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The ravens pull me away from the window and I follow because that is why I came, and that’s when I finally see him.

My heart flips in my chest, hope and fear wrestling for dominance.

He is on the next landing up, back to me, standing in the middle of the stone looking at the warm window with his head tilted the way he tilts it when he is working something out. He is barefoot and in his white shirt with the suspenders. There is no red, no blood. In this place he is pure and intact.

But he’s moving toward the window.

“Baz?” I call out after him, my voice reverberating in the air.

He doesn’t turn.

“Baz. Love. Look at me.”

He pauses, then slowly turns.

For a moment it seems he doesn’t know who I am. His eyes find my face and it’s as if he’s forgotten what eyes are for, as if he can’t really see anymore with them, and I almost break down right here and now. Because what if I’m too late? What if his soul has already moved on and the him on this landing is only the husk?

What if this was all for nothing?

But then his face changes and his mouth opens and something human comes back into him, and he says my name. No sound comes out, but I know it’s my name.

“Baz!” I cry out.

I close the ground between us and grab his hand.

His hand is warm, so wonderfully warm and alive and real, and I know in the grip of it that he is still mine to take.

I tell him, “We are going home,” and the ravens close around us in a black spiral and the golden window and the red ground and the ruined Mortis all go out with a blast of frigid air.

I am slammed back into my body, hard and all at once, and I fall to my knees. I cry out as my kneecaps meet the hard stone, and then the pain brings me fully back. I’m in the Midnight Classroom and the chartreuse is dying off the sigils, the wind is dropping, my hair is settling against my neck. My face is wet and my mouth tastes of salt and iron.

Baz is on the floor beside me.

His chest rises, falls, rises again.

He is alive.

He coughs, an ugly wet cough, and blood comes out of his mouth, trickling down at the corners. With one hand he manages to wipe it away, while his other hand tightens on mine. He slowly turns his head and looks at me, eyes open and the color of honey. He is confused and alive, and he looks at the ceiling and then at me and I’m not sure he knows where he is.

I’m not sure he knows what happened.

But right now, all I can feel is the deepest sense of relief as it floods my body from head to toe and releases my heart from the fist it’s been held in.

“Saturna?” he asks hoarsely.

His voice. He’s saying my name.

He’s alive and he’s here and he’s saying my name.

I bend over him and I laugh and I cry and I say, “yes, it’s me, I’m here,” and I bring my forehead down to his forehead and I feel his breath warm on my mouth and he is cold everywhere else but he is here.

He is here.

The ravens come down from the air like an onyx wave and they pour back into the grimoire, oil-black into the pages, one after the other until the whole flock is gone. The grimoire sinks back onto the stone and the pages close themselves gently and the chartreuse at the sigils fades to nothing.

The work is over.

The work is done.