For everyone who kept walking. Even after the last painted sky fell. Even after the wide sky became familiar. Especially then.
"The sky was never the limit. It was the beginning of the question."
One last thing, before we begin.
We have been walking together for five books. The narrator — that is, the particular voice that has been with you since the painted sky town and the wide lands and the many voices and the silent stars and the shadow of fear — has tried, throughout, to be useful without being intrusive. To offer the occasional observation. To note, now and then, what Elias could not see about himself from the inside, because nobody can see themselves from the inside, which is one of the many reasons stories require narrators.
The narrator has watched this young man become a middle-aged man, which is the way of narrators and of time.
He is forty-two years old now. He has been walking since he was sixteen, which is twenty-six years, which is — even accounting for the occasional stop — a very considerable distance.
He has not finished walking.
He is not going to finish, in the way you might expect. This is not that kind of story, and the narrator will not pretend otherwise.
What lies ahead — in the chapters that follow — is not a destination. It is something closer to what happens when a person who has been looking at the light for a very long time begins to understand not just that the light is there, but what the light actually is.
The narrator will, in this last book, mostly stay out of the way.
The story knows where it is going.
This is the last book.
But the last book of a series about wonder cannot end with a period.
It can only end with the widest possible opening — a door left ajar, a horizon dissolving into something unnamed, a pilgrim still moving, still curious, still alive to the possibility that what waits ahead is not less than what came before but infinitely, quietly, lovingly more.
What follows is the record of a man at the edge of everything he has learned, standing at the place where all his knowing becomes, again, not-knowing — and discovering that not-knowing, held with warmth and without fear, is the oldest form of prayer.
Read slowly.
The sky is very large.