Chapter 41 — Epilogue: The Things That Don't End
Years later—though no one could quite agree how many—the story still refused to settle.
People would argue about it in the way they argue about weather that changed them once and then moved on. Some swore there had been a man who unmade authority. Others insisted it had simply collapsed under its own weight. A few claimed nothing unusual had happened at all, and that was perhaps the most accurate account.
There were no statues.
Attempts were made, of course. They never lasted. Either the likeness felt wrong, or the purpose did. Stone left alone long enough forgets why it was shaped.
In quiet libraries—real ones, with dust and bad lighting—scholars wrote about The Indexing Failure, The Gap Event, The Era of Provisional Certainty. None of them agreed. All of them contradicted themselves in the footnotes.
That was the mark.
Arthur lived.
Not as a legend. Not as a warning. Just… lived.
He changed names more than once, not out of fear, but convenience. Some years he stayed in one place long enough to be known. Other years he didn't. He worked jobs that required hands more than authority—repairing roofs, copying texts, guiding caravans through regions that no longer trusted maps.
Sometimes, he taught.
Never doctrines. Never systems.
He taught people how to pause before insisting they were right.
Puck stayed.
That surprised everyone, including Puck.
He complained endlessly, grew slightly grayer around the ears, and developed a fondness for naps in sunlit windows. When asked why he never left, he gave different answers depending on his mood.
"Someone has to make sure he doesn't become important again."
"He's good company."
"Leaving would imply narrative closure, and I object to that on principle."
Valerius returned to the skies.
Not as a weapon.
As a watcher, once more—but a different kind. She intervened rarely, and when she did, it was never to impose order. She stopped massacres before they began. She broke sieges that forgot why they existed. She left arguments alone.
She visited sometimes.
They never spoke of what had been.
They spoke of weather. Roads. People who argued badly and loved fiercely.
Elric vanished.
Or perhaps he didn't.
Books appeared in unlikely places—unattributed, unsigned—full of careful observations and deliberately unresolved conclusions. Margins wide enough to breathe.
In one such book, a single passage appeared again and again, translated imperfectly across languages:
> Authority fails when it demands attention.
Freedom survives when it forgets to perform.
As for the Ninth Shard—
Some said it still existed, scattered across habits and hesitations and institutional doubts that could never quite be erased.
Others said it was gone.
Arthur never answered when asked.
Because the truth was simpler and harder to accept:
The Shard had not been destroyed.
It had been outgrown.
On an unremarkable evening, in an unremarkable place, Arthur sat on a step and watched people pass by. Someone laughed. Someone argued. Someone chose poorly and learned from it.
No one looked to him for permission.
He did not correct them.
He did not intervene.
He did not reach.
And in that quiet refusal—
in that life lived without annotation—
the world continued.
Not perfectly.
Not safely.
But honestly.
And that, in the end, was enough.