, and after a few seconds their names came back to him They were Alice and Julia

CHAPTER 30

You let go of the power,” Julia said

Daas breaking over the raw, ragged, still-healing horizon, and he was losing it all already, everything but the faintest, od He savored the very last of it—the certainty, the power, that sense of total knowledge and well-being and control, forever and ever It evaporated froone It wasn’t the kind ofon to

He was just Quentin again, nothing more But he would always know that it had happened, that he’d knohat it was like, both for a few seconds and, in the life of a god, a thousand years

“I let it go,” he said “It wasn’t mine”