Gill and Rosabel’s ending: Fairytale love

It’s not an easy thing to rebuild a life, let alone dozens of lives. Lives ensnared, enslaved, uprooted, dragged away into the timeless gloom of another world. For the people of Hollowstone, awakening from their long and confusing dream, the reality of their situation is not easy to face.

The fey, to their credit, do their part. Satyrs, chastened and a little sheepish, and treants, stolid, inscrutable and tireless, help to move goods and people back through the portal. On the other side, the abandoned village shows the signs of neglect; time, weather, wild animals and looters have all continued while the usual inhabitants were away.

But Hollowstone is a village of builders, and putting things back together is second nature. While Rosabel tends to a bevy of injuries, and to a number of village women now facing mystery pregnancies, Gill does his bit lifting, carrying, building, quarrying. Weeks slip by, and in the flow the everyday it’s easy to forget just how damn weird things got for a while back there.

There are reminders, of course. True to her word, Sylvia has opened up the Valley to travel once again, and even once the great migration is over, mortals and fey continue to come and go between the two realms. Drawn by curiosity, some sense of atonement, odds forms of trade – and, as the swirling rumours would have it, plenty of sex.

But Gill has no need for other worlds, or for fey lovers. He has everything he needs. He and Rosabel laugh to swap the stories of how each almost told the other how they felt, time and time again, until fate’s strange sense of humour finally threw them into each other’s arms. And for all that Gill has craved a sense of belonging and acceptance in the village his whole life, he finds that such thoughts no longer trouble him. One woman’s acceptance is enough.

There are still mornings when Gill wakes up and wonders if it was all a dream. If it was just his fantasy, yet unfulfilled. But it doesn’t last long, since he wakes up next to his beloved wife, and she remains wonderfully real.