The Power of Five Oblivion

much I missed Jamie … and George as well. But very quickly things began to get better and this is the important thing.
    The world was healing itself.
    You could see it every day in the weather, the clear skies, the fact that you could actually see stars at night. I’d had no idea how beautiful they were. The seeds we planted quickly grew instead of withering and dying. Fish began to reappear in the rivers and animals in the woods. We still had no electricity or telephones – in fact we don’t to this day, despite all the work being done on the lines. But people stopped attacking people. If there were any police around, they had decided to hang up their black uniforms and do something useful. There was no need to be afraid any more. More people started arriving, coming out of the fields and woods, looking for somewhere to settle down, and very quickly our community grew.
    I am seventy years old now. I’ve had a pretty reasonable life, with a husband, four children and no fewer than eleven grandchildren. I still see the Traveller, who married Sophie (the woman with fair hair from the pod). I’m glad he doesn’t need to travel any more. Everyone in the village asks me about Oblivion and people can’t believe I was actually there. And I shot the Devil. I suppose that is something to be proud about.
    Richard lives just a few doors away. He married late and had just one child, a son. I wasn’t at all surprised when he christened him Matt and I sometimes think he even looks a little bit like Matt too – or what Matt would have looked like if he’d grown up – with the same dark hair and blue eyes. Richard is ten years older than me and his hair has gone quite white but he’s still in pretty good shape. He never wrote a single word about his adventures, even though he had always promised to. In the end, he left that to me. I’m not sure what will happen to all these pages, but I expect in the end the Old Ones will be forgotten, just as they were forgotten after they were first defeated, ten thousand years ago. I don’t really mind. Just so long as they don’t come back.
    And the Five?
    They went back to the dreamworld, as that was what lay on the other side of the mountains of Oblivion. When we were on the Lady Jane together, Jamie told me something of the dreamworld and I know how he saw it, how it was when he and the others visited it before the end: black and white, like a desert, with everything dying or dead. It was a world full of frightening things … giant swans that swooped out of the night sky, poisonous trees that turned out to be volcanic eruptions. There was a huge library in the middle of it all. Matt had visited it – but none of the others.
    Jamie had told me all this, but in fact when he and the others returned, it all changed.
    As they made their way forward, leaving the ice and the Antarctic night behind them, the colours came back. The sky turned blue. A bright yellow sun rose over the horizon. The hills were covered with grass and of course there were hedges and wild flowers dotted here and there like splodges of paint. The sea which had once seemed so dark and threatening was suddenly crystal clear, reflecting the sun, with waves breaking onto a white sand beach.
    In front of their eyes, the dreamworld changed and became something quite different from what they had experienced. There were birds in the trees and animals – cows and sheep – in the fields. Matt saw a grey horse cantering across a field, throwing its head from side to side and kicking out with its hooves, and he had to smile because he recognized it. It was the very horse he had ridden in the first battle at Scathack Hill, all those years ago. Meanwhile, Scarlett found herself in an orchard, and not one with maggoty apples like the ones I’d spent so many years picking. There were peaches and apricots and every kind of fruit right at her fingertips. There was a bonfire burning in the distance and it added its scent to the summer air.
    Flint and Jamie were walking together as though they’d never been apart. As far as Jamie was concerned, it was as if Scott had never died because really he and Flint were the same, even if they had lived centuries apart. Pedro simply stood there, wide-eyed, unable to take it all in. And gradually they were no longer alone in the dreamworld. There were other people and somehow they seemed to know them. Houses sprung up in the distance, with smoke curling from chimneys. They heard