Chapter XXII: Sumarana, Where it All Began
Just as Cédes, Stefi, and Rhaka had planned, the Otsukuné ran the two freshly signed documents back to Mafouras right away. He returned just before nightfall, bearing news of what was now taking place.
Apparently it took Richo several minutes to fully comprehend what he was reading, his face acting as an indicator, growing redder as he read. Stefi could’ve sworn she heard his angry yelling from where they stood.
On the plus side, Pheia had convinced her brother and his men to stay for a while and aid in the reconstruction and future defense of Mafouras, the perfect cover to continue her search for Sohei, who, along with her friends, hadn’t been seen for some time.
“Where is there left to go?” Stefi asked. She already knew the answer. Arolha Se-Baht.
“We are close to Sumarana, are we not?” Cédes said.
“Come to think of it, yes,” Stefi said, only just now realizing. “About three days away.”
“Only if we take your original route here,” Sansonis said. “I’ve been there before. The main road is a little winding. We can make the trip a little quicker if that’s what you want, to check things back home.”
For some reason she hadn’t given returning home much thought, thinking, unconsciously, that she never would; this had only been reinforced by Cédes’s news that they were doomed to failure no matter what. Of course, now that she thought about it, it would be nice to see how her mother was doing. Her father, not so much. Still, he was family, so she felt she ought to.
The next second she felt a terrible stab of pain, remembering Maya’s behavior before they had left home. The ferret had checked his stashes before leaving. Now they would wait forever, for an owner who would never return to make sure a few meager yet precious possessions remained untouched.
“We’ll go,” she said at last, “if that’s all right with everyone.”
“It would,” Cédes said, “be an honor to meet your parents.”
“If they don’t try to hand you in for a reward.”
“This,” Stefi said as they at last left the forest two days later, “is Sumarana. My home.”
Night had fallen several hours before, yet the Fieretka had pressed on, all hampered by the darkness except Cédes. Once they emerged from the forest, hungry and chilled after falling into a deep stream, the lights twinkling behind windows warmed their spirits. In the distance the snowy mountains glowed in the moonlight, appearing as if they were draped in white linen. A dome of deep blue scattered with countless points of light loomed overhead, the stars so close Ifaut even tried to reach out and grab one. The only clouds were wisps of pleasant wood smoke bearing hints of macrocarpa and pine.
“There is something in the air,” Cédes said, sniffing along with Ifaut. “Something ancient and reassuring, something I cannot quite place.”
“Yeah,” Sansonis agreed. “Don’t you think the stars look closer here, dad?”
“Yes,” Rhaka agreed. “And their number appears greater. Most curious.” His eyes sparkled with childlike wonder.
“It smells…” Ifaut began, then trailed off into several minutes of silence. They politely waited, shivering, for her to continue. Just when everyone thought she’d unsurprisingly lost her train of thought, she suddenly whispered, “Peaceful.”
Now that Stefi thought about it, there was something about Sumarana, something she’d only grown to appreciate after traveling across Feregana. “Traveling,” she mused aloud, “isn’t about discovering new places. It’s about discovering home.”
“Wise observation,” Cédes said, teeth chattering as she hugged herself. “Now, if it is all right, may we go to your home and discover warmth?”
“Oh, of course.” She pulled herself from her thoughts, thinking, just for a minute, she heard a voice from the forest.
My son… Where is he?
Stefi rapped the door with her knuckles three times, all the while making sure her companions didn’t stand out. Ifaut had hidden her ears beneath another straw hat Cédes had thought to take in Mafouras, while the pale Furosan concealed her features beneath the hood of her robes. Sansonis decided to forgo any disguise, reassured by Stefi saying that she had been friends with a Kalkic–Adnamis of all people–as a child. Her parents would understand, she said. Rhaka, meanwhile, was content to sit around the back by Stefi’s bedroom window, drinking in the new stars.
“Yeah? What ya want?” A bleary face greeted them, peering around the door and smelling of stale beer and cigarette smoke.
“To come in,” Stefi said with surprising firmness. “I live here, don’t I?”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called from the kitchen.
“The girl!” Stefi’s father shouted back. “And a buncha weirdoes. What’ve you gone and done now?” he said to Stefi, all the while glowering at Sansonis. “Oh god, this bloody Kalkic hasn’t gone and knocked you up, has he?”
“No, you idiot,” Stefi shouted, hitting the door. “Now can my friends and I come in or not?”
“Let them in!” came Stefi’s mother’s voice again.
Her father reluctantly agreed, opening the door wide and moving aside as Stefi and her three friends, Gemmie tucked up sleeping in her shirt, stepped in. All the while he muttered something about Stefi joining a cult and getting “knocked up”, an expression that baffled Ifaut and Cédes.
“It was she who knocked the door,” Ifaut hissed. “Strange man.”
“Stefi!” A woman flew from the kitchen, nearly knocking over a lamp in her haste as she seized her daughter. “Where have you been? The note said a few days but it’s been weeks! I thought you’d… we thought you’d… died!” She turned to her husband, who had skulked back into an armchair and spread a newspaper before him, hoping to shield out this unwelcome intrusion. Sansonis noted the headline with bitter amusement: Church of Kardin in disarray. Furosans to blame?
“No, I’m fine,” Stefi said, struggling against her mother’s crushing embrace. “These are my friends, if they’re allowed to stay a while. Sansonis, Stacia, and her granny, Mrs.…”
“Call me Serena, ma’am,” Cédes rasped in a very passable impression of someone four times her age. “You have a fine young daughter. She’s been staying with me in Bandārun for some time, helping with the farm. These other two are workers too.”
“Time just flew by,” Stefi said. “I must’ve forgotten to write.”
“Quite all right,” her mother gushed. “I’m just glad my Stefi’s fine.” Then, noticing their wet clothing, she herded them into the small kitchen. “Come on, come on, sit by the range, you’re all soaked.” She pulled the four chairs from the kitchen table and positioned them in front of a huge, ancient coal range before placing a kettle on to boil.
Once they were all settled before the radiating warmth, she hurried off to prepare somewhere to sleep in Stefi’s room, leaving them alone.
“I like her,” Cédes said, using her normal voice. “Very kind, like her daughter.”
“Dad seems a bit grouchy, though,” Ifaut said, and was elbowed a second later by Sansonis.
“Always has been,” Stefi said, sighing deeply. Warm, the promise of her own bed, her mother once more fussing over her only daughter… So why didn’t it feel like home? It was the same coal range she had often sat before, reading, cooking, seeking protection from the cold. Same gruff dad, same mum. But something was missing. As she rearranged a sleeping Gemmie her hand bumped against a small glass bottle in her pocket. She pulled it out. It contained a gray powder, and its top was sealed with a cork and wax.
“We’re back,” she whispered.
No one said anything. Even Ifaut knew it was best to leave her for a while.
“We made it back.” Stefi blinked heavily and left her tears unchecked. “We’re home.”
“Beds are ready!” Stefi’s mother rushed back into the kitchen. “And so is the kettle. Who wants tea?”
Stefi turned away, concealing both Maya’s ashes and her sadness. She d
idn’t want tea. All she wanted was sleep. And the two friends she had lost by her side.
Stefi woke with a start from a dreamless sleep, not knowing why. It took her a few minutes to realize she was back home in her room, that everything was all right. Blue moonlight slanted through her window, illuminating Sansonis and Ifaut sleeping on an old mattress, while Cédes twitched next to her bed upon a thick mat, deep in sleep.
She dismissed the sudden awakening and rolled over to go back to sleep. But she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something had woken her.
Just as she closed her eyes she glimpsed a silver light out her window and gave up all hope of going back to sleep anytime soon. Moonlight? No, she thought, it couldn’t be; it was moving steadily towards the house from the forest, too purposed to be mere moonlight scattered by the trees.
It drew closer, wandering an irregular path as if searching for something. Whatever it was, Stefi couldn’t tell. Its silver glow obscured any features
Almost without noticing she got up and crossed to the window, pressing her face against the cold glass. Her breath left a fog much like the one now rising from the trees. She wiped it away as whatever the thing was came ever closer. She felt calm, almost at peace. Then perhaps it wasn’t a ghost. Not that she really believed in them, anyway.
Where is my son? I cannot find him… The voice came so suddenly that Stefi whirled around to face her bedroom. Nothing. She could’ve sworn that voice, the one she’d first heard years before and most recently just the previous evening, had come from right behind her. But there was nothing. Only her sleeping friends.
She turned back to face the light. It had gone. A shiver ran through her, chilling her body with the eeriness of whatever had just happened.
Hello, Stefi.
She let out a frightened squeal and turned to face the bed again. There, sitting upon it, was the source of the silvery light. As her eyes adjusted to the glow of silver-strained starlight, she just made out a small ferret-like form, smaller than Gemmie and Maya, barely more than a kit.
“Who are you?” she whispered, not so she wouldn’t wake her friends, but because her voice refused to come out of hiding.
I’m just like you, the ferret said. Long ago I too sought to wander the world to help those dear to me. He–at least Stefi thought it was a male–ambled about the bed like any other ferret might, sniffing and curiously stuffing his head under mounds of blankets.
Propelled by the same dream, he continued, though in search of a different goal. Life and Death, Dream and Awakening, they’re not so different, are they?
“Uh… No?” Stefi answered, not sure what else to say. She sat on the bed next to the ferret. His aura bathed her in a cool light.
Remember me?
“No, not really.”
Not surprising. It was I who spoke to you when your consciousness briefly Awoke in Alzandia, when you touched the being of Raphanos.
The memory of that time came hurtling back, of the star that had streaked past telling her it was returning. “That was you?”
Yes.
“But, not meaning to be rude, who exactly are you?”
A ferret of Sumarana, discoverer of the Rainbow Bridge across which all souls must someday traverse. The First Fieretsi, if you will.
Stefi didn’t move, her mind frozen in shock, still not comprehending what the ferret had said. Another Fieretsi like her? But he was just a ferret. Or had been long ago. Now he seemed so much more.
You look confused, and rightly so, he continued. Understandable. I spent most of my life confused, wandering Feregana in search of a bridge that a dream told me to find.
“And you found it, didn’t you?”
Yes. The ferret’s voice suddenly became tired. Sad. All across Feregana I looked and found nothing. At long last I came back home to Sumarana. It had been here all along. I just couldn’t see it through naïve eyes. No, sometimes the only way to find something so utterly hidden is to first find that you know nothing.
“Then… is that what I’m supposed to do too? Find this Rainbow Bridge? What about Arolha Se-Baht?”
The Rainbow Bridge still remains, though its time grows short. As for Arolha Se-Baht, or Iferona as it is also known, you will never reach its shores alive.
“Why not?” she asked, her eyes growing wide.
You will die before then. The ferret’s voice suddenly grew colder and Stefi shivered, drawing her blanket up and around herself.
It brings me no joy to tell you this, but everything you know is as if a lie, a dream, a figment of the waking world. The purpose of the Final Fieretsi is not to follow the path of the others, or indeed my own. Her purpose is to Awaken every ferret from the dream, to find the Dark Bridge from Dream to Awakening, to lead every ferret across its span and so end this fallen Feregana.
“No!” she said. She felt numb, barely able to speak or move, every limb bereft of feeling, her mind drowning in confusion. “I can talk to ferrets, to Feregana, I’m here to save them!”
I only wish that were true, the ferret said. How often have you had a wonderful dream and regretted waking up?
“Often,” Stefi admitted, seeing at last what the ferret was trying to say. “You mean, even the best dream must be awoken from at some point?”
Precisely. Crepusculum’s ferrets, the elementals, Lady Serena, all have been dreaming this world for a very long time. They must wake up some time, and you are the only one who can let them find peace from this collective dream at long last.
“Dream this, dream that,” she said, mumbling into her blanket. “Do you mean it’s literally a dream?” She wanted to ask about his mention of Serena–the false name Cédes had called herself–as well, but figured he would answer in good time. Maybe when he at last revealed his own name.
Yes, it is. A dream like you have in sleep. The Crepusculan ferrets dream of Feregana, a better past for their shattered world where things may have turned out differently. A dream perhaps no more real than yours.
“Oh, god.” The walls of reality seemed to collapse about her, trapping her beneath the rubble of impossibility. She only hoped this silvery being could save her before she died. “It feels real,” she said, barely audible, and stroked her arm. Every fine hair brushed beneath her fingertips, the skin gave way ever so slightly at her push, her rapid heartbeat pulsed through the blue veins in her wrist. “How can it be just a dream?”
A collective dream. You are not truly “real”, and neither are your sensations, your feelings. He looked to her face and seemed sad. Regretful of what he was saying, even. Neither are your tears.
“Or you,” she said as a flood of emotion choked her throat.
I know.
“Then why? Why are we here? What’s the point if we’re not real?” Her voice rose into a shout, climbed into a scream. “Why even bother if we don’t exist and all this is a lie? Why? Why? WHY!”
For that you must ask Lady Cédes, the ferret replied calmly.
Indeed, the Furosan began to stir, roused by Stefi’s frenzied cries.
No, the real one, the ferret said, following Stefi’s gaze. Not a phantom of a dream like that one beside you.
“She’s real!” Stefi screamed, and without thinking she swiped a frustrated fist at the ferret. It passed though, leaving the ferret quite unharmed. She pointed to Sansonis and Ifaut. “He’s real, so is she, their love, too. So what if it’s a dream?” She fell forward, hyperventilating, as the room tilted about her.
The ferret began to fade, its silvery form melting into the very air. I knew this would not be easy for you. But very soon you are going to cross the Dark Bridge, to Awaken and find this was all a dream. There you may find the truth.
“Awaken from what?” she shot back, her blurring vision nothing more than starlight and darkness. “My dream? Or the Crepusculans’?”
The only dream you have ever known.
“Stefi? Stefi?” She heard her own name called again in several voices. Lifting her head, she saw the fe
rret had gone, and her friends standing about her, all wearing expressions of concern and disbelief. She also noticed vaguely that her window had been forced open and Rhaka had joined her.
“What’s wrong?” Cédes asked. “We heard y-” But the Furosan never finished her sentence. She slumped backwards and fell to the floor. She didn’t move.
“Cédes?” Sansonis hurried forwards then he too collapsed like a puppet that had suddenly lost its strings, sprawling next to her.
Seconds later Ifaut too staggered, her eyes glassing over just like Radus’s had when he died in Stefi’s arms. “I… don’t get it.” Her body crumpled, lifeless and unmoving.
“All over…” Rhaka gasped before falling into an ungainly heap on the floor, where his glowing aura and body seemed to fade.
Frantic, her own distant screaming in her ears, Stefi dug through the blankets to find Gemmie. Her fingers closed around the still-warm body, but she knew right away there was no life left in it.
What does it matter? a new voice said, terribly familiar, mournful and stern. They were not real. Grieve not for the dreams that never lived, never breathed, and so never truly died. Having lost what was never found, left behind what never was, come. I have waited far too long.
As her world faded into the darkness, Stefi thought for a moment that she recognized the voice. Cédes? No, it couldn’t be. Cédes’s body lay lifeless before her.
It spoke again. Well done, Keet. You have performed your task admirably.
I was cruel, the ferret’s voice–Keet’s voice–said. Now please, let my soul find rest.
Then there was nothing, her room and friends gone. And, somehow, she just didn’t care anymore.