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endbook rogue 4 1 2
The day that Tin Man left Kazdel, Nymph and the other Storytellers went outside the city to see him off.
The dream seemed to linger in them; none knew what to say at a time like this. They stared at each other under the sun, and the workers moving stone on the walls laughed at them during break time for standing out here on such a hot day.
It was Tin Man who broke the silence. He shows off his newly-bought knit shirt, with a mini Soul Furnace embroidered on the chest. Nymph is impressed by his metal body's heat dissipation capability, while Crownie recognizes the shirt as being from her stall. At the end of the farewell, Nymph presents a gift on behalf of the group, a box of 'potato fries' sculpted using scrap Oriron from the Great Furnace. Tin Man laughs and says being a box of fries wouldn't be so bad, if he had never found an appropriate body.
'Farewell. I'll be back once my work in Columbia is done. I just hope I'll still recognize Kazdel by then.' Tin Man lights a pipe and walks into the wilderness. The three 'Tin Friends' on his shoulder snatch his hat and play catch with it in the air.
A month later, Qalaiša left without telling anyone.
There is a box and a letter where the hut used to be. The box was filled with ointments and a single garland. The witchcraft on the garland had been removed, but it remains beautiful. In the letter, Qalaiša asked Nymph to bring the ointments to the Nachzehrer soldiers working on the new plate outside the city. She had officiated funerals for their fallen comrades, and the ointment soothes the pain the survivors suffer from their rotting skin.
At the end of the letter, she asked Nymph to forgive her abrupt departure, for she did not want to experience the awkwardness of Tin Man's farewell again. She believed that the secret to soothing the pain of the Nachzehrer awaited her in Sami, but would continue to look toward Kazdel from the wind and snow.
Nymph had returned to the Great Furnace to tell the revenants more stories, and the symptoms of Furnace Syndrome had faded, but reading the letter put tears in her eyes. Crownie comforted her by saying that she could always visit Sami in the furnace while telling stories to the ancestors.
In time, the Soul Furnace's renovation was completed, and the revenants left. Crownie once again packed her luggage; this time, she is really leaving.
The Storytellers once again gathered under the walls to see their friend off. The walls were now fitted with brand-new Arts defense units, and there were no longer any workers to laugh at them. Nymph grabbed Crownie's sleeves and cried, 'The ancestors have gone, and now you too!'
Crownie pins a rose-shaped hairpin on Nymph's head, and places a garnet necklace around her neck. She steps backward twice, takes a good look, and smiles. 'Don't cry. I'm really proud of this work, but it only goes well with a smiling face.'
No longer was Crownie seeking the legendary lost city. She had brought her designs, and was planning to apply to be a designer at the sportswear brand. She was not afraid of failure, she said; she still had her souvenir business in Kazdel, after all. The city was changing by the day. It might not be long before tourists started flocking here.
And indeed, there were new faces in Kazdel soon after Crownie left. Not tourists, though, but Infected of all races who moved in from the settlement outside the city. There was enough space for new accommodations, and the expanded vertical farms could feed more people. Even the ashes of the furnace nodes had more potatoes in them. Pohl told Nymph that this was how every prosperous city was: people come, and people go. Kazdel was not yet prosperous, but who knows what could happen tomorrow?
Nymph had planned to ask Mudrock when she was planning to leave, but left the question unasked when she saw the rows of houses behind Mudrock, and vegetables growing in the soil of the gardens beside them. She gave Mudrock a big box of protective gear, which Crownie had sent through Penguin Logistics.
'What should we do now? Do we stay or leave?' Nymph asks Pohl, as she helps him load his belongings onto a cart heading towards the new employee housing next to the Rhodes Island office.
Instead of answering, Pohl takes a booklet full of numbers from the cart and points out a few figures. New seeds had just been planted, and the previous season's crops had yet to be harvested, but mortality rates among the elderly were down significantly from previous years, because there was enough food and water to go around. The decrease in the overall percentage of the elderly was instead because more and more young people were coming to Kazdel, who were not only self-sufficient, but also helping to make the city a better place.
She turns around to look at the Great Furnace. It does not appear any different from how it used to be, before the revenants left, but Amnannam burns quietly within. Energy flows from the furnace into the pipelines, and towards the furnace nodes. In the flickering flames, Nymph could sense the breath of the city, a city that never stops growing. Her bloodline is as resilient as it is ancient.
It is a city that has many exciting new stories to tell.
