On the far side of the chasm, alone, Mihao unbraided his beard. He had never once thought to look at it closely. Why would anyone look closely at their own beard?

Each long white strand, held to the grey light, was a line of handwriting: small, slanting, and very familiar. Not his. Hers. The ninth leaf had never been lost. He had spun it into himself, word by word, and worn it on his chin for a thousand years, so that no one could take it from him. Not even himself.

And then he remembered. All of it, the way a dam remembers the river. The hut. The fire. Wen, grown so old and small she fitted her chair like a letter in an envelope, and Mihao, no kitten now, on the arm of it with his beard already white.

“One more,” she said. “The last one. Keep it for me.” It was a story about a cat and a fox. The cat was old, and kept a great library, and was frightened of the dark. The fox was young and carried a light in her tail. And near the end of it Wen stopped talking, not because the story was finished, but because she was. The fire burned down. The cat sat in the dark and waited for and then, and it did not come.

He could not bear it. That was all. It was not wickedness. He took the silver shears from her sewing basket and cut the last page out of her story, so that in the Library her tale would go on forever, unfinished, and she would never quite be gone.

The page did not vanish. It fell into the margin and lay there, breathing. Over the centuries he cut more: every drowning, every winter, every letter that came too late. He told himself he was being kind. And the cut pages gathered in the dark beyond the shelves, ending-less and aching, and grew together into something that was always hungry. He had not found the Hollow. He had made it.

Pell had crossed the chasm after him. She took one strand of his beard very gently in her teeth, held it to her lantern-light, read it, and sat down hard.

“It’s me,” she said. “The fox in the story. The one with the light. That’s me.” She laughed, shakily. The forest had grown her from a whisper of Wen’s last tale, the little that leaked out through the cut. She had been looking for her ending her whole life, and it had been hanging under his chin all along.

He remembered that night too. The Hollow, grown vast, coming for the last page. The shelves cracking. And Mihao, rather than give it up, weaving the page into his beard and burning away every memory of where he had put it.

The Library broke into nine leaves. The Keeper woke in a desert. Now he knew everything, and only one choice was left: keep refusing, or let the story end. He looked at Pell. He looked at the Hollow. He chose.