Two Years Later

Once the South Ward had been largely rebuilt -- and with better, safer housing for everyone -- Nel moved once more to a townhouse by the docks with her children, Mia, and Mia's toddler. Bogdan stayed with Msr. Bocouse and they were married shortly before the move.
 
The house wasn't as grand as the manor, but it was big enough that the children could all be no more than two to a room, and it was warm, safe, and as clean as a house with four children and a toddler could be kept. They attended the now-flourishing South Ward Public School.
 
Transforming the South Ward involved some delicate and deliberate steps to make certain that the changes really did benefit the poor who lived there, rather than making it a place where middle and upper class people found desirable and pushed the poor further out -- but the leaders of the South Ward -- especially among the Labor Guild, Domestics Guild, and with Captain Parr and the Rooks, made sure that it happened. Between careful quality building following Vera's housing's example, Ottilie's eletech heating, and the great many community gardens established by the community members with help from Muse, Nita, Nel, Jearyn, and many, many others, it was no longer an inevitability that the winters would claim lives in the South Ward.
 
Captain Parr did, in fact, accept Nel's application to become a ROOK, and after about a year of planning and working with the justice system, Nel piloted Novandria's first diversion program -- offering people arrested for crimes of survival, whether Syndicate members forced into their work or just people stealing to eat or afford medicine, immediate assistance, membership and training in the guilds, and a chance to avoid both the lash and prison by doing volunteer work in their communities to help repair the harm they caused. Most, in doing so, found that it felt good.
 
The Syndicate remained, but as the community members became empowered rather than desperate, their power over the South Ward waned and leaving the organization was no longer a death sentence. It worked well for both the South Ward and the Syndicate. Average citizens were no longer terrorized and local businesses no longer had to pay protection, and the the new Syndicate leadership was replaced with someone handpicked by Valistad--a thief who did crime, but was not cruel, and who knew that an organization full of unwilling participants is a doomed organization.
 
The guild application loan program grew and expanded, offering loans to start small businesses, pay university fees, and other needful things at low interest rates. Little by little the South Ward began to thrive.
 
Nel stayed close with her parents, for whom she bought the townhouse next door, and with her beloved friends and family in both Novandria and Unatha. She was a frequent visitor with Nita, Muse, and their families at the Meadows, at the new home shared by Sareena, Victor, Arinelle, Elsinore, Bocuse, Bogdan, and others, and at the new home that Bella, Zayn, and their children shared, as well as with the Esches, Valistad and Jearyn, Gregor, Seraphina and her family, and everyone to whom she had grown close in the course of saving the world.
 
She watched her children grow, and took in more as needed -- though with fewer deaths in the South Ward, more children grew up with the parents and the need was less.
 
It was not a perfect life and it was not free of stress, pain, or hard times, but it was full of love and meaning, it was free, and it was good.