Final Chapter: Dream’s End
My son, where is he? He is curious, but not very wise.
An observer, nothing more than the dream of a dream, Stefi found herself floating above a grassy plain with familiar snowy peaks in the distance. Sumarana.
My son… the voice continued as a female sable ferret wandered into view, sniffing and probing the air. Where is my little Keet?
The scene wavered and vanished, giving way to a hilltop temple that overlooked the distant sea.
“It’s not yours!” a male Furosan shouted. “Leave Makora be, let Irinis go!”
Hooded figures moved forward, a flash of steel, and the Furosan fell down dead.
“Varan!”
A flash of light and Stefi sat beneath a shady willow as an albino ferret poked her head from a hole in the ground.
Look what I found, she said, dropping a silver disc at the feet of her two sable friends.
That’s nice, Cici, the smaller sable, a languid little female, said with a yawn.
At least feign interest, dear Ifi. I think it’s Furosan make.
Furosan? No such thing! Right, Shin?
The world about Stefi changed yet again, melting into a farmhouse set amidst an endless plain.
“It’s my house!” a young woman Furosan a little older than Stefi shouted, a large scythe clutched in her hands. A second later a dozen humans materialized before her, armed and prepared to kill.
“Go away!” she shrieked, awkwardly swinging the scythe. Liquid light sprang from the earth about her, bathing her in a gold aura. “Leave… us… alone!” Each slash of the air saw a soldier collapse dead, unmarked and unmoving.
The Furosan and her house vanished beneath a torrent of water as the next scene flooded Stefi’s consciousness, bearing a young man and a familiar sandy ferret on its currents.
“Pishti! Little Pishti!” the man cried, silenced when he sucked down a mouthful of water and sank, holding the ferret above water until the very end.
You have to live! The ferret said, looking much younger than the one that had lived many lifetimes between Feregana and Crepusculum. To plant our flowers! His pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Serena, it is over.”
Stefi at once recognized the voice as that of the one she had loved, though more articulate in his Common Language, more refined. A floor materialized beneath her, open sky all around. Radus and Serena stood atop the same tower of Alzandia that she once had.
“Radus!” She stumbled towards him, arms outstretched, but passed straight through his form. That’s when she realized he was no Radus she knew. His tail had been hacked off, one ear was gone, and scars marred his once-soft features. She couldn’t touch him. She was nothing in this time.
“It is the end of Feregana,” he continued. As Stefi turned her eyes skywards, tearing her gaze from him, she couldn’t help but agree. The land itself was awash in flames, and the blue moon lay scattered across the sky, rent apart by unimaginable violence. The sun was gone.
“The Nefairu cannot be stopped,” Serena said, eyes shut tight against the scene. “Our age… is over. I could not save Stefi…”
Hearing her own name, Stefi froze, only her eyes able to move. They followed Radus as he knelt beside a figure, eerily familiar. It was her.
“The fault lies with me,” Radus said, throwing Stefi’s world into confusion as he touched her hair. The other her. The dead her.
“Why can’t I ever save those whom I love?” Serena continued. “Even if they are human… Stefi… My Stefi…”
Stefi!
Yet again the world shifted about her, bringing two very familiar ferrets into focus: Gemmie and Maya. And one more, a ferret she had never seen but at once recognized, clad in the same armor and war-claws Maya had used to kill Karick. Kilara.
Maya, Gem-girl, you must flee!
Through the smoke that choked the air, Stefi could barely make out the ghostly silhouettes of animals, led by a single young woman, fighting and dying amidst the flames of their home.
No, you fool, Maya protested, tugging at her armor with his teeth. We’re all here for each other. You think I’d leave you now, damn it?
You must live, Kilara said, breaking free from his grasp. To protect the Fieretsi. That is your highest purpose. Mine and Calo’s is to protect something else that is perhaps even more important.
What the hell is that? An explosion rocked the ground and he sneezed as a wave of acrid smoke swept across them.
You.
The three ferrets and their burning home vanished into smoke and dreams as massive stone walls leapt up about her.
The smoke remained, yet this was another place altogether. Hundreds of humans, most of them women, children, and the elderly, huddled together inside what looked like a circular temple as the towering doors shook with successive blows.
“The Furosans, they’re breaking through!”
“Mummy, why do they want to kill us?”
“They’re merciless monsters.”
As the doors at last fell inwards, smashed from their hinges, a defeated silence settled amongst the crowd, mingling with the smoke. It seemed to last an eternity until one of the many soldiers who had just entered spoke.
“Your orders, Astaros, sir?” he said and gripped his bloodied spear tightly.
“We surrender,” a large Furosan at the head of the soldiers said, casting down his own weapon and a massive figure-eight shield his own height. “Sol-Acrima has won this war. Acharn surrenders.”
“But, sir,” the soldier said, “what do you mean? These humans are all that remain!”
“Let them have their war,” he said, taking a tiny sable ferret from a pouch at his hip. “We’ll at least keep our hearts…”
Then the terrible scene began to fade.
“Violence, hate, death, that is all the old Feregana ever was, all its Dream ever was.” Kardin’s voice jolted Stefi, plunging her back into darkness. “If you think differently, pathetic human, you are sorely mistaken. Even the Dream, your world in which I was trapped, is but a reflection of a violent past. Glorious violence, glorious death. Now, why don’t you just lie down and accept it?”
“Accept it?” Stefi said, those two words taking all her strength. “I won’t.” New images, her own memories, flashed before her eyes: Gemmie and Maya sleeping with her in the sun, Sansonis and Ifaut holding hands, Cédes holding her after the ferrets Awoke in Sol-Acrima.
The next thing she knew, five colored lights, twisting wisps, floated before her. They may have been mere specks of what they had once been, but she recognized them at once: the elementals’ power.
She reached out to touch them. They fled from her outstretched hand like moths before coming to rest just out of reach, twining about each other until they coalesced into a ball of writhing, living light.
Like a blossom in spring they bloomed outward, and there stood Radus clutching a letter, both now unbloodied and whole. He smiled and held it out to Stefi.
“Leave it!” Kardin shouted. The darkness all about Stefi reverberated with anger. “The Furosan is dead. Dead! Nothing!”
Stefi ignored it, instead taking the letter from Radus’s hand. He winked and vanished. The letter had no hole, no blood, just as he had intended her to have it.
She turned it over, pried open the flap, and slid the delicate paper from its sheath like a sword from a scabbard. Printed, in a childish hand, were two words:
Love Stefi.
“Drop it!” Kardin roared, and it seemed the very air trembled about Stefi and shook her soul to its core. “False! Illusions! Fragments of a dream!”
“You’re wrong,” Stefi said, her voice growing bolder every second as she read and re-read the two words written by a Furosan now dead. “Look at this!” She thrust the letter outwards, facing it to every facet of the darkness she could. “Proof of love from the dream you so easily dismiss, isn’t it?”
The only answer was pained silence, and the blackness appeared to shrink from the outstretche
d letter.
“I’m right, aren’t I? It was real to me, to all of us. The hatred, the death, yes. And the love! And that’s the one thing you can’t face! All dreams, yes. We’re all figments of whatever dreams us up, be it a dead world or the hatred inherent in our hearts. Mere dreams, but real if we want them to be, only real because of both love and hate.”
“Yes, you are but a dream,” Kardin said, his voice growing stronger. “Accept you are nothing. Nothing!”
“I accept that now,” she said, and the letter in her hands dissolved in a shower of light and sparks. “And so are you. I dream you, and if I want to, I can make you vanish, just as you can me. We can all dream what we want. I can accept that. And you know all that I feel? Pity.”
“Self pity,” Kardin gloated. “Weakness present in all humans.”
“You’re wrong. The only pity I feel is for you. You can destroy me if you want. I can destroy you too, if I so wish it. We dreams can vanish on a whim. It takes greater strength to realize that even you have your place and to forgive you.”
The voice trembled, unsure, and the fabric of darkness rippled like a curtain tugged in a breeze. “What?”
“For all you’ve done, Kardin, Nefairu, humans, whatever you are, I forgive you. And you know why? Without your darkness, your hatred, there can be no knowing the opposite of love and hope, no Feregana I’ve lived in. And that is your greatest gift to everyone.”
“Fieretsi!”
The next second a spear of darkest night, colder than ice-water, stabbed through the air and Stefi’s chest. The darkness about her shimmered for a second, wavered into smoke, and cleared to reveal the now-starless sky between Feregana and Crepusculum.
I am a part of you, Fieretsi, the dark voice said, now ringing in her head. The power over Furosa, the elementals, all mine to wield against the disparate worlds of the Fountain.
Stefi staggered to her feet, clutching her head as it felt ready to split from the agony that gripped it. After the darkness, the muted twilight shone with the force of a thousand suns, amplifying the pain a hundred times over. But she knew something the voice didn’t: the elementals were gone forever, the last of their power illuminating the truth.
You accepted me, forgave me, Kardin spat.
The world tilted, and her blurring vision alighted upon a motionless Serena. Cédes hurried blindly towards her, while Sansonis and Ifaut pulled themselves up from the shattered shrines of Dawn and Twilight. And, so small she barely noticed her, little Gemmie appeared at her feet.
Stefi! the ferret squeaked desperately. Stefi! Fight it, you can do it! Do it for Maya, do it for all of us. Do it for Pishti and his flowers!
“Flowers are but a pathetic dream!” Stefi hissed in a voice not her own. “Just like Feregana!”
The world tilted again, casting Gemmie’s image into a nauseating spiral. She found herself turning, trying to wrest control of her body back. But it was too late. She was taken, like Sansonis before her, Karick IV, Serena.
Suddenly she noticed a spark of silver, the flash of one final star upon glinting iron. Love like the letter. Love as death, death as love, something even Kardin, as a force that relied so much on death as hatred, could never understand.
“I love you, dear heart.”
Mustela’s Fang, clutched in Cédes’s hands, found Stefi’s stomach, guided only by a blind love. Unseeing, yet seeing more than the sighted, the Furosan saw the one thing she could from behind her eyes: a future.
Blazing pain exploded through Stefi’s body, driving away the voice of Kardin as it uttered one last gasp from her mouth. “Filthy, dirty Furosan.”
“That may be,” Cédes said, driving the spear deeper into her best friend’s body, “but a filthy, dirty Furosan who can love.”
“Stefi!” She heard her name called in the four voices of her remaining friends. Their owners appeared by her side as she toppled backwards.
“Don’t go, please don’t go!” Ifaut squeaked, stroking Stefi’s hair as her tears wet it, sad rain upon night black. “You owe me!”
“You’re thinking of Sansonis,” she gasped, smiling through the pain.
“No, I mean you! I don’t know what you owe me yet,” she sniffed, “but I’ll think of something. Then you’ll have to stay! You’ll have to!” Her body went limp, weakened by grief. “You’ll have to!”
“Silly girl,” Stefi laughed, “you’re the one who owes me. You owe me a future, so don’t let me down.”
Ifaut wailed and pulled her face into Stefi’s shoulder. She left it there as she sobbed. Sansonis moved to pull her away, his own gray eyes misting over, but stopped. Instead he took Stefi’s hand.
“It was an honor, Miss Fieretsi,” he said. “I guess the stars were wrong, huh?”
“Why is that?”
“They’re gone, aren’t they?” He pointed to the empty sky. “Dad, the last Otsukuné, is gone too. You know what that means?”
“I wish I did.”
“The future’s ours to read and write now.”
“So you better make it a good one,” Stefi said, smiling weakly. “That wife of yours deserves a happy ending. Give her one, will you?”
Stefi! Stefi! Gemmie squeaked, clambering across Stefi’s chest so that she nearly sat on her face. Are you going? Will you be okay? Her tail puffed and her dark eyes shone wide and afraid.
“I’ll be fine, Gem-girl,” she said, running a weak hand across the ferret, trying to smooth her puffed fur.
But my purpose, it’s to protect you, she protested. I failed if you’re going to die! I failed you, Maya, and Kilara…
“Failed?” Stefi laughed, unsure if it was the loss of blood or gratitude that made her so light-headed. “You Awoke so you could save me! That’s not failure. And, my sweet little girl, I’ve succeeded in what I was meant to do. You protected me to the end, so keep smiling.”
What can I do now? You’re my friend, I need to look after you.
“You can do me a favor.”
What’s that?
“Protect Cédes.”
I will, Stefi.
She took the bundle of shivering fur and loyalty, pressed their noses together. “Where’s Cédes?”
“Right here, unable to look upon what I’ve done,” her mournful voice answered as she stood a short distance away, her back to Stefi.
“Come here,” Stefi ordered. “Look at me. I’m really upset with you.”
“I cannot see, and you know it,” the Furosan said, managing a shade of a smile. “Or should I say something else? Sarcasm, perhaps?”
“Just come here.” She plucked Gemmie from her chest and handed her to Sansonis.
He took Gemmie and pried a sobbing Ifaut from Stefi. He felt he knew what was coming.
“I am sorry, dear heart,” Cédes said, the smell of hot blood in her nose. She ran a hand across Stefi’s body. It found the spear still buried deep inside her. “This is just like Valraines, that poor little girl…”
“Only this time it was on purpose!”
“Stefi… that was a terrible joke, even for you,” she said, managing a laugh.
“I know.” Her eyes slid in and out of focus, staring at something far away, in another world. “She forgives you. I forgive you.”
“Feregana forgives me?” Cédes gasped. “You asked her?”
“You don’t see it, do you? I’m Feregana. You’re Feregana. We all are. I saw it when Kardin took me, like looking deep into the heart of existence. It all makes sense. When I listened to Feregana those other times, it wasn’t some mystical god or whatever, it was us. Us! It’s our world. We dream it, we live it.”
“Then the purpose of the Final Fieretsi-”
“Was maybe to help even such hatred realize it is necessary for good.”
“But how? I don’t understand…”
“You will,” Stefi said, taking a pale, delicate hand in hers. “One day, far from now. But you already know. You learnt it in another life as Serena.”
“We’r
e not the same person,” Cédes shot back, suddenly remembering the Furosan that lay nearby. “Not anymore.”
“I’ve got one more thing for you, to pay you back.”
Cédes stiffened, expecting for a second that her stabbing of Stefi would be repaid in kind.
“I don’t need it anymore, and I know you’ll make good use of it.”
Cédes felt Stefi’s free hand upon her face, the human’s palm resting on her forehead, the finger slipping through her hair.
It seemed as if Cédes’s world tore itself apart as what felt like flaming spikes drove through each of her eyes, burying their burning points deep inside her soul. Her own pained screams split her head, ringing through her ears and setting her being aflame. She would’ve wished for death, if not for the golden lifeline pressed against her, tethering her to sanity. It was like Raphanos all over again.
“What did you do?” she screamed as she was thrown backwards from the pain. Her eyes flickered open, blinded by the light falling upon them. Lying where she was, unable to move, a brilliant light rose from the blurred horizon, sunrise from the eternal night of her vision. “What is this burning, this brightness? Do you try to kill me for killing you?”
“Open your eyes.”
As if pushing the world she forced the blackness that had long obscured her vision from her eyes, one action so simple yet long forgotten. “This light,” she gasped. “The world, I see the world. I see the world!”
“Use it well. I get the feeling I won’t need it where I’m going.”
“Sight…” Cédes breathed, savoring the long-forgotten sensation of light, of the world, falling upon her eyes. With the greatest difficulty, not wanting to miss a second of the beauty unfurling before her, she climbed to her feet and turned around.
“Stefi, is that you?” She stumbled towards the figure upon the ground with a spear through its stomach as she shook the ringing pain from her head. “You’re more beautiful than I could’ve imagined…” Her knees buckled beneath her, dropping her alongside the dying human.
“Except for the blood,” Stefi choked as blood bubbled from her mouth, staining her lips crimson.
“Even with the blood,” Cédes whispered. She leant forward, finding her own red eyes staring back from Stefi’s. Without quite knowing what she was doing she reached out a hand, wiped the blood from Stefi’s lips, and placed a soft kiss upon them. “I love you.”
“I love you too. You’re a good friend.” Her eyes stared blankly, as unseeing as Cédes’s had once been.
Cédes’s heart thumped in her chest, pumping disgust for killing the beautiful creature before her. This one human who had shown her more of the world than she could’ve imagined, who had always been by her side, bleeding to death. So why was she smiling?
“What happens now?” Cédes asked, unable to take her eyes from Stefi’s. If she kept looking at them, perhaps the human wouldn’t die…
“Who knows? Feregana will go on, I know that much.”
As if on cue the ground beneath them shook, and the island of Iferona twisted in the currents of Dream and Awake, caught in the riptide of Feregana and Crepusculum.
“They’re separating,” Stefi said. “This overlap of worlds, it’s fading…”
“What does that mean?”
“Feregana is whole. Crepusculum too. The mistakes of the past won’t be repeated, the ferrets will go on. But they have help. We can all dream this together.”
“What about you?”
“I guess now… anything can happen if I dream it.”
Ready, Stefi?
Stefi had all but forgotten Keet and Pishti. The two ferrets, star and lover of flowers, the First Fieretsi, and the seeker of peace, stood on either side of her head.
“Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know the way.”
To the Bridge? Keet asked, his laugh the tinkle of cold starlight. You’ve known all along, silly human. Look into your heart. Dream and Awake, you’ve already crossed it. The other’s not hard to find. Just follow the rainbow.
“I can’t see it,” Stefi said, her voice failing, blind eyes fixed on the distant horizon where a sight unseen in Crepusculum for thousands of years appeared, peeping timidly over the horizon. “The sunrise is too bright.”
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Coming soon: Broken Fangs: Part III of the Fabula Fereganae Cycle
Six months have passed since the death of Stefi, the Final Fieretsi, and the destruction of the Dark Bridge. Yet things are still far from peaceful in the newly ascended world of Feregana.
One morning a letter arrives for Cédes on a blue-ribboned bird, its two words enough to spur her on yet another journey: Love Stefi. A command? A farewell? Only one way to find out.
On her new adventure to find out the mystery behind the letter and lay Maya’s ashes to rest with his long dead mate Kilara, Cédes finds herself with two new companions: Calo, a Kalkic girl of Farān who once fought alongside the last war-ferret and now drinks to forget the past; and Merek, an Acharnian caravan driver turned gun runner with a woman in every town who sees a reluctant Cédes as his greatest challenge.
Even after the collapse of the Church of Kardin unrest remains in Acharn. A resistance has arisen that seeks to rid the rest of that vast region of the occupying humans from Sol-Acrima, and investigate the terrible rumors emanating from the town of Ru-Charena, now known as Fractured Heaven. They are the Broken Fangs, named for the brave ferret that felled the leader of Sol-Acrima.
And yet with ever more frequent visions of Serena’s life, and visits from a girl with blood-red hair and eyes that no one else can see, it seems Cédes’s search for meaning in a letter bearing the name of the one she loved may be just beginning.
Meanwhile, to the north, a lost girl and ferret from long ago find themselves washed up on a beach, caught in a tide of flowers from an island now lost to memory and time…
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