oh fuck me, i forgot about frumpkin.
also, take this beginning of the second epilogue:
Their group returns to Xhorhas. They use moorbounders, and Nott rides behind Jester, in front of Beau, sandwiched between two women who don’t let go of her once as they travel, still protective, still frightened –
(And how strange is it, that they haven’t died once, yet? How strange is it that Beau would be so hard to hit from the falcon-wraps on her forearms, that Caduceus would be so versed in the dangers they were to face, that Fjord would be so strong in healing, that Jester would smile so bright already, that Molly’s charm glowed with warmth whenever he took too much damage? How strange, how peculiar; and yet not, when Nott thinks about it, strange at all.)
-- and between all that she thinks, too, about moorbounders, and how long it should have been since their group has travelled by foot, unused to the strange spinning world of a teleportation spell, unused to the odd convenience of going anywhere in the world in an instant.
Three days of this type of travel find them back in Rosohna, reporting to the Queen. Nott already knows what Beau will say: that they’ve found one of the God-killing artifacts, that Yasha wears the bracer around her forearm, but her gaze catches and lingers on one member of the Court in particular, one who has never stuck out to her before in this timeline but whom she knows, now, as invaluable.
She still doesn’t really understand how he walks. Once, a long time ago, she and Jester and Beau had spilled marbles across their foyer in a clumsy attempt to find out for themselves. She almost smiles at the recollection.
Sneaking up on him is easy enough. He is a prodigy, yes, but she is the best rogue to have ever lived, comfortable in her body and her own ability. And besides. She knows him far, far better than he knows her.
“Shadowhand,” she says, as he ducks out of a shop stocked with fine papers and inks (one that she and Caleb used to frequent, one of many stops on their meandering walks around Rosohna, before the Crawling King and Ikithon and the beacons and before they started dying, one-by-one). She pushes down nostalgia as he startles and hides it, just as quickly.
She pushes back her hood. “Veth,” she says.
“Veth Brenatto,” he says, smoothly. “I know who you are.”
“I know,” she says. “I have a favor to ask.”
He deals in favors. Toward the beginning of a relationship, at least. “What is it?”
“For the peace we have wrought between our countries,” she says, because she knows that was his objective, too, the first thing that aligned him and the Nein, back in a timeline that is no longer. “I’d like to borrow one of your beacons.”
They’re called many things, here, these objects of nigh-unstateable importance; Light-Bringers, the Eyes of the Luxon, the Mirrors of Possibility. They can, Nott knows, from a lifetime long-gone – because here, they had not looked into the beacon before they turned it over, not a single one, so of course they did not know what it would show – these Mirrors can show what might have been.
They can show what once was, and what will never be.