The seasons pass for podling and gelfling as they always have, with the festivals and the rights of passage and songs sung in a language that I no longer need Kira's help to understand. The sadness that lingers in the village's only two gelflings cannot forever cast a pall over the village. The podlings have known much sorrow and death, and they go on as they always have, though they embrace us and ply us with food and drink when they sense that our sadness is heavier than usual.

I lie with Kira in the nights that she seems to dread, curling my body into hers in an attempt to fill that emptiness that I know from dreamfasting still haunts her. I have never had her gift for words, and so I try my best to simply be warm for her, warm and present. She is grateful, and I am grateful that she is with me, and if there is sadness between us there is no longer anger.

One night she has a dream that I do not see, and before I am half awake she has leaped from beneath our blanket and is saying the same words again and again, "The houses of the old ones…the houses of the old ones…"

I run after her, stumbling through brush and trees on that dark trail where a Skeksis once chased us. She tears through the gates of the ruins. If the podlings have heard her they do not follow us. I know that they still fear the place, though the death that was visited upon it is centuries old.

I find Kira with her arms wrapped around the stone chair in the middle of what must have been a throne room, gasping. I put my arms around her, fearing that the sadness has finally driven her mad. But she does not weep. For the first time in many nights, she smiles at me.

"I have seen our world," she says, her eyes glistening.

I nod, listening.

"I have seen the world we will make." She stands and moves slowly through the ruins, touching the crumbling walls, the vine-covered columns, finally running her hands over the Wall of Prophecy that had led us to the castle. She touches the symbols that she cannot read, their shapes faint in the moonlight.

"We have to rebuild the houses of the old ones, Jen. We have to show the podlings and the nebri and the landstriders what we once were. And then we have to leave a trace. On this wall. I will tell the story, and you will write it, because you are the only one who can."

In the light of the moon I could see her face was flushed, and her hair sparkled. She seemed holy to me. I held her, feeling the quickness of her heartbeat.

"This is how," she said. "This is how we make the world."