On the lip of the Abyss we strove and strove with our enemies.

Some might have slept, in the pauses of that long tale. I'm not sure how they managed it. For days we fought, waiting for the Jewel, waiting for the tide to turn. The storms began, and reality shifted around us, and still we did not have Corwin with us.

A pageant of numinous things bore Oberon's coffin and Dworkin's after it.

Brand came upon us from the distance. He had a patch over one eye and evaded every blade that tried to strike him. Fiona finally caught him, by the web of strange forces flying from her hands. He parried with sorceries of his own, shouting that she still had designs upon the Universe, that her treachery had kept Oberon from repairing the Pattern. Neither of them was exactly a reliable narrator.

Fiona's sorceries drove him back, back, until at the very lip of the Abyss he put his hand to Werewindle and a blast of light went out from him. It caught Fiona and then there was nothing where she had been but a shower of sparks.

Bleys gave a shout of rage and charged for his brother. I will never know if his tackle were misaimed, or whether he chose to give his life to take Brand down with him. They fell.

The battle went on. The forces of Chaos were relentless. Benedict, at the head of Amber's armies, finally fell in battle; a thing of Chaos struck him from his horse, and his eyes did not open again. Perhaps three days, perhaps many more days, he had been commanding tirelessly. I took his place then.

Finally, Martin came to us, through the wild winds of change and the seas of Time. He bore the Jewel glittering red around his neck, and had a strange light in his eyes.

"It fell to me," he said. "Oberon's last contingency plan. The universe is a different place now. I will have to explain later. Right now, we must survive the storms...."

The worst of them came, and he sheltered us.

The things of Chaos remained outside. They had their own defenses; they could survive the rapid shifts in gravity, the sudden lack of air, heat and cold, the alterations of their timestreams.

When the storm passed we had a few days of detente. They were too busy re-forming themselves to fight. Dara and Merlin, who stood among us still, spent a long while in conference with Martin.

Merlin would return with us to Amber, Amber as it had become. Dara parted ways with us there, to rejoin her kind. The Black Road was gone, and shadow itself re-made. The way to Amber was closed to the children of Chaos and their vendettas, and the better for it. They bore us not small animosity.

And as for us... No longer were we the descendents of the Pattern-maker.

Try rather aunts and uncles and a stray father. We faced a new universe in which we were at least partially obsolete. I wished for Benedict to lead us. I would have wished for Corwin, but had made my peace with that long ago. I hoped Corwin had made his peace with it, too, before the end.

Corwin and Caine and Fiona and Bleys and Brand and Benedict and Eric... The war, in its entirety, took more than half of us. Some of the best and some of the worst. I wondered what that made me. I would have to find out.