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When I opened my eyes, I was all alone.  It felt like I was floating, and everything around me was a fuzzy shade of grey.  But then, I could see something in the distance.  There was a young boy running towards me.  He had dark hair and tanned skin, and in that moment, I knew it was Jungkook.  It was uncanny.  He looked nearly the same as he had the moment I’d first seen him in the inn, but his eyes were full of a wonder I’d never seen in him.  He had a bouquet of what I recognized to be crocuses, Eira’s city flower.  He ran past me, and I turned around to see he was headed for a girl with a head of hair light as snow.

He stopped in his tracks as a boy with dark hair handed a bouquet of flowers to the girl.  Tae.  My only guess was that he was handing the flowers to Lumi.  I couldn’t see her face or Jungkook’s, but I saw the bouquet he’d been holding drop from his hands.  The flowers shriveled up the second they hit the concrete, and he turned back towards me with an anger in his eyes.

The Albians aren’t allowed to mix with the Chandians, I heard.  They will taint the skin of the Chandians with their snowy blood, and their children will no longer belong to either home.

The scene changed then, and I saw a little tiny boy standing amongst a crowd of other Chandian children.  They mocked him for the streaks of blond that stained his hair and the lighter skin that he had.  I empathized with him, for that had been the same way the kids in Aine had treated me.  I saw as time went by, and he used charcoal pastes to color his hair black.  This didn’t stop the kids from mocking him, though, so he fled to Alba.

I could see how the rest of it played out.  He fell in love with Lumi, and he hated Tae for being a pureblooded Chandian.  He thought that if he cursed the lands to be separated, Tae would be forced to return to his home country and he could have Lumi to himself, reasoning that his Albian blood would able him to stay in the cold land.

But it hadn’t worked the way he’d planned it to.  The mystics had been formed, and the temple of the curse in the snowy land of Alpin served as evidence of what had been done.  He’d disappeared while he sought for a way to change the effects of the curse to what he had initially wanted.

Before he could do that, though, he’d been banished to another dimension by the mystics.  When he’d returned, he reasoned that the only way to fix all of this would be to separate the two people he’d done all this for in the first place, so he’d gone to Eira to work with Tae at the inn and heard about the prophecy.  And then…he’d seen me, and he’d known his time was up.

My vision seemed to start dotting, then.  Pieces of what I was seeing began to disappear, and a loud static noise pierced my ears.  I shut my eyes tightly and pressed my palms over my ears, but I could still see and hear it all.

The image I was seeing changed one last time, then, but instead of an image, there was lettering that shown brightly above me.

שׁוּב קְלָלָה

I now realized that they were the runes.  I couldn’t read them, but their meaning was something I could hear loud and clear in my head.  The reversal of the curse.  I’d done it.  I’d broken the curse.

Slowly, it faded out, and I fell into a deep sleep.

☀☀☀☀☀

I blinked my eyes open, and the sun blinded me.  I sat up and looked around.  I was in a white room that resembled that of the rooms in Tae’s inn, but there were things in the room like the palm leaf pinned to the wall that reminded me of Chanda, too.

A low humming noise was getting louder, and I could tell it was coming from someone who was approaching the door.  The door opened then, and a tall man was pressing against it with his back as he carried a tray.  He turned around and smiled at me.

“Princess Odelle!  You’ve awoken!”

I blinked up at him. “Princess?”

He tsked and set the tray down on the nightstand that I hadn’t noticed before that moment. “I’m sure Queen Lumi and Prince Tae will explain that to you when you’re up and about.  You should try the soup!  We just got a shipment of avocados from Chanda, and the chef has been making all sorts of dishes with it!”

I wrinkled my nose.  Avocados were bad enough, but someone had let those things into soup?  No way was I going to be eating that.  I pushed the blanket off my body and shook my head.

“That’s ok. I’m not hungry at the moment.  Where are the queen and the prince?”

☀☀☀☀☀

The world I stepped into after leaving the castle was nothing like I’d seen before.  Eira’s walls had been knocked down, and the forest was nowhere to be seen.  Maybe there was a few trees I could see in the distance, but it was nothing like the forest I’d seen before.  One glance to my left had my eyes widening as I saw my hometown on the horizon.  I hadn’t even been able to see Aine from the border before, so how could I see it from here?

“Odelle!”

I turned my attention towards the man running towards me, and an epiphany hit me just then.  I recognized my father in him.  How had I not realized it before?  This was why the person inside had addressed me as ‘princess’.  Tae was my brother.  I ran toward him then and crushed him in a hug.

“I thought you were dead,” I gasped.

“I thought you were dead!” he exclaimed as he hugged me just as tight. “You did it, Odelle.  You broke the curse.” He pointed toward the horizon. “Look at how close home is now.”

I grinned, tears shining in my eyes.  I had a real home now, but it wasn’t in Chanda.

“Wait, I need to show you something.” Tae pulled a map from his pocket and unraveled it. “Look.”

I stared down at the map, confusing clouding my brow.  It was almost as if it had shrunk…and been blown up at the same time.  All the towns were there, but they were far closer than they had been before.  Yule Forest was smaller than I’d ever imagined it could be, but somehow, the towering Viola mountains stayed the same.

“I have something to tell you, too,” he began, but the moment I looked into his eyes, I could tell that he knew I’d already figured it out.  He chuckled. “You’ve united the royals, Odelle.”

I furrowed my brow. “Huh?”

“You told her without me, Tae?” Lumi asked in exasperation.

I turned to her as she run up to us, and all the pieces clicked in my mind.  Lumi resembled the fuzzy painting I’d had of my mother.  My eyes went wide as I glanced between them.

“I’m related to both of you?” I ejaculated.

“Uh…” Tae glanced over at Lumi. “Well, yes.”

“Azar and Yoongi are waiting in Aine.  They want to meet you, Odelle.”

“They have met me,” I pointed out.

“They haven’t met you as their sister!” Tae exclaimed.

I laughed and shook my head. “Let’s go, then.

☀☀☀☀☀

Neither Tae nor Lumi made a comment about the temperature when we crossed the border.  I would’ve expected it to affect them somehow.  In fact, I would’ve thought that Tae would have to return to Chanda or at least his old clothing when the curse had been broken.  What was going on?

Aine’s walls were still as they once had been, but that was reasonable.  The majority of the town’s houses were built into the city walls, so knocking them down would’ve been a waste of resources.  As we entered the city, I noticed there were many things that had changed, though.  Yoongi’s shop took up twice as much space as it once had, and there was a massive sign on the front that said: Yoongi’s Relics – learn Akshaya’s history!

I smiled as I saw children playing in the streets with those who didn’t look like them.  People in the streets who had once shunned me greeted me, too.  I hadn’t known Jungkook, but something within me told me he would’ve been happy to see this.  His destruction had brought good to many people, as ironic as it was.

And so, the continent of Akshaya was one again.  The peoples were united with their relatives that they hadn’t even known they’d had, and the weather failed to harm anyone.  Everything was good, and I was accepted for who I was.