IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE

By Dolores J. Nurss

Volume 1: Welcome to the Charadoc!

Chapter 46

REUNION

DREAM NOTES

Aside from Deirdre’s concern for Rashid, overwhelmed by medical responsibilities beyond his years (in accordance with other, later dreams) this is exactly how the core dream concluded.  In the end, my viewpoint becomes all Jonathan, watching Deirdre invite the rebels to put her leash back on.  And I know that I am dying in disgrace, and that my little girl, for whom I’ve lost everything, has turned her back on me.  And yet I also know, painfully but finally honestly, that she, an adult and my girl no longer, has made the better choice—or so at least it seemed in my dreaming at the time.  To this day I remember the devastation.

What part of me, the dreamer, had to die?  The part refusing normal teenage rebellion–and so refusing an essential phase of growing up.  The part that wanted to do everything within the approved system, compromising more and more until I had nothing left, in denial about how all that I achieved was the contempt of my elders, who would have actually respected me more if I had shown a little spine.  And I had to die to an adoration of parental authority.  When Deirdre turns back to apparent slavery rather than the “freedom” of being Jonathan’s little girl, Cyran sets her free.  Accepting the bondage of adult responsibility ultimately liberates one.

In the dream, from Jonathan’s perspective, I did not know the identity of Cici till the very end.  Oddly enough, even as Dolores I didn’t realize till later, fictionalizing it, that this explained Cyran’s disappearance from the band holding Deirdre prisoner.  E would have had to drop out to check up on messages, to see when and if Jonathan would strike out on his own.  E could not have contacted Jonathan so long as the man traveled with Sanzio, who would have recognized hir immediately, under any guise.

These characters will always haunt me.  I tried to run away from them.  I retreated into Tolkien fanfic for eight years, leaving the story of the Charadocian Revolution unfinished in the middle of a sentence.  But always they come to me in dreams, saying “Remember me!”  Part of me will be one or more of them, and another part will observe and promise to remember. 

They say that writing is cathartic.  I certainly feel something powerful, but whether it’s catharsis I can’t say.  Will I finally purge this story from me when enough people read it?  Or is that possible?  This story chose me, and I must make the best of it.

The last chapter of this volume comes next week.  And then the real story begins.