“The angels weep for her,” said the Mote, “but she does not cry. You stand upon the cliff’s edge, Shira, thinking you have wings. How pathetic you are.”

“You will let us pass,” Shira said simply. She gripped Mosel’s hand. “Four times,” she whispered quietly against Mosel’s wisteria hood.

The Mote climbed toward them, as though the words it spoke were rungs of a ladder. “I was called from the souls of everyone here,” it hissed in a poisonous voice that stung Mosel’s eyes. “I will not move aside and abandon my purpose!”

A red tear pushed out from somewhere inside Mosel and fell the ground.

“You will let us pass,” Shira said once more.

“I am God, Shira,” the Mote said from its bed before them, thousands of voices now almost distinguishable from each other within the throat of their captor. “I will not move. I will not let you pass. I am everything. I am you. I am your God, and you created me.”

Shira swallowed. When she opened her mouth, a plea spoke alongside her honey and almond voice: the desire of a sadness deep and calm as the very Deep.

“You will let us pass.”

At once, invisible strings snapped. Every arm and vestige of the Mote released into glass-like shards, which fell with the sound of innumerable broken voices. Their tiny knells rushed up and around them, but their embrace was not nearly as warm as Shira’s had been. Before long, it melted into stillness. The Mote was now taut and resolute as a promise.

Shira and Mosel waited, bound by silence and each other. They then walked to the edge of the Mote and Mosel peered down at the nectar of so many hearts. She saw only her reflection below.

Another seed at her core withdrew, but this time she could see it abandon her. It swept from her chest, dripping down her arm and down into the redness. It didn’t fade there, but tied her wrist to the body of the Mote.

Now she only had one seed left. One more experience in the world above her home.

“Shira–” she began, but stopped when she saw that another red thread had fastened itself about Shira as well. It had, in fact, wrapped about the hand that held Mosel’s.

“Once more,” she whispered. She bent down to the Mote of pomegranates to quell any chance that her words would be missed. “You will let us pass.”

Nothing visible changed. The looped threads still held their wrists, and the Mote neither spoke nor moved as Shira stepped on it, her small foot scarcely disrupting the suspended stillness.

“Let’s go,” she said.

She and Mosel slowly traversed the Mote’s crystalline face, its tendrils still tied about their hands. Mosel sorely missed the moss. She missed the dancing stones and the birch leaves and even the people in the dream she’d had when she slept.

Soon, they had crossed the Mote, and the soil beneath their feet hardened and shattered into grains of sand. Shira and Mosel’s winding red strings followed them with eerie loyalty all the way past giant teeth of white quartz that cleft the ground, through the rib cages of long-neglected boats, and around the long, horizontal spine of a fallen lighthouse, whose unlit face had shattered into the ground. If the cumulative body of the Moors had ever indeed lived, it was its ghost that possessed Mosel’s voice and dampened any light of curiosity she might have held to its corpse. Even her heart, emptier than ever now, made its small rhythm smaller. Mosel quietly willed it not to surrender its song – hearts will always heed determination.

Even as they continued through the scattered ruins, the thread about their wrists shivered. It pulsed and tugged. Mosel turned to regard the trail of red behind them and wondered at how very long it was. Shira seemed to notice the brief hesitation in her steps. The humming about Shira’s motion preluded her speech in faint, echoing whispers of air folding into itself.

“The Mote is chasing us,” she told Mosel, “but don’t worry – it can only move so slowly as this string.”

“Oh,” Mosel said. She fiddled with the thread, trying to hear the Mote’s voice again, but it was quiet as the Moor’s bones.

A beat of silence followed. “We’re almost to the ocean,” Shira said. “About three dozen more steps. How is your heart?”

Mosel meant to speak, but her throat suddenly constricted and the slurry of would-be-words slipped back down from where they had come. She looked at their interlaced hands and traced the outline of Shira’s round thumb. As usual, she was brimming with more questions than answers. “How can something so empty,” she said, “be so heavy?”

“Oh, Mosel,” Shira said softly. “It’s carried you so far already. It’s known you longer than you’ve known yourself. You’ve a strong heart, Mosel, and strong things are often heavy.” She squeezed her hand as Mosel’s tears fell to the sand with a gentle stream of tpping sounds. “How many seeds are left?”

“One,” Mosel confessed.

“Ah.” Shira’s humming movements dropped until the sound was low and broken as the sand. After a moment, she continued in a voice straining to find its pieces. “It’s a good thing we’re almost there. Then we’ll both be home.”

Somehow, this didn’t feel true to Mosel, and her heart felt heavier than ever. It shivered threateningly under its own weight, and she silently pushed against whatever force was dragging her away from her heartbeat and from Shira. She needs me to get home, she thought.

Even as the notion left her, they rounded a smooth limb of quartz and, just like that, tehom blossomed across Mosel’s gaze. It then fell completely still.

The ocean of the Deep was as serene as the Mote had been after Shira’s command, but it stirred. It didn’t need to reach the pair to touch them. Mosel felt a finger of void tickle her breath, loosen her exhale, beckon to her. The light around the nothingness before them danced like like leaves falling.

“The Abyssal waters,” Shira said. She touched Mosel’s shoulder with her free hand. “It will be alright, Mosel. Soon you’ll return home, and all will be well – you won’t even remember who I am.”

“Or who I am,” Mosel whispered.

They walked steadily to the shore, the red string slithering behind them. Before long, they were at the water. It was there that Mosel’s heart nearly collapsed. She fell to her knees at the threshold of the Deep, and the thread coiled into itself at her side.

“Mosel!” Shira cried, kneeling to lift Mosel’s spindly arms in her own. “Oh, Mosel, I’m so sorry. It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright, I promise. Please come with me!”

With Mosel draped in her arms, Shira strode to the edge of the shore. The coils of her hair swirled about her as she approached their way home.

“Shira,” Mosel whispered, determined to remember, even after her heart left her. “Mosel.”

“Please let us go home,” Shira prayed. She closed her eyes, then stepped forward, onto the water, onto the Deep, toward their salvation with Mosel in her arms.

And they fell.

Shira screamed and clung to Mosel’s limp form as the Mote’s thread whipped out of their hands and wound endlessly back up. Mosel struggled for a moment, only half-conscious and not quite sure what was going on. But she stopped when her heart thudded once within her chest. It pounded again. Once more, even stronger. It was only then that something – something painful and wonderful and alive – flew from her throat and out of her mouth like a seed sprouting.

Time was still.

They were no longer falling.

They weren’t on the ground either.

Whatever had volleyed from Mosel dropped into place in front of them like liquid pouring into a cup, bright red and singing. Mosel watched, spellbound – Shira listened wonderingly to the rhyming song that spilled over its shifting curves like rainwater. It ebbed closer, tendrils of melody brushing gently against Mosel’s cheek.

“Do you know me?” it asked. Its voice burned like embers, but softly as ash.

Shira gasped. Mosel closed her eyes, and hummed happily.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re my heart, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Mosel’s heart. “And since you know me, Shira is no longer tied to us, and we can truly live.” It then breathed in so deeply that Mosel could feel the inhale tickle the roots of her being.

And then Shira and Mosel were out of the water, out of tehom, and back on the beach of the Moors, tangled up in each other like two loose skeins of yarn.

Before Mosel had quite recovered, warmth bloomed at her core and embraced every edge of her being. Her heart, back in its place at her chest, thrummed against her while her inky body twitched with its beat. It was more than content to be an instrument that her pulse played.

When she opened her glowing eyes at last, the ocean of tehom unfurled before her, but she saw that a new light had enveloped its surface. She sprang up, trying not to disturb Shira’s splayed form along the way, and turned around to see the lighthouse standing, unbroken and lit, a gleaming star against the sand. Mosel gaped, overcome.

“Mosel?” said a muffled, sweet voice from the ground. The sound of her name filled Mosel to her very brim, but it was the voice who spoke it that poured into her heart.

“Shira!” she yelled, whipping around so fast that the hem of her wisteria cloak nearly tripped her as she sprang to the other girl’s side and threw herself upon her, arms wide. Shira, who had attempted to get up from the sand, fell back down like a twig snapping. She laughed and held Mosel closer.

“You’re alive!” Shira extolled.

“I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive!” Mosel sang against the coils of Shira’s thick hair. “And the lighthouse is, too! And maybe even the Citadel?”

“What?” Shira stood up with Mosel still curled around her, and allowed the other girl to lead her to the lighthouse while Mosel bounded and twirled with happiness. When they reached the white bricks, Shira reached out, shivering, to touch them.

“How?” she asked. “I can’t remember the last time the lighthouse stood.”

“I’m alive, like my heart said!” Mosel said. “I know my heart’s shape, and that means that there’s nothing tying you to creation, because I’m not anything like tehom anymore!”

Shira crumpled to the ground, hand still lifted to the lighthouse, anchoring her. “But – the Mote – it took everything long before I summoned you.”

Mosel sat beside Shira, flapping her sleeves thoughtfully. “Everything it took was still there,” she said slowly, “but in a different shape. So perhaps that doesn’t matter.” She tilted her feet from side to side, then continued. “The Mote must have risen because it knew what would happen, what you would do.”

“But the whole reason why I called you was because of the Mote! I didn’t need to do that before everything happened! I think!” She thought for a moment while Mosel traced an outline of a brick in the wall. Shira’s blind eyes then opened so wide that the markings beneath them were reduced to small circles. “And what if I hadn’t summoned you?” Mosel looked at the other girl, and a warm kind of feeling quirked the corners of her mouth.

“But you would have,” Mosel said.

Shira paused. “I would have,” she conceded. She dropped her head in her hands. “Oh, this is making my head hurt.”

Mosel patted Shira’s shoulder consolingly with her mitten hand, then leaned her head against Shira’s. “Do you want to go home, Shira?”

When Shira lifted her face, tears had long since welled and poured down her round cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “More than anything in the world, Mosel.”

Mosel smiled her cinder-bright smile and stood, holding out her hand as Shira had done when she had emerged from the well. “Let’s go together.”

Shira grinned, her face shifting with an amalgamation of tears, then stood and wrapped her arms around Mosel. She kissed Mosel’s very flushed cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Shira and Mosel walked, hand in hand, from the Moors, then crossed the empty Mote and came to the Citadel. There, the trees, the moss, the flowers, and their people waited to welcome them home.