HOME, SWEET HOME — Feliz’s laughter

Then laughter came from the doorway.

Skyblue turned. She did not have to wonder whose laugh it was. Feliz stood there in his blue form, looking at her with the joy she had once known in a tree.

She got up and went to him.

She embraced him without a word. The whole long journey seemed to gather into that embrace: the day she chose her home, the goodbyes, the messages passed through roots, the laughter in her dreams. Feliz held her and waited.

When Skyblue could draw back a little, she studied him.

“Now I can really see you.”

He smiled. In that smile, Skyblue felt the movement of branches.

Aurora came over, and the three of them held one another. For a while they stayed that way, without trying to decide which part of all they had lived through had been the most extraordinary.

Then they talked.

Feliz had reached the Blue Planet first. Aurora had followed. They had both been waiting for Skyblue to complete her passage through the Amethyst Realm and join them.

“But I only just said goodbye to you,” Skyblue told Aurora.

Her friend smiled again.

“And I’ve been waiting quite a while.”

Skyblue let the difference go unexplained. She had learned enough about time to stop insisting that it behave the same way everywhere.

She looked around the room again. Was she a dragon dreaming of the Blue Planet, or a being from the Blue Planet who had dreamed a dragon’s life?