✧ The Final Chapter ⎯⎯ Page's DRP

Instructions

"It was night when you died, my firefly." The usually cozy bookstore was entirely silent, the soft atmosphere doing nothing to soothe the numb feeling in Pages soul. She lay tucked tightly into a soft blanket, faer breathing shallow and ragged. There was no physical sickness left for a twoleg vet to cure. Page’s heart was simply breaking under a crushing weight that she had carried for far too many moons. "Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction." A dark, suffocating thought clawed at her. Because I loved them, they died. It felt like a curse. Every single cat she had ever let into faer heart had been ripped away. Her mind began to wander, drifting through the fog of her final moments like a series of unspoken letters to the ghosts of faer past. "Did you get enough love, my little dove" She shut faer eyes, grimacing slightly as the numb feeling crept ever closer. Suddenly, the darkness behind Page's eyelids fractured, exploding into a slow-motion carousel of everything fae had ever lost. "Why do you cry?" The first memory spun into focus, sweet and agonizingly slow. It was the scent of pine needles and warm fur. Page saw her mate’s face, captured in absolute clarity, turning to look at fae with a bright, easy purr. Beetember. Her beloved. She felt the exact moment faer heart had opened to her—and in slow motion, fae watched the phantom image of her walk away into the dark, terrifying canopy of the forest. "Should we look at the moon, my little loon" The scene shifted like water. Now Page was listening to the echo of faer best friend’s laughter, a sound that played out note by note, stretched into eternity. Fae saw the sun hitting their paws as they stood on the border of the two-leg place. In the memory, Page reached out a paw to stop them from crossing into Clan territory, but faer movements were trapped in molasses. She was too slow. She was always too slow. Fae watched her vanish into the trees where the predators waited. Lily and Pollenparadise. Gone. "Make the most of your life, while it is rife" Then came small warm blurs, bouncing around her. Small faint echoes of tinkling laughter and adoring questions taunted Page. Kits? Fae gave a heart wrenching thick sob. The blurs slowed and got further from her as faer vision got fuzzy, their small faces turning back to look at Page one last time before dissolving into nothingness. "Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?" The carousel spun one last time, decelerating until it stopped. Pages eyes flickered open and gazed for the last time at her home, the slow-motion delusion shattering. Time rushed back all at once. Page saw a little ball roll into her view and a few small mews. Tulip; one of Page's only living loves. "Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky" One of the last beautiful things Page had to lose. Leaving her kits was going to be one of the hardest things fae had ever done. She loved Tulip and the rest so much and it frightened fae to the core. Page was to weak to whisper final loving words into the ears of Tulip and her remaining kits and it almost broke her right there. The bookstore, the blanket, and the sweet shadowy silhouette of Tulip against the wall all began to blur into a soft, quiet gray. Fae didn't want to go. Fae wanted to watch her final kits grow up under the safety of the bookstore's shelves, away from the claws of the wild. But the tide of grief was pulling fae under, and she could no longer fight the current. Had she been good enough? A good enough mother? A good enough friend? A good enough mate? A good enough aunt? A good enough sister? Had she been good enough? At all? "We're all gonna die" "We're all gonna die" "We're all gonna die" With one final, trembling breath that sounded like a whisper to the wind, Page’s chest went perfectly still. The numb feeling took over, her heart finally giving out. It shattered into a million pieces in Page's last few seconds. A single tear slipped down her cheek as faer soul slipped away. "I'm sorry." <//3