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The journey is a long one by design and necessity. It’s a journey to both dread and appreciate. One taken both in love and grief. Duty and honor. It takes 10 days on foot from Tir Asleen. Horses would be faster, but this is a journey taken on foot. Each step must be felt and taken of free will.
They pass several pilgrims. Some are traveling out, just as many on their return trip. Beyond the nodding of understanding and respect, little passes between those who travel the same road. It’s rare they pass other duos. Most travel alone.
It’s why Jade and Kit get more forlorn and sympathetic looks than the solo travelers. Grief and duty multiplied is hardly a balm for the soul.
The night before they reach their destination, already camped out for the evening and quietly leaning up against one another for comfort, a weary couple approaches them. A man and a woman, neither older than thirty years, each empty handed. Eyes rimmed red.
They ask for nothing more than a moment’s rest at the fire. The easiest request to grant.
They don’t speak about their loss, but it’s clear by the way the cling to one another. A grief multiplied, not divided. The couple doesn’t ask Jade and Kit if they share a similar burden. What matters is the duty they all share, the physical weight the couple have left behind. The weights that sit in velvet pouches slung around each Kit and Jade’s waist.
The couple doesn’t stay long. Jade notes the way their eyes lift as they look to the road ahead. Neither looks as if they regret the one from whence they’ve come. Hands linked, Jade thinks she reads relief in their bodies.
The time arrives to rest their travel-worn bodies. Together, Jade and Kit unpack their simple rolls. They place them side-by-side and curl together. Kit’s back to Jade’s front, pieces of a puzzle that have long since found the comfort of home in each other.
“What if I don’t want to let him go?” Kit’s voice is a reedy, trembling thing. So quiet that Jade’s not even sure if Kit was asking her or her midnight ghosts.
“You aren’t,” Jade whispers back, her lips soft and comforting behind Kit’s ear. “You’re helping him find his next adventure.”
Kit had been so stoic when it happened. She’d painted upon herself the face of the perfect soldier. She’d held out her arm so solidly, that only Jade had been able to note the smallest trembling of her fingers as Elora had formed the bond of light. It had wound like ribbons between Kit and her father. First, an equally balanced display. Then, as his soul pulled from his body, the light moved in waves from bright to dull, narrowing into a single, long thread that solidified, coiled onto the palm of Kit’s outstretched hand. His Life Thread settled into an iridescent teal.
Kit had been so brave that afternoon six weeks back. But that night, she’d crawled into Jade’s arms on their marriage bed wracked with grief. Jade had held her as her tears fell.
Tonight, like that night, Jade isn’t sure when they both doze off, just that they do. And again, it’s the sun that wakes them. Not filtered through the yellows and reds of stained glass, though, but breaching the horizon in softly glowing rays.
They’re quiet as they gather their small packs and link hands, taking those last steps.
It doesn’t take long.
The sun has barely crested the horizon and the Little Sister still hangs low in the sky, not yet gone to rest.
They reach the peak of that final hill. It blinds Jade at first, the rays of early summer morning glint sharply off silvers and golds. The glowing of greens and blues create the mirage of distant pools of water.
Talked often but never described spoken or written. Because how could you ever put to words the beauty of a million lives laid to rest and joined together? The brilliant tapestry of humanity.
The Quilted Plains.
Jade stands there awestruck. For several long moments, perhaps even hours, she and Kit simply look. Simply feel.
The Plains billow with the magic laid into their very being. They are quilted as the name suggests, but so much more intricate than a simple blanket divided into equal squares.
The ground itself is made up of more colors than Jade even knew could exist. Several feet ahead, chartreuse twines like a braid with opal and a shimmering pearl. Three lives that have bound themselves together in the time after death. Jade wonders if they’d been so in life or if was only in the after that they’ve determined their purpose together.
Ten feet away, Jade notes a pit of deep mauve, nearly perfectly round and with a diameter the length of her wingspan. It’s not a single thread, but what must be at least a dozen wound together.
Jade’s feet take her there of their own accord. She hadn’t been sure how she’d feel about stepping onto the Plains. She’d been afraid it would feel like desecrating graves.
The Quilt of Life is anything but. Instead, it invites her forward.
She falls to her knees beside the circle of purple. A heaving claims her heart and tugs and tugs until she places her hand at the center of the circular patch.
Unbidden, a heavy *OH* falls from her lips. And she knows.
A breeze passes over her. It brings with it the scent of berries and fruits known once to her childhood tongue but long since forgotten.
Jade pulls her hand back only so that she can reach down to her waist. She’d had been so small that it was only at the sight of the weathered pouch that the memory had come back to her. Her mother’s last breath. The hurried, whispered prayer of a spell as one of her aunts bound Jade’s mother’s soul to her daughter.
The pouch had been swept away with the soldiers who had taken her. One, though, had the forethought to hide it away. But life had moved on and what had started as a desire to wait until she was older had turned into forgetting about it altogether.
Until the day after Madmartigan’s death, Ballantine had come to Jade with an apology and her mother.
She opens that pouch now and lets the Thread inside spill onto her palm. It’s the first she’s seen of it. There’s a heavy richness to the color. The mauve holds a depth that is felt just as much as it is seen.
Slowly, Jade leads one end to the circle at her knees. It happens fast, but not all at once. The Thread of Jade’s mother’s soul falls with both reluctance and relief from her daughter’s hand as it weaves itself between sisters, friends, and family made by oaths.
It settles, knotting itself amongst those its chosen to grow with in the beyond. Other Threads shift, clutch and spin around their newest neighbor. She’s home.
Jade lets her gaze eventually fall away from the pit of purple. To look beyond and feel the hope and love and grief and certainty and uncertainty and all that makes life worth living. She takes in the shifting Plains. There are patches like the one Jade kneels in, ones that remain unchanging. Some solid, others patterned. There is just as much beyond that shifts as well. Trails of dark brown that slither like a snake between dancing threads woven into stars so colorful, Jade thinks she understands the role of rainbows in hope.
She hadn’t felt Kit pass her by. The air in the valley heavy enough to hold their privacy, yet light enough to ease their burdens. But Jade spots her now.
Her wife’s form is small, nearly a quarter mile away, made smaller still by the hunching of her shoulders.
Teal like the shimmer of a sun-drenched river swims between Kit’s hands. The wind shifts the Thread where it lays suspended.
She doesn’t kneel like Jade. Instead, she lets her father’s soul fall from where she stands. It’s a gentle drift down to the ground. Gravity need not be a weight where it can choose to exude solace.
From afar, Jade can only see so much, but the Plains choose for her to witness the relief ahead of her. Teal iridescence weaves circles around its daughter.
Jade feels Kit’s smile ripple through the tapestry around her, feels it in the collective sigh shared between each knot and tie. What a gift to share the truest moment of Kit’s heart with the consecration of all life.
Madmartigan’s Thread completes a final circle, a final farewell.
Then, it swims off. Jade knows it will weave through acres of Plains. It will shift between rainbows and dance among stars. But it will not settle completely.
Rest for a soul doesn’t require stasis. Adventure need not end with death.