[A/N #1: If you haven't read the other chapters in a few months, I'd recommend you give them a quick reread before finishing the story. A lot comes together here that you might not expect or remember. The rest of the notes are at the bottom.]

NORTH OF THE WIND

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Chapter Ten: In Nightmare's Wake

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I felt it in my fists, in my feet
In the hollows of my eyelids
Shaking through my skull, through my spine
And down through my ribs

No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself had come undone
No more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden
No more dreaming like a girl so in love, so in love
No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world

[Florence and the Machine: Blinding]

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We're wrong, though. There is still one thing for the Divine Dragon to destroy.

There's still Dart himself.

Nothing opposes our limping descent from the Mountain of the Dragon's Tomb. Blessed Soa guides us safely down—I believe that now. At the foot of the mountain, we find an oxcart Deningrad-bound and climb into the back. The trees passing us on either side are dark smudges, the oxcart driver a man-shaped blur without a face. My eyes burn like coals. Dart's voice is a ragged ghost. When the soul of the White-Silver Dragon handed me back to my humanity, it left me hollow and dizzy. I feel both unbearably heavy and unthinkably fragile.

In my shaken world, Dart is solid and warm and alive. There is nothing in the night that can scare me again.

We doze, propped against each other. I rest my head in the hollow of his shoulder, and his cheek presses against my hair. Between us, our hands are locked together so tightly that our fingertips turn white. Maybe I am real for Dart, too.

In fitful moments of sleep, I dream that I am still searching. I jerk awake in a cold sweat. He understands and holds me close against his side. The Divine Dragon stone feels like a live ember, slowly burning through his chest. For a quiet moment, Dart leans his forehead against mine, and my nightmare subsides into peaceful delirium.

"Didn't even know how much I needed you," he murmurs hoarsely.

"It was Shana's Dragoon first."

"No, Miranda. You saved me."

If I were wiser, or less dizzy, I'd note the fever he is running. I can't even detect it behind the rising of my own.

There is too much to say, tangling up the breath between us, and all of it belongs to the category of things that do not fit easily into words. The next time I lurch, gasping, out of a nightmare, I tell him, "If you ever let that Soa-damned thing get hold of you again, I will kill you." Then I sock him in the arm.

Dart winces. We're both stiff and sore. "I think," he says wearily, "that's the sort of thing that only gets to happen once. Like the Setting of the Moon." Justice plays a part in Dart's view of world. Sometimes we just have to make it happen ourselves.

I fall asleep again with his knee pressed against mine, the heat of our fevers mingling, and my mind lost in what-ifs and second chances.

Lucidity comes and goes. At some point I recognize the sound of the evening bells from Bishop Dille's church, echoing against the ridges that surround Deningrad. Two helmeted heads hang over me, silhouetted against a fading sky. A torch comes close to my face. I fling up my hand and drop back into darkness. Then I am being helped into the Queen's royal carriage, semiconscious on my feet. It's night, and the streets are empty. I know the feel of the hand holding mine: Luanna. She is guiding me. Laughter bubbles up from some giddy place inside. After all these years, our roles have reversed.

"You're home now, Miranda," she soothes. Fingers like ice test my forehead.

My knees buckle. I sit down hard on the floor of the carriage. Something lies on the long cushioned seat behind me—a person—Dart. I find his hand and hold it tight. I don't want him to be alone, even in sleep.

In the opposite seat, a blur I had taken for part of the carriage leans forward. The cinnamon smell of incense surrounds me. "Your grace, the city has been in an uproar for days," Bishop Dille says. "The story of Sacred Sister Luanna's healing has spread all the way to Furni. Invalids camp in the streets, waiting for your return…"

He trails off when I shake my head, grinning to myself. Right now I can't bring myself to care about anything, other than the man I brought back from his inner hell. "It's all right," I tell them. "I saved him." Dart's fingers twitch against mine. Half-awake, as he was the night Shana died.

I remain half-aware of the carriage rumbling through the night streets, straight to the very doors of the Crystal Palace itself. Wink waits for us there, attended by the Commander of the Holy Knights. She gets under one of my arms and Luanna takes the other, and with their help I reach the second floor before I pass out completely.

The Commander and Bishop Dille are left to carry Dart. They are numb to what Luanna, with her uncanny senses, would have known in a heartbeat if only she had touched him. The Divine Dragon burns him from the inside out. His fever rises by the hour. Like a snake in a net, he slowly drowns in his own poison.

A little before dawn, he dies.

I know when he's gone. The breath of smoky air I once took in from his lungs rushes out of me in a sudden sigh.

I wake with the last of his breath leaving my lips, staring at the ceiling of the room as a soft gray replaces the blackness of night. The Crystal Palace is silent. A small emptiness burrows a hole just under my heart. The world feels colder. Why wouldn't it? A fire has gone out of it that cannot be rekindled. I'll never be warm again, I think.

My throat constricts. I bite my fists, strangling on the howls that can't come out. If I implode right now it would only be mercy. There's too much hurt to bear, too big a void inside to survive. My teeth grate against my knuckles. I slide off the bed and crash onto the floor. I wrap my trembling arms around myself, trying to crush myself out of existence.

Even broken hearts beat, relentlessly.

I don't die with Dart.

My muscles relax. I stare numbly at the tile floor beside my cheek, my eyes dry as two empty oases.

A wind whispers through the silent, closed room, ruffling my hair. Goose bumps rise on my arms. It smells like Serdio: fields and sunshine and apple trees. The first streak of pale light creeps along the wall. I watch until it touches the baseboard. Then I lift my head.

Lavitz's ghost kneels beside me, hand resting weightlessly on my shoulder.

"I thought I saved him." A whine creeps into my whisper, like a beaten dog.

"You have," Lavitz agrees gently.

My head thumps back onto the floor. My nails gouge angry holes in my palms.

"Miranda, would you rather that the Divine Dragon had run him to his death? That he'd died crazed, lost, and alone?"

"I'd rather he stayed alive!"

The quietness of ghosts goes beyond any natural silence. I see his hand tighten on my shoulder but feel nothing. "He died in peace," he says at last. "You've done miracles for us."

I squeeze my eyes shut. Something clacks softly down on the tile and rolls: the stone from the heart of the Divine Dragon, which I last saw embedded in Dart's ribcage. Lavitz brought it to me. I catch the stone and wrap my fingers around it. It's dead now, cool to the touch. I hope it never wakes again.

"Can I see him?" I croak.

"There's nothing to see but the body of a very brave and very tired man."

"I see you." Futile argument.

"He's gone on. You wouldn't want him still wandering the world, Miranda."

"Did you know? Did you know this was going to happen all along?"

"No." Lavitz traces phantom fingertips along my cheek: a faint tingle of sensation. "Weep for yourself."

I can't, though. The tears won't fall. They freeze in the backs of my eyes. I sit there in silence with the spirit of a dead Serdian knight, imagining Dart slipping away in the dark. I brought him all the way back from the precipice of oblivion only for him to die alone, just a corridor away. No one to hear his breath turn shallow, his heartbeats slow. Even when Shana faded into nonexistence, she wasn't alone.

It's not fair.

I look at Lavitz. The pale beam of dawn light illuminates the back of his head and shines through it at the same time. His face is turned away. "So that's it, then?" I ask him. Bitterness crackles like ice through my voice. "Shana's dead. Dart's dead. I guess the rest of us should just lie down and wait for our turn."

"If that's how you want it. But I don't think it is."

"Rose got to die with Zieg."

"But Claire didn't," he reminds me. He turns to me, and for all his gentle words his face is twisted with pain and grief. The jarring thought that a ghost can mourn his comrade's death disarms me. My anger with Lavitz is abruptly extinguished. Steadily, compassionately, he tells me, "It's your call from here."

For a minute we just look at each other. My fist tightens around the Divine Dragon stone. "Help me up," I say at last.

"You can't touch—"

"Lavitz."

For the past week, I've been more avenging Dragoon spirit than mortal. When I reach into the ray of light, my fingers are still translucent, with dark crescents of blood under my broken nails. Lavitz takes my hand. The absence of a beating heart is such a subtle thing, but it is all the difference in the world. His hand feels no more real than a soap bubble, but then he tightens it, and his calluses scrape against my palm.

He pulls me to my feet and steadies me when my knees start to buckle. I can't tell if he is more tangible, or if I am less so. Leaning on him, his arm around me, I limp to the window. I open the shutters and sit on the sill, indifferent to the height. The Serdian breeze that carried Lavitz's ghost whirls around us, with no one else awake to feel it. We Dragoons are always a long way from home, because there is nowhere we belong but with each other.

Below me lies my city, Deningrad, safe and unbroken. For the first time in my life as a Sacred Sister, the people sleeping down there in their cots and gutters revere me as well as fear me. As soon as they hear I've returned, they will begin begging me to heal them. It doesn't matter to them that Dart Feld is dead any more than it mattered that the Moon set. They are blind and deaf to the anguish of the world.

No—what they are is innocent.

It's because I protect them.

With the Divine Dragon stone still in one fist, I reach into my nightdress and wrap my other hand around the opal that holds the White-Silver Dragon's spirit. I've always worn it on a chain around my neck, one forged of steel so it can't be broken. Some of the other Dragoons wore theirs in plain sight, but I always hid mine. I couldn't bear the thought of theft or loss taking it from me. I saw what its absence did to Shana. I would be so fragile without it.

Lavitz spoke. "What are you thinking?"

"Luanna can see now," I answer slowly. "No one will ever dare threaten the Queen or my Sisters again, as long as I'm around. Shana's soul survived. Dammit, those are miracles." I tip my head back against the window frame, closing my eyes. "And I don't care."

Dart is gone. The one who understood, who cared—not loved, I won't lie to myself about that—the one who knew my fears and my anger and my ugly, selfish heart and still thought the best of me, has left me behind. When I thought the Dragoons had forgotten me he came to me, out of everyone else in the world. It was as if he came to save me as much as for Shana. I took him to my mountains, sheltered him in my sanctuary, let him into my heart and let him change me, and now he's dead and I'm alone.

Lavitz cups my face in his cool hands. Liquid brims in the corners of my eyes. It trickles down my temples onto his thumbs. "He's not the only one who ever has or ever will care about you."

I shake my head. "I believed because of him." I'm pleading. What good will it do? "And now it doesn't matter."

"It always matters," he insists.

I draw in a deep breath, then release it slowly. Breath belongs to the living.

The ghost's fingers run down my arms. He catches my bruised, gouged hands and holds them between his. We are the same: guardians of kings and queens, faithful friends who fell a little short of triumph. If I had been more like Lavitz, with my goodness right there on the surface instead of buried under the scars of guilt and anger, maybe I wouldn't have needed to hurt so much.

In Lavitz's hands, my fists are tame. The stones inside them are cold. I lean forward, resting my forehead on the knot of our hands. "Please stay."

He is silent. I jerk upright in time to see him shaking his head. The question why is burning on my lips when he preempts it.

"Do you want to end up like Rose, Miranda? Caught between the living and the dead, barely able to tell the difference because you live for the past?" He shakes his head a second time. "You're meant for more than that. You're our bright and shining sun."

I don't know what to say. My face feels numb. A thousand years wouldn't be long enough—not eleven thousand. "So it's another goodbye," I mutter.

Lavitz catches my eye with the gentlest of smiles. The bloodstain blooms rose-like on his translucent chest. He sinks to one knee, still holding my hands. "Not forever. Time will pass faster than you think—when you live every day of it."

"Will you be there?" I ask, and I hate myself for how weak I sound, as he kisses my knuckles.

The sunlight is strong, he is vanishing, the words are a whisper. "I'll be waiting for you."

I'm alone.

The nightmare is over, and with it, the dream.

I sit there on the sill, too raw and tired to cry. When the quiet knock on the door comes, as I knew it would, I take it for the Queen. "Come in," I rasp.

The door opens. It's Wink.

I pull my knees up to my chest and cross my arms over them. The message she's come to deliver is written on her face. There's no teary redness around her wide blue eyes—she wouldn't weep for Dart—but a vertical crease mars her smooth forehead. She stops a few paces away, glancing from me to the ravaged bedclothes. She takes a breath, stops, and tries again.

"Miranda…"

Her hesitation pricks at my knotted-up heart. I lift my chin from my arms. "He's gone."

Her tensed shoulders droop. She nods. "I'm sorry."

Her golden hair is uncombed, a quilted robe thrown over her nightdress. She must have checked on him just after waking—always needing to know everything. That old complaint brings none of the usual resentment, since she came to me at once. She couldn't have known that I already knew.

We remain rooted in our places. The invisible wall between us looms, cutting off any further intimacy. I swallow hard against the lump in my throat, wishing it had been Luanna or the Queen who had come to tell me. I could have cried on their shoulders, mourned for Dart. In Wink's presence I am made of ice.

Wink rakes her hair back in a tired, almost frustrated gesture. Her hands twist together in front of her stomach. "I wish I knew what to say," she says, her voice almost too small to be heard. "I feel like I failed you."

Of all the things that could have come out of my Sister's mouth.

My hands clench around the Dragoon stones. Just before she came in, I had been thinking of the people in the streets, who flocked to Deningrad to ask me for miracles. They will be so disappointed. I don't expect to be called upon as a Dragoon ever again. I don't want to be. The mountains that used to be my refuge hold no interest for me, now that they're so haunted by absences.

Once, we Dragoons kindled each other. We rose, one by one, as Endiness needed us, monsters with human hearts to hunt monsters with no hearts at all. Rose woke a father's legacy in Dart—Lavitz followed, to guard Dart's back—Albert, Haschel, Meru, Kongol—little, gentle, lost Shana—and me, the last.

Now our fires are dimming, going out. Three are already gone. The time of Dragoons is ending. The last monsters in the world will be lonely ones.

When Wink knocked, I had been thinking: I doubt the newborn Princess Shirley of Serdio will have long with her father.

"The Queen used to tell us how brave and how strong you were," Wink says, the dry-eyed diplomat, even while her voice sounds small as a child's. "No one ever told me you were broken, too. I was so angry with you for that. I wanted you to be our leader, so I took all those diplomatic trips and left you with the Queen. Every time I came back, you gave back the authority. I had to make all the decisions and I thought you'd despise me if I asked for help. I couldn't talk to you without it becoming a fight. Everything I did pushed us further away." Her hands knot and unknot. "I just wanted you to like me.

"I thought this time you weren't coming back. That Soa had taken you away forever because we didn't believe. I've been praying you would return to us so that I could tell you how proud I am of you… how much I need you." This speech takes a lot out of her. She can't meet my eyes. "And even now all I hear is how selfish I am, because your friend is dead and there's nothing I can say or do for you."

With every word, the Dragoon stones grow heavier in my fists.

I have to make the time count. I never wanted to be a Sacred Sister, nor a Dragoon, but I won't let that keep me from people I love anymore.

I uncurl and swing my legs back inside the room. My bare heels thump down on the cold floor. Wink stands gazing at me, sad and vulnerable. That expression of pain and disappointment in her blue eyes, the one that's always there when she looks at me—it isn't for me, it's for herself. And I never knew.

How many years have we wasted, holding back the things we've most needed to say?

"You never failed me," I tell her, and go on quickly before she can reply. "Listen, Wink, there's something I should have told you."

"Miranda, whatever it is, it's alright. I should have—"

"Lloyd didn't die at Vellweb."

Words die on Wink's lips. The color leaves her face. Her expression wavers between confusion and hope. I hold her eyes as long as I can, confessing the secret I've kept from her for over a year: that the man who broke her heart was, in the end, not unworthy of her love.

"I told you that after we faced him on Kashua Glacier, after you were stabbed, he brought us to meet his master. He showed no remorse for what he'd done to acquire the Mirror, or any of the other Moon Objects. Once he delivered it, his master had no more use for him."

I breathe deep—these memories are strong and fresh, rarely touched, and I can nearly feel the icy winds of Vellweb, the presence of my Dragoon comrades around me. "Lloyd wasn't like his master, though. He wanted him to let Shana go, not to harm her. And when he found out that the utopia he'd been promised came at the price of Endiness' destruction, Lloyd turned on him. Lloyd said that his utopia existed in the future of this world. That was when his master threw him down."

I don't go into all the details about Emperor Diaz being Zieg Feld, Zieg Feld being Melbu Frahma. That part doesn't matter to Wink's heart. Whether Lloyd was redeemed does.

"We thought that he was dead. It was a long fall. But we saw him one more time… on the Moon. At the end of all things."

Wink fumbles for a chair. She sits abruptly, as if her legs have given up carrying her.

This is the part of the story I withheld. I hated Lloyd so much for hurting my family that I couldn't bear for Wink to think well of him. Loving Dart, even when he was the Divine Dragoon, has taught me something about believing the best of monsters. Wink deserves the same right to mourn hers as I do for mine.

There on the Moon, reality crumbled apart. We walked on what was not ground, we saw by what was not light, we heard what had no voice. It could have been a horrible dream, except for our scars.

"We reached the Moon too late. Lloyd's master had made himself a god that would end the world. Even with all the Dragoons together, we couldn't have stopped him at that point… and then Lloyd came."

Lloyd arrived like a flash of lightning. The whole time we chased Frahma from Signet Sphere to Signet Sphere, Lloyd had been limping his lonely way to the Divine Tree to wait for the inevitable confrontation. The once-charismatic Wingly was bruised, bloody, his armor cracked and crumpled from his long fall. He stood like a dead man. Still he defied Melbu Frahma, laughing as he did.

"Lloyd brought us the soul he'd cut out of the Divine Dragon. He gave it to Dart so that Dart could become something as terrible as what we faced. He gave our enemy everything he needed to destroy the world… then, when he realized what he'd done, he gave us everything we needed to save it." I show her the clotted-blood and old-bruise marble, the remnant of the nightmare we all shared. "Lloyd said that he couldn't die with Endiness in the hands of the wrong god. He told his master, 'There is no place for you in my utopia.' He took on this God of Destruction by himself.

"That was when he died, Wink."

Her eyes are wet with tears, her mouth a thin white line. Spellbound, she hasn't stirred.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before."

I give Wink silence. Sooner than I would have expected, she gives her eyes a careful dab with her sleeve and pulls herself up straight. " I understand why you didn't say anything before this," she says, looking at the corner of my jaw rather than my eyes. "I'm not sure why you are now."

I think of Dart's fingers tightening around mine. "You deserve to make up your own mind about him."

"I see." I can't tell if she's angry until she brings her eyes up to meet mine. A sad smile hesitates at the corners of her lips, unable to come into full bloom. "Well, I want to hear what you think."

Wink has never asked my opinion on anything. Perhaps that's been part of our problem. For a moment I'm tongue-tied. At last I find myself repeating his declaration: "There was no place for evil in his utopia. The actions he took to achieve it were monstrous, and he knew it, but in his heart, the dream was pure."

Wink is nodding slowly to herself. I can see her struggling to fit the piece that is herself into the puzzle that was the Wingly swordsman. "He said he had no reason to save me," she murmurs, "but he did anyway." She's never showed any uncertainty, any dismay, where I could see.

I just wanted you to like me.

I wish I could have healed the rift between us at the same time that I healed Luanna's eyes, as simple as a touch of Dragoon light. All I have now are my own hands. It's past time to use them. I've been the First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau for most of my life, but I haven't yet been a sister to my Queen's other daughters.

I crouch on my heels beside Wink's chair. My face is a little lower than hers, but this time I don't mind. What would I say to a little sister of mine? What would I have said to Shana?

Wink is patient with me. Maybe she is as apprehensive about sisterhood as I am, even having had Setie all along. Finally I say, "When Lloyd saved you from the bandits in Donau, it wasn't because you were the Third Sacred Sister. Yes, he took advantage of that later, but the first time, he didn't know. He was callous but not heartless."

Although I started out just meaning to soothe Wink's heart, it become true as I speak. "What I think is that he saved you because he didn't want everything good and innocent to get trampled by the vicious things of the world. Even if he was one of them." In my mind I see Dart punching Lloyd on Kashua Glacier, me punching Dart at Shana's pyre on the mountain. I muster up the bravest, truest smile I have for my Sister, my sister. "Lloyd saw that you had a good heart."

Tears run from the corners of Wink's eyes. She matches my smile tremulously. "It runs in the family," she murmurs.

Instead of wiping her own eyes, she wipes mine. I hadn't realized they were leaking. Then one of us reaches, and the other's shoulders fall, and we're embracing each other for the first time. Her back trembles with long-suppressed sobs. I tuck my face into her shoulder and let my own tears fall. I cry for Dart, for Shana, and for my own patchwork family.

When eyes are red and dry again, we sit with arms around each other's shoulders. Wink pulls my fingers back to see the Dragoon stones again. The power that shattered Deningrad and killed Dart is what Lloyd died to give him, the power to protect the world. All monsters for a reason.

I broke my heart for a young man who was blunt and clumsy and good-hearted; Wink, for an ageless one who was clever and beautiful and charming, with darkness at his core. In the end both of them were far too mortal.

"I don't believe in love." I say it quietly. The words hang between us.

Wink closes my hands again, hiding the Dragoon stones for now. "I understand," she says. "But it's because of people like you that the rest of us still do."

Is that true? I know she would not lie to me. I look out the window onto my city, onto a world that survived and people whose hearts still keep hope inside. Dawn covers Endiness with gold, until the light is all that I can see.

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FIN

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A/N #2: That's it. After a year and a half, "North of the Wind" is finished. Thank you for your patience; I hope you enjoyed the read, even if it didn't always go the way you expected. This story started as just a theoretical crack pairing-Dart and Miranda-and now it's become, for me at least, the only way I can picture events going after the end of the game. I can't imagine Shana and Dart living a long and happy life; I can't picture the Divine Dragon leaving its host alone; I can't imagine that all battles will be won and all scars healed. Most of all, I can't imagine a future devoid of tragedy. All I see is room for hope and love even within the pain.

Is it still a crack pairing? Yes-but hopefully one I justified as the story went on.

Again, thank you for reading. Even bigger thank yous need to go to Psi-liloquy and the anonymous Some Random Reviewer for writing such beautifully long reviews and inspiring me to keep going. The biggest of all goes to to Raindog Bride, who reads my scraps and drafts, makes sense of what I wrote when even I don't understand it, and throws around crack pairing ideas in the first place.

I have another one-shot to write (charting the lives of the other surviving Dragoons, as a sort of follow-up to North) and I'm still picking at First Dragoon, even if it's been a few months since I updated. There's always more stories to tell, even if this one has finished.

-KJ

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

[W. H. Auden]