No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
Destiny is made known silently.
--Agnes DeMille
"I hope so," Tara said as she smiled at her girl. "That's the best part..."
My girl, Tara thought. She liked the sound of that phrase as it reverberated in her head. She could call Willow that again, she realized. My girl. Our room. Phrases she hadn't been able to use for so long. Now she could say them again and not just in the privacy of her own head.
Everything was falling back together.
She felt more alive today than she had in months. While she had learned to not simply exist but to actually live and grow without Willow, those months apart hadn't been easy. The holidays had been the worst. Eating Thanksgiving dinner alone in a small university cafeteria. Celebrating Solstice with the campus Wiccan group, where she had just begun to make friends. Attempting to avoid noticing all the happy couples on Valentine's Day. It had been hard, but she had grown and learned that she could stand on her own. She had forged new friendships, and she had discovered her family, her true family.
Tara suddenly realized that Willow hadn't said anything in response to her teasing quip about how they'd spent the last night. And most of today. She had been hoping for some sort of teasing response in return, if not another round of making up.
Something was wrong.
Willow wasn't just silent. She wasn't moving. She stood completely still, posed like a statue mid-motion as she was taking something from the chest of drawers.
As Tara took a step toward Willow, something else struck her--the world was utterly silent. The background sounds of cars driving down the street and birds chirping in the trees were gone. The air was eerily still, and her breathing, suddenly loud in her ears, was the only sound in the world.
It felt like the entire world had stopped. Except for her.
The door opened.
A tall figure cloaked in grey stepped across the threshold. A leather-bound tome, ancient and thick, was chained to his arm in the way that books had once been chained to their cases in monasteries before the advent of the printing press. He looked like a monk too, his eyes hidden under his hood as he pointed behind her.
"Father," Tara breathed, memories flooding back to her.
Tara's stride unconsciously quickened until she was almost running as she fled the dormitory behind her, leaving boxes, books, and clothes strewn messily across the floor of her new room. She had to get away. She couldn't bear the thought of trying to make a home without Willow. It was too much, too soon. Tears blinded her eyes, but her feet guided her surely to the place where she instinctively went when she was troubled.
The hedge maze.
She had always found insight and comfort in places like this, wandering the hidden paths of the woods with her mother and doodling labyrinths on paper when she was in class. She had been so overwhelmed her first day in Sunnydale, her first time away from the uneasy familiarity of the house that had somehow ceased to be home with her mother's passing. The university had seemed too large and too full of people after the smallness of her hometown. She had wandered the campus, searching for a place where she could be herself alone, and then she had found this, almost too perfect to be believed, a real hedge maze like the ones she had only read about in books.
Tara needed to know if she had made the right choice, if leaving Willow had been the right thing to do. It felt so wrong, fleeing her heart's desire, like leaving half of herself behind, but she couldn't stay and remain herself, never knowing if what she forgot was real or if what she remembered was imaginary. The maze would tell her if she had done the right thing, for the nature of this place was choice.
The labyrinth would offer her choice after choice, rights and lefts, curved passages and straight ones, until she was lost in its embrace. If she could find her way to the center and find her way out again, then she would know that she could do the same with her life. She'd know that she could find her way out of the despair that embraced and surrounded her like an endless grey mist.
She blinked the tears from her eyes and willed the insubstantial fog of despair from her mind. She needed to see clearly. At the entrance, she paused a moment to take a deep breath. She let it go shakily, then stepped across the threshold.
The first choice was always simple: right or left.
She went left.
Right.
Left.
Left again.
Was she taking too many lefts? She'd read once that you should thread a maze by always making the same choice of direction at every intersection. To her, that idea seemed to miss to the point. Why go in at all if every choice you made was the same?
Left.
Right.
Four choices of direction this time. She went straight ahead, uncertain where her path was taking her but determined to follow it nonetheless.
Left.
A long curving passage that seemed to take her back to where she had come from, but different somehow. It felt like it wasn't the maze that had changed, but herself: she was reversed, her left become right, her past become future.
Right.
Right again.
Left.
As she neared the center, the labyrinth grew strange, the hedges taller and thicker than they'd appeared from the outside, their ancient brambles tangled and thorny. Resembling the undergrowth of the primeval forest, these brambles presented an impenetrable barrier, too thick to push through and too tall to climb over. Even as she recognized the strangeness, a deep sense of familiarity welled up within her heart. She had been here before.
Left.
Left again.
Right.
Left.
Tangled brambles turned to tall, old walls of irregular stones, their edges worn smooth and the mortar between them brittle and crumbling with age. Any chance of cheating the maze was gone. There was only the path that had been followed behind and choices to make ahead.
Right.
Right again.
A third right.
Left.
A footbridge of white marble, its stones marred with age but enduring nonetheless, crossed a small stream. As she crossed the stream, a small voice in her head reminded her that no stream flowed into or out of the hedge maze, but a deeper intuition within her told her that she was on the correct path, that this strangeness was to be expected.
She emerged from the hedge maze into a garden, beautiful but ancient beyond comprehension. Ruins, stone arches and fragments of walls like the ones she'd seen in pictures of Greece and Rome, were dotted across the landscape. Above, the sun was huge, red and bloated with age.
"Welcome, daughter," the grey-robed man read from the book bound to his arm before looking up at her, his eyes hidden beneath the fringe of his hood.
Tara embraced the man who wasn't a man but who somehow was her father. He had never explained his relationship with her mother, and only in this place, the place that was at the center of all mazes, the garden where every person walked its paths all the days of their lives without ever seeing them, had she ever seen him. She shared a tiny fragment of her father's gift which allowed her to find her way through any labyrinth to the garden.
"I am sorry." His left arm wrapped around her awkwardly. He smelled faintly of ancient books as he embraced her.
Tara stepped back and looked up into her father's pale face as she asked, "Did I do the right thing? Could I have made it right if I had stayed?" She didn't have to explain what had happened to him. It was all in his book, every choice that had ever been made and every choice that ever would be made.
"I am Destiny. I am what is and what must happen. I cannot tell you what might have been."
"Why does everything good have to end?"
"My sister would say that beginnings and endings are essential to make life meaningful."
"But your life won't ever end."
"I am the eldest of the Endless and I do not have a life, but when the universe comes to an end, I will close my book and pass with it.
Tara was uncertain what to make of this proclamation. Destiny rarely revealed anything about himself, and her mother's journal had told her little more than how to find him. "What do you mean?"
"I watch over the paths of others," he said, "but I have no path of my own."
"But mother ... and me?" Tara asked, a confused look on her face. "Aren't we a choice, a path?"
"The threefold goddess came to my garden, telling me that your mother had asked them to be blessed with a daughter after learning she could have no more children. I consulted my book to determine the meaning of their visit and discovered that while she and I would never touch, it was our path to have you."
"Didn't you love her?"
Destiny paused a moment to think. "She was an interesting woman," he said in measured tones, as if he knew the answer she sought but couldn't bring himself to tell her anything other than the bare truth. "I always looked forward to the days when she brought you with her to see me."
"But then she stopped bringing me here and I forgot."
"I knew you would, as I knew that you would in time discover the truth and return home to confront Nathaniel Maclay, causing him to deny that you were his daughter, and finally leading you to your mother's journal."
"How could you ... she let me believe that for all those years?"
"She believed it best if you thought yourself a normal girl."
"And am I?"
"I told you before that you were not a demon," he said. "Your father feared you, sensing that you were not his, but there's nothing for you to worry about. No child of the Endless is likely to be ordinary, but you are a unique human being, no more, no less."
"No child?" Tara asked. "Do I have any brothers or sisters?"
"I have no other children, but my brothers and sisters have had children."
"Do you love me?" Tara asked with a quaver in her voice. He had always been kind to her, considerate of her thoughts and feelings, and she had no one else now. No friends. No family. No Willow.
"I care for you deeply, my daughter," Destiny said. The tone of his voice did not change, but he placed his left arm around her shoulders. "I love all my family."
"Will I ever meet them? Your brothers and sisters." Tara asked. "I'm a bit scared of them."
"You've already visited each of them save my youngest brother in their own realms," he said, "but we can talk more of that later. For now, you are tired and hungry. Come with me." He turned toward his citadel, a massive and ageless stone structure, Romanesque in appearance, where he dwelt when he was not watching over the garden.
"How long can I stay?" Tara asked.
"You have a path to return to," he said, "but you may stay as long as you like."
Tara started to go with him, then paused, knowing there would be no more answers once she left the twisting paths of the garden. "Will I ever get her back?" she asked. Her heart pounded in her chest as she wondered if she really wanted to hear the answer to her question.
Destiny stared at her for a long moment before answering. "You will," he said before turning away.
Tara couldn't help wondering as she followed him if that had really been a tear falling down his cheek when he answered her, but the joy of his affirmation of her hopes made her forget her question almost as quickly as it had come to mind.
Her mind full of surprise at seeing her father come to her in the real world for the first time, Tara turned to look in the direction he was pointing. One pane of the window was shattered, fragments of glass suspended in the process of falling to the floor. A bullet stopped midair in its flight path directly toward her heart. She was going to die, she realized.
"You came to change this?" she asked, hoping beyond hope.
"I came to say goodbye, my daughter."
