A soft, gentle rain was falling. Selvara awoke to the smell of wet asphalt and the distant, familiar sound of city traffic. She was in an alleyway, soaked, but whole. Mira was stirring beside her. Across from them, Kael was helping a groaning Draven to his feet, a familiar, charming grin on his face.
"Worst... office party... ever," Draven mumbled, his head pounding.
They were all there. The six of them. In a back alley in a city they recognized as their own. The memories of Eryndor, of gods and monsters and a war for creation, were fading like the details of a particularly vivid, and particularly nasty, dream. All that remained was a strange, inexplicable sense of a shared, and deeply profound, history.
A car pulled up at the mouth of the alley. A sleek, black town car. The door opened. And from it, stepped a man. Old, with eyes that seemed to hold the light of a thousand distant, and not entirely friendly, stars. He was dressed in a suit that was worth more than their collective lifetime earnings. He held up a single, simple, and elegant business card.
"Aris Thorne," he said, his voice the calm, dispassionate hum of a being who has seen it all. "Head of Acquisitions, Multi-versal Resources Division. We had a… slight system crash at one of our primary research installations. An unexpected, and frankly, quite beautiful, cascading failure. And you," he looked at the six of them, not as gods or heroes, but with the keen, appraising eye of a manager looking at a promising, if chaotic, new batch of recruits, "you are the results. My employers believe in recycling. And you six have just demonstrated a truly… unique… talent for creative problem-solving on a cosmic scale. How would you like a job?"
Lucian and Elara looked at each other. The memories were clearer for them. A shared, silent, and now deeply ironic understanding passed between them. They had not ended the game. They had simply, through their sheer, divine, and utter incompetence, managed to get themselves noticed by the home office.
The war for a single, broken world was over. A new, far stranger, and infinitely more complicated job, in a universe of infinite, new, and almost certainly hostile realities, was just about to begin. The final page had been turned. It was time to start a whole new book.