Hope awoke in transition for the second time, only the memory of the first quickly faded from her memory along with everything that had come after. She was back in Mystic Falls. She thought she was. She was actually inside a cage and she was starving. Malivore. He thought he could starve her in there, keep her from feeding, keep her from completing her transition into the Tribrid. He underestimated her. She did escape, just in time to save Dr. Saltzman from the student Malivore had turned into a dragon, barely in time to take the vein he offered her and drink. The sky crackled ominously, as if she hadn’t been aware enough of what a mystical freak show she was. She’d never wanted any of this, but fate had come knocking and here she was. She had to end this, no matter what.
Hunting Malivore was a little bit fun. She could admit that. There was definitely a part of her that wanted to make him suffer a little, make him pay for the things he’d done. For Raf, for Landon. Most of all for Landon. And then suddenly he Landon, the boy she loved, but it became pretty apparent that there were no choices left here. She and Landon both knew it. To kill Malivore, she had to kill him. That would have been true, anyway, even if this had still been the monster inhabiting his body and not him.
Hope never would have consciously chosen to flip her humanity switch, not knowing the kind of havoc a regular vampire could wreak with their humanity off and definitely not knowing how much worse she would be capable of. She hadn’t chosen it, but damn if it didn’t feel like freedom. For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t grieving. She wasn’t feeling all the survivors' guilt that came with having lost so many people. It was a breath of fresh air, but it couldn’t last. Her humanity started to creep in slowly, gett8ng louder and louder. Ironic that it was a talisman she’d made that hempd it along and helped her come back to herself. The weight of the new guilt was staggering and she couldn’t believe how many people forgave her for all the terrible things she’d done, but she was grateful. And she was just in time to save all of them from the wrath of a god who wanted to kill her and probably everyone else, too.
They shouldn’t have gotten through it as easily as they had, but it wasn’t without more loss. Ethan, Aurora, she couldn’t say if their deaths had been worth it, but at the end of the day, the school and her found family were safe and Hope was left with the next big decision: where to scatter her father’s ashes. What she wasn’t expecting was that Landon would become the new Ferryman between Limbo and Peace and arrange one last message from her father, himself. Somehow, it was exactly what she’d needed and she was almost at peace as she finally scattered his remains in the place that had become her home.
She was standing in the courtyard a not long later, greeting the newest group of students when everything shifted again. Suddenly, she was standing in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge. Memories flooded her mind instantly as she quickly moved out of the path of traffic. The phone in her pocket buzzed with day-old alerts and she pulled it out, skimming through worried texts from friends before her eyes landed on the alert she’d dreaded for months.
Her dad was gone. Caroline, too. She was back and she was alone.