Lev Grossman - The Magician King

Then she uttered a word she had never heard before and flew, naked and bloody as a newborn baby, up into the lightening sky.

The others had stayed out on the beach until dawn, waiting for Quentin and Julia to come back up from the underworld. Finally they’d given up and gone back to their berths aboard the Muntjac, chilled and exhausted, to sleep. When they woke up a few hours later they were relieved, and then overjoyed, to find Quentin and Julia waiting for them on deck.

Though the scene they woke up to was a weird one. Julia stood there transformed, newly beautiful and powerful. She radiated an air of peace and triumph. Quentin wasn’t transformed, but something else was going on with him: he was down on his hands and knees for some reason, just staring at the wooden planks of the deck.

They had flown up and up and up, until gradually Quentin realized that the weightless feeling he had was of them descending instead, but not the way they had come: they dropped down through wet clinging clouds, and then he saw a little chip of wood below them in the ocean that turned out to be the Muntjac, the water around it glittering with dawn light. The goddess placed them on the deck, kissed Julia on the cheek, and vanished.

Quentin found that he couldn’t stand on his own; or he could, but he didn’t want to. He got down on all fours and put the key down in front of him. He looked at the good wooden planks the Muntjac was made of, really looked at them: after a night spent in hell everything was real and vivid and impossibly detailed. Colors looked superbright, even the grays and browns and blacks and the other undistinguished, intermediate noncolors that he ordinarily would have skipped over and ignored. He followed the lines and striations and tiger stripes of the wood, drawn and arranged with careless perfection, dark and light, order and chaos, all mingled together with little splinters along the edges of the boards that had been scuffed up and set at different angles, each one, by the passage of careless feet.

He absolutely understood how weird and high-seeming he looked, but he didn’t care. He felt like he could stare at the wood forever. Just this: the good, hardy, noble wood. He was never going to lose this, he thought. He was going to enjoy everything exactly as much, to the atom, as Benedict would have enjoyed it if he could have come back from the underworld. And Alice, and all the rest of them. It was all he could do for them. Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.

He pressed his forehead against the deck, hard, like a penitent pilgrim, and felt the beat of the waves transmitted through it from below like a pulse, and the heat of the sun. He smelled the sour salt smell of seawater, and he heard the hesitant footsteps of baffled people gathering around him, unsure of what to do. He heard all the other meaningless noises reality was always cheerfully making to itself, the squeaks and scrapes and thumps and drones, on and on, world without end.

He took a deep breath and sat up. Away from the warmth of the goddess’s body he shivered in the early morning ocean air. But even the cold felt good to him. This is life, he kept saying to himself. That was being dead, and this is being alive. That was death, this is life. I will never confuse them again.

Then people were hauling him to his feet and guiding him down below to his cabin. He was pretty sure he could have walked on his own, but he let them half carry him — they seemed to want to do it, and who was he to stand in their way? Then he was lying on his side on his bed. He was dead tired, but he didn’t want to close his eyes, not with everything that was going on all around him.

Some time later he felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed. Julia.

“Thank you, Julia,” he said after a while. His lips and tongue felt thick and clumsy. “You saved me. You saved everything. Thank you.”

“The goddess saved us.”

“I’m grateful to Her too.”

“I’ll tell Her.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel finished,” she said simply. “I feel like I am finally finished. I became who I was becoming.”

“Oh,” he said, and he had to laugh at how completely stupid he sounded. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Are you all right?”

“I was stuck in between for so long,” she said, instead of answering his question. “I couldn’t go back — I wanted to, for a long time. A long time. I wanted to go back to before what happened, when I was still human. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t go forward either. Then somehow in the underworld I realized for the first time, really understood, that I was never going back. So I let go. And that’s when it happened.”

He felt tongue-tied. What did you say to a newly minted supernatural being? He wanted to just stare at her. He’d never been in such close quarters with a spirit before.

“You said you were a dryad.”

“I am. We’re the daughters of the goddess. That makes me a demi-goddess,” she added, by way of clarification. “I’m not literally her daughter of course. It’s more of a spiritual thing.”

Julia was still Julia, but the anger, the sense that she was violently at odds with the world over some crucial point, was gone. And she’d gotten her contractions back.

“So you take care of trees?”

“We take care of the trees, and the goddess takes care of us. There’s a tree that belongs to me, though I’m not sure where it is. I can feel it though. I’ll go there as soon as we’re done.” She laughed. It was good to know she still could. “I know so much about oak trees. I could bore you to death with it.

“Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

“I feel so powerful, Quentin. It’s like there’s a sun inside me, or a star, that will burn forever.”

“Does that mean — are you immortal?”

“I don’t know.” And here a cloud passed over her face. “In a way, I’ve already died. Julia is dead, Quentin. I’m alive, and I may be alive forever, but the girl I was is dead.”

Sitting this close to Julia, he could see how inhuman she was now. Her flesh was like pale wood. The girl he’d known in high school, with her freckles and her oboe, was gone forever — she’d been destroyed and discarded in the making of this being. Julia would never be mortal again. The Julia sitting next to him on his bed was like a magnificent memorial to the girl she used to be.

At least this Julia was beyond all that. She was out of the game, the living and dying game, that the rest of them were trapped in. She was different. She wasn’t kludgy, rickety flesh and blood anymore. She was magic.

“There are things you should know,” she said. “I can tell you now, how this all began. Why I changed, and why the old gods came back.”

“Really?” Quentin propped himself up on one elbow. “You know?”

“I know,” she said. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

“I want to know.”

“It’s not a happy story.”

“I think I’m ready,” he said.

“I know you think that. But it’s sadder than you think.”

There were no more islands. They were past that now. The Muntjac slit its way through calm empty ocean, day after day, farther and farther east, the sun rising in front of them, roaring by overhead, and then extinguishing itself nightly in the water behind them. It was visibly larger in the mornings — they could almost hear the muffled rumble of its burning, like a distant blast furnace.