Once more, Ariana finds herself running.

It’s been years since she last ran like this. She is too old for it, now. Nathaniel took over the responsibility long ago. She taught him well, and he does an admirable job, but this rescue is too important. Ariana will do it herself.

It will be her last one.

She could not run like this, on the ground. Her bones will no longer allow it. So she runs barefoot on air, on moonlight. She has been running all night, and only sheer luck has prevented anyone from seeing her.

Ariana is striking well outside the boundaries of her jurisdiction. She left Ketterbridge behind before the sun began to set, and the night is raven-black, now. She has made only one stop, and come away with soot-stained hands.

Finally, she sees it: a tremendous, grandiose house. White colonnades framing the front and sides. Ariana can sense the restless energy of the place immediately, though this is not her town. It moves out like a wave: collective panic.

Her heart pounding, Ariana gets as close to the door as she can without being seen, then drops out of the air and runs the rest of the way on the grass. She is out of breath, and she knows that at her age, one bad fall could cost her everything. But she presses on, her silver hair streaming behind her.

She rings the bell. There’s a response from within: hurried movement, scurrying feet. A servant opens the door, his collar crooked and his composure faltering. The staff don't understand what’s happening, of course. It’s no wonder the man looks so rattled.

Ariana speaks before he can so much as open his mouth. “I must see Levi.”

The servant frowns, as if decorum should still be adhered to, even at a time like this.

“Lady Alice is not seeing visitors. I’m afraid she’s not feeling well.”

“Why do you think I’m here?” Ariana is panting, struggling to get her breath back. “She will want to see me. Please. Please.”

“I apologize, ma’am, but-”

Ariana does not wait for him to finish. She makes a quick decision and pushes right past him, racing for the stairs.

She stops at the top of the steps. She’s never been here before. She does not know all the paths and ways through a house so much bigger than her own.

“Levi!” Only when the echo of her voice returns to her does Ariana realize that she’s shouting. “Levi, where are you?”

“Now, really!” scolds the man who let her in, hurrying up the stairs after her. “This is completely-”

Ariana takes off running, making for the center of the panicked energy she feels from the house.

She bursts into a bedroom. It is elegant and expensive, with an ornate, canopied bed - empty.

Levi is on the sofa. Two doctors at her side, one of her maids at her head.

“Levi,” Ariana breathes, and rushes to her. She might be in time, after all. She drops to her knees - wincing on the impact - and leans over her friend.

Levi’s face is flushed and overheating. Her whole body is, everywhere her skin is visible. Her violet eyes are clouded and terrified. She is drenched in sweat, gasping and choking.

She sees Ariana, and grabs for her hand.

“Blue!” Her fingers squeeze Ariana’s to the point of pain.

“Yes, I’m here!” Ariana lets her squeeze. Bruises are a small price.

“Excuse me!” interrupts one of the doctors, having recovered from the shock of Ariana’s arrival. “What the devil is-?”

“Get out,” Levi snaps. “All of you but her, out!”

The moment the door closes after them, Ariana turns back to Levi and tries to free her hand.

“Release me, Levi! I want to help!”

With great difficulty, Levi summons an illusion. Ariana blinks, and Levi is in her most comfortable form, the one she wore when she visited with news of Will’s rescue, all that time ago.

“My - Tree,” Levi gasps. “My Tree, it-”

“I know, love, I know,” Ariana says, fighting back her tears. “I went to it before I came to you. I tried. A whole swath of the forest is burning. I couldn’t reach it.”

“Isaiah - saw this,” Levi struggles. “I’m - lost - Blue.”

The illusion flickers, and begins to fall away. Cold fear grips Ariana’s heart. She knows that Levi would not give up this form unless she absolutely had to - or unless she couldn’t hold onto it, anymore.

“Levi, let me go. Let me help, damn you! At least let me try!”

Levi’s fingers slacken, and Ariana wrenches her hand free.

“I’m right here,” she whispers, getting to work. “I’m right here. I will not let you burn.”

Ariana blocks everything else out. She focuses all of her attention on keeping heat from overtaking Levi’s body. It is not her specialty, but she creates cold.

She lets the whole room frost over. She seals the door shut with ice, so no one can come in and disturb them. She calls a little snow cloud to powder down on Levi. The white flakes steam where they touch her skin.

She wants to remove Levi’s clothes, as her dress is trapping heat. But Levi has fallen entirely back into her given form, and to expose her feels wrong. Ariana leaves her clothes as they are.

Levi is sometimes aware, and sometimes lost. She eventually falls unconscious, but makes soft, pained noises, all the while.

At dawn, Levi gasps and sits upright.

The violet magic in her eyes sparks once, twice - and goes out.

She falls back against the sofa, and is still.

Ariana is about to scream out her pain and loss, but - Levi’s chest begins to rise and fall.

Her Tree is dead, but Levi is not.

Ariana’s final rescue has been a success.

~~~~

The wildfire has burned itself out, leaving ashes in its wake. Where sunlight should fall in shafts through green glades, instead it falls on smoking destruction. A whole slice of the forest, gone.

Levi walks a few steps ahead, leading the way. Ariana keeps the path safe for them, as Levi no longer can. Together, they hike across the smoldering embers.

When they reach the place where the Tree once stood, only a few charred pieces remain. That, and a massive, blackened stump. It must have fallen completely. It must have been consumed by the flames.

Levi stops before it, staring. Her eyes are still violet, but they do not glow.

There is a long silence before she speaks.

“I always knew it was coming,” She sounds like she’s trying to reason with someone, but she’s speaking to herself. “I always knew it was...” She draws in a shaking breath. “I wish I could have taken you here while it stood, Blue. It was a giant of a thing, the only one of its kind in this entire forest. A leviathan, and proud.”

This time, when Ariana takes Levi’s hand, Levi does not pull it away.

“I can almost still see it,” Levi says. “I can almost still-”

She begins to sob, and Ariana gathers her into her arms. They put their heads together.

“I’m lost, Blue,” Levi says again. “It took me with it.”

Ariana pulls back, looking at Levi.

“No,” she says. “I see you. You are right here, as you always have been.”

With the Tree gone, there is nothing tying Levi to her town. Her name, her title, her house - those things were never why she stayed.

She follows Ariana home, all the way back to Ketterbridge.

~~~~

At first, it’s because she needs more care. Her body has been through something no doctor could understand, and she has lost her magic. She can’t heal it herself.

Ariana tends to her gently, keeping her skin cool. With magic, and, when she is too exhausted for magic, with bits of cotton dipped in cold water. It’s a week before Levi no longer feels that she is burning.

Ariana does not mind her unexpected presence. Nathaniel has his own home, now, where he lives with his wife. They wanted Ariana to move with them, but she could not give up her father’s house. How, then, would Will know which garden window to visit?

She doesn’t know if he still comes, after all this time. She waits for him every night, sitting in the window, like he might walk up at any moment and leave the white blossom on the sill. She speaks to him. Sometimes she imagines she can feel him there, among the flowers.

Even so, the house is lonely. Ariana is the only occupant.

“I was sorry to hear of it,” Levi tells her. “Finch. I know you loved him.”

“Do not be sorry.” Ariana smiles. “His life came to a peaceful conclusion. He was an old man, with his family at his side. I always count such losses as success. He made it safely to the end of his ride, and dismounted gracefully.” She sits back, thinking of him, his warmth, his endless patience. “But I do miss him terribly. And Will. I miss them both.”

Levi lingers for another week, then another. She sleeps in Nathaniel’s old room, wears Finch’s old clothes. Ariana finds that she likes the company, and she stops mentioning the mansion that Levi left behind.

Months pass.

One night, Ariana stands before her mirror, brushing out her hair. Levi sits on the bed, watching her, as has become their custom.

“Are you done with love, Blue? After William, and Finch?”

Ariana pauses, surprised. “Why do you ask?”

Levi hesitates.

“There are ways of loving,” she says quietly. “Between women.”

Her violet eyes are fixed on Ariana in the mirror.

“Is that what you are, Levi?” Ariana asks. “A woman?”

“I have this body.”

“But is that what you are? Is it so - simple, as that?”

Levi looks down at the bed, and does not answer.

“A man, then,” Ariana suggests.

“No,” Levi says. “Is there not - something else?”

“Something in between?”

“Something… outside.”

Ariana comes to sit on the end of the bed. “There is you.”

Levi fidgets with the blanket. “Before, I could call myself a chosen one of the Guardian Tree. I knew at least one thing that I was. Now I’m not even that.”

Ariana takes her hand.

“You are still that,” she insists. “You will always be that. You have saved countless lives. Turned so many painful endings beautiful. You have served your people, and your Tree. No one can take that away from you.”

“But what else am I?” Levi asks, her gaze still on the bedspread.

Ariana considers. “Does it make you unhappy? When I say woman, and mean you?”

“What else should you call me?”

Ariana shrugs. “I’m an inventor. You’re an artist. Surely the two of us could come up with something. A word is not so difficult a creation.”

“No,” Levi says. “Don’t change the things you call me by, Blue. Not now. I know you don’t see them as my - as my totality.” She pauses. “Some things are better, without my magic. I have left my town, my damnable position in society. I am here, now, with you. And the silence, without the energy...” She closes her eyes. “You would not believe it, Blue. The silence. It’s beautiful. I didn’t know the world could sound like that. I’ve never slept better.” She chews her lip. “But… the loss I cannot help but mourn, is myself. I don’t even recognize…”

Without her magic, Levi cannot do her illusions. She has been stuck in her given form ever since the Tree fell. Ariana can see how it troubles her.

“I only want to see myself as I truly am,” Levi says. “Even if just once more. One more time.”

“I wish that I could help,” Ariana tells her. “But I’m no illusionist.”

Levi suddenly grabs her hand, her eyes wild and hopeful. “Could you still see me like that, Blue? As I was?”

Ariana blinks, taken aback. “Of course. That is how I see you, always.”

Levi lets out a breath.

“Then you can do it. I can show you how. Just see me like that, really see me. You already have the paint. The magic is only the brush.”

Ariana closes her eyes. She remembers Levi on her porch, boots up on the railing, her broad shoulders in shirtsleeves. Her muscled build, the soft delicacy of her face, her close-cropped hair.

When Ariana opens her eyes again, there Levi is, as she once was. Only aged up, her hair silver kissed with a shock of white, her face lined by the years.

Levi comes down from the bed and goes to the mirror. She has not spent more than a few seconds before a mirror since she came home with Ariana, but now she stands there, looking at herself, for a long time.

“There I am,” she finally whispers.

Ariana comes up behind her.

“This love you speak of, between women,” she says quietly. “Or - between us. I’m sorry, but I am not made for it, Levi.”

Levi turns, and takes her hand again.

“There are other kinds of love, besides physical. Surely you of all people know that, Blue. You, who have loved a ghost for so long.”

They both expect the illusion to fall away when Ariana’s focus turns to other things. But she did not lie to Levi: she always sees her like that.

The illusion sticks even while they both sleep. It’s there the next morning, and the next. It does not go away.

Ariana thinks about what Levi said. One evening, when Levi climbs down from her bed to go to Nathaniel’s old room, Ariana catches her wrist, and asks her to stay.

Levi sits on the bed and watches her snuff out the lights. She lays still in the dark at Ariana’s side, and though they do not touch, the heat of her body closeby is comforting. Ariana falls asleep with ease she hasn’t known since Finch passed on.

The illusion Ariana has cast is so powerful that it has a physical feel. Ariana wakes in the middle of the night and finds herself cozied up in strong, burly arms. She first thinks she has awoken with Will. Then she thinks it’s Finch. Then she knows it’s Levi.

Levi sleeps in her room every night after that. She doesn’t say anything when Ariana leaves the bed to sit at the window, look into the garden, and wait for Will. She doesn’t comment when Ariana says goodnight to Will and Finch both, before she goes to sleep. She only holds her, and sometimes kisses a strand of her silver hair.

The town considers them two batty old crones, and they are content to let that lie. It keeps people away from the house. The only ones who come are Nathaniel, his wife, and their newborn, but this is how they prefer it. Levi shows Ariana how to do more illusions, and when people stray too close, Ariana conjures images of black bears or wolves, sending the intruders running. Levi and Ariana sit on the porch and cackle like fiends.

They discover that they’ve become something of an urban legend. The vanished Lady Alice Levitt, and the wild woman who came in the night to steal her away. They hear tales of it, and laugh themselves to tears.

So it is that Ariana, who once thought herself terribly unlucky, finds herself with not one great love of her life, but three.

But she never forgets Will. Not for one day, or one moment. She thinks often of the Heliomancer, the one who will save him. She decides that she must pen two letters, not one. She unseals the locket, after decades of wearing it closed around her neck.

Ariana writes in the dark, by candlelight. She writes to the Heliomancer. She reduces the letter to a size smaller than a coin. She redesigns the enlarging system for both letters, so that only the right person will activate it. Then she seals up the locket, once more.

She returns the locket to her neck, goes back to her bedroom, and tucks herself up against Levi’s sleeping body. She closes her eyes and, smiling, falls easily into deep, peaceful slumber.

After a lifetime of work, Ariana has completed her last piece of invention.

Now, finally, she lets herself rest.