How does Feyn world manage without a keeper? Or maybe it does have one?
As an expert puts it:
- Paollo: That's what surprises me! A dream of this complexity and size could never hold together without a dream keeper, not to mention the vast amount od energy. How is all of this possible?!
So what are the possibilities?
- There is no keeper
- This is what the Feyn claim (Douglas is very insistent that they don't need humans for anything but sustenance), but Marula never says that. It's possible that keeper exists, but most Feyn just don't know about them.
- The "keeper" is a collective of all the grown-up people whose creative energy fuels the place
- Maybe they just can't agree on those very subjective things? Maybe the Feyn world is literally the work of a commitee?
- Or it's a collective of all the children
- The kids don't really know how world's supposed to feel and simplify it.
- The keeper is king Ur, and he's from the Majestan family
- Assuming he's that guy we had a glimpse of in chapter 4 - he had purple Feyn wings (and lots of them), but they didn't seem to grow out of his body. A body wrapped in grey shroud, with a single human, waking world hand sticking out - this would mean Ur is human.
- Marula recognizes Paollo as the Majestan - that means she knows at least something about what's going on outside of her kingdom, including who the Majestan family are so maybe Ur is a relative? It's unlikely a disappearance of the heir apparent would go unnoticed, but maybe a little hunting accident? Maybe a younger brother?
- Possibly they've been grooming Odette to be his replacement, perhaps just in case something happened. Other girls she knew "aged out of the system" and are being used to sustain the Feyn world - she somehow hasn't, at twenty-eight, which is definitely adult. We see she has experience in shaping magic, she shows sensitivity to disturbances in the dream - maybe she's their answer to Paollo. This would explain why the Feyn don't seem to get over her leaving. She has a bee motif - maybe she's supposed to become the "queen bee" in the Feyn hive?
- Or - Odette's supposed to be a soul-bound guard of sorts to Ur. She can stabilise an out-of-control keeper, she's perceptive to psychological problems, can listen and the more mundane sort of support comes naturally to her.
- The keeper is actually that poor guard, Adazi
- In chapter 7 we learn that thirty years ago something happened that resulted in one of Nemo's soul-bound guards dead and another...
... when we found him, he was silent, barely alive, and a shadow of his former self. Still, he could dream nightmares of constant torture and suffering. Whatever happened to him did not weaken the power of his dream magic.- While the poor guy's body remains in strict confinement, heavily medicated so he can't infect the dream world, we don't get to see what's going on with his mind. Maybe... it's out there? And his dead colleague might have been the first person the Feyn did this to, only it went even more wrong?
- And it's implied that Adazi is Zatachi's father. Suddenly his jokester act seems much less silly...
Who is Odette, really?
As said above, at twenty-eight, she's a bit old to be kept in the Feyn kingdom. Maybe Douglas just wants her back out of a twisted sort of attachment, but... What do we know about her?
- She shapes her light spell like a lightbulb, and nobody around knows what it is, just like Paollo didn't know what cars were in the swamp. By Word of God:Douglas' library contains books from long ago eras of human history so she's read about a lot of people, places, and things that are lost to time in Paollo's era.
- She speaks Majestani sign language - how did she learn just from books? How many children who spoke it could have been taken over the years? Maybe she really was taken from Majestan? Maybe she's even a dream noble and the spouse-finding aspect of the tour wasn't a complete failure after all?
- While her personal dream world is pretty empty for now, Tusura notes it has solid foundations and lots of potential. Maybe that's simply extensive knowledge and healthy imagination waiting to be used, but maybe it's an uncultivated talent for dream magic? Shaping spells comes naturally to Odette, and her first rune comes out just right while Tusura is teaching her.
- There are curious paralells between her and Noon - they both grew up in hardship in the dream world but are gentle souls.
- She also has paralells with Paollo, as they both feel like disappointments who don't deserve what they got and are puzzled as to why people are even nice to them. Birds of a Feather, or...?
- She seems to have something to do with creating Amalgams. Who else have we seen who could do that? Marula. The "queen bee" of the Feyn. Keeping with Odette's bee motif, that may be telling.
Odette might be the catalyst Paollo needs to gain control over his power
- Her influence makes him feel safe and steady, she contains his magical explosion and their magic fits together very well - when their joint spell blows up, Tatami finds a blue-yellow shard in the debris with colors perfectly blended. And there's a definite connection - when she's trying to cast her first spell by herself, which is supposed to make light, Odette thinks of lanterns, fire and physical equations (and exact value of speed of light), but what actually lets her make a spark is thinking of Paollo (she thinks of stars, then stargazing with him after they left Feyn world, then just of him). Is someone falling in love, or ...?
Odette might be Artificial Human created from Lun and/or Adazi's soul or other bits and pieces
- They had their mysterious accident (which left one dead and the other in an And I Must Scream situation) thirty years back. Odette is twenty-eight, as far as she knows. Maybe they were taken for some sort of experimentation (by the Feyn or someone in cahoots with the Feyn), and Odette is the result? She would make a pretty good soul-bound guard with her calm bravery and how she "stabilises" Paollo.
