They went back to the ruins together, the cat, the fox and the Hollow, and the eight recovered leaves rose out of Mihao’s book and hung above the broken shelves like lamps waiting to be lit. The seven guardians came, and the queen of Ankhara, awake past her hour, and Iselde of Orrin with her paws quite solid again.

Everyone the Hollow had hurt came to watch it end.

Mihao unbraided his beard one final time, and the strands lifted and spread into a page of light as wide as the sky. He began to read it aloud. He got as far as the second line.

His voice would not come. For a thousand years he had carried this page so that he would never have to hear it, and now his throat closed like a fist. Hush held the world still for one long breath to give him time, and it was not enough. Then a small warm weight leaned against his side. “I’ll do it,” said Pell. “It’s my ending too.” And she read.

And the old cat was afraid of the dark, because the dark was where stories went when they were finished, and he loved them all too much to let them go.

So the fox went on ahead, carrying the light in her tail, so that the cat would always know the way. And the cat was not afraid any more. For he understood, at last, that a story which ends is not a door closing. It is a lamp left burning in a window, for whoever comes next. And then, Wen had written, at the very bottom of the page, in a hand that had nearly stopped shaking, and then, little one, you begin again.

The Hollow listened to every word. When Pell finished, it let out a sound that nobody there ever forgot: a long, slow breath, like a whole city sighing in its sleep. And then it unfolded.

Ten thousand pages lifted off it at once, and every one of them, at last, had an ending. The drowned city rang its bells beneath the sea. The mother at the window opened the door. The letter came home. Page by page they flew back to the empty shelves, and the shelves grew up out of the ruins to hold them, and the Everlasting Library rose around its Keeper, whole, with all its sad stories in it.

Where the Hollow had been there was only a small clean page, which wrote one sentence on itself and settled on the lowest shelf: Here ended the Hollow, and it was not afraid. The guardians bowed. Ashkara went back to sleep, satisfied.

Mihao looked for Pell among the shelves. He found only her pawprints, leading to the far wall, and the warm glow of a lantern gone on ahead. His beard was long and white, and it no longer shone. It no longer needed to.

At the end of Pell’s pawprints there was a door that had not been there before. The Library had nine wings, one for each leaf, and Mihao had built every one of them; but this door was carved with a numeral he had never cut into anything. X.

Beyond it, faintly, a light was moving away. Mihao opened his book. Every page was full, all nine chapters, in gold, except the very last, where a new line was drying in a small, quick, slightly untidy hand, the way a fox might write if a fox had ever learned: Once upon a hao, there was a fox who went on ahead… Mihao picked up his staff, and followed.