Take Back Worlds (Diamond Universe: Sierra Walker #3)

Epilogue

T he forest here is the same kind of forest as my grove, which complicates my feelings even more than they already were.

We’d been so close all along, and I’d never known.

I follow the path to the front door of the cabin, intending to knock, to ask for permission, when I feel a hint of magic elsewhere that feels... stronger than the ambient magic in the air, which I did not at all expect.

I debate for a minute and then knock anyway. But when that doesn’t result in any response, I circle around behind the cabin, following the sensation of magic to a tall tree.

I look up but don’t see anything through the branches.

“Emmie?” I call tentatively, hand clutching the wand in my pocket.

Yes, I’m nervous. She was understanding enough when it was a matter of life or death, but this isn’t.

Sort of.

“Sierra? Uh, hang on a sec, it’ll take me a minute to come down—“

If she’s as high up as she feels, it will take longer than that. “Can I come up to you?”

“You can climb?” she sounds surprised. “The branches are pretty thin up here.”

I am too. She climbed? She must be a hundred feet off the ground. “No, I can fly.”

A pause. “Oh.”

Is that a disappointed ‘oh’? Did she want me to be able to climb? Does she want to be able to fly? Does she just not want me to come up?

“Sure, I guess.”

Not exactly a welcome, but it’s not a ‘go fuck yourself’, so I swallow and fly up.

Emmie is sitting on a branch high in the trees, not wearing any climbing gear that I can see.

“I didn’t think Ms. Jones had my address,” Emmie says.

“Ms. Jones?” I echo incredulously. “You’re like. Twenty-four, right?”

Emmie rolls her eyes. “Some of us meet her when we’re still children, and don’t have ongoing contact. Would you call your elementary school teacher—“ She breaks off. “Would you call Evram by his first name?”

“I do now, yeah.”

She blinks. “Oh.” Then: “You’re... on good terms with him?”

I snort. “Even if I didn’t hold a grudge over how he was when we were kids, he’s tried to kill me a few too many times for that. But I think he’s going to stop that, so that’s like progress.”

Emmie stares at me floating in front of her, then shakes her head. “Why are you here, Sierra? I don’t live in an isolated cabin in the woods by accident.”

I take a breath, and withdraw the wand in my pocket. “This is for you.”

Her attention fixes on it, a moth drawn to a flame.

But her voice when she finally speaks is strained. “Sierra, I’m glad I could help you before, but that’s not the kind of life I want.”

I swallow. “I know. This isn’t an obligation. You don’t ever have to talk to me again. But you literally helped save the universe—“

“I helped you save the universe,“ she murmurs.

I’m not sure what she’s getting at. “There was literally no one else in the universe who could have done what you did. But that isn’t even the point. The whole point of this is so you can have magic without anyone else getting to decide what you deserve to be able to learn or do. If you want to learn anything, I’m making High Earth teach us and share books, on whatever we want. And if you don’t—“ I can’t imagine not, for either of us, but—”You still deserve to have magic. No one should have been able to take it from us. So the wand is for you. That’s all.”

Silence reigns between us for a moment.

“No, that’s not all, I’m sorry,” I say in a rush. “I’m so sorry, Emmie. I’m sorry I didn’t help you when we were in High Earth. I’m sorry that—“

“Whoa, whoa.” Emmie finally manages to tear her gaze away from the wand. “I’m definitely not mad at you!”

She’s... not?

“You should be,” I whisper.

“Ohmygod, wait. No, this is not—gah. Okay. Sierra, I absolutely did not expect you to do more than what you were already doing for me in High Earth—“

“You should have.”

“Okay, we were in a very fucked up situation that normal judgment doesn’t really apply to, but we were children . You were, what, like, ten? That whole thing isn’t why I didn’t want to talk to you when you got back, if that’s what you thought. I just...“ She blows out a breath. “I’d already lost magic. I knew you’d never be able to accept that, but I wanted to be happy. And I just... I felt like if we connected again, that I’d end up playing second fiddle to you, I’d get sucked into your orbit and never learn how to be me , you know? Like being the sidekick in my own life, because you were always doing this epic shit, right, while I was hiding in the library. And the one time I tried to do epic shit on my own, it blew up in my face. If I couldn’t be the hero in my own story, I wanted to at least be the main character. And I couldn’t articulate that when I was a teenager, but I figured eventually we’d reconnect as adults and I’d get to explain but then you never called, because of course I told you not to call and you respected that, and then I was a chickenshit. So uh. Thank you for stalking me, I guess? But you super don’t have anything to apologize for.”

I stare at her, completely taken aback.

Finally she mutters, “Please say something.”

I shove the wand at her. “Please take this.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She stares at the wand in her hand, and so do I.

“I am much too awkward for this conversation,” I finally say.

Emmie bursts out laughing. “Ohmygod same. Isolated cabin in the woods, Sierra. Highly recommend it.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Are you? I guess I figured, since you were like, doing big stuff, you’d have to talk to people more.”

“Oh, I do,” I say grimly. “That’s why my boyfriend is making me build a house, so I can retreat.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

I make a face. “Technically I have a mate, it’s a spirit thing, but that just sounds super weird, right? Eventually we’ll have a wedding, but, you know. Sometime after I’m more confident angels aren’t going to show up and spoil shit.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you don’t want to do battle at your own wedding.”

“Oh yeah no, that would be fine, I just don’t want to worry about the world blowing up, you know? That seems unnecessarily stressful.”

“Right, of course.”

I wince. “Oh god, I’m not helping, am I? I know you don’t want that for your life, and that is totally valid, but also I genuinely think you are underestimating yourself. I could never have dreamed of what you tried back in High Earth.”

“It didn’t work,” Emmie reminds me wryly.

“Without the work you did when you were eight, an entire world if not more would have literally been wiped out, so that’s way more successful than you’re giving yourself credit for.”

Emmie blinks. “Are you serious?” Before I can answer she adds, “And you still weren’t going to call me?”

I wince. This is not the way I thought this conversation was going to go. “That is not the thing I thought I needed to apologize for,” I mutter.

“Sierra!”

“Does that mean I can call you?”

“Yes, Jesus, call me!”

“What if it’s to like. Go to lunch?” I ask tentatively.

Emmie pauses. “Do you even have time for that?”

I huff a laugh. “Yes. My boyfriend—“

“Your mate .”

I glare, and she laughs.

She laughs .

“He keeps dragging me away from spellwork to make me eat,” I grump.

“What a villain.”

I scowl.

Then my stomach growls, and Emmie laughs so hard she almost falls off a tree branch.

I reach instinctively for magic to catch her only to pause when I realize she hasn’t actually fallen off.

She’s suspended at a weird angle, for just a moment, before she restores her balance on her own.

And I just barely catch a glimpse of two tiny spirits before they flash invisible again.

Emmie meets my gaze, and there’s that same hint of defiance I saw in her eyes all those years ago when I learned how she was managing to con education out of High Earth.

We both lost magic.

But she never let go any more than I did.

“Call me,” I say, “whenever.”

Before she can say anything, I portal out.

I take an anchor to where I thought Nariel was, but it’s just—just!—the hairclip that contains his essence. No longer trapped in Dark Earth.

I pick it up off the leaf it’s clipped to and smile.

A puzzle for you, Sierra.

He left it for me in the middle of a different forest, and I walk through the trees. There’s no clear path, and that’s okay. I can make my own.

I can just follow the sense of magic.

The sense of him .

Maybe someday that will feel commonplace again, like it did when I was an adolescent. But until then, I will savor it.

Someday I may want the path, too. Maybe I’ll get tired of finding my own way every time.

But the sense of exploration and excitement that comes with magic—that, I never, ever will.

The light shifts. There’s a break in the trees, and I see Nariel, waiting at the top of a hill.

He turns, and although he’s in silhouette, I can feel the smile radiating off of him.

Abruptly done with walking, I hurtle toward him, knocking him off his feet with an oof as we both fall back.

So maybe I don’t yet have total control of not going overboard with all the magic in me now.

But Nariel can take it, and I kiss him on the forest floor.

We’re both mostly recovered from our ordeal. At first using magic hurt, like we’d burned whatever inside of us lets us channel magic, and that had been terrifying. But that’s settled down, and as long as I don’t overdo it, I’m okay. And as long as I take it easy, it’s getting better every day, but who knows how long I’ll be able to do that for.

No one has heard anything from Bright Earth yet.

But High Earth and Dark Earth also reached an agreement: since Bright Earth moved through High Earth unchecked for so many years, almost anything could be a bomb in waiting. High Earth has agreed to modify and regulate terms for summoning spirits going forward, and spirits will help High Earth identify any traps left by angels. After some negotiation where High Earth wanted magic from Dark Earth, too, in exchange for the magic stolen from them that I put directly into another world, they were eventually convinced to let that serve as their reparations for how they’ve been treating spirits for generations.

Someday we may get Bright Earth to offer reparations, too, but one thing at a time.

The political orders of all the worlds are in flux, and even in Low Earth, Letty is working on a charter for wizards so that someday I can be replaced as wizard master, too. (I’m hoping by her—after all, Letty is the one Low Earth wizard who brought us together even before magic – but I’m not telling her that yet because it feels like her writing the charter to supplant me would be a conflict of interest, and I really want her to write that charter.) Though that will probably take longer than it will for the demon princes to come up with an alternative candidate to Nariel, since the wizards of Low Earth all have some magical education to catch up on.

But we made it, and we’re not waiting to make time for each other.

While I’m still kissing him, Nariel dissolves us into shadow, which is disorienting enough that he manages to maneuver me so he’s holding my back to his front, the shadow of his wings blocking the sun so I can see the ground below us as we float.

“What do you think?” he murmurs in my ear, and I shiver. His arm bands around me more tightly to prevent me from getting distracted, and I smile.

He’s been scoping out places for me to build a house for us, and I guess he must really like this one.

And honestly, that’s enough for me.

I reach a hand out in front of us and cast a spell that I’ve been working on privately for a while now.

I make a house.

It won’t be an isolated house in the woods, though. There will be rooms for my sister and Ayaka to visit.

But it’s mine .

Nariel sucks in a breath as the temporary house appears below us.

“Can I show you what I’m thinking?” I ask Nariel.

“Always,” he says, his voice close to a growl that makes me grin even wider.

I hold up my magic hand for Nariel, and he takes it, and we float down into a home made of magic.

It’s temporary, yes. But that’s because I believe that magic isn’t going anywhere. I can take my time to thoughtfully, purposefully build a space for my people, and my magic.

Because I brought magic back into my world.

And this time, there are no take backs.