Image by Oleksandra Bardash

The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode click here. To read it from the start, click here.

Gina, Zack, and B’frona had vanquished Gina’s monstrous Questing Beast. Now, wary of what was to come, they turned to face an unknown future. This is the final episode of The Wishing Map.

“I will make it better!” Zack shouted out the window, across the River Rennou, over the tops of the mighty irontrees. And as if anointing him for the task ahead, rain drops began sprinkling his face.

His memory snapped back to a moment after their first return home from Ismara. He’d climbed out his bedroom window to his rooftop thinking place, and been pelted by a late summer storm. Then the impossible had happened. A two-mile-long swath of subatomic particles traveling 60,000 miles per hour and blazing at 50,000 degrees had ripped open the sky, followed by a supersonic shock that rattled the heavens! Impossible. And yet it was only one of sixteen million electrical storms in the world that year, a typical year for…

“Dunder and lyning!” Zack laughed, remembering what Liulah the cloud fairy had called it. As his hair turned to wet thatch, he’d blinked away the rain and patted the shingles, saying, “Good old roof. Good old house. Good old Middleton.”

“Does it help with the pain?”

“Huh?” Zack turned to find his sister standing beside him.

“The rain. I don’t know why getting rained on would help, but anything’s worth a try. I hurt all over.” Zack winced as she leaned into him. “There’s something I’m supposed to tell you.” She paused to make sure she had it right: “‘The purpose of your life didn’t begin with you, and it won’t end with you.’”

Zack could hear Rhema speaking the words. He smiled, not because he knew what it meant, but because he trusted Rhema more than anyone, even himself. Especially himself.

Gina pulled the enigmatic Revealer out of her pocket. “So, now we have to take this little bugger to Zshinia. Do you think we’ll ever get home?”

“I hope so.”

“Me too. Because there’s magic in our world too.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“But before we do, we might have to fight more monsters.”

“Well, ‘it’s always best to face monsters in the company of friends.’”

“Rhema tell you that?” asked Zack.

“Maybe. Yes.”

Zack grinned. Gina punched him in the arm.

B’frona emerged from the narrow stairway and joined them at the window. He watched the downpour for a while. “The cloud shepherds are pushing out the last of the rain. Tomorrow they will begin making snow. Just as we leave for Zshinia.”

“We?” asked Gina.

B’frona silently took Gina’s hand, and put his other hand on Zack’s shoulder, as the three stood staring out at the shadowed outlines…

Of the distant mountains.

φ

Thoughts: It is always best to face monsters in the company of friends.

In fabula nunquam desinens