"[Basta] was staring at him through the smoke as if an invisible bond united them. The flames licked up at him in vain, and he raised his knife. Who was he aiming at? And why was he smiling like that?
Dustfinger ... shouted Farid's name, but the noise all around drowned out his voice. The boy was still holding Meggie's hand with one of his own, while his other hand held the knife, the knife that Dustfinger had given him in another life, another story.
'Farid!' The boy did not hear him — and Basta threw.
Dustfinger saw the knife go into that thin back. He caught the boy before he fell to the ground, but he was already dead. And there stood Basta with his foot on another dead body, smiling? Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger's heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years. He saw Meggie's face, heard her sobbing Farid's name, and put the boy's body in her arms. His legs were trembling so much that he had difficulty straightening up. Everything about him was trembling, even the hand holding the knife that he had pulled out of the boy's back. He wanted to get at Basta, through the fire and the fighting men, but Silvertongue was faster. Silvertongue, who had plucked Farid from his own story and whose daughter sat there weeping as if her own heart had had a knife driven into it, like the boy...
Mo ignored the flames moving toward him. He thrust his sword through Basta's body as if he had never done anything else in his life, as if from now on his trade was killing. Basta died with an expression of surprise still on his face. He fell into the fire, and Dustfinger stumbled back to Farid, who was still held in Meggie's arms.
What had he expected — that the boy would come back to life just because his killer was dead? No, the black eyes were still empty, empty as a deserted house. There was none of the joy in them now that had always been so difficult to banish. And Dustfinger kneeled there on the trodden earth, while Resa comforted her weeping daughter, and men were fighting, killing, and being killed all around them, and he no longer had any idea what he was doing here, what was going on, why he had ever come beneath these trees, the same trees that he had seen in his dream.
In the worst of all dreams.
And now it had come true."
— Inkspell (Tintenblut), by Cornelia Funke
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