Stay

There are shapes to pain, just as there are shapes to joy. We do not always see them, but they are there: mist and stone and shadow, given form by the weight of what we carry. Depression is not simply a mood. It is a geography, a weather, a collection of beings that live in the spaces between your thoughts. They speak with your voice, but they are not you. They feel like truth, but they are not the whole story. And you are never as alone in fighting them as they want you to believe.

Part Zero — Before the Song Begins

The Bridge

It was the kind of autumn evening that did not so much fall as soak in, the light going out of the sky the way colour goes out of cloth left too long in the rain. Ewan stood at the middle of Blackstone Bridge with both hands flat on the parapet, and the stone under his palms was cold enough to be honest. That was something. The cold told the truth. Almost nothing else did, lately.

Below him the river moved without seeming to. He watched it for a long time, the slow black braid of it, the few lights from the houses on the far bank smeared across the surface and pulled apart and put back together again. The air tasted of woodsmoke and wet leaves and something mineral underneath, the smell of water that has been moving over stones since long before anyone thought to build a town beside it.

He was not crying. He wanted to be clear about that, even to himself, especially to himself. He was not standing on the bridge weeping into the dark like a boy in a film. There was nothing in him to weep with. He had checked. He had reached down into the place where the weeping might be kept and found only the soft grey nothing that had been there for months now, packed in tight, taking up all the room.

Lir was with him. Of course Lir was with him. Lir was almost always with him now.

He did not see Lir arrive so much as notice, after a while, that the world had been made smaller and further away. The lights on the far bank dimmed by a degree no one else would have measured. The sound of the river receded, as if someone had taken it into another room and closed a door. A pale haze gathered at the edges of everything, fine as breath on glass, and the haze had a shape if you did not look at it directly, a tall and willowy shape woven out of smoke and winter morning, robes dissolving into air at the hem, no face, no hands, only that drifting, patient softness that settled around Ewan's shoulders like a damp cloak and asked nothing of him at all.

Everything stays the same, Lir said, in the voice that always sounded as though it were being spoken to him from underwater. Nothing touches you. You are safe here, in the quiet. You do not have to feel. You do not have to be. Just be still.

And Gavoran was there too, because where Lir went Gavoran tended to follow, the way fatigue follows being awake too long. Ewan felt the weight settle. It came down onto his shoulders like a hand the size of a door, like the slow grinding descent of something carved from dark stone and packed earth and old iron, and it pressed, and pressed, until lifting his own head felt like a thing he would need to schedule for another day. His feet were rooted to the boards of the bridge. His chest was a chest with a colossus sitting on it. The air had thickened until breathing was a chore he kept forgetting to do and then remembering, with a small effort, to do again.

You are tired, Gavoran told him, deep and slow, stone sliding over stone. You have always been tired. You will always be tired. Everything is too heavy. Why move. Why speak. It is easier to stay still. Forever.

Ewan let his head hang. The river went on not seeming to move.

I do not want to die, he thought, and he turned the thought over carefully, because it mattered to him that it was true, that he was being accurate. He did not want blood. He did not want pain. He had no appetite for endings of the dramatic kind, the kind with sirens and a note and someone's mother on her knees. I just want to stop being. That is all. I want the weight to come off and the noise to go quiet and the greyness to either soften into something or stop being anything. What is the point of a life that has no shape and no colour and no end? It is just a line. It goes on and on and it does not curve.

That was when the air changed.

He felt it before he understood it. A warmth, small and certain, somewhere off to his left, the way you feel the sun come out from behind a cloud against the side of your face before you think to look up. Then footsteps on the boards, unhurried, and a girl walking towards him out of the thinning mist in a coat the colour of burnt orange, bright as a struck match in all that grey, and the mist drew back from her as she came.

It actually drew back. Ewan saw it. Lir's haze, which had wrapped him so tight a moment before, shrank and thinned where the girl's warmth reached, like frost retreating from a windowpane in the morning. And the weight on his shoulders shifted, not gone, never gone, but loosened, the colossus easing back a fraction onto his heels as though something had given him pause.

She stopped a few feet away and looked at Ewan. Then she looked, deliberately, at the space around Ewan, at the drifting pale shape against his shoulder and the dark heaviness pressing on his chest, and she did not flinch, and she did not laugh, and she did not arrange her face into the careful blankness people arranged their faces into when they had decided you were not quite right.

"I see them," she said.

Her voice was clear and unhurried and it went through the fog like a wire through soft cheese.

"That one's Lir, isn't it. The mist. The one that makes everything far away, like you're watching your own life through a window in someone else's house." She tilted her head. "And that's Gavoran. The stone. The one that sits on you. They aren't just thoughts, Ewan. I know everyone tells you they're just thoughts. They're not. They're real. Real enough to hold you here on this bridge in the cold."

He could not speak. In all the months of it, in all the appointments and the forms and the kind tired faces, no one had seen them. No one had so much as believed they were there to be seen. He had described them once, carefully, to a man with a lanyard, and watched the man write vivid imagery on a pad and known, in that moment, that he was alone inside this in a way that had nothing to do with whether there were other people in the room.

"How do you know my name," he managed.

"I asked someone. I've seen you. Around." She came a step closer, and Lir's mist gave another half-foot of ground, and Ewan found he could, with effort, lift his head and look at her properly. Honey-coloured hair, water-coloured eyes, a face that was simply, stubbornly there, saturated, present, refusing the grey. "I've watched you carry them across the playground and down the high street like they weigh nothing, and I've thought, that boy is doing the hardest thing I have ever seen anyone do, and nobody is even looking."

"They aren't real," Ewan said, because it was the thing you were supposed to say, the safe thing, the thing that kept the men with lanyards from writing on their pads.

"They are," she said simply. "But so am I."

She held out her hand. Ewan looked at it. It was a perfectly ordinary hand, slightly chapped at the knuckle, a plaster on one finger.

"Tell me," she said. "All of it. What they say. How they feel. I've got nowhere to be."

So he told her. He had not meant to. He had meant to say something polite and turn back to the river. Instead it came out of him in the cold, the whole shape of it, the way Lir made the world recede until he was watching it from the far side of glass, the way Gavoran turned his limbs to lead so that brushing his teeth was an expedition, the way the days had stopped having edges, had run together into one long undifferentiated stretch of grey that he could not imagine ever ending. He told her that he did not want to die. He told her, fumbling, ashamed, that what he wanted was something he did not have a word for, a stopping that was not the same as dying, a putting-down of the weight that did not require there to be a him left over afterwards to feel relieved about it.

She listened the whole way through. She did not say have you tried going for a walk. She did not say but you've got so much to live for. She did not, at any point, look at her watch.

When he had finished she took his cold heavy hand in her warm one, and her warmth went right through the skin of it and into the bone, and she said, "They lie. That's the thing about them. They tell the truth about how you feel and then they lie about what it means. You feel like nothing. That's true, I believe you that's true. But you are not nothing. You're you. And I see you. All of you. The tired bits and the empty bits and the bits that believe them." She closed her fingers around his. "I'm not going anywhere."

Her name was Eloise. She told him on the walk back, the two of them going slowly because slowly was all Ewan had, and the mist trailing thin and harmless behind them, keeping its distance, biding its time.

Names and Faces

In the weeks that followed, as the two of them folded into one another's days the way two streams fold into one water, the rest of them showed themselves. They had been there all along, Ewan understood now. He had simply lacked the words, and Eloise, it turned out, was a person who handed you words the way other people handed you cups of tea, without fuss, exactly when you needed them and slightly too hot.

Selenis came first. Or rather, Ewan finally saw the one who had been quietly at work the longest.

He was trying to play Eloise a record, one he had loved once, the way you love a thing when you are fourteen and it seems to have been recorded specifically about the inside of your own head. He put the needle down and waited for the old lift of it, the thing in his chest that used to rise to meet the first bar. And nothing rose. The music came out of the speaker and crossed the room and reached him and was simply sound, organised pleasantly, signifying nothing. He looked at the cover in his hands and could remember having loved it the way you remember having had a fever, as a fact about the past with no heat left in it.

She was standing by the record player. Selenis. Slender to the point of fragility, carved out of moonlight and frost, her skin like glass that had been breathed on, her eyes large and glassy and aimed at nothing in particular, her limbs hanging loose as a puppet whose strings had been let go. She had laid one translucent hand against the spinning record, gently, almost tenderly, and where she touched it the colour drained out of the sound.

Nothing is good, she said, breathy and soft and absolutely without malice, which was the worst of it. Nothing is fun. You thought you cared about this once. You were mistaken. It was always this hollow. You only fooled yourself it wasn't. Why bother. It will all be the same. Flat. Dull. The same.

Ewan lifted the needle. He felt his face doing the thing it did, the slack closing-down.

Eloise watched all of it. She did not tell him the music was lovely. She did not insist he feel something. Instead she got up, crossed to him, and turned the volume up. Up, and up, past comfortable, past sensible, until the bass came up through the floor and into the soles of their feet and the speaker cone was a living thing and the windows hummed in their frames.

"You can't feel it in your chest," she said, close to his ear so he could hear her over it. "I know. So we'll feel it in the floor. Selenis can take the inside out of things. She can't take the floor. The floor is real. My hand is real." She put his hand flat against the speaker so the sound thrummed up his arm. "This matters. We matter. You matter. She drains what's true of its feeling. She doesn't get to drain what's true of being true."

It did not fix it. Ewan understood, even then, that nothing here was going to be fixed the way a tap is fixed. But he stood with his hand on the trembling speaker and Eloise's other hand on the back of his neck, and for the length of one loud song the flatness had a texture pressed into it from outside, and that, he was learning, was the whole game. Not to feel better. To have someone press a shape into the flatness from the outside until you could remember that shapes existed.

Kyrus did not announce himself. Kyrus never announced himself. Kyrus was simply suddenly there, the way a draught is suddenly there, a cold thin presence at Ewan's shoulder, small and hunched and wiry, all sharp angles and inky shadow, a hooked nose and narrow eyes lit with a mean cold light and a mouth fixed in a sneer, perched up by his ear where the words could go in warm.

You drag her down, Kyrus hissed. He was always urgent, always pressed right against the skin, as though the truth he carried were too important to be said at a civilised distance. Look at her. Bright. Alive. And she's spending it on you, on this, on a grey nothing of a boy who can't even get out of bed for her. She stays out of pity. She'd be free if you were gone. Happy. You're a weight on her. You're a weight on everyone. You ruin everything you touch and the kindest thing you could do, the only kind thing, is stop touching things.

It had the terrible plausibility that Kyrus's words always had. That was Kyrus's whole craft. He never said anything Ewan could not, in the cold logic of three in the morning, believe.

Eloise saw it land. She could not hear Kyrus, she told him later, not in words, but she could read him on Ewan's face like weather coming in off the sea, the small collapse of it, the way his eyes went somewhere she could not reach. She leaned in until her forehead nearly touched his and she spoke loudly and clearly and slowly, the way you speak to drown out another voice.

"You are not a burden. Listen to me. Loving you is the best thing I do all day. It is not the hard part of my day, it is the part I get up for. I am not here out of pity. Pity is cheap and I am not cheap, I cost a fortune, ask anyone. I choose you. Freely. Gladly. Every single morning when I wake up I choose you again before I'm even properly awake." She took his face in both hands. "Whatever that thing on your shoulder is telling you, it does not know me. It is guessing. It is guessing wrong. I know me. And I am exactly where I want to be."

Kyrus fell quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Sulking in the shadow of the chair, watching, waiting for her to leave the room.

And then, at dusk, on the bridge, with the first frost of the year furring the parapet, Eloise kissed him.

She cupped his pale cold face in her two warm hands and she leaned in and her mouth was warm and certain and tasted of the tea they had been drinking, and something happened that Ewan had stopped believing could happen.

Lir thinned to nothing. The mist that had wrapped him for months simply was not there, the world rushing back in at full volume and full colour, the river loud below them and the lights on the far bank sharp as stars. Gavoran's weight lifted until Ewan felt, absurdly, light, lighter than air, as though he might come up off the boards of the bridge altogether. Selenis flickered at the edge of his vision like a candle in a draught and guttered. Kyrus, for once, had nothing to say.

For the length of the kiss, and for a few seconds after, Ewan was solid. He was real. He was a boy on a bridge in the cold being kissed by a girl who loved him, and he was entirely, undividedly there, and the wonder of it, the sheer ordinary enormous wonder of being a single whole person located in one place at one time, brought something up the back of his throat that was almost, almost, the weeping he had gone looking for and not found.

"You are not nothing," Eloise whispered against his mouth. "You are everything to me. Do you hear that. Everything."

The Endless Line

It could not last, and Ewan had known it could not last, and the knowing was its own small cruelty, because it meant that even inside the good days he was braced for the floor to drop.

The floor dropped in December.

What came was not Lir or Gavoran or Selenis or Kyrus, though they were all there, all of them stronger now, the days short and the light thin and pale and never quite arriving. What came was new. It came in the small hours and it was vast.

Thalis. There was no other way to describe him than vast, and even that was not enough. He towered. He stretched upward and outward and seemed to have no top and no bottom, only a vast flowing robe woven out of blurred and overlapping hours, days, weeks, years, the fabric of him rippling and elongating like warm taffy, like rising smoke, filling the room and then exceeding the room so that the walls felt as if they had been pushed back to an impossible distance and the ceiling lost in haze. Where Thalis stood, space went hollow and enormous, and time stopped having any shape at all.

It never ends, Thalis said, and his voice was wind in an empty cathedral, deep and resonant and going on long after the words should have finished. It never changes. It will be exactly like this forever. No start. No finish. No point. You are stuck here, in this, forever, and nothing will ever be different, and nothing will ever get better. You are a line. A straight line drawn on nothing. You go on, and on, and you do not curve, and you do not arrive.

Ewan tried to explain it to Eloise the next day and found, to his horror, that he could not stop, that it poured out of him flat and toneless and certain.

"It's just a line," he said. They were sitting on the end of his bed and she was holding his hand and he could feel her holding it but the feeling was happening at the end of a very long corridor. "That's all it is. No beginning, no end. It just goes. And Thalis says it'll always be exactly this. Always. And I believe him, El, I can't help it, I look forward and I can't see anything but more of this stretching out flat forever, and I don't want to die. I keep saying it because it keeps being true. I don't want to die. I just want out. I want to not be on the line any more. I want to be nothing, because nothing is the only place the line isn't, and that's the only peace there is. Do you see. That's the only one there is."

Eloise did not let go of his hand. She did the opposite. She moved in against him so that her side was pressed the whole length of his, her warmth and her weight and the solid simple fact of her, and she put her head against his shoulder so that he had to hold some of her up, so that he had a job, a small bodily job, the job of being something her head could rest against.

"Lines get marks," she said. "Listen. A line with no marks on it, fine, that's just length, that's just going on. But you put a mark on a line and now it means something. Now there's a here and a there. Now there's a before the mark and an after." She turned her face up to him. "We make the marks. Every time we're together. Every time you laugh, even the small ugly laugh, the one you hate. Every time you feel something, even something terrible. That's a mark. That's a notch cut into the line that says, this part was different, this part had me in it. You are not just a line, Ewan. You're a line with my whole name carved down the middle of it."

He almost smiled. Thalis pressed the room out wider and hollower around them.

"And if you ever get to where you can't bear it," she said, and here her voice dropped and went very steady, very careful, the voice of someone laying a plank across a gap, "if you ever get to where you have to get out, then you take me with you. Do you understand me. You don't go anywhere I can't follow. You bind us together so tight that there's no me-without-you and no you-without-me and wherever the line goes it goes for both of us. Just don't step off it on your own. That's the only thing I'm asking. Stay where I can reach you. Stay with me."

It was meant, Ewan knew, as the kindest thing a person could say. He held onto it like a rope.

But somewhere off in the corner of the room, in the grey where the five of them gathered close in the small hours, something was beginning to happen that neither of them could see. Lir's mist and Gavoran's stone and Selenis's frost and Kyrus's shadow and Thalis's endlessness were drawing together. Their edges were blurring into one another. Their separate voices, the underwater murmur and the grinding rumble and the breathy absence and the urgent hiss and the cathedral wind, were finding a single pitch, harmonising, resolving into one chord, and out of the chord a new voice was forming, low and melodic and soft and unbearably kind, and the new voice said, very quietly, to no one yet and to Ewan most of all:

You are right. There is a way out.

Part One — If This World Is Wearing Thin

Winter came down over the town like a lid.

The days shrank to a grudging few hours of grey, the sun never properly clearing the rooftops, the light arriving late and apologetic and gone again by mid-afternoon. The river ran black and high. The frost did not lift between one night and the next but built up day on day on the parapet of Blackstone Bridge until the stone wore a permanent pale fur, and Ewan, when he passed it, which he did most days, on the long slow walks Eloise insisted on, would lay his bare hand on it to feel the one honest cold thing in his world.

All of them grew stronger as the light failed. That was their season.

Lir wrapped Ewan so close and so thick that there were hours when he could not feel Eloise's hand in his even while he watched their fingers laced together, even while he told himself, that is her hand, that warmth is her hand, you can feel that. He could not feel it. He watched himself fail to feel it from the far side of the glass.

Gavoran was no longer content to lean. He bound. Ewan woke in the mornings, on the mornings he managed to wake into anything at all, with the sense of iron laid in bands across his chest and his arms and his legs, the weight pressing him down into the mattress so that getting up was not a decision but a campaign, a thing fought yard by yard, sit up, that is enough for now, rest, now the feet to the floor, rest, now stand, and standing took everything, and having stood he would have to begin the whole impossible business of the day, every separate action of it requiring the full effort of a man pushing a stalled car uphill.

Selenis had drained the world so thoroughly that nothing reached him. Food was texture and obligation. Music was sound. Eloise's bright things, the bold colours and the loud songs and the hot tea, came to him muffled and far, gifts handed across a great distance by someone he loved and could no longer quite feel that he loved, only remember that he did, the way you remember a country you have left.

And Kyrus never stopped. That was the new thing about Kyrus, that winter. He did not pause to let an answer land any more. He simply ran on, a low continuous stream of it pressed against Ewan's ear from waking to sleeping, waste, burden, drain, mistake, in the way, in the way, in the way, a tap left running in another room that you cannot turn off and cannot stop hearing.

Thalis stretched each hour into a year and each grey afternoon into a flat eternity, so that Ewan would look at the clock and find that four minutes had passed since the geological age in which he had last looked at it, and despair, quietly, without drama, the way you despair at a thing that is simply the case.

And out of all of them, in the deepest part of that winter, she rose.

Morrigan.

She did not arrive the way the others arrived. There was no settling weight, no creeping cold, no sudden vastness. She was simply there one night at the foot of his bed, and Ewan understood, looking at her, that she had been coming together for weeks, that she was made of all the others, refined and combined and perfected, and that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She was tall. Her skin was pale as milk, paler, pale as the inside of a shell, and her hair flowed down and around her like black smoke that never quite settled. Her face was flawless and serene and endlessly, gently kind, and her eyes were dark and soft and held no light at all but a great and terrible understanding, the eyes of someone who has read your whole heart and is not going to judge you for a word of it. She was weightless. She cast no shadow. She had no heartbeat, no warmth, no breath, and where the air met the edges of her it blurred, as though she were not entirely committed to being a single solid thing in the world. She did not walk. She was at the foot of the bed and then she was beside it, gliding through the space between as though space were a courtesy she observed rather than a law she obeyed.

She looked, Ewan realised with a lurch that was almost recognition, almost relief, exactly like the rest he had been craving for years. She looked like the put-down weight, the hushed noise, the softened grey. She looked like the stopping.

When she spoke, her voice was low and melodic and soft, and it was endlessly, perfectly reasonable, and it was the worst thing of all, because it did not sound like an enemy. It sounded like the truth, finally arriving, kind enough to come to him in person.

You are right, she said. About all of it. You were right on the bridge in the autumn and you have been right every night since. It is too heavy. You are right that it is too heavy. It is too empty, and you are right about that as well, and it is too endless, and it hurts in a way that has no bottom, and you are tired, you have always been tired, you will always be tired. They have told you all of this and you have called it lies because she told you to. But you knew. You knew it was true.

Ewan lay still under Gavoran's iron and listened.

And here is the thing they never told you, Morrigan said, and she sat, weightless, on the edge of the bed without depressing it at all. There is a way out. Not the way you are frightened of. Not blood, not pain, not the thing with the sirens. Something kinder than that. Something soft. You do not have to die, Ewan. Dying is loud and frightening and it leaves a mess and a body and a mother on her knees, and you are too gentle for that, you have always been too gentle. No. You just have to stop. That is all. You just have to let go, and be still, and let the line you hate so much simply not have you on it any more. No weight. No cold. No time. No you, even, no small aching you to have to keep being. Just rest. Just the quiet. Just nothing, and nothing is the only thing in all the world that has never once hurt anybody.

She made sense. That was what broke something in Ewan, those first nights of her. She took the whole roaring chaos of it, the mist and the stone and the absence and the hissing and the endlessness, and she gathered it up in her cool pale hands and she ordered it into a single clean sentence, and the sentence was you are in pain and here is the end of pain, and Ewan, who had spent so long being unable to make any sense of anything, found the sheer relief of being made sense of almost more than he could bear.

He began to drift. Eloise saw it.

She fought, that winter, the way you fight a fire that has got into the walls of a house, everywhere at once, never resting. She brought thick warm blankets and wrapped him in them and lay on top of them so he could feel the weight of her, a good weight, a chosen weight, against Gavoran's cruel one. She painted his grey room with bright things, scarves over the lamp so the light came warm, a bowl of clementines like small suns, her own laugh, loud and frequent and slightly too much, filling the air. She played music with the bass turned up so he could feel it in the floor when he could feel it nowhere else. She kept her hand on him, his arm, his neck, the small of his back, constant contact, a steady current of here, here, here run into his body where the words could not reach.

And over and over, like a prayer, like a rope thrown again and again to a swimmer who keeps going under, she said the thing she had said on his bed in the autumn.

"I'll go anywhere with you. Do you hear me. Anywhere. I'll carry half the weight, I've got strong arms, I can take half. Bind us together so tight there's no telling where you stop and I start. Just don't go alone. Whatever happens. Don't step off where I can't follow. Stay here. Stay with me."

And Morrigan, who could afford to be patient, who had all the time there was and was made partly of it, would wait until Eloise had gone home for the night, and then she would lean in close to Ewan in the dark, cool against his cheek, and murmur, soft as anything, reasonable as anything:

Listen to what she is asking of you. She wants you to stay. Heavy. Tired. Numb. In pain. She wants you to keep all of that, to keep carrying every ounce of it, and do you know why. So that she will not be lonely. So that she will not have to be the bright girl in the orange coat with no one to be bright at. She loves you, I am not saying she does not love you, but love wants. Love is a wanting thing, it wants you here, it wants you suffering quietly within reach. I do not want anything from you. I am the only one in your whole life who has never wanted a single thing from you. I offer you rest, and freedom, and an end, and I ask for nothing back, nothing at all, because there will be no you left to ask it of. Tell me which of us is being kind.

Ewan lay in the dark between the two voices, the warm one gone home for the night and the cool one right beside his ear, and could no longer always tell which was which.

Part Two — No In-Betweens

It got into his sleep.

That was how Morrigan worked, in the end. Not by argument, in the cold light, where Eloise's words had a chance, but in the soft borderland of half-sleep, the place where the mind lets go of its grip on what is real and what is only felt, where a thing that is merely true-feeling can pass for a thing that is true.

Ewan would lie down at night already so tired that the lying down felt like the first instalment of the larger lying-down she promised, and Lir's mist would thicken until the room dissolved, and the mist would not be grey any more but a soft luminous pale, and out of it Morrigan would take his hand, her hand cool and weightless and asking nothing, and lead him.

She led him to the edge of a place.

He came to think of it as the Otherplace, though she never named it, never needed to. It opened out beyond the edge of the mist like a held breath, and it was nothing, and the nothing was the most beautiful nothing imaginable. No ground and no sky, no up and no down, no horizon because a horizon is where two things meet and here there was only one thing, which was the absence of all things. Pale grey going on forever, weightless, formless, silent, and entirely, perfectly at peace. There was no pain in the Otherplace because there was nothing for pain to happen to. There was no weight because there was no body. There was no time because nothing happened, had happened, or would happen. There was no Ewan, and that, when he stood at the edge of it in the half-light of his half-sleep, was not a horror. It was the offer. It was the whole gift. No more you to ache. No more you to fail her. No more you to drag the line out flat and grey forever. Just the quiet, and the rest, and the end of being the thing that has to keep being.

And then, into the half-light, into the borderland where she had thought she could not follow, came Eloise.

She came the way she had come along the bridge in the autumn, bright and warm and solid, burnt orange in all the pale, walking towards him out of the mist, and Morrigan's soft voice and Lir's thick haze parted around her as though they could not quite touch her, as though she were running on a different power.

"Ewan." Her voice was sharp and clear and warm all at once, and it cut. "Look at me. Not at her. At me." She got between him and the edge of the Otherplace, she put her warm hands on either side of his face, she made him look. "In the dark, when you're lost in the grey, when you can't feel my hand even though I'm holding it, you think about me. My hands. My face. The way I laugh too loud. You hold onto that, because that's the real thing and all of this is the lie."

She glanced once, only once, at the pale nothing yawning at the edge of everything, and then back at him, fierce.

"You can't do both. Do you understand me. You can't be half here and half gone. You can't keep one foot on the line and one foot in her nothing and call it managing. That's not a thing. There is no in-between, Ewan. There's no halfway house where it stops hurting but you still get to be you, where you still get to have me, still get the clementines and the loud songs and my head on your shoulder. That place doesn't exist. She's selling you a halfway that isn't there. You have to choose. All the way. You choose me, or you choose her, and you choose with your whole self, because there's nothing in the middle to stand on. Choose me. Choose this. Choose to feel it even when it's agony. Choose to be here even when it's heavy. There is no in-between. Stay."

It landed in Ewan like an anchor going down through deep water, and for a moment he reached for her, his hand coming up to cover hers.

And Morrigan, who missed nothing, took the very thing Eloise had said and turned it, gently, like turning a key.

She is right, Morrigan said, and slid closer, and her breath was cool on his other cheek. There is no in-between. Listen to how much she is asking of you. All of you. Your whole self, she says, choose with your whole self, give it all, every ounce, hold nothing back. She wants the entirety of you, your time and your energy and your mind and your every aching day, and she wants you to keep producing it forever, to keep being heavy and tired and here, for her. That is what choosing her costs. Everything you have, given over, again, every single morning, world without end.

She let that settle. She was never in a hurry.

And what do I ask. Nothing. I have never asked you for one thing. She is right that there is no in-between, that you must choose all the way, and so here is the choice laid out plain, with no middle to hide in: stay, and be bound, heavy and tired and in pain, giving everything you have to someone who needs you to keep hurting so she is not alone. Or come with me, and give nothing, and need nothing, and be nothing, and rest. There is no halfway, she said so herself. So choose. You already know which one of us is telling you the truth.

The divide in Ewan went sharp and deep and began, slowly, to bleed. Because Morrigan had found the terrible seam in it. Eloise was warm and real and loved beyond anything, and Eloise meant the line, the weight, the effort, the long grey campaign of every single day, fought and fought and never won, only survived into the next day's fighting. And Morrigan was cold and empty and meant nothing, but the nothing meant rest, meant ease, meant the putting-down of the campaign forever, meant the one thing Ewan had wanted on the bridge in the autumn and had wanted every night since, the stopping.

He felt all five of them pull, the mist and the stone and the absence and the hiss and the endlessness, all hauling him one way, towards the soft pale edge. He felt Eloise hauling the other. And he felt himself, somewhere in the unbearable middle that he had just been told did not exist, beginning to go slack in her grip, beginning to let the rope run, beginning to lean, very slightly, towards the rest.

And then Morrigan did something she had not done before. She turned to Eloise.

She drifted across the borderland towards the bright girl, cold air swirling out around her like a tide going out, and she looked at Eloise with those dark soft understanding eyes, and she spoke to her, almost gently, the way you speak to someone whose effort you pity.

You think you can hold him, Morrigan said. You think your warmth and your songs and your strong arms are enough to keep him on that line. But all you are doing, little candle, all you have ever done, is keep him trapped in the pain. Every day you keep him here is another day he carries the weight you cannot lift and feels the cold you cannot warm and walks the line you cannot shorten by a single inch. He belongs with me. With me there is no effort and no demand and no terrible choosing between stay and go. You had better hope. You had better pray. Because once he lets go, all the way, the way you yourself told him he must, once he dissolves into the quiet, there is no road back from it. He will be at peace, yes. I will give him that, which is more than you can. But he will never, ever be yours again.

And for the first time, Ewan saw something flicker across Eloise's bright face that he had never seen there before, not on the bridge, not in all the long campaign of the winter.

Fear.

Part Three — Hope and Pray

It came to a head on the longest night.

The winter solstice. The night when the dark wins its largest victory of the year, when the sun barely troubles the sky and gives up early, when there are more hours of black than there have been or will be until the wheel comes round again. The whole town held its breath under a hard clear cold, the stars out in their thousands, the frost so thick on Blackstone Bridge that the parapet looked carved from bone.

All five of them were at their peak that night. Lir's mist was so dense Ewan could barely make out his own hands in front of him. Gavoran's weight bound him so completely that lifting a foot was a thing he had to think about and then commit to and then achieve. Selenis had reached back into his memory and drained the colour even from the good days, so that the bridge in the autumn, the first kiss, the loud songs, all of it came to him now as facts about a stranger, that happened, that boy felt that, what a curious thing. Kyrus screamed without pause, no longer even forming whole words, just a single high continuous note of worthlessness driven straight into his ear. And Thalis stretched the long night out past its already enormous length into something with no end conceivable, so that Ewan walking out across the frozen town towards the bridge felt that he had always been walking towards the bridge and always would be, that the walk itself was the eternity he had been promised, flat and grey and without arrival.

Morrigan went ahead of him. She was almost solid now, almost tangible, clearer and more present and more beautiful than she had ever been, and her voice had lost the last of its distance.

Tonight the line ends, she said, gliding backwards before him so that she was always in his sight, pale and serene and kind. Tonight you can step off it completely. It is the longest night of the year, the dark is as strong as it will ever be, and you are as tired as you have ever been, and these two things have met for you on purpose, do you see, they have arranged themselves for your sake. It is easy. You have made it so hard for so long. But it is easy. You just stop resisting. You just let them take you. And then no weight, no cold, no time, no you. Just the rest. Come. I am right here. I have always been right here.

Ewan came out onto the bridge.

The river ran black and loud beneath, swollen with the winter. The frost burned cold through his thin shoes. He laid one hand on the parapet out of long habit, for the one honest cold thing, and found that even the cold was muffled now, even the stone lied tonight. Lir's mist closed over him. Gavoran's weight bent him. Morrigan glided to the very edge, to where the parapet ran low, and behind her, opening out over the black water and the cold stars, the Otherplace yawned, the soft pale endless nothing, and Ewan felt it begin to take him before he had decided anything at all.

His limbs grew light. The lead went out of them, Gavoran's iron simply dissolving, and the lightness was wonderful, the lightness was everything he had wanted, his body going from a thing he had to drag to a thing that weighed nothing, that was barely there. His skin turned pale and then paler, the colour running out of him into the grey. His edges, the hard outline that made him a single Ewan-shaped thing separate from the air, began to blur and soften and give way, and the giving way did not hurt, the giving way was the opposite of pain, it was the end of the long ache of having edges at all, of being a sore and separate self in a cold world.

He was ready. He understood that he was ready. He had only to stop, as she had said, only to let the last of the holding-on let go, and he would dissolve out of the line and out of the weight and out of being, and there would be rest, and there would be quiet, and there would be no Ewan left over to have to do any of it ever again.

He let go.

And Eloise came through the mist.

She burst out of the pale haze at a dead run, breathless, her hair wild, her face set with a fury that Ewan had never seen on it, the fury of someone who has been afraid and is done being afraid and has decided to spend everything she has. The burnt orange of her coat tore through the grey like a wound, like a sunrise, like the first colour at the end of the world. She did not look at Morrigan. She did not waste a single second of herself on the pale and beautiful thing at the edge of the bridge. She went straight to Ewan, where he stood half-dissolved at the brink with his edges gone soft, and she seized his fading hands in her two warm solid ones and gripped, gripped hard, and pressed the whole warm living length of her body against his half-there one, anchoring him, pinning him back into the world by main force.

And she spoke, loud and clear and ringing, her voice carrying over Kyrus's scream and through Lir's mist and straight past Morrigan's soft melodic reasonableness as though none of them were there.

"You think this is peace." It was not a question. "Look at it. Really look. It's not peace, Ewan, it's nothing, and nothing isn't the same as peace, nothing is just nothing. You won't be heavy. Fine. But you won't be you. You won't be cold, but you won't be warm either, you won't be anything either, you don't get the warm without the cold, that's the trick she's not telling you. You won't be tired. But you won't be alive. She keeps offering you the end of all the bad things and she keeps not mentioning that it's the end of all the things, full stop, every single one, mine included, me included."

She got her face right in front of his, made his blurring eyes find hers.

"You think your life is a line that never ends. But you're not the line, you idiot, you're the start of it. You're where it begins. And I'm the shape. We're the shape. Every time you held my hand. Every time you laughed the ugly laugh. Every single time you felt one true thing, even a terrible one, that was real, that was a mark cut into the line, that was something, and something beats nothing, something always beats nothing, even heavy cold hard something beats the most beautiful nothing she can dream up, because at least there's a you in it to know your name." Her grip tightened until it hurt, until the hurt was the realest thing on the bridge. "She's made of nothing. That's all she's got to give you, the one thing she's made of, nothing. I'm made of life. And what I'm offering you is me. All of it. Every day. I know you're tired. I know you're so tired you can't see the end of it. I'll carry half. I'll be your warmth where you've gone cold and I'll be your weight where you've gone light and I'll be your edges where you've gone soft. But you have to come back. You have to choose it. Because once you step into that nothing there is no road back out, she told me so herself and the one true thing she's ever said is that. So you'd better hope, and you'd better pray, and you'd better wake up, because only you can break this. Choose me. Choose us. Choose being. Please." Her voice cracked, finally, on the last of it. "Please. Stay with me."

Ewan stood at the very edge, half himself and half the grey, and he looked at the two of them.

He looked at Morrigan. Pale. Soft. Weightless. Serene. Empty. The end of all weight and all cold and all time and all pain, and the end, in the same single breath, of everything else.

He looked at Eloise. Bright. Warm. Solid. Heavy with life, her face wet now, her hands shaking with the effort of holding his fading ones, gripping a boy who was halfway gone and refusing, refusing, to grip any less hard for it.

And in that moment, at the very edge of the longest night, Ewan understood the whole of it. The spell, the thing that had held him all this winter, all these years, was not really magic at all. It was one single trick, run over and over in a thousand voices. It was this: they had made nothing look like freedom, and they had made living look like a burden. That was all. That was the entire spell. Morrigan was beautiful because she had taken the truth of his pain, which was real, which he would not deny, and she had used it to hide the lie underneath, the lie that the weight was the enemy. But the weight was not the enemy. The weight was part of being alive. The cold was part of having warmth to lose. The hard soreness of having edges was the price and the proof of being a single irreplaceable Ewan-shaped self that could hold a girl's hand on a bridge and feel it. Something, even heavy and cold and hard and tired beyond bearing, even this, was infinitely better than nothing, because nothing was not rest. Nothing was just nothing. And he had never, not once in his whole aching life, been made to be nothing.

Part Four — Break the Spell

He turned away from her.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done, harder than the bridge in the autumn, harder than every morning of the winter, because Morrigan was so beautiful and the rest she promised was so deep and he was so unspeakably tired. But he turned his soft fading face away from the pale edge and the yawning grey, and he turned it towards Eloise, towards the burnt orange and the wet bright eyes and the shaking warm hands, and he pressed himself into her, all of his half-dissolved self, into her warmth, and he held on.

And the colour came back.

It came back into his skin first, the grey draining out of him and the living colour flooding in, his hands going solid again in hers, his edges hardening, sharpening, drawing him back into a single clear Ewan-shaped self standing on a frozen bridge in the deep of the longest night. Gavoran's weight came down onto his shoulders again, but it was bearable now, it was the ordinary weight of being a body in the world and not the crushing iron of the small hours. Lir's mist thinned to a soft harmless haze at the edges of things, present, but only present, no longer the whole of the air. Selenis drew back into the background, and somewhere far off the memory of the loud songs got a little of its colour back. Kyrus's scream dropped to a whisper, a mean small whisper in the shadow of the parapet, sullen, defeated for tonight. And Thalis shrank back down out of his terrible vastness into ordinary steady time, the longest night going on around them, yes, but going on, moving, the way time does, towards the morning that always comes.

Morrigan screamed. It made no sound. Her flawless serene face came apart, her edges blurring not into peace now but into dissolution, her black smoke hair unravelling, her pale form coming undone and sinking back down into the grey from which the five of them had woven her. But she did not vanish. Ewan watched her go and understood that she would not vanish, that this was not how it worked, that she would draw back into the shadows and the small hours and wait, patient, for another bad winter, another longest night. She retreated. That was all. That was the most that could be asked.

Depression did not go away.

That was the truth of the morning, and Ewan would not pretend otherwise, not to Eloise, not to himself, not to the man with the lanyard, not ever. It did not vanish in the dawn the way a spell is supposed to vanish. There was no clean ending, no cure, no waking to find the room flooded with sun and the figures all gone. What had changed was not that they had left. What had changed was who held the reins.

They walked home together as the sky began, very slowly, to lighten over the rooftops. Eloise had her arm tight around his waist and Ewan had his hand clutched fast in hers and they went slowly, because slowly was still mostly what Ewan had, and the morning came up grey and cold and absolutely real around them, the most ordinary morning in the world, and Ewan had never in his life been so glad of anything so plain.

He still carried it. He wanted to be honest about that. Gavoran's weight was on his shoulders as they walked, and Lir's haze was thin at the edges of the street, and somewhere underneath Kyrus muttered, and the days ahead would still come grey and heavy more often than not. But the weight was his to carry now, and he was not carrying it alone, and that, he was learning, made all the difference there was to make. And when Morrigan whispered, as she still did, soft and reasonable and kind, from the shadows in the bad hours, he found that he could hear her now for what she was. Not truth. A lie, born out of pain and exhaustion, wearing the face of mercy. He knew her name. He knew her nature. He knew her one trick. And knowing it did not make her go silent, but it meant that hers was no longer the only voice in the room that he believed.

They sat together later in his room, wrapped in the bright blankets, a warm mug going cold in Ewan's hands because he kept forgetting to drink it and kept remembering and drinking a little and forgetting again. The lamp had Eloise's scarf over it and the light came warm. The mist was thin and faint, pushed back into the corners by the warmth and the light, biding its time, but only biding it. Ewan leaned his head on Eloise's shoulder, the way she had leaned hers on his on the worst night of the winter, so that now it was his turn to be the thing rested against, and he spoke, quietly, honestly, with no spell on him at all.

"I still feel Lir's fog," he said. "Most days, a bit. I still feel Gavoran's weight when I wake up. I still hear Kyrus, when I'm tired. And sometimes, El, I won't lie to you, sometimes I still hear her. Morrigan. Calling. Soft. Reasonable. Telling me there's a kinder way." He turned the cold mug in his hands. "But I know now. The point was never to be weightless. It was never to be perfect, or empty, or finished. The point is just to be here. With you. Even when it's hard. Even when it goes on so long it feels like it'll never end. I choose to stay. I choose this. I'm not going anywhere."

Eloise kissed his forehead, warm and slow and steady, and her love sat between them solid and plain as the mug in his hands.

"And I'm staying with you," she said. "Always. We carry the weight together. We fight the cold together. We're real, together, even on the days you can't feel it. Especially those days." She tucked the bright blanket closer round his shoulders. "You don't have to be happy to be alive, you know. I think that's the bit nobody tells you. You don't have to be happy. You don't have to be fixed, or light, or fine. You just have to be." She rested her cheek against the top of his head. "And you are enough, exactly as you are. Heavy and tired and grey and here. You are more than enough. You always were."

Outside the window the longest night was over and the days, from here, would only get a little longer. Not quickly. Not all at once. But the wheel had turned, the way it always turns, and the light, a minute at a time, was coming back.

You do not have to be happy to be alive. You just have to be. And you are enough, exactly as you are.