Sometimes an ending is just a beginning

I lie back on the sand and watch the stars in their slow pinwheel dance over our heads. The waves lap up on the shore and tickle my bare toes as the firelight fades.

Stacey curls up tighter against me in her sleep, and I gently run my hand through her hair. I blink and shift my perceptions, and I can see the dancing astral figure she's always been to me, whatever name and whatever body she has. I feel that familiar clench in my heart – joy, loss, lust, love, so many things at once. I've only known her as Stacey for a handful of weeks, but in those weeks I've learned how much of my Lucy is left in her since their merging, Lucy's experience and growing cynicism tempered by Anastasia's youth and innocence. Like me, she took two disparate and incomplete personalities, and emerged from them whole and complete.

We're both free of the people we used to be now. Free to decide for ourselves who and what we're going to be, how we're going to face the world. There are still technocrats, nephandi, monsters. There are still killers and rapists and so many dark things that the world might call for my knives to cut away. But here, on this beach, on this island so far removed from the darkness and the rot, that call is so very quiet, and I wonder if the world will continue to turn just fine without me, for just a few days more.

Because here and now, I'm in the arms of the woman I love, under the stars. Nothing on this world or any other can change that. And tomorrow? Tomorrow is ours, to do with as we see fit. No more fate, no more prophecies. Our duties are fulfilled. Lucy's price has been paid. As for my own? I can see the road to my own redemption stretching out to the horizon. Every step will flay the sin from me, until one day I will stand bloodied and pure, forgiven at last. The road will not be kind, but it is the road that I have chosen to walk. And I don't have to walk it alone any more.

So if you'd go out to hurt your brothers and sisters, if you'd upset the turning of the Wheel of karma for your own gain, look over your shoulders. One day, I'll be there. And when your blood is on my knives, and your heart is still and cold in your chest, I'll return to my love, to the only person to see me as the real human being I could have been, and forget all about you.
But until we meet, I'll be watching.

Don't be just another step on my road.

- Abel Vaughan