//------------------------------// // 24. How It Must End // Story: Bug in a Blizzard // by Paracompact //------------------------------// I had not anticipated everyone else already being gathered in the foyer once we’d arrived. Even less had I anticipated that everyone else would be awaiting our arrival, complete with stiff postures and pointed looks. And yet, this scene was exactly what we walked in on, or very close to it—there was the notable exception of Blanche, who was nowhere to be seen. Girard followed my lead in taking the stairs down, while Bluebird attracted the majority of the pointed looks by gliding down ahead of us. Of these looks, Gloria’s was surely the sharpest, and it was the only one that could outright be called hostile. Grid’s was one of strict concern, while Bon’s appeared merely curious. Zorn’s was inscrutable as always, but it was telling that he was the only one whose gaze still stuck to me and Girard rather than my partner. “Ahah, you guys… waiting for something?” my partner said. “Waiting for you, yeah,” Grid replied with an uncertain level of politeness. “Gloria said you probably have something to say about Girard, if you’ve been talking to him so much lately.” Gloria nodded sagely. “Indeed I did. And I wanted to be among the first to hear such a thing if that is, in fact, the case.” Her gimlet eyes sharpened even further. “And I do hope that’s not the case.” “I think we would all be inconsolable if it turned out Girard was the one who’s been replaced,” Bon agreed. “Nonetheless, I put my trust in the investigators. I imagine the detective and the cadet have their reasons for concern.” “I can’t,” Gloria said. “My imagination must not nearly be so inspired as yours, Bon, because whenever I try to conjure up a picture of my ‘changeling’ cousin breaking into Blanche’s room while at the exact same time playing a game of draughts with me in our room, why, I simply draw a blank.” Bon’s eyes migrated to an empty corner of the room, and he grumbled meekly, “I only mean to say there must surely be an explanation for the matter.” “Oh, if you truly have one in mind, I implore you, allez, allez! Stand up and share it!” Gloria pursued. “I’ve never known you to be shy about it.” Gloria was not currying her audience’s favor, this time around—she was deliberately instilling tension. Tension that could very well become chaos, which would be inhospitable to any sort of vulnerable confession on Girard’s part. I think every single person in attendance had something to say following Gloria’s crude swipes, but it was Bluebird who won out: “Now, now,” he said with a placating waft of his wings, “Bon is right that we’ve had our reasons for talking to who we have. We don’t just do things arbitrarily, after all. And I can also tell you all with our fullest confidence that Girard has not been replaced—he is the exact same Girard you’ve ever known and loved. That said, Gloria is right that there is something we have to say about Girard. Or, ahah, something that I think he would like to say, on his own behalf.” It was a nice segue. Just to be sure, I gave Girard a gentle pat on the back to drive the cue home. Bluebird ceded the floor to Girard, who inspired deeply before speaking his piece. Or at least thought about it. Gloria cut him off. “Girard, you don’t have to say anything! If they’re making you do this, it’s because they have nothing on us. On you, I mean. They’re framing you!” To my surprise, Girard stood his ground. “They’re not making me do this,” he said simply. “And, well… I’m sorry, Gloria, but I’ve told them everything. Everything about who we are, what we’ve done, and why we did it.” He walked over and wrapped his now-catatonic cousin in an embrace of wings and claws. It was a much more composed and dignified hug than the one he had given her not half an hour ago, but it was just as unreciprocated. “I know it’s scary, and I know it’s my fault we have to go through it in the first place,” he told her. “But I think we have to trust them if they say they’re on our side. And if they can say that, I think our friends will, too.” Frozen in frame, this was what Gloria’s face told me: Had Girard’s embrace lingered for one more second, she would have surely throttled him in front of everyone. Girard paced back to center stage, closed his eyes, and plopped down onto the carpet. Diffidence and confidence mixed in equal parts in his voice as he finally spoke up. “Um, I’m not sure what the best words are for something like this. At least, I can’t think of any better way to put it than this…” He said no more. Slowly at first, green sparks buzzed at the crown of his head, and then, like a curtain falling they raced down the length of his body, obscuring him completely. The lights and the sparks soon subsided, and what remained of the timid griffon they had consumed was another creature altogether. It was a creature that was otherworldly in its appearance with its armored, jet black carapace and its sharp, perforated limbs. It was a creature that was wholly nonthreatening in its posture, seated there on its haunches on the foyer carpet, eyes still closed with its chin tilted up and fangs protruding. It was a creature that was perfectly reminiscent of the one it had replaced in the way it swallowed and buzzed its wings self-consciously. It was a changeling who was eager to start a new life with old friends. Bon and Grid were the most taken aback—they were, after all, the only two who had not yet known. My partner and Zorn both beamed as brightly as ever I had seen them, even if for the latter, that meant no more than a curl at the corner of his lips. I didn’t bother to read Gloria’s face, because I was sick of it by now. I myself was in on the reveal, and not prone to emotional display, but I must have betrayed some amount of surprise to the extent that Girard’s true form subverted my expectations in one peculiar way: He was not bald but for a cartilaginous frill on the back of his neck, as I had believed was the case for every one of his kind save Queen Chrysalis herself. Instead, quite like Queen Chrysalis herself, he sported a full straight-locked mane of hair. Unlike her seaweed cerulean, however, his was bright and golden. I could only imagine this was the privilege of those who had partaken of the royal jelly. “… W-well?” Girard swallowed again. “I bet you all, all have a lot of questions, huh?” Girard did not see, and probably did not even hear, Gloria creep up to within throttling distance. “You could say that.” He opened his bright compound eyes, and startled at how close she had gotten. “O-oh?” She toyed with his locks with a crooked finger, with a crooked smile, saying nothing. “Gloria, like, did you know all along?” Grid asked. “Why yes, Grid. I knew.” “Then all this matter of the draughts in your room, the hostility toward the investigators, the framing of Grid Iron,” Bon followed, “all this was a consequence of your complicity?” “Like, Bon, she had to do all those things!” Grid said. “Right? She knew she had to protect Girard! This has all been for his sake, hasn’t it?” Gloria gave a morose chuckle. “I appreciate the support, Grid. However”—she turned to me and my partner—“there’s not much hope if I try to run with that angle, is there?” Silent up until now, it was Zorn who answered on our behalf. He put it perfectly: “Not a chance in Tartarus.” “Right, right.” Gloria stopped toying with Girard’s hair, and slicked back her own with a claw. “Anyway, Girard, I do have some questions I would like to ask you, in light of all this.” “Haha, d-do you?” he asked. “Sure, but, maybe we should answer our friends’ questions first, given that they—” “My first question is,” she said, “what was the last thing I told you, before the two officers took you away for your latest round of interrogation?” “Um…” “Oh wait, never mind, I remember. It was, ‘say no more.’ Silly me,” she said. “But that leads quite naturally into my next question, which is, how ever did ‘say no more’ translate to, ‘spill your goddamn guts to the police and then detransform in front of everybody’?” And now, Girard began to tremble. “Don’t have an answer? That’s okay. I can’t for the life of me figure it out, either,” she said. “Let’s try another question: How the hell do you think we’re going to survive this?” Once again, she received no answer. She repeated her question, this time with a different inflection: “G-Girard…” she said, hiding her face and turning around, “… how the hell are we going to survive this?” Gloria’s emotions were as fake as her identity, and just as self-serving. It didn’t take a full-fledged detective to tell what she was trying to do, as evidenced by my partner, who flew over to call her out. “That’s about enough, Gloria!” But Gloria knew enough to keep talking, and Girard didn’t know enough not to listen. He was transfixed on what she had to say in her moment of faux-vulnerability, and I could tell that nothing short of physical force was likely to change that. “I can’t fix this one, Girard. I just can’t. I promised you I could, but I think I lied.” She took some sharp, unsteady breaths, but somehow found the strength not to cry. “Please, just this once… I need your help.” “My help?” he whispered. “I’ve made the preparations for our escape—at least, most of them, we can make it if we struggle. But they’re going to stop us if we try.” She turned back around to face him. “I need you to stop them.” Unsteady on his hooves, Girard turned around to give a nauseous look at me and my partner. “… You mean, hurt them?” “Only if it comes to that.” “I-I don’t think it will!” he exclaimed, trying and failing to push a smile. “They said, they said we’re all on the same team! They can help us!” “You mean, they’ll really let us escape? We can really trust them?” She forged some hope in her eyes. “Then come on, Girard, we need to get going!” She took her emotionally disoriented cousin by the shoulders and, with a clear hurry in her step, began to escort him away from his friends and in the direction of the boiler room. I already knew she had predicted my reaction, but I had no other choice. “Stay right here,” I ordered them. Obediently, she stopped. “Oh,” she said, her hope extinguished. “I suppose they’ve tricked the both of us, then.” Girard shrugged his cousin’s claw from his shoulder. It was clear in his voice, however, that he had not fully shrugged off her spell. “I… don’t want to hurt them,” he said. “And I, I don’t want to leave my friends! If that means we have to fess up to the Royal Guard and plead our case to Celestia herself, then s-so be it!” “Attaboy!” Bluebird said. “Attabug!” Gloria deepened the look of hopelessness on her face as she stared at her cousin’s feet. Her hair covered her face as she asked, “What makes you believe they’re going to think any differently about you than she did?” “She who?” “Blanche.” She lifted her head back up. Something else, now, flickered in Gloria’s eyes, something very genuine: Malevolence. “Blanche? The apple of your eye, the love of your life? You showed her your true form and she was disgusted. What makes you think the rest of Equestria is going to feel any different?” Hang in there, kid. “B-but, in the letter she wrote me, she wasn’t disgusted with what I am, j-just, just, just what I did, and if I—” “Oh, is that what she said?” Gloria’s tone was dripping with false concern. “Tell me, do you know where Blanche is right now?” “In her, in her room?” “Correct. She’s pining away in her room, working on her stories in accordance with her daily schedule,” she said. “We tried to gather her. We told her that the investigators had something important to say about you. Knowing what she does, I’m sure she understood what that might have been. Still, she refused to come along.” I thought I had seen malevolence in her eyes several times before this hour, but I had been mistaken. I had only seen flickers; I had not seen the flame. “Do I need to spell it out for you? She’s repulsed by you. And open your eyes, Girard, she’s not the only one!” She grabbed Girard by the shoulders once more, this time to crane his head and panicked eyes at all his friends around him. It was true, they were repulsed—but not by the changeling. “Don’t listen to her!” Bluebird railed. After Gloria’s latest stab, it no longer looked like Girard was listening to anybody. His face caved in as he tore himself away from her and collapsed to his knees, and began counting his breaths in and out, in and out. But Gloria was relentless as she vaulted over him and pressed her forehead against his. “You won’t help out just once!? You won’t trust me just once!?” she shouted. “Not even when our lives depend on it?” “I’m sorry…” he mewled. If this was the flame, what followed was the inferno. Time itself seemed to melt away as she wrenched him by the shoulders one more time: “Girard?                Girard… Girard! Look me in the eyes when I’m speaking to you! When I’m begging you!                                                                                      Begging you to help me one fucking time to clean up this shitstain of a mess you made!                     Please, Ardy, I love you…                                                                             Remember how good things used to be? Back when it was just the two of us? Let’s go back to those times. Let’s leave these fairweather friends behind.                               They never loved you. Blanche never loved you. She called the police on you and now she’s broken your heart. God, I’m so sorry, I feel so guilty,                                                  I couldn’t stop her from breaking your heart. I tried, I tried… but you didn’t listen. You never listen. … … … Girard… Girard? Do you want to see me go to prison, Girard?  Is that…‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Will that... what you want? ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ make you happy? Girard, where do you think you’re going to go? If you hate me so much you can’t stand to be around me and you don’t care if they hang me in the town square like my dad then that’s fine, I get it, but what about you, Girard? What happens to you? Do you honestly think you can do what I do? What do you know about watermarks or royal seals or official inks or signature forgery or diplomatic mail channels or the formatting of birth certificates or the at-mint densities of every last denominations of authentic Equestrian coinage? What do you know? You can’t even do your fucking homework by yourself, Ardy! … … … I’m scared for you, Girard… I’m scared that you’re making another mistake you’re just going to regret—” It was at this point that someone in the foyer finally broke free from her gruesome spell. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my partner, and it certainly wasn’t Girard. “You shut your mouth, Gloria!” Grid hurled. Drunk on adrenaline, limbs rigid and quaking, he marched to confront her. It snapped Bluebird back into action as well, who joined him in his step. “Yeah!” Grid and Bluebird positioned themselves as a physical barrier between Gloria and the target of her abuse, who sat bawling his compound eyes out all the while muttering a litany of apologies and self-deprecations. She had broken him, there was no question about that—but he did not succumb. The brainwashing did not take. By now, Grid was furious, furious enough to raise a hoof and place it on the lapel of Gloria’s robe. It was a threatening display, but if a fly had been resting there on her lapel, it would have surely been uninjured. What Gloria did next, I am sure Girard could not have seen from his angle: She latched onto Grid’s hoof and twisted it up in the fabric of her robe, ensnaring his grip. “What the—” “Ow! Grid! That hurts!” With Grid in her tow, she slammed herself up against a wall, stood up on her hindlegs, and screwed her face up in pain. “What are you doing?” “Please, let her go!” Girard begged. Purple—not green—sparks popped and shocked the air around him. “It doesn’t have to be like this!” Bluebird was quick to react, but he only made things worse. He pulled her from the wall and grabbed her to try to disentangle Grid’s grip, but succeeded only in giving Gloria the opportunity to fall backwards and send her two relentless aggressors crashing down on top of her. “Scolus!” she wailed. “Do something!” At last, Scolus succumbed. “It didn’t have to be like this…” The sparks around him ignited into a violet flame where he sat, which grew like a house fire to consume him whole. Once he was nothing more than a spire of flame, the spire itself began to grow, and grow, and grow. When it seemed certain that the foyer would be reduced to ashes and likely the villa with it, finally the flames subsided. In their wake they left nothing burned, no soot, no ash. What they left behind was much worse: a mountainous beast of fur and fangs, an Ursa Minor ready to rampage. Following its birth, it only stood there, staring indomitably at myself, Zorn, and Bon. But we were not its targets. Once it had its bearings, it turned around with pounding footfalls to train its gaze upon the two who would dare assault his protector, the two who still lay atop her, paralyzed with fear like the rest of us. The Ursa Minor lumbered toward Grid and Bluebird… “Not these two!” Gloria ordered. “Get Pesco! He has the magic suppressant!” The beast obeyed. It whipped back around, this time showcasing its frightening speed and coordination. I did not know what part of Scolus or Girard was still inside that Ursa Minor, if any part at all. With strength like that, he could kill me by sheer accident. I was resigned to a death sentence at Gloria’s behest. I reached a trembling hoof inside my trench coat for my only means of self-defense. My body was acting of its own accord, because my mind knew it was utter nonsense. In every conceivable timeline, I would fail to inject an Ursa Minor that already had me in its sights. It readied to pounce… From behind the beast I heard the unzipping of a saddlebag, and then a screech from Gloria: “Wait!” My hoof found only an empty pocket where I had been keeping the syringe. My eyes found that very syringe now buried in the hip of the Ursa Minor. The beast turned around to stare in horror at its injector, the true owner of the magic suppressant for these last twenty-four hours: Bluebird. My partner grimaced as he punched the plunger, emptying the syringe and sending its payload coursing through the beast’s veins. The beast roared and lashed out blindly, in the process coldclocking Bluebird on the muzzle with the flat of its paw. But this was a paw that was, like the rest of its body, already beginning to dissolve into a weeping glob of purple glitter. “Scolus you imbecile!” Gloria seethed. Her misdirected insults could not save him. The Ursa Minor bellowed and pawed at itself futilely as its body washed away like a sandcastle in the tide. The beast had been vanquished as soon as it had been summoned, and now was no more. In its place it left behind Scolus, standing amidst a pile of ripped carpet, broken furniture, and dying purple flames. As the flames turned to sparks and the sparks evaporated into nothing, the bug raised a hoof to his head and started to sway dizzily in place. “Not a s-single thing, huh,” he said, his eyes glazing over. “I couldn’t do a single thing right…” He walked a lopsided few steps, this way and that, before collapsing in a heap on the floor. He didn’t get back up. He didn’t even stir. Is this how the magic suppressant is supposed to work? “No!” It was Zorn. He was the first to react, and with a loud and panicked urgency that I would not have expected from him. He bounded from his seat, slalomed around the broken furniture to reach his deathly still changeling friend, and bent down to cradle him in his hooves. Gloria was the second to react: She started laughing her ass off. That didn’t bode well. “Zorn, what’s the situation?” I said. He didn’t reply at first. He was too busy searching for a pulse on the changeling’s body, to no avail. Maybe he was unfamiliar with their biology; maybe there was no pulse to be found. I cut a line through the rubble in his and Scolus’s direction, and was joined more timidly by Bon from behind. Bluebird was still out of commission from Scolus’s errant swipe, and Grid could only gape uncomprehendingly while still wrapped up in the robe of the cackling witch beside him. “Zorn…” Bon called softly, more than a little shell shocked, “is there something the matter with Girard—or Scolus, is it?” Zorn had heard the question, and he was not too busy to answer. And yet, he elected to say nothing as he continued to palpate the unconscious changeling’s body. Standing over him, I could at least be sure Scolus was still alive; his chest rose and fell in a shallow but steady rhythm, and a faint wheeze rattled from his throat. “There is, isn’t there?” Bon insisted. “I’ve made a mistake,” Zorn said. His vagueness wasn’t helping things. “What was in that serum?” I demanded. “Was that not a magic suppressant?” “It was.” He gave up on Scolus, and began to palpate his own brow instead. “I should have known.” “Should have known what?” Gloria caught her breath for long enough to chime in. “Oh, this has just been a comedy of errors for everyone, now hasn’t it?” Bluebird was finally coming to his senses and taking stock of the situation, while Grid braced Gloria up against the wall—for real, this time. I was glad he had finally found a healthy outlet for his anger. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” he snarled. “Well, I certainly screwed up,” she said. “Not for lack of effort, mind you: I tried my absolute god-damnedest! But in the end, Scolus was less like an albatross around my neck, and more like a six-ton Ursa Minor. I simply underestimated his stupidity. “And I think Scolus underestimated his own stupidity, too. I’m sure he had an inkling what could happen when he went behind my back to pursue that parasocial romance of his, but do you really think he could’ve predicted this? “How could he have predicted that among all his friends, Zorn—the smartest cookie in the jar—would fail to foresee what a magic suppressant would do to a creature for whom magic, love, sustenance, and their very life force are all one and the same? “You might as well have injected him with cyanide! If nothing else, it would have all been over sooner! “Honestly, I thought you at least had an idea of the risks, but your faces all say otherwise. Just goes to show that more than anybody else, I always knew what was best for the disobedient little grub, and I—!” Her soliloquy met an untimely end as Grid slammed her to the floor and lodged a hoof in her upper abdomen, where it stayed. We could finally enjoy some peace from her cackling and her schadenfreude speeches, but what filled the silence in their absence wasn’t any easier to listen to: Scolus’s wheezing breaths were growing more strained by the second. And I didn’t think it was an illusion on his part, the way his body seemed to wither and dessicate before our very eyes. Amidst the rasps, Scolus started to burble, as if to say something. The four of us who were free leaned in to try to listen. Alas, if there were any words at all among his feeble croaks, nobody was able to make them out. Going by the intonation, it seemed he was asking a question, or perhaps a series of them. Eventually, he gave up the effort, and a singular tear rolled down his cheek. I doubted we had the answers to his questions, anyway. “Surely there’s something we can do!” Bon cried, wringing his hooves as he huddled beside the bug. He looked up expectantly at Zorn. “I don’t know,” was the expert’s answer. “Absolutely nothing at all?” “I can not think of anything.” “How long will this drug stay in his system?” “My roughest guess, informed only by body weight, is three to ten hours.” “Well, it’s a magic deficiency, isn’t it? And I have antlers! Can’t I channel him magic somehow?” “You can try,” Zorn said, “but I do not think it will work.” “And why not!” Without waiting for Zorn’s response, Bon primed his antlers and enveloped Scolus in the aura of his magic. He tried jostling him one way and another, desperate to discover some way to feed his friend. He ripped off the bandage from Scolus’s cheek by accident, spattering the carpet with coagulated green blood. His wound had festered. “I’m sorry!” Bon yelped, his voice cracking. Beyond this slip-up, his jostling was only aggravating Scolus's breathing troubles. “Please put him down, Bon,” Bluebird said. “You’re only making it worse.” The young master complied and set the bleeding, wheezing creature down. He appeared to take his plan’s lack of success as a personal failing. “Why?” he asked. “Why won’t it work?” “Extracorporeal magic is a waste metabolite,” Zorn said listlessly. “The effects of a spell are no more than an exothermic resonance which is itself devoid of any magicaloric energy, created as the end product of an enzymatic reaction which catabolizes magicaloric compounds. Beyond that, no known magicaloric compounds exist which can be transmitted intact through inorganic media. Stable resonances in the form of enchantments and prostheses are no exception, as they do not interface with any known metabolic pathw—” “I get it! I get it!” Bon bleated. “You knew all that, but couldn’t have predicted this?” “Magical biochemistry is remedial. Changeling amitabolism is conjectural.” He shook his head. “I made a mistake. I made a mistake.” Behind golden locks Scolus's eyes had floated halfway open, but I saw no light left in them. The only signs of a creature still fighting to survive came from his chest, and he was losing that fight. “Well, if he can’t take Bon’s magic, can’t he still, ahahaha, take our love?” my partner suggested, ticking traumatically. “Or in his condition, would that just be… a waste of time?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” “If there’s any hope at all in it, we must try it,” Bon said. There was a silent consent. However, the look Zorn and I exchanged made it clear that neither of us were capable of aping any emotion beyond despair at the moment, even if it were to save our own lives. That left it up to Bon and Bluebird, who weren’t gushing with confidence either. My partner initiated, kneeling down to blanket him with one wing while giving him a pillow with the other. With a hoof he wiped away the lonely tear from Scolus's cheek, but he did not say anything. Not even any generic coos to assure him that things were all right, or that this, too, would pass. Perhaps he felt guilty enough as it was without lying to him on his deathbed. Bon, on the other hoof, cleared his throat and ventured a verbal approach: “I wish I had more time to consider my words, to prepare for my performance, so to speak—you know me, it is my habit. But I understand that this is rather do-or-die, now isn’t it? Very well, I’ll speak from the heart… “I know we may not have always been the closest of friends in our clique. Perhaps I only really knew you as Gloria’s cousin, and you only knew me as Blanche’s brother. Blanche’s haughty, pretentious, inimitably insecure and assuredly alcoholic brother. I suppose I always assumed you were a good judge of character, and that that’s why we never really bonded.” This is a eulogy. It’s a mercy killing. “But no matter! I think it’s become abundantly clear as of late that we were all mistaken, each and every one about each and every other. For example, it turned out that we actually have a lot in common, you and I. Or maybe we have but one thing in common, that nonetheless binds us as kindred spirits pour toujours, at least in my eyes. Do you know what that thing is, Girard, Scolus, my friend?” I did not know if Scolus could even hear him. Regardless, Bon paused politely for an answer before giving his own: “We have both felt the sting of a romance that rewarded our cowardice more than our courage; we’re both loveless losers with nothing to show for it.” He teared up and choked up as he leaned in. “Don’t be selfish and die now, my friend. We have to survive this, for each other’s sake.” There was almost a tender moment. “You poor fuck, Bon! Is that what you call sympathy?” Gloria heckled from a distance. “Prench and all, that’s just the same old narcissistic drivel I think we’ve all come to expect from—” Grid sunk his hoof deeper into her belly. He had a full-time job on his hooves stifling Gloria’s squawks as she tried to squirm free. “Shut it!” he said, before turning to the rest of us. “I could use some help here!” There were two of us available who could have assisted in the restraint of the dangerous criminal: the adolescent civilian Zorn, and myself, the trained law enforcement officer. I stood there until Zorn realized waiting on me was hopeless and walked over to help. Hopeless. The entire situation was hopeless. If Bluebird and Bon’s therapeutic first aid could do anything at all, if it wasn’t simply prolonging a long, painful, hypoxic death, then it was being undone by the background noise of his beloved Gloria being strangulated by his own friends. And even if it wasn’t being undone (it was), even if it was all he needed to survive (it wasn’t), it would have made little difference in the arithmetic. When it was 10am and the Royal Guard was due to arrive at noon, three-to-ten hours was one-to-seven hours too long for a changeling to stick around. No, the story was over. The plotlines were finished, their loose ends all tied up in a slip knot. To any reader who was paying attention, it was patently obvious: Nothing remained but the epilogue.