that you survived—”
“I didn’t.”
Corin shook his head. “You did. You must have.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t know, last time, but I remember now. It took everything I had to move the city.”
“Then don’t—”
“I have no choice. This is my memory, and I remember how it happened. Those who survived the fire slipped off to the Isle of Mists, but I was trapped within the city. I never left this throne again. I died with Gesoelig beneath the mountain.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“How?” Corin asked. “If you died, how are you here to answer me? You see? It is impossible.”
Oberon smiled sadly. “Aeraculanon died, but his memory lives on, even in your age. Is it so strange that my memory does the same? I am the world’s creator, after all.”
“But…how? Aeraculanon’s shade has never spoken with me.”
“As I said, I am the world’s creator. I play by other rules. Perhaps the universe gave me some extra reach from a sense of self-preservation.”
“Or perhaps I have gone mad. Likely sometime long ago.”
Oberon tapped his temple and gave Corin a wink. “I have thought the same. Quite often, really. But I ever reached the same conclusion.”
“Yes?”
“If I am mad, no choice I make can matter in the least. If I am not, then it is the world that’s mad, and I must address that madness with whatever resources I have.”
“But I’m so tired.”
“I have thought this also,” the king said.
“Yes?”
“Yes. And it only gets worse.”
Corin groaned.
“Please,” the king said softly. “We come at last to the point of everything. Give me ten minutes more, and all will be made clear.”
“All?”
“As much as I can grant.”
Corin sighed. “Very well. Go on.”
Oberon nodded. “As I said before, all Hurope is my dream, and if I die—”
“The dream ends.”
“Indeed. And in the end, in the days after this day, even as my spirit faded, I saw that more than I feared the nothing, I grieved the billion pretty little lives that I had created. I ached to know that everything I’d made would be undone—”
“Then let me ease your heart. It was not. The world without you is no paradise, but it is not undone.”
“That is the story I brought you here to tell. You see, as I lingered, waning, in Gesoelig’s magnificent tomb—”
“It was magnificent.”
He smiled. “Thank you. Before I slipped away completely, I devised a plan to keep the dream alive. There was one, among all my subjects, who would not leave me for the Isle of Mists. I demanded it of her, for her own sake. I begged it of her. But she would not leave my side.”
“Delaen?”
Tears shone in the king’s eyes. “A well-thought guess, but no. My druids’ craft in trade is logic, and though it broke her heart, sweet Delaen saw reason and went off with the others to keep the kingdom of my refugees in order.”
“Then who?”
“Maurelle. The loveliest of Violets. She blossomed while Gesoelig burned and coordinated our response, but when the survivors left to found New Soelig, she stayed with me. And when my memory began to fade, when I felt my fire burning out, she spent a thousand years in darkness, in silence, imprisoned on a wild, foolish errand to preserve the dream.”
Corin swallowed hard and told a lie. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“She wrote it down. She caught my dream and pinned it to a page. She wrote down the fifteen million lives that made Gesoelig. She captured everything I could recall of these last days.”
Corin said, “The books.” And in his heart, he thought, Please, fortune, no.
But Oberon nodded. “The books. They are my legacy. They are my memory writ down, the dream preserved.”
For a while, Corin marveled at the immensity of it. Then he frowned. “But…where’d she find the paper? Or is that the wrong sort of question?”
Oberon laughed. “It is. You have an unromantic soul. But there was paper in the city. You have seen Aemilia’s shop. Even Gesoelig had its documents and forms. She used those at first.”
“At first?”
“She filled them up—every empty page within the cave, though it did not tell half the memory. Still, I begged her once again to leave, to take her memory and return to the world of living men. She would not leave me. She devised instead a way to scrape the pages of old books, erasing what was there to record my dream.”
“Cunning.”
“Indeed. When she had filled all the books, she tore bits of linen to write lives upon. She sought other fabrics, but the refugees had