The Final Chord
The song that came to her was not one she had learned. It rose from the strings the way water rises from a spring — inevitable, sourceless, belonging to the instrument and the moment and the ancient tension between the worlds that had been building since the first human told the first story about a door in a hill. She played, and the gates listened, and the Fair Folk gathered in the silver grove and stood like statues carved from moonlight, and for the first time in their immortal existence, they waited for a mortal to decide their fate.
The melody forked at the bridge. She could feel it — two paths, two resolutions, each as musically inevitable as the other. One chord would seal the gates, and the worlds would separate forever, and the magic would drain from the mortal realm like water from a broken vessel, and the Fair Folk would become what they feared most: a memory, a story told to children, a myth stripped of its power to shape. The other chord would fling the gates wide, and the old magic would pour back into the world unchecked, and the boundaries between real and unreal would dissolve, and nothing that happened after would be predictable or safe or small.
Eileen paused with her fingers on the strings and thought about sight. She had it now — the gift the Fair Folk had promised — and it was everything and it was not enough. She could see the Otherworld in its terrible