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Epilogue




The primeval forest of Arden, as it once was, with large trees, crowded close. Upon the ground the three spinners sit, working the threads of life. Amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost appears and solidifies.


The three Fates spin beneath the trees of a forest, outside time and space. “

So the king has got his crown,” the youngest one says.

“And the queen’s web is spun,” the middle one says.

“And the traitor’s round is done,” says the oldest one.

She holds in her hand a dark thread, through which a vein of pure gold runs, and holds her scissors poised over it. A sigh makes her tremble. “And yet it is a pity to waste such thread. This stuff is hard to come by in this debased age. And a magic thread thus bequeathed by an ancestor full of power . . . .”

“It is illusion,” the middle one said. “Merlin never was.”

The younger one fingers the thread. “And yet, here’s the gold, here’s the vein of truth and the power and the word.”

“What would you do with it?” the oldest one asks, lifting her head.

A little ways away, amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost stands, immaterial, and yet possessed of Marlowe’s charm as we first saw it—his clothes are impeccably clean and the best cut, and he looks like a man on his way to a fashionable assembly. His ghost has both his eyes, both full of myrth.

A slow smile molds to his lips, and expands, into something like mischievous intent. He walks forward, charming, confident, his mincing step all that could be expected of such a London dandy, a protégé of noblemen, the toast of theatergoers.

“Give the words to the poet,” he says. “Let my words live on, even if another must write them. I bequeath my poetry and the power in it to William Shakespeare of Stratford. Let anyone find fault with that.”

On those words, the old woman cuts through the thread with her sheers.

Marlowe laughs. A small ghost appears beside his—a child who looks much like Marlowe, and who wears a miniature version of Marlowe’s velvet suit.

“Will you tell me a story now, Kit?” the child asks.

“Of course, Imp.” Marlowe extends his hand to the small boy, who takes it. “I have eternity to tell you stories.” Together, they walk away, growing fainter as they walk.

Marlowe’s voice comes from a long ways away. “There was once a King, and he had an only son . . . .”

“Humans,” the maiden mutters to herself, and joins the spun gold to a white thread. “The livelong day I’ll never understand them. Treacherous as the serpent and kind as the dove, full of bitter hatred and sudden, mild love.”

“Humans are as they must be,” the matron says. “And we as we are, that from their minds are born and control their fate only in this small degree.”

“Everything that was will be again.”

“Humans are all that is, and their heart our reign,” the crone completes. The thread measured out upon her lap is now white, but through it shines a single strand of pure gold.

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Framed