NovelChina Chapter 439: They said it was a dream
Chapter 439: They said it was a dream
I know what I experienced in that world wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t have been. I could still feel the phantom ache of the labor pains, the weight of the triplets on my lap, and the striped tiger tail of little Nadir, the love I experienced...
But the human world didn’t care about my feelings and just diagnosed me as being unstable after waking up from a two year coma.
They said it was a dream. A long dream that my body had processed in the time my consciousness was dormant, living in a world similar to the fantasies I had before the accident, but they know nothing.
They don’t know the joy I felt. The happiness spread through my chest whenever I held my babies, whenever Fenric or Damar held me in his arms, whenever they whispered their love to me... they didn’t know that the world was real.
Was it?
The next few weeks were a special kind of hell. I was 21 before the accident, but I’d missed two critical years of my life. My college classes had moved on without me, my peers had graduated or transferred, and my parents—true to form—looked at me like I was a walking, talking medical bill.
To them, my coma was just a massive financial inconvenience. I was right back to being the invisible wallflower, sitting in the corner unnoticed while everyone else lived their lives.
I couldn’t even stand out no matter how good I was at what I did. I was once again reminded of the kind of biased hell I had lived before becoming Arinya.
My left leg was a mess, requiring a pair of clanking aluminum crutches just to get to the bathroom.
Life became even more bothersome and all I could think of was the warmth I felt from Nadir when he was in my arms. My eyes grew hollow by the day, depressed, and unable to accept reality as it was.
One afternoon, the autumn air outside took on that exact crisp bite from the day we had the picnic at the meadows behind the palace.
The memory hurt so bad I thought my chest would split open. I limped out of the house, dragging my crutches down the street, whispering their names like a crazy person.
"Noah... Fenric... Damar... Thalor... where...?" Where are you?
I considered going back to that park and jumping off the cliff again. But my logical brain—whatever was left of it—stopped me.
What if it didn’t work? What if I didn’t wake up in the Beastworld, and instead just broke my other leg and ended up back in the sterile room? I couldn’t risk it.
But then what do I do? How do I get back? I can’t live the rest of my days in this world. I just can’t. I’d rather die, but I want to see them. I want to hold my babies. I want to breastfeed little Nadir, and my twins. I want to watch Lyra hold her brother and then Phina and Raiden doing what they do best.
A broken smile spread across my lips but the tears still rolled down. You can’t tell me I can’t go back to all of that. It’s impossible.
Blinded by tears, I dragged myself past a discount bookstore down the street, just trying to escape my own head.
But a display in the window made me freeze.
It was a cheaply bound, clearly pirated paperback. The cover art was awful, but the title printed on it made my heart stop.
The Ugly Duckling That Makes The World Better.
It had a rather peculiar name but it somehow reminded me of the beast world.
Could it be...?
With shaking hands, I leaned against my crutches and reached for it, flipping the pages open. My eyes widened as I saw the names on it. This novel world was very similar to the one I had been writing but it wasn’t it. A cold shock went straight down my spine as I came to a realization.
While this wasn’t my original draft—Someone had stolen my concept, altered it, and published it—It detailed the exact reality I had just lived through.
It described the tiger tribe, how I left with Damar and Fenric, the rabbit tribe, Noah, the way we carved our paths and I gave birth to my first cubs.
The war, the west way, Thalor, all of it. It even described the selective nature of my tiger pregnancy. It listed the names of all six of my kids: Raiden, Phina, Lyra, Kaito, Marina, and Nadir.
Every single bit of it was printed right here, being sold for five bucks on a dusty shelf.
I wasn’t even mad about the piracy. I didn’t care that someone stole my book.
If this world had the exact blueprint of the world I had just left... then the beastworld wasn’t a hallucination. It was definitely real.
How?
Maybe it was a parallel reality connected to the very words on these pages. This thief had published the portal.
A familiar, fiery spark of the Land Mother ignited in my chest, burning away the helpless Stephanie persona.
The world I entered... It’s this book. There has to be a way back.
I hugged the cheap paperback tightly against my chest, tears tricking down my cheeks.
"Thank goodness," I whispered, genuinely thankful that it had not all been in my head and that it was real. My journey, my experience, my babies... All of it was real.
The aluminum crutches clanked against the pavement as I looked up at the gray sky.
"I’m coming home," I muttered, a smirk finally returning to my lips. "You guys better not have messed up my palace while I was gone."
I flipped through the pages right there on the sidewalk, my fingers moving so fast I nearly ripped the paper.
The text blurred before my eyes as I skipped past the descriptions of the silver stone walls, past the integration of the Leopards, straight to the very last Chapter.
My eyes locked onto the final paragraphs.
...And as the cry of her sixth child, Nadir, echoed through the warm stone halls of the Sovereign Wing, the soul of the Land Mother finally fulfilled its cosmic anchor. With the debt to the beastworld paid and her lineage secured, the foreign soul faded from the body of Arinya, returning peacefully to the human realm from whence she came. The Queen was gone, leaving behind a mourning kingdom, a silent serpent husband, and a legacy written in silver stone.
"You have got to be kidding me," I muttered, my knuckles turning white against the cover.
The thief didn’t just pirate my work; they got lazy.
They didn’t know how to write a proper long-term epic, so they slapped on a sudden, tragic ’return to the real world’ ending just to wrap up the plot neatly.
They wrote me out of my own life.
They wrote me away from my babies.
How dare they?!