Status: the end

Once there was a ghost whose tears turned into roses. She had so much to cry about, but no one listened. She longed to sleep in the ocean, her thoughts muffled by the rushing waves. She longed to dance among the stars. She asked her king to build a ladder tall enough, but he did not know how. This bothered him deeply, because he knew everything. She just went back to bed and pretended to dream.

The ghost had a special dagger. It was the color of blood and as long as her forearm. The hilt was shaped like the crescent moon. It had once nestled deep within the mouth of a god, but now it rested against her hip. She did not trust anyone with it.

Time passed, passed, passed. The ghost had no children. If she could've gone back in time to meet the little girl who swallowed poison and turned herself barren, she would have ripped her throat out. As it was, she sat at her piano, weaving songs into dreams, singing through the winter to keep herself warm.

The king said he loved her, but only when she curled around him in bed. She knew it was a lie; he had never loved anything. His heart was a cavern, a hallway of mirrors that only reflected himself. He was a scared little boy's idea of a king.

No one hated him more than the girl of sunlight with poisoned blood. And no one loved this girl more than the ghost. They had bled from the same womb, after all. As children, they cleaned each other's wounds and lathered each other's hair. They sat together in the water, limb to limb, two timeless trees, their roots labyrinthine beneath the dirt.

The ghost longed to be swallowed by the dirt again. She longed for lilies to bloom from her empty skull. She was so tired. She left her dagger in the garden, for the girl of sunlight to find. They did not speak, but they had no need to.

One night, the girl of sunlight found the boy of moonlight in an empty, violet-lit hallway. She drove the dagger through his ribs. He laughed, at first. No blade could spill his blood. But this one could. This one had already killed a dragon. He realized too late. Golden blood gushed from the wound. He would have collapsed, had the ghost not appeared to catch him. She picked him up in her arms like a child.

It was a pale night, the sky close enough to touch. She carried him, invisible, through the gardens, though the city, to the edge of the forest where train tracks cut a deep scar through the earth. Her bare feet made no indents in the snow.

She stood in the middle of the tracks and set the boy on his feet, still cradled in her arms. Behind her, the hollow wail of a train cracked the frigid air. Its light blinked into view, a distant star, and she could feel it rumble in her feet. The trains moved fast at night.

The ghost brushed the boy's hair from his forehead, her grey dress soaked in gold, skin sticky from his blood. She cradled his mind in some liminal space, where he wasn't bleeding, couldn't see the train. "Darling?" he whispered, confused. He was cold.

The train cried again, close enough that the boy's limp was illuminated. His gold blood glistened, beautiful even as it drained from his heart. The ghost traced the perfect angle of the boy's jaw and said nothing. She was crying. She was always crying.

"Silvia," he murmured, shifting against her thin arms. He was too weak to twist from her grasp. His breaths were coming in shallow half-gasps, now, eyes fading, but he didn't know it. "What's going on?" The train screamed a third time, one last warning. The ground convulsed beneath her bare feet, but she did not fall. She did not move.

"It's time to wake up," she whispered.

The train struck her spine as he died in her arms. Twenty-seven forever, dead at last. Somewhere beyond reality, a slain god smiled.

Decades passed. The city collapsed inward like a star. It had no king, no queen; only a twisted girl of sunlight and an unfettered knight. They would kill each other, in time; but time would take the rest of Adsophel with them.

There was a boy, down a smoky alleyway, who had stars hung in his eyes. The darkness was a doorway, for him, or a set of biting fangs. His cheeks were still chubby with youth, but there were purple stains all over his knuckles. His sneer was a hurricane; so were his hands. He was the best soldier they had. Maybe because everyone else was already dead. But there was inky black poison in his veins, and charred, gaping pits in his palms where the rose thorns had severed bone and tendon. He was going to die.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. This he knew. He found a dragon that slept as a mountain, and he whispered a story of war, of blood and ash and dreams and water, of a snake eating its own tail.

The dragon did not like this story.

The girl of sunlight stood at the cliffs, the knight's severed head dumped in the gravel at her feet. The city burned behind her, and the waves below were boiling, tumultuous and hissing, as something hungry stirred. Ships bobbed in the bay, unmanned, crushed like piles of twigs. The girl clenched a fist of broken glass, mouth full of coppery blood, and laughed madly. Not a single heartbeat left, here. Just piles of empty bodies, severed buildings, a trillion shards of a glass palace.

But the cliffs were the same as ever, faded red and coated in salty grime, worn smooth from endless years of the ocean throwing herself against it. The water was the color of bruises, all blue-green-grey.

The ghost stepped closer to the girl, breathed in saltwater. She prayed for the cliffside to crumble, for the waves to rise and devour the whole city.

"I only came back for you," the ghost said.

The girl smiled. "Oh, really? My sweet baby sister finally came to thank me?" She threw her arms wide and laughed at the sky, which was a flush of pink and gold, too beautiful to exist within the same scene. "I'm shocked."

"I love you," the ghost said. She readjusted the dagger in her grip; the hilt was perfectly crafted for her spidery fingers and thin palm, but she'd never used it before. "I hope you know that. You're the only one who's ever loved me, and I love you, forever."

The girl said nothing. She disliked the way the words made her chest ache. "Thank me, Silvia. Prove to me you were worth everything I ever fucking did for you. Prove you aren't still a useless little girl. Or I'll kill you, too."

The ghost stepped forward once, twice, three times, until their noses were almost touching. She pressed the tip of the dagger just above the girl's heart, and the girl shivered, still trapped in a half-dream where she couldn't quite feel it. The ghost looked into her eyes, endless pits of light and cruel joy. She looked at the girl's upturned nose, her doll-like lips, the delicate curve of her jaw. An older, smarter, meaner reflection of herself. It would be so easy to kill her. Just one push of the knife; she could die without even knowing about it.

"Say thank you."

"No," the ghost said, and the world collapsed. But only for a moment.

Something had changed.

The ghost blinked. She looked down; the dagger was shoved through her sternum. She was not bleeding, and it did not hurt. Her sister was gone. The sky was white. Only the ocean remained.

There was a boy with stars in his eyes. He had two trembling, scarred hands wrapped around the dagger. Tears streaked down his face. The ghost had always loved his face. That was what started it all, really. He had such lovely eyes.

The ground was trembling beneath them now, and with the softest of sighs the cliffs started falling away, collapsing into the ocean. There would be nothing left to stand on, in just a few moments, but that didn't much matter. There was a dragon overhead. The ghost could see it now.

"Go to hell," he said.

The ground fell out from under them.

So this is how it ends, she thought. What a sad game.

The ghost awoke somewhere else, between ancient trees. Ivy hung in the air like cobwebs. Nearby, the jagged black maw of a mountain cut up through the dirt. The corpse of the boy of moonlight was stretched on the ground beside her, red eyes staring up at nothing. His blood still coated her body. Beside him lay the head and body, still separated, of the knight of hollow sand. Beyond them, furthest from the ghost, the girl of sunlight slept peacefully. Of all of them, it turned out, she was the one who was spared.

The other boy was gone. He must have woken up.

The ghost sobbed, curled up on the ground beside the bodies for three nights and three days. Then she carried her sister and the corpses, both undecayed, up the mountain until she arrived at a series of crumbled pillars and an archway of darkness. She laid the bodies just within the archway.

The darkness, cold and damp and infinite, sighed. Shadow wrapped itself around the corpses and the sleeping girl, and in a moment, they vanished.

"I'm so sorry," the ghost said.

For what? the darkness asked.

"Everything."

These stories are all that's left, now. Only I remain.

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This is the final entry of this style, though not the final entry by this author. If we piece together entry fifteen, the note from entry seventeen, the glitched text from entry eighteen, the note from entry twenty-one, and this final excerpt, we can gain a general sense of the "lore" from Agent Montag's dream(s). Once again, these are all excerpts from the complete book mentioned in entry fifteen.