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For the first time in hours, days, weeks, Sloane feels like herself again. Clear-headed, the calm after the storm. A storm she herself had wrought, the results of her own destructive wrath held carefully in her arms.
Hurley is dying. Sloane needs no connection to nature to feel this, no instinctive pull of the tides to know that Hurley is being pulled away, no flow of vines around her to know the flow of Hurley’s tainted blood, no spark of electricity to know that Hurley’s own spark is fading, and fast. Sloane only needs to hold Hurley in her arms for the knowledge to creep through her like poison as well.
This is her fault. This knowledge does not flow but sits, a weight, a massive knot in her gut, weighing her down, down, down. Cocky and sure, Sloane took the damn belt. Overconfident but afraid, Sloane wanted to find something more powerful than it. Sloane had been a fool, and Hurley is paying the price.
Silverpoint’s end is sharp, painful, and inevitable. Just as Hurley’s own end is to Sloane.
The belt still whispers in her mind, promising the thing she wants most, more than anything before it. How rapidly have her wants changed. How quickly do things end. The belt seems to know it too, the voice quieter, as though it knows its partnership is ending in favor of one far stronger. Racers, criminals, partners.
“There’s still one thing I can do for her,” Sloane tells the three adventurers who stand before her, the wizard as unaccepting as she, the cleric as resigned, the fighter as full of grief. And then Sloane leans down, her free dark hair brushing against Hurley’s poison-marked cheeks, resolve taking root deep within Sloane. “Hey, Hurls,” she whispers gently. “Would it… you can stay. We can stay together. We won’t be the same, and we can’t race anymore, but…
“You always did love the cherry blossoms.”
The light of realization shines in Hurley’s eyes even as the light of her life fades.
“Yeah… I think that’d be alright.” Hurley’s voice is soft, and even now there is love in her eyes.
Sloane looks up, her own eyes brimming with tears. “I want to thank you, for everything you’ve done. But- but I have one last request. Are there other objects… are there other objects as powerful as this belt out there in the world?” Pain strikes at her heart at the affirmative, but then, this is the favor she’s asking, isn’t it? “Don’t let this happen again.”
And, one last time, Sloane uses the Gaia Sash.
The pair are enveloped by light, pure energy whipping around them, scattering their masks but leaving the Raven and the Ram themselves behind. Sloane holds Hurley safe all the while just as she holds the shape of her last act in her mind, intent as clear as her mind is again.
And then Sloane is alone. Alone in the dark.
“Hurley!” Sloane calls, desperately, frantically looking around. Nothing. Where is she? Sloane wasn’t too late; Hurley hadn’t crossed that most final of finish lines. They’d been neck and neck at the end, but Sloane had caught her. She’d caught her. Right? Sloane begins running. “Hurley, where are you?” Her voice bounds out and fills the darkness.
“Fear not, little one.” The voice comes from everywhere, and yet nowhere. It is old and young, loud and soft, so very far and yet impossibly close. Sloane skids to a halt, looking for the source. “Your love is safe.”
“But where is she? Where am I? Who are you?” Sloane demands of the void. “I want answers, and I-” The belt is gone. Sloane is powerless to make such demands. “I want Hurley.” This statement is not a demand, but a plea.
So quickly that Sloane cannot discern how it happened, but slowly enough that She may have simply been walking through the fog of night, a woman appears. Pale like bone, with hair blacker than the darkness around them, She wears a dress with dark feathers that glisten and a mask not so unfamiliar to Sloane.
Sloane knows who this is.
“No.” Sloane’s denial is immediate, cracking over her tongue like lightning. “No. I wasn’t too late. No, it’s not, it’s not- it’s not her time yet. Please, Your Majesty, I know you said she’s safe, but please, please… I need her here.”
“Little one.” Again moving too quickly for Sloane to perceive it, or perhaps not moving at all, the Raven Queen is standing directly in front of Sloane. Sloane, for her part, stands firm, rooted, craning to look up at the tall, tall goddess.
“Please,” Sloane begs. “I can’t have been too slow. I… I already destroyed everything else, all over that stupid fucking belt. Please, please don’t tell me that I couldn’t make this right.”
It’s difficult, nearly impossible to meet those dark brown eyes that so burn with divine fire, but Sloane manages, even with the tears of her living form spilling over in this one. A birdlike talon raises from the Raven Queen’s side, but it’s a hand that reaches out to gently touch Sloane’s face, the fingers long and spindly and delicate and so very cold. A thumb brushes a tear away, and Sloane almost wonders how it doesn’t freeze the moment it comes in contact with the goddess.
“Little one.” The Raven Queen’s voice is low but still resonating with power. “Your love is safe.” Sloane bites back a sob, determined not to flinch away, no matter what the goddess tells her now. “Hurley was dying,” She says, retracting her hand, “and she had very nearly entered my domain.”
“So take me with her. Throw me in the Eternal Stockade, if, if trying to save her was a crime. I’ll follow her to the Sea of Souls if you’ll allow. But take me too. Hurley never gave up on getting me back, and even if I can’t get her back in this world, I’m not giving up on her either.”
“Sloane. I govern the natural order of life and death. You are so full of life. You are not ready to enter my realm.”
“I don’t care if I’m alive. We’re partners.”
“The Raven and the Ram.” The Raven Queen nods. “Sloane. Why did you choose the raven?”
Sloane blinks. “What? But- why- Hurley- Your Majesty?” The Raven Queen simply waits, tilting her head, eyes still firmly on Sloane. Sloane purses her lips and blows out a long breath. “I chose the raven… well, you said it yourself, Your Majesty. You’re the goddess of the natural order, how things ought to be. I’m a racer, I love racing. And I’ve always thought racing was like life and death in a way. You follow the course of your life and you follow the course of the track. You do your best, you race your best, and you get to the end you earn, whether that’s at the finish line or… well, life’s finish line. And you yourself don’t interfere, Your Majesty; you leave our fate in our hands. And I have never felt more in control of my own fate than I do holding the steering wheel of a battlewagon.” The Raven Queen nods along as Sloane speaks. Sloane stops, studies her a moment more, and then tacks on, “Also, ravens like stealing shiny things. And I’m a rogue who steals lots of shiny things.”
The last gets the Raven Queen to laugh, the sound reverberating like so many temple bells. Reverberating in Sloane’s very soul. She doesn’t move. “And Hurley? What of the ram?”
“Stubbornness.” Sloane answers immediately, love and affection and laughter and grief painting her answer with countless colors. “Mostly stubbornness. Hurley, she tracked me for weeks before she finally found my garage and found out that I was racing. And then we talked for hours about it, and then she wouldn’t leave until I said that she could try it, ah, with me. Hurley gets that look in her eye, and you just know that you’re not winning this argument. But she was stubborn about racing, and she was even more so, infinitely more so with the belt. I told you, Your Majesty, Hurley never gave up on me, and that’s exactly why she is the Ram.
“So you see, Your Majesty. We’re partners, the Raven and the Ram. We stay together. If, if you’re going to tell me that Hurley really is gone, then no matter what else you say, I’m going after her.” Sloane finishes, breathing out, waiting.
“Sloane,” the Raven Queen says, shaking her head slowly, a smile on her face. “Hurley was dying. She did not die. To borrow from your own expressions, you kept her from crossing that finish line.”
Hurley isn’t dead. Hurley isn’t dead. For a moment Sloane feels as though she’s falling, just as she did when she’d arrived here, no Hurley in sight. But then she lands, the realization knocking breath back into her lungs and more tears from her eyes. Hurley is alive.
“Pardon the rudeness, Your Majesty, but you couldn’t have said that from the beginning? No, actually, rudeness intended, why didn’t you say that from the beginning?” Sloane is too relieved to be truly exasperated, laughing through tears, her heart slowing as she’d slow her battlewagon to a halt after that final sprint to the finish line.
The smile on the Raven Queen’s face freezes, splintering, and for a moment her face is as icy as her death-cold hands.
“There is a darkness coming.” The Raven Queen states. “The threads of fate are already bound, all of them inextricably tied together. Not even Istus herself can untangle that knot or know definitively what will follow.”
Sloane feels a similar chill settle in over herself. “What… what does that have to do with me?” She asks, her voice the smallest it has been since arriving in this place, this here-nor-there pocket between worlds.
“We all have our parts to play in this story, little one. You and Hurley fought for each other. I wanted, no, I needed to know if you would still fight when it seemed all hope was lost. To know that when the time comes, you would again, as we will all need to.”
Sloane considers. They’ve overcome so much already; both of them beat the Gaia Sash, together. “Your Majesty. You can count on it.”
The Raven Queen smiles, and those brown eyes burn brighter. “Thank you. Now. I believe someone is waiting for you.”
And then. Light.
Sloane slowly blinks, or perhaps, she would blink, had she eyes. Her form feels different now. Larger, so much greater, but quieter, slower. She can feel their roots driving deep into the earth below Goldcliff, their branches reaching upward to the sun, the bees cautiously drifting into their cherry pink blossoms. Theirs, for Hurley is here, too.
Hurley, Sloane rings out, the flutter of unabashed joy tracing the entire vasculature of the tree in an instant.
Sloane, Hurley calls back, mellower, softer. Still resting, recovering from the mortal injury to her previous form. And as she had both moments and a lifetime ago, Sloane embraces Hurley. There is time still to rest. They’re safe now, the both of them.
And when the time comes? They’ll be ready to fight.