Chapter Text
The storm raged around the small house, and the electricity flickered in-out, yellow, while outside the lightning flashed down jagged, white and blue. Will resisted as long as he could; the choice was made, his choice, and yet he feared that, tested, his heart would waver again. But the rain and the wind were relentless, and they would not let him hide. When the noise could no longer be distinguished from the crash of waves on a shore, Will saw at last no other way, save to let himself go.
The living room, with Jane and Bran in it, froze and faded around him, and between a breath and the next Will had slipped away. The beach stretched before him, misted and half-obscured in the driving rain, and there at some indeterminate remove stood the great carven Doors. They split the landscape like a wound healed but still visible; not yet a scar.
But there was a sun that Will could not see warming his back, and a harp playing a melody that the downpour could not drown out.
‘Well met, Will Stanton,’ Gwion said from behind him, and as Will turned in sudden astonished joy, the Lost Land coalesced around and behind the bard’s small neat form, with Gwion’s smile as warm and brilliant as it ever had been, in that short time that Will had known him. Will’s own smile broke out across his face as he took the proffered hand.
‘I never thought I would see you again,’ he said.
‘Likewise,’ Gwion said. ’Strange, is it not?—that my Land should find its way back to your time in this manner, and myself with it, layered into your world like half-remembered dreams.’ He looked at Will with eyes that were very direct and very clear. ‘How is it with you, Will?’
Will half-laughed, held Gwion’s gaze and did not look away; he knew that the other man read much of his mind and his heart. ‘How did you bear it?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t understand, not completely, when I was last here, but—how did you bear it?’
Faint in the inescapable distance: the sound of rain and a thundering sea.
Gwion sighed and gestured for Will to walk beside him on the rolling yellow dune. ‘With bitterness, at times,’ he admitted. ‘With grief, with anger. With losing myself in the making of light for others, to relieve some of my own darkness.’ He brushed a hand tenderly over the harp that he carried, and turned a wry smile to Will. ‘Does this sound familiar?’
Will could not return the smile. ‘It does, except you were braver and less selfish than I’ve been.’ He grimaced. ‘I’ve done nothing but run…’
They walked on without speaking. Around them now, in a growing haze like television static, the rain was becoming visible again, though Will could not yet feel it against his skin. Gwion half-turned his head with a questioning air, as if hunting for the source of something he could not quite hear. For a moment there was a flickering transparency to him that had not been there bare seconds ago.
Ahead of them, still the Doors stood waiting.
‘I wish,’ Will said, ‘that I could explain to them—to Merriman, to the Lady—’
Gwion shook his head. ’You have no need, Will. They will understand and honour that this your choice: to pin your sun upon the shifting sand.’ And in response to Will’s sharp glance and intaken breath he only smiled knowingly.
Will rolled his shoulders restlessly and looked squarely ahead at the Doors. ‘When the Land drowned,’ he said, ‘you stayed because you belonged there. I belong—’ He swallowed hard; never before had he allowed himself to say these words, barely even to think them. How could he make this claim? And yet, and yet: how could he not?
He tore his eyes from the Doors and turned them instead to Gwion, who watched him without word or gesture, only a strong compassionate understanding evident in his face.
‘I belong,' Will said fiercely, in a rush, 'with Jane and Bran.’
And as he declared himself the Doors vanished from sight; with them sounded and faded, for the last time, the bell-like phrase of music that burned his heart always. Will realised, now, how it had always haunted him; hung about him like a ghost. And he realised too, in a flash of knee-buckling insight, that the melody of it had been woven into Bran’s song of Eirias, though he had not recognised it at the time. Impossible, impossible—but it had happened nonetheless.
Almost now, the Lost Land was gone, hidden behind a thickening curtain of mortal rain. Gwion’s form was scarcely visible as he clasped Will's hand once more, this time in farewell.
‘We shall not meet again, Will,’ Gwion said, ‘so pob hwyl, my friend…’
And with a jerk Will was back in the warm familiar living room of Jane and Bran’s house—which was his house, now, too—
‘Duw, that thunder!’ Bran said. ‘Right over the house, the storm must be now—we’ve really not had one this bad in a long time.’ He grinned at Will. ’Getting woken up like that—serves you right for dozing off on us, eh?’
Moved by a sudden overwhelming mix of emotion—gratitude, love, the heady excitement of a future he was choosing, for himself—Will reached out and found Bran’s hand, and Jane’s. He brought them to his lips and kissed them, holding them there for a long moment afterwards. Both Bran and Jane blinked, startled and touched by such uncharacteristic tender intensity.
‘Well,’ Will said. ‘I’m wide awake, now.’
FIN