Epilogue

Once, there was a girl on the cusp of womanhood who lived on a tropical island near the earth’s equator. The island smelled of monsoon rain and honeysuckle, of fish markets and incense, of a hundred spices whose names she knew by heart, where she sucked juice from pineapples and nibbled pieces of lianwu. She went on a voyage that would span many seas, but before her journey was complete, her ship would find itself lost and broken near another island—one where the mysterious thing called magic still ran strong.

There, she met a goblin prince who helped her find the answer to her mother’s strange disappearance.

The girl did not find her mother. She did find a friend. Perhaps importantly, she refound her father.

When the girl’s father (and her two aunts and her uncle) boarded the repaired ship once more, the girl, no—young woman—gave the goblin a parting embrace, before stepping aboard the vessel, too. She and her family would travel on to their destination in a much different country than the one the woman knew. But there she sought to rebuild a life—one upon which she stood with her father, hand in hand for the first time in their lives.

As the ship departed, the young woman looked to the goblin island, where stood the friend she had made. He looked back at her. A nod of understanding passed between them. The distance between them grew, measured in time and salt water, but something invisible remained—a thread spun from shared grief and unlikely friendship.

One day, perhaps, they might meet again.