The Word Lord known as "Had Been" uses his monumental powers over time and continuity to convert Seo back into a person. Then he lectures the Word Lords for their wicked ways.

Seo and Catherine, meanwhile, are pulled inside of Oliver, where Atrus has already formed a plan. He needs Seo to materialize her ship around the planet of the Word Lords. Seo insists that she doesn't want to, because it would strand her here forever. But Catherine begs Seo to trust her husband, and Seo complies.

Seo does so, and when she does, the whole of reality goes wobbly.

Why?

What did Atrus do?

Turns out, Atrus altered the Trap Book so that it now holds more than one person, and so that it perfectly describes Seo's ship materializing around the Word Lords. When Seo made that reality actually happen, while her book was connected to the trap, the two worlds got confused.

When the wobbling stops, Seo discovers that the Word Lords have been trapped inside the book.

They'll get out, of course, but not for a little while.

That means that Seo and the others finally have time to figure out what to do to save the universe.

And Seo, inspired by Atrus' cunning, has a brilliant idea.

She takes out a quill pen formed from the feather of a temporal falcon, and asks Atrus to write the entire universe inside one of his books. It doesn't matter how much he knows of the universe, so long as he writes it exact and also writes that the feather of the temporal falcon draws energy from the instability, applied to the book.

Atrus agrees to do so only on condition that Dave finally tell Seo the truth.

"Truth?" Seo asks. "Truth about what?"

"The truth," Atrus says, "about his children."

Seo's eyes go wide.

And Dave, a little sheepishly, admits that he does love Alonna. And that they've had two children, together.

This leads to a lot of screaming between Seo and Dave.

We cut to Atrus' journal, where Atrus describes the way this story ends.

"At first, I wrote the book of the universe, just as Seo had said," Atrus writes. "But before long… I realized that I wasn't writing, anymore. The universe was writing itself."

The book stabilized the universe.

Seo then took the book that contained the entirety of the universe, and that had stabilized it. She placed it inside another trap book that Atrus wrote up for her.

Then Seo burned the linking book.

The prison dimension where the universe-containing book lies still exists. But all links to it are gone.

"As for the personal matter between Seo and Dave," Atrus writes, "well… Seo was furious and heartbroken. There was a lot of screaming between them both, when they dropped myself and Catherine off on our island of Myst."

On Myst, Catherine tried to comfort Seo. It was obvious that Seo had cared for Dave very deeply, and even though the affair was now over, she'd still had her heart broken. There would be a lot of tears before she overcame this.

"Then, one day, when Catherine and I awoke… we found that Dave and Seo had left," Atrus writes. "They'd both returned to their own universe, somehow. I never did work out how."

He wonders what happened to them.

Atrus laments that, in return for their saving his wife and giving them back his life, he had to return the favor by destroying both Seo's and Dave's. But — Atrus decides — maybe that's what he's learned. The dream of building D'ni up again on the ruins of the old D'ni is like Seo and Dave trying to build a relationship based on lies. The result may be beautiful, but what lies beneath will always come out, in the end. And make the beauty turn ugly.

Seo had said that perhaps ancient fallen civilizations should remain dead — and perhaps Atrus now agrees.

What's done is done. He can't undo what the Word Lords did, creating the Fall of D'ni or manipulating his family. He can't even go back and undo the wrongs his sons brought to the universe.

But he can build a better world on a more solid foundation, one where the D'ni could start over.

One where his family can start over.

Atrus can only hope that the two strangers, upon returning to their realm, will do the same.

The End.

That's all, dear readers! Hope you enjoyed all the fanfics over the years. I've loved having you as readers.

Hope you all keep reading so you can enjoy my new novel, "Shockwave Vampires".

Available soon on Amazon Kindle and Fictionpress.