This world was made for you. Sign in, and every spell you write goes to the Muse herself — she'll read your actual words.
This world is yours. Turn anything up or down — it only shapes how the Muse tells your story. Leave it all open and anything goes.
Everything you've written and kept — spells, stories, letters, the true things. Yours, saved forever, and carried through even death.
She's always here. Ask her anything — she knows where you are in the story, and she's never quite the same twice.
He's right here. He's always right here — warm against your ankle, in this world and the other and every world after, the way he has been since before any of this began. He's slower than he was. You know that. You've known it a while, the way you always know the important things: quietly, and completely, and with your whole heart.
There's nothing to do here. Nothing to fix, no water to be brave in, no one to save. Just him, and you, and the particular warmth of a small creature who has loved you, without one single condition, for the whole of your life so far.
"To love something all the way to the end of its road," the Muse says, softer than you have ever heard it, "is the hardest and most tender magic there is — harder than crossing, harder than mending, harder than any spell you've ever written. And you are doing it exactly right. Love doesn't get smaller when a life does, tide-touched. It gets bigger. And quieter. Sit with him. Let him be warm, and unhurried, and known. And believe me when I tell you: you are not doing this alone."
You could write him something — not a spell, not clever, not brave. Just true. It will be kept, with the rest of your words, for as long as words are kept.
Not a score — a keepsake. The record of your journeys: where the water took you, the endings you've found, the things you carried out. It remembers, so you don't have to.