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In the end, they all return to the earth.
Everything in nature has its place, a role to play in the cycle of life. The seed exists to sprout, the plant to feed the animals, the animals to feed the worms. Many of those who come to the Wildmother seek that purpose, seek to understand what role they’re fated to play. When Captain Fjord Lavorre first looked uncertainly to her harbor, she believes that is what he hoped she could give him.
He is a talented sailor, and a loving friend, and a greater champion than she could have ever asked for. He contains his former patron, keeps the power that once weighed on him from ever pulling another into its depths. He builds a crew of driftwood and jetsam, a family for the orphans and runaways seeking freedom on the waves. He marries the woman he loves, and makes a home with her in motion, a thousand places they call their own.
He asks the Wildmother sometimes, in quiet moments, if this was what he was meant for. If fate brought him here, if she shaped him to fill this place in the world. She has no words to answer, but she can show him the waves, ever-turning and shifting; the clouds, a storm brewing one moment and drifting into wind in the next; the sand, shaped and molded and wiped clean, over and over and over. She shows him the vast, unpredictable whole of the world, the million different ways chance might have taken him. She shows him the life he’s built and she shows him his purpose: to live. To change. To make his own fate.
He is the first to join her. There is a place for him in the Blooming Grove, and a gathering of old friends. They drink and weep and remember the man they loved, and they put him in the ground together. The woman he married stays. In time, she will keep moving, keep living, keep smiling and laughing and remembering him in every moment of joy and grief and everything in between. But she stays long enough to say goodbye, and to see the plants begin to cover his body. Seaweed, vines, plants that are lush and green but somehow smell faintly of the sea. And cutting through it, a sweet, sugary smell from a bright blue flower, nestled at the heart of it all.
Caleb Widogast assumed, for much of his life, that he would have no mourners. He had no family, after all, had killed or abandoned everyone he ever cared about. He believed he deserved that fate, to go to the ground alone and forgotten. In the moments when he dared to hope for anything, he hoped that he might do some small good before that day came.
When he dies, and the man he loves brings him to the Grove to be buried, there is not enough room in the Clays’ house for everyone who comes to pay their respects. His students at the Academy, dozens of them, share stories of their soft-spoken teacher and the many ways he touched their lives, some as small as a kind word in a time of need and some much greater. His colleagues, mages from the Empire and the Dynasty and beyond, speak of a brilliant mind, a relentless curiosity tempered with wisdom and respect for the dangers of power.
And his family, his families, they come too. A priest, who remembers the man he first met and the man he is now, sends him to the next world with the certainty that he will find the peace he deserves. A pirate who owes him his life finds himself weeping over the grave, though all he knows is a story and a half-remembered dream. A traveler dances with her friends, a slow waltz, smiling and crying all at the same time. An angel who saw herself reflected in him so long ago leaves a flower, and whispers a word of thanks. An Expositor of the Cobalt Soul drinks and rages and begs for more time, swears to carry on the work, cries until she has no more tears to give. And a halfling woman, a mother and a sister, a student and a teacher, says goodbye to her dearest friend.
Weeks later, when most of the mourners have gone, a drow man stands at the grave of his lover, companion, friend. He holds a strange black object that seems almost embedded with stars, and he turns it over and over in his hands. He stands there for most of the night, until his legs ache and his hands feel numb. Finally, as the sun begins to rise, he kneels down, buries the object in the freshly turned soil, and walks away from the grave.
Caleb Widogast is remembered in this world for a very long time. And more than that, he is loved.
Beauregard Lionett has never known how to stop fighting. She fights less now with her fists (saving them for a special occasion, she likes to say), but is no less feared or respected for it. Neither she nor her body are willing to give up, to age, to let time slow down her relentless and never-ending pursuit of justice. Decades pass, and she is as strong as ever.
To most who know of her, she is a legend. She lives in the frightened whispers of the powerful who know what they’ve done, in the awed envy of blue-robed students who wonder how she could ever have been one of them. But for the ones who need it, the ones who are restless and hurt and angry and screaming for somewhere to put all that pain, she makes herself human. Says Call me Beau, and sits with them, and tells them about living someone else’s life. Tells them about the beach in Nicodranas, and unlikely friends, and standing in a courthouse speaking the truth. She has always been reluctant to raise children—a small part of herself is still frightened of the harm a parent can bring—but this she can do. This she has to do.
She doesn’t show the years, as they accumulate, but she begins to feel them. She has more time than most: 90 years, 100, 120. Somewhere along the way, she sits down at a hand-carved wooden table with her wife and talks about after. She does not say I want you to be happy, or It’s okay to move on, though both are true, because some things don’t need to be said between them. They hold each other close, and swear to wring every last bit of joy out of these years they have.
When she dies, she knows that her fight will continue. She knows that every child she saw her younger, broken self in, she gave shelter and the tools to rebuild. She knows that everyone she saw her father in, she brought exactly what they deserved. When she dies, she knows she’s left the world better than she found it. When she dies, Beau is at peace.
It isn’t fair that Jester Lavorre should outlive so many of her friends. It seems a cruel trick of fate that such a bright light, such a source of joy and mirth for everyone around her, should have to grieve so many times. And she is not the same person she once was; she is no longer the young girl setting out from home for the first time with a bag of pastries and an irrepressible love for the world. She grows older, and learns sadness.
But she is not broken by it. She does not give up and stop loving, does not stop believing that the worst enemy can be made a friend and that the world can be made right. She loves her family, and she lives for them. She solves crime, and opens a bakery, and travels the world, drawing dicks wherever she goes. It is impossible to know the scale of Jester Lavorre’s impact on the world, over the course of her long life. More than most, she makes it what she wants, simply by believing that it can be.
When her time comes, she isn’t ready for it. There’s so much more she could still do, so many memories left to make, if her body would only keep moving, if she only had a little more time. Before she dies, she calls on an old friend to keep a promise he made to her a long time ago. She sees the Feywild, and lives her last days in the place her friend once called home. When she’s ready, he takes her hand, and leads her to the next adventure.
Kingsley Tealeaf lives longer than he has any right to. He survives shipwrecks and rivals and any number of outrageously dangerous situations, spitting in the face of death again and again on his rise to infamy. Maybe his soul is fiercer than most, clinging tighter to the life his friends gave so much for him to live. Maybe the Wildmother’s blessing is stronger than she intended it to be, his body stitched together a bit too perfectly. Maybe she watches over him, just a little.
But he, like the rest of them, slows with time. He wakes in the morning to aching joints and lies down at night with weariness settling in his bones. He retires from piracy, passes the mantle to a younger man, as full of life as he once was. A worthy successor to his throne, he thinks with some satisfaction. And he sails back where he came, to a small, cozy house not far from Zadash, where flowers of every color bloom in the garden and a very large woman waits to welcome him home.
He does not go out in a blaze of glory. He does not die loudly, in defense of his friends, or quietly, as a stepping stone on someone else’s road to power. He dies at home, an old man, with a smile on his face and a friend’s hand in his. His eyes shut, and he embraces death with arms wide open.
He is not a fragment of a soul when he reaches his end. He is a mosaic, a shimmering tapestry of all the pieces he gathered in the course of a very, very long life.
Yasha Nydoorin outlives another wife. Her life is a tragedy, viewed from that angle—how sad, how deeply unfair, for her to find happiness again, only to lose it. Yasha Nydoorin does not look at her life from that angle.
She gardens. She tends her house. She thinks of old friends, and lets the sadness wash over her like rain, like the pounding of a storm that comes from nowhere and lasts however long it feels like. She can’t outrun her pain, or avoid it, or fight it. Some things you just have to batten down the hatches and outlast.
She is not alone, either. She has her old friends, and new ones, and many happy moments ahead of her. She has tea and soup and rosé to drink and a shoulder to rest her head on when the storm is too strong for any one person to weather. She cooks and smiles and laughs and talks and loves and lives.
A thunderstorm rages for nearly a week after she dies. It’s the longest and fiercest storm anyone can remember for a very long time. Like the sky was weeping, some people say, and they’re more right than they know. She is buried in the Grove, next to her wife, and the flowers she planted for the woman she loves cover her, too. They lie together, under a beautiful blanket of color, and are never apart again.
Veth Brenatto has so much family. Her son, of course, and her husband. Later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all their friends and spouses and loved ones. Her home is a place of love and comfort, but also of mischief and adventure. She teaches many young halflings to use their first crossbows and cast their first spells, over the many decades of her life.
She grows not a little bit famous by the end of her life, not for one of her skills but for many of them. Her combat lessons are sought after by aspiring thieves and adventurers across the continent, and a year under her tutelage comes to carry almost as much weight as a year in the Soltryce Academy for a young mage. Her skill in alchemy is renowned, too, concoctions under the Brenatto name filling the shelves of many healers and shopkeeps. (There is one shop in particular, run by four extremely similar-looking men, that dedicates quite a bit of space to her products.)
It takes time for her to really believe she’s allowed to have both: to have fame and adventure, and still come back to find her family waiting with open arms. Her husband tells her, as often as he can, how much he loves her, how happy and proud he is that the rest of the world gets to see some small portion of all the things he adores about her.
She is surrounded by family when she passes. She looks at the faces around her, the familiar comfort of them all, and for once, she feels she’s earned it. She feels at home in her body and in her life.
Her husband outlives her, but not by much: months, a year. It’s alright. They’ve been apart for longer, and he knows, as always, that he’ll see her again soon.
And finally, Caduceus. (There is another, but he has many centuries left before he joins her, and so for now, her Clay is the last. Perhaps she simply can’t resist giving him a special place in her memory.) He lives much longer than most of his friends, puts each of them in the ground one by one and nurtures their gardens. He is proud of the work he’s done, and comfortable in the knowledge that they’re at peace.
His family doesn’t always recognize him. He is no longer the boy they knew, after the things he saw and the places he went. They don’t always recognize the man he’s become, but they love this new version of him just as they loved the old. He wanders, when he needs to, and they let him go.
If his faith is more complicated now than it was when all this began, it is no lesser for it. He believes in the purpose his goddess set out for him, but he also believes that she would not mean it to be a single path, unwavering. He looks out at the rest of his life as a splitting of branches, green leaves bursting from every end. Wherever he goes, she is with him.
His family buries him in the Grove—siblings, nieces, nephews, friends. The tea that the earth makes of him tastes strangely like the cups he made all those years ago, for a group of strangers bonded by grief. Woven through the garden of his grave, lilies bloom.
In the end, they all return to her. She can’t stop it, and she wouldn’t. This is the way of the world: all things, no matter how good or powerful or deserving, have their time to live and their time to die. She can’t stop it. But she can hold them close, give them a place to lie down and rest, grow wild and beautiful things to mark their passing so that years and decades and centuries from now, someone will stop and read their names and wonder who they were in life.
In the end, they all return to the earth. And in turn, the earth remembers them.