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What happened during that seance was not recorded, not by the two vessels who partook of it, nor any of the spirits who observed, and certainly not by Kalokin and Nikolak. What is known is that the ephemera of Nikolak reclaimed the seed of the lost and nameless god she'd devoured eons ago, not in subjugation, but in healing. In healing, she released Kalokin from his sworn duty of protecting the world from her, upon which time he reunited with his own long-thought lost ephemera.

The ephemera being the part that processes emotion, and the seed being the part that processes thought, Nikolak gained true self reflection, and with it, understand of her many, grave sins. Kalokin, in turn, felt emotion for the first time in thousands of years, and in that moment, all he felt was rage.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, destructive as it was, which gave the Achaeans much grief; and it hurled down to Hades many strong souls of heroes, and made them spoils for the dogs and every bird. Sing, the hate of the betrayed, screaming as their betrayers are burned to ash, and sing of the ashes of the heart left after vengeance is exacted in its great and terrible fury. Sing the rage of the abandoned and forlorn, and in doing so, sing a shadow of the emotions Kalokin felt, for the eons in isolation of the core of the moon had twisted him into exactly the same monster Nikolak had once been, when she was first freed from the vault of the earth.

So great was his fury that the moon itself, long thought inert, returned unto flame, a cold-burning star that seared the night with pale fury. Every soul in the world, both attuned to magic or not, felt this reunion, greater still the ones able to see the moon burning in its fury. It was then that many realized the oldest legends, those of an ancient and primeval people living beneath two suns had been true once, and would be true again; The Gemini had been broken, the separate halves fully split apart, each reclaiming the lost piece of themself from the other, and surely they would return to battle as they ever had before.

But those brave souls, Khaesho and Shouyousei, stood betwixt two gods who's feud would consume the globe in violence, spoke in one voice, "not again." The first, a student of the past, sang the pain that had resulted from their battle in the past, of the great and terrible harms both had inflicted upon the innocent in their pettiness. He sang of the dark ages lost to history, memories and stones burned away, civilizations wiped from the records of history, but eloquent as he was, his words were not enough.

It was the Dancer, the Dreamer, the Artist, who gave hope to the future. She sang to them a new way of being. She sang to them not of peace, but of duality. She sang to them of their true nature, and such was the force of her belief that they conformed to her song. They did not change so much as they evolved, understanding who they were in a new light, and the spirits that emerged were thus.

Nikolak firstborn of the mortals, who had consumed Belluosus, the spirit of chaos, became Life. The fear that had always sustained her became the fear that drove mortals to great feats, to fight and struggle and breathe for another day. Her fear was the fear of the hunter, aware of his empty belly, and of the prey, fleeing the teeth at their heels, the fear of the parents protecting the child, the fear of Life continuing to burn. She became known for carrying an umbrella which carried a small thundercloud beneath it so that she could always be washed over by the chaos of the storms Shouyousei loved so much.

And Kalokin, jailor of the great demon, once-known as Solus, the spirit of Silence, became Death. The peace he yearned for, the silence in which he found rest, the eternity unchanging could only be known as the peace and silence of the grave. He adopted the shepherd's crook, which he used to guide lost and dead souls to An Afterlife, of which he was very secretive. It is said that not even his chosen vessels could enter his great and mighty realms of sleep, for those once dead do not ever truly live again.

And their place in the cycle, as it always had been was midnight, but not merely a midnight as the deepest part of the dark. Their place in the cycle now, was the Seam. The place where the late of the night meets the early of the morning. They are the place where the death makes way for new life, where the page is torn from the calendar, where the past is written in stone eternal, and where the future brings its first promises to bear.

In evolving, in understanding themselves and one another, their feud was not ended, but replaced. Kalokin was given the past, the entirety of unchanging history to chronicle, and Nikolak was given the future, in all its chaos and potential, and neither were allowed the present, for that is the place of mortals and their kin.

With the spirits thus healed, there was no longer a need for the Legend of the Ghanyr. There was no need for a monster haunting the sands, preying upon the greedy and silencing the foolish. People stopped telling stories of the Ghanyr, because they stopped seeing him, in shadows and sands and scorn. That Khaesho, first among the Outcasts, relieved from his great and terrible secret, was outcast no more. He spoke the truth of the past before the queen and reveled in his true name; Thrask Ghanyr, brother to Rykhan the devourer. Rykhan had died long, long ago, in service of his own legend, and Thrask, kept alive by Kalokin's machinations, had haunted the sands for eons since. Rykhan had not been a murderer corrupted by the great demon's wickedness, but a martyr, who had sacrificed his own name and legacy to create a fearful legend which would feed his beloved Nikolak.

Thus freed from the chains of the past, he returned east to Appalachia to reunite with Shouyousei, and take courses in modern universities on mathematics, chemistry, physics, and computing, anything regarding the workings of the world had a place in his schedule, and his schedule was packed. Rumor had it that he did not sleep once for the two years he spent studying, but he had spent a thousand years kept awake by the ghosts of guilt, their voices finally silenced by the truth. A measly two years of studying the Machinations of The World was a paltry time for him.

And so it was that he began teaching a course himself, at a humble college in the town where everything started. It had an academic enough name, 'mechanics of the existence,' and the course itself covered a wide slew of mathematics applied to sciences. Gravity, Heat, Electromagnetism, and Light, among many other things, and it functioned as either a math or a science credit mostly for general studies courses. It was a normal enough class, save for a lecture he gave on the very first day of each semester.

He spoke about an optional lab for the class, worth no credit, but meant to deepen one's understanding of the world. This lab, without fail was scheduled at the shore of the nearby lake from 3-4 AM in the morning, and in class he told his students that they need only meet him there and wait, and they would be enlightened.

The first semester, nobody came, but even so, Khaesho held his nightly vigil at the shore, watching the stars turn. By the second, rumors had spread of this supposedly crazy teacher, the Naga with eyes in the back of his head, who always caught cheaters, who knew the moment you pulled out your phone, who privately reached out to help struggling students before they even knew they were in trouble. Everyone who put in any kind of effort passed Professor Scorpent's course, and that in and of itself drew the curious.

The second semester, he had a few people show up to his night-time vigil, but most of those only to see if the rumors were true. The japed, they laughed, and they left, and Professor Scorpent was labeled 'crazy' by the younger generation.

But there is peace and stillness in the night, and every now and then, someone came by his vigil. Students seeking peace. Students who needed to get away. Students in the midst of emotional collapse, who'd heard rumors that if they went to a certain place, at a certain time, he could help, and the stories from these meetings were as outlandish as they were commonplace. Those who found Professor Khaesho Scorpent alone on the shores of the lake in the dead of the night walked away telling stories of magic, and promised to teach it to those who believed.

The third semester, he was already on the shore when students began arriving early, and the crowd jeered, demanding a show, but the Naga appeared to not hear them, reclined in quiet meditation, waiting, for what, nobody knew, but he had insisted in his class that patience was necessary.

Eventually, the novelty wore out, and most of the crowd left. Those who'd come for a laugh, had it, and they walked away telling about how nothing had happened, and this was why the patience was needed. Disbelief is a powerful force of spirit, an act of magic in and of itself, and is key to why many magi were renowned for pride and ego, for the belief that an opponent's magic is harmless dampens the effects. An entire civilization's worth of disbelief was enough to make magic all but impossible, save for where their disbelief could not reach; remote places, wild places, secret places.

And with the disbelievers gone, there remained those who were uncertain. The desperate. The curious. The Truth Seekers, who seemed willing to wait to the dawn if only to understand why a Naga from the old myths was teaching at their college. To them, Khaesho taught magic. Not the barbaric stuff of the old world, no flinging fireballs and thunderbolts and brute force shifting of mountains. No, he taught them a magic unbound by knowledge of the past. He gave them no limits, told them naught of the boundaries, simply taught them how to exert their spirits into the world, and when the first student managed to shift a pebble on his own? The seal was broken. Curiosity became Belief, Belief became Power, and Power became Truth. Soon, all those gathered that first night were amateur casters, capable of moving their souls out into the world as energy.

These young minds naturally assumed that, for the professor teaching a physics course, they should view magic as an extension of physics, and so it was quite on accident that, with an understanding of physics greater than any naga of the old world, they broke many old boundaries of magic, created new spells never before dreamed of, and advanced the study of the arcane by centuries, all quiet on accident, mostly because an old naga knew better than to tell a curious mind 'no.'

Excitement is a contagion in its own right; the world was full of disbelief, still, but these young magi learned quickly that two believers could lift the weight of doubt from a single person, and show them magic. These new initiates, once convinced, of course wanted to learn how this magic was done, and if they could do such miracles. Magic spread like flame in its own right, lighting the new world alight just as it had kept the old world burning.

First it was a few students of his class. Then all of that one class. Then all of his classes. Then the whole college, then the whole town, but unbidden, All who Knew, understood not to talk about it on the internet. Not yet. To invite the gaze of the world was to invite the disbelief of a planet, and under such scrutiny even the greatest of magi would fail.

So magic spread in the old ways. Friend to friend. Traveler to host. Students from out of town carried Magic back home to their families, started fresh seeds amongst further towns, and faster than even Khaesho had thought possible, it spread to the point that it could no longer be kept hidden.

News reporters, historians, academics, diplomats, illusionists and their debunkers, all began flowing into a quiet college town in the mountains to interview The Naga from The Old World. He answered their questions politely and earnestly, but those who came seeking magic couldn't find it, for most carried a certainty of disbelief that could not be shaken, not with their cameras and microphones and doubt.

Liminal space is not bound by time, you see, and through the lens of a camera which captures a moment, a gifted mage can, for that moment, feel the weight of scrutiny of ever person to view that photo, that video, and the weight of that much disbelief is flattening. Even the two gods themselves, together with the three Strahz, could not shift their souls under such a weight.

But the box had been opened. Magic was spreading, touchstone, memetically, and those who'd interacted with it took to the internet with fervor, discussing their experiences. Eventually, the balance shifted, and magi managed to do magic on camera. Minor parlor tricks, things an illusionist could do, small moments shared among close circles, leaching out onto forgotten forums of the internet piecemeal. None have been able to track down what The First Video of magic was, but everyone noticed when acts of magic became commonplace. Magi went viral, the world opened its soul, and history changed for the better.

No longer bound by mechanical instruments, scientists cast their souls further and further down, into the smallest component pieces of existence, to directly observe phenomena which could never have been captured by such clumsy means as light bouncing off of objects. Understanding of circuits lead to the first Magitech, revolutionizing labor and convenience both, ushering in a new golden age of the arts and the arcane.

Having shepherded in a new age of understanding, and after a thousand years awake, the old naga found a place to rest deep in the caves he'd once called home. A mortal blessed by the lord of death might never truly die, but neither could he live. The world was too loud, too noisy, too -alive- and so cradled in the depths of the earth, wrapped in stone and memory, he went to sleep, and never woke up.

Many have gone searching for his chambers, or more aptly, for his tomb, but those who get close are warned back by death itself told that to go further is to invite peril. Those who press onwards seeking answers find exactly what they are looking for; the quiet realms of sleep, from which there is no return.

Shouyousei, on her part, became a diplomat. Kept hidden by storms and illusions for an eon, the lost nation of Naghant re-entered the world, her Queen stepping onto the world stage with all the grandiosity befitting the Glass-Crowned monarch of the Jeweled City of Ocala. Her people needed an envoy though, one sympathetic to the Naga people, yet well versed in the modern world, and they found that in Shouyousei. She facilitated the Naga re-entering the world, and helped them in shaking off the dust of the past... and there, she found the treasures greater than any jewel or coin.

In the bronze age collapse, much of civilized history was lost. Maps of nations, Mathematical treatises, great works of art and literature; modern historians could dig through the past only by sifting through the ashes of the Library Alexandria, digging up the bones of the dead and inferring on their lives. Here now, was a nation slithered clean out of the past, with copies of books and scrolls long thought lost forever.

The transition was not an easy one, nor a clean one, but here, her passion for the arts met its match, as she helped copies and transcriptions of the past meet archivists and historians of the present. Then too, once the initial shock had faded, she took up the brush and bow herself and experimented making new music; new styles for old melodies, new techniques for old canvases. Fueled by the deity of life, her inspiration was boundless, and she created art up until the moment her hands could no longer hold a brush.

For even a mortal blessed by the deity of life could not live forever, no, perhaps -because- she was blessed with life, for a rich life she lived, loving every moment, and filling every minute with the joy of creation, but it is the purpose of life to die. When she died, she died happily, in her sleep, at the stroke of midnight, where the day shifted, the seasons turned, and the old moves on to make way for the new.

A chapter closes. A story has its end. When I first wrote this story with Shou, it was an exploration of self, an attempt to understand who I was. When I started revising it into a novel, I had a curious idea; to start it with an epilogue, and end it with a prologue. I wanted to start it with the end of Khaesho's life in Naghant, and end it with a prologue for what new stories could yet come.

But that was many years ago. I have not spoken to Shou in five of them, I think. I wanted the Children of the Sun to be the first published work of a budding new author, I wanted to write forever about the things that brought me joy, until that thing turned sour with frustration and anguish.

I could not write the final chapter at first, because it hurt too much. I cannot write it now, because I am not who I was then. But... I never liked how I left things. Never liked the ramblings of a broken man, dreaming of what could have been. The characters deserved better. They deserved an end to their story. As it was then, so it is now; this is not the ending that I wanted to write, but finally, I am at least able to write the ending. So long, Goodbye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8YgpKLvGY

To any and all who've read to The End, your kind words have meant everything to me. I'll see you in the echoes, but probably not on the shelves. Thank you for believing in me.