Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Then Tao Tao, our Founder of the Homecoming, lifted her head off my shoulder. Fierce, wet-eyed, and completely herself, she said, ”Then we get very, very good at waiting. Together. We already learned how to carry grief without drowning. We’ll learn to carry hope, too. Same craft. You just point it at a different weight.” She glared around the fire like she was daring the universe to disagree. ”Su Yue waited a thousand years alone. We can wait a little longer, all of us, holding each other’s hands off the Homelight until it’s safe. That’s not a dark hour. That’s just love, being grown up about it. And we’re extremely good at love. It’s the whole thing we do.”

Mu Chen wore that tired, soft smile of his and told us that, really, he was right — the carrying-craft was never just for the heavy stuff like grief; you could teach your heart to hold any weight without drowning in it, hope included, longing included, the brutal nearness of what you want most included — and he’d start teaching it tomorrow, the whole world learning how to carry its own hope just like it’d learned to carry its own grief.

Yun Shu leaned into me, smelling like home, and whispered, ”It’s a worse soup. But you’re a better man than you were a month ago, and you held the world back today instead of letting it crush you, and I’ve decided that’s worth a bad bowl of soup.” She kissed the side of my head. ”Also, you’re going to bed. The floor’s got the night. The floor’s got every night now — that was the point, wasn’t it?”

Across the fire, the First Author hummed the dark’s lullaby. She studied her list — eleven thousand four hundred and one, with one name underlined and waiting right at the top of a fresh page, a name she’d get to bring home last and brightest of all, when it was finally safe, not one hour before — and she didn’t look restless. She looked like a woman who’d waited a thousand years already and finally realized that the waiting itself was just another kind of love.

We have a whole world to bring home, after all — and the one we love most is waiting in the cold at the top of the sky, and has asked us, for the world’s sake, not to hurry.

So we won’t. We’ll build the shore right. We’ll hold each other’s hands off the Homelight every night the whisper comes. And we will love the Lantern the hard way, the grown way, the way that waits — which is, it turns out, the last and hardest thing this tired world had left to learn.

A little longer. For them. We can do a little longer.