The Watchtower

just then, deeper than any she’d experienced in all the centuries she’d lived. And that was to live out her life in a harmonious relationship with Will.
    She had missed him terribly while she’d been away from him, missed him so that every drop of her immortal blood, every pore of her unaging skin, felt incomplete. Yet that intense ache was nothing compared to the ecstasy she’d been feeling since their reunion. These emotions combined now to forge a terrible yet thrilling imperative: she must make herself mortal, so that she could be with him more fully and more naturally than up until now.
    Belonging to different classes of beings was always going to be a barrier between them. It would spark fights that could lead to the end of their relationship. And trying to make Will immortal was too risky. The forces that needed to be unleashed could kill him. Marguerite would be better able to withstand them, transforming in the opposite direction. If they later decided they needed immortality, they could avail themselves of the kind everyone else did: having children. She shivered with pleasure at that thought, in the moonlit darkness of the room. The corners of Will’s mouth in sleep seemed to turn up slightly, in a smile, as if he were dreaming her thoughts. Yes, they were soul mates. That was a kind of forever time itself could never match.
    Marguerite saw that she had no choice but to turn mortal, saw it with the same clarity those who gazed into the pool at Paimpont without deceit received. She would go to the pool and wrestle with Morgane for the portal reentry Marguerite believed to be her entitlement. Reentry might happen on the shore, or underwater—in the air—it might require a simple plea, or a thousand hours of arguing. But it would happen. She had made up her mind.
    Marguerite took one last look at the room in which they had spent so much of their reunion, a room that she could see, even with the moon behind clouds, had taken on a blood-lit glow. As if her decision to become mortal had a life force, one so fierce that it had excited the atoms in the room to primordial red heat. The glow was like a marker, she thought, delineating her long past life from her much shorter, but much more fulfilling, life to come. She kissed Will on the forehead and made her way down to the pool.
    *   *   *
    The thing that frightened Marguerite the most about summoning her sister from the pool was Morgane’s ability to change her shape. She could emerge from the water as a mermaid with a monstrous face, or as a hummingbird, or as a fire-spitting dragon. The one option Marguerite was reasonably certain Morgane would not choose was to appear as herself, the sister she had grown up with in their immemorial past. It would create too much intimacy and connection.
    The last time Marguerite had seen her, anguish had serrated Morgane’s features upon her learning of their sister Maeve’s demise in war. They were the most agonized expressions Marguerite had ever seen on a human, or nearly human, face. She didn’t anticipate anything like them now, but she suspected Morgane would not receive her request to leave their family’s tradition kindly. Nor the reason for it.
    As she prepared to kneel, overlooking the pool, a crackling sound from the woods behind her made her whirl around. She stared into the dark forest that rose steeply from the shore, using all her preternatural senses to detect an intruder, but the sense she got from the forest was ambiguous. She felt some kind of presence—or presences —but no threat. She felt as though some benevolent being might be watching over her. Almost as if some sister of the Watchtower had come to aid her in her quest. But that couldn’t be. Of her sisters, Maeve lay dead in a tomb in the Val sans Retour, Melusine haunted a castle hundreds of miles from here, and Morgane lay beneath the pool. And no one would call her benevolent. No, it must have been her overwrought imagination.
    She tried to relax, body and spirit. It was useless to focus on the enormity of what she was attempting. That would make her do nothing. She relaxed until she could feel her spirit assume wings and begin to glide along the predawn sky directly above, as if looking down at and watching over her. When she could see from that lofty vantage point and gaze calmly into the pond, she felt at peace, whole. She had unified different parts of her being. She could speak to Morgane.
    “Beloved sister, it’s me,