can you imagine the magicians giving queliot a happy ending tho? and everyone else too?
margo is high king of fillory and she tries her best to do right by the people she is responsible for and to make changes where they are necessary because she loves being king and she cares alot and she is good at it.
and alice takes over the library and turns it into an actual library? a place where all magical knowledge is collected and it is shared among people and taken care of. knowledge coveted as a precious resource that can do immense good and immense harmdepending on who wields it.
and she works together with penny40, who slowly but surely works to make some changes in the underworld.
and julia travels the worlds as a demigoddess. seeking new magic and helping people wherever she goes (quentin starts jokingly calling her the doctor, which julia objects to, but she still agrees to a doctor who marathon rewatch with q).
and kady tries to organize and build a network between the hedges so that they can organize and support each other better.
eliot helps her with that because if there is anyone who knows the dangers and downsides of magic in the hands of untrained or unchecked people it's kady and eliot. and maybe if they manage to build a system that doesn't rely so heavily on traditional and exclusionary institutions like brakebills they can prevent other people from having early experiences with magic like they had. maybe they can prevent a few people from losing their parents or losing themselves.
and quentin teaches classes at brakebills about minor mending and about how magic comes from pain, sometimes. but pain doesn't make you stronger because there is no inherent value in suffering and sometimes magic also comes from love or care or kindness. and he tries to turn brakebills a bit more into what he wanted it to be, not what it actually ended up being.
and between them they try their very best to make fillory, the library, the underworld, brakebills, magic, the systems the magical world operates in and the world as a whole into a slightly kinder and more functional place. and sometimes they succeed. and sometimes they don't. and sometimes they mess up and make things worse. and when that happens they always have someone to call for help.
and quentin and eliot live in a cozy, beautiful flat somewhere in new york. and a few years after the monster debacle their kitchen table is full of the paperwork they need to do to be able to adopt the children they want to raise together. and alice helped them with a spell to find a child with magical aptitude in the system because they might be able to raise and support a child with magic better than non-magical people would be able to do (and quentin worries what would happen if they raised a non-magical child around magicians. worries about that child feeling lost or left out). and they are both very nervous but also excited to start a family together. to get to have and chose this life with each other.
and in the evenings margo sometimes steps out of the clock standing in their living room and the three of them sit on the balcony for a few hours. eating food that eliot made, talking about everything or nothing, depending on the mood, watching the sun go down and paint the sky above new york yellow, orange, red, blue, black. feeling for a short while just a little bit lucky to be alive and so unbearably happy and glad to have each other and to get this life they are living.
