A Visit from Lioness — A Vision in the Desert of Dreams

The dawn sky was only beginning to blush when Ffyo slipped quietly out of the Amethyst Sanctum. Her thoughts had been loud all night — tumbling, buzzing, stacking on top of each other until she could barely hear her own breath. So she did what she always did when everything inside felt too tight: she walked.

Her hooves carried her toward the Desert of Dreams, a vast stretch of shifting pink-gold sand where the horizon felt wide enough to hold anything. The wind there had a way of smoothing out the edges of tangled feelings, and today she desperately needed that smoothing.

She paused at a ridge overlooking the dunes. Heat shimmered gently across the rising sand, but beneath it… something stirred. A hum. A pull. A quiet invitation. Ffyo exhaled and let herself follow it.

The moment she closed her eyes, the desert brightened. The air stilled. The swirling noise inside her softened. And then — as naturally as breath — the world around her shifted into a vision-quest shimmer.

Out of the rippling light stepped a familiar shape: the steady form of Lioness, her first mentor, her anchor, her truth-in-stillness. Even though Lioness was far away on her own mission, vision-Lioness stood before her as if she had been waiting all along.

Lioness tilted her head, studying her with those calm knowing eyes. “Ffyo,” she said gently, “your mind is running without waiting for your heart. Why are you moving like this? What is driving you today?”

Ffyo answered honestly — about her thoughts, her worries, her choices, her attempts to do right by everyone. She laid out her reasoning piece by piece, proud she could trace it all back to her training.

But Lioness’s face stayed… puzzled.

Ffyo felt herself wobble inside. “This is the training you gave me,” she said, almost defensive but mostly confused. “This is how you taught me to clarify.”

Lioness stepped closer, her voice steady and warm. “Yes… and no,” she said. “You are using the training I gave you. But this is not the way I taught you to limit the training.”

Ffyo blinked. “Limit it?”

Lioness nodded. “Training is not stone, Ffyo. It is water. It flows. It evolves with the moment and with the person. You learned my method — and then you kept growing. You added experience, heart, logic, pattern-seeing, mistakes, victories, and everything in between. You’ve expanded the training into something larger than what I could give you back then — not because I didn’t want to, but because you weren’t ready to hear it yet.”

Her voice softened. “You are using it correctly. You’re just using it at a level I could not yet teach you when I first started training you. That’s not a mistake. That is growth. That is you.”

The wind shifted again, swirling sand around Lioness’s paws. “You carry all your Rangers with you,” she said, her form beginning to glow. “But never forget — I see you. I always have. And what you’re doing now? It is exactly what you were meant to grow into.” And with that, the vision dissolved, leaving Ffyo standing alone in the warm hush of the Desert of Dreams… but no longer tangled. No longer unsure. Just steady — with Lioness’s presence still echoing in her chest.