Chapter V: Goodbye Friend

Fiera reminisces about Zanzibar many years after his death. She promises to honour his memory by dedicating herself to finding the Mystic Forest.

            As Fiera crouched beside the blooming white lily bed where the ashes of her beloved Zanzibar lay thirty years after that night when the human died at her feet, soft drops of rain began to spatter the grassy earth. It nourished the dry blades of green just as the once magnificently glorious unicorn's ashes nourished the lily flowers. Thirty years had seemed to slip by her so quickly that she felt as though she had blinked and missed it all. However, time seemed to come to a halt completely whenever Fiera was here in this rolling meadow among the wildflowers and tall grasses that swayed in the wind. The Spirits of the Air enjoyed playing their amusing games and tricks upon unsuspecting mortals here.

            Humans had not only been responsible for the brutality done to Fiera so very long ago, but for the death of the lovely Zanzibar as well, although this had been a fateful accident. Fiera closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, remembering the painful shriek of her friend that had brought her running on wind's very swiftness and grace, and the sight of her beloved companion on the ground with a bloodied arrow protruding grotesquely from his graceful neck, the grass beneath him turning a slow, steady silver as was the colour of unicorn's blood. She had caught a fleeting glimpse of a male human with his bow drawn, quickly fleeing as humans always did. She had taken Zanzibar's lovely elegant head in her arms and wept over him bitterly as the last signs of life drained from his once vibrantly energetic body.

            That night, Fiera had set things right, at least in her eyes at the time. Expertly tracking the human deep into the forestry lining the very meadow in which she now sat, she had waited for her moment to settle the score. Despite his pathetic excuses that he had thought the unicorn had been a deer and that he had been driven out of his home by dragons and he was starving, Fiera's hatred welled up inside her like a putrid poison and the quick, clean line of dark red where she had slit his throat dripped warm and sticky over her hands. Realization that she had taken life in cold blood dawned on her. She clapped a crimson-stained hand to her mouth and a strangled sob of self-loathing escaped her "Dear Lady, what have I done?" she whispered, horrified at her own actions. She was no better than them now, and this made Fiera so ill that she vomited, the contents of her stomach spilling out of her along with her grief in the form of hot, salty tears assaulting the ground where she knelt.

            A bird somewhere within the trees sang out peaceably and Fiera gasped, coming back to the present. Touching her fingers to her face, she realized that she had begun to cry and sternly scolded herself for doing so. Zanzibar had died ten years ago, but ten years to an elf is little more than thirteen moons. The emotional wound blistered painfully in her heart still, but Fiera had come to learn to stop these emotions from getting out of hand.

 

            What a strong, fearsome adult Fiera had grown into. Just becoming of womanhood at one hundred and ten years, Fiera was only vaguely identifiable as the young girl she once was. She had gained even more muscle, but still weighed a mere seventy pounds, typical of an elf her age and looked quite beautifully figured. Her long hair which gleamed a bright silver in the sun remained in its restrictive braid down her back, ending at the tip of her calves and her steely cold eyes were now so sharp and foreboding that to look into them made one feel as if they were being sliced with a blade.

            Fiera had not come to Zanzibar's final resting place simply to grieve. She felt as though she needed to do something for him to honour his memory and fulfill something he had wanted dearly but never achieved. Delicately fingering a lily petal that had been shirked from its former home as a trick of the Wind Spirits, Fiera blew softly, allowing the forlorn petal to be caught and carried by the breeze just as she had done with the ashes of her home so very, very long ago. Sighing, Fiera leaned close as though afraid the playful Spirits may steal what she was about to say to her long departed friend as well. "I know the Mystic Forest is real. I will find it, regardless of how long it takes or how much it hurts me along the way. It is what you wanted, and you shall have it, dear friend," she whispered solemnly as the songbird in the trees cried out a fitting melody of sorrow.