Too late, they realized the darkness had a plan.
"Hold on tight!" Lyse screamed as the boat went airborne.
A moment later, it crashed back into the surface of the water. Only the water had become so shallow that the stern of the boat slammed into the solid ground underneath it and the raft split apart, sending everyone flying. Arrabelle felt fingers grasping at her ankle, trying to hold her back, but then her own velocity ripped her out of its grasp and she sailed away. With a thwack, Arrabelle's hip connected with the ground and she cried out in pain, holding on to her side.
The water was freezing, soaking into her pants and shirt, and she began to shiver uncontrollably. Her hip throbbed-she'd probably taken a layer of skin off as she hit the ground-but she gritted her teeth against the pain, rolled over, and crawled to her knees. She'd been thrown on the other side of the darkness, but instead of a maelstrom of cloud and water and wind, she found herself inside the calm.
She was in the eye of a storm.
There was no wind here and the sky had been blotted out by the black clouds swirling above her. Inside the eye, the air was heavy with water, and her lungs fought to pull oxygen from it.
"Evan!" she cried. "Lyse?!"
There was no reply. She felt her ears pop as the pressure changed, and she knew that she had passed out of the eye of the storm. All around her, there was nothing but sand. She realized that the dreamlands had changed again on her. The water was gone and a powdery red sand had taken its place.
"Hello?!" she screamed, the heaviness of the air blunting her cries. "Help me!"
After a while, she gave up calling for help and began to wander, looking for a way out of the darkness. But it was like being trapped in smoke. The gray smog made it hard to see very far in any direction. And the more she walked, the less confident she was that she wasn't going in the wrong direction.
She must've walked for hours, anger giving way to frustration and then frustration giving way to fear. She was in a strange place and she had no idea how to get back to her own reality. She gave up on finding the rest of her coven and began to try to call up one of those orbs Lyse used to transport them in and out of the dreamlands. She went around and around, working on figuring out a way to use magic to get herself out of the darkness.
As an herbalist, she knew how to manipulate plants to make tinctures and poultices and powders . . . what she didn't know how to do was take those skills and use them to save herself.
It didn't take long for her to give up and start walking again. The red sand began to change, replaced, instead, by bright white rocks in various shapes and sizes. It only took stepping on one of the "rocks" to discover that it was made of a soft and fluffy material-and not a rock, at all. She knelt down and picked up one of the smaller "rocks" and held it up in the palm of her hand.
"What are you?" she asked it, lifting it to her nose and sniffing. It smelled like steamed sweet rice, a heady sugary scent that made her stomach growl.
She raised an eyebrow, not really believing that the dreamlands were trying to feed her. She pinched off a section of the "rock" and put it in her mouth. It tasted heavenly. Starving, she stuffed the rest of the "rock" in her mouth and barely chewed, the fluffy rice ball melting as she swallowed.
She knew it was a mistake the moment it hit her belly, the ache she felt there spiraling out to the rest of her body. She clutched her stomach and groaned, but she was in such pain that she was hardly conscious of doing it. All she could see was the darkness. All she could feel was the evil in her stomach slowly dissolving her from the inside out. Black dots appeared in her peripheral vision, and a deep ache of pain filled her every cell. It took over her senses and leached all the life from her veins. She fell forward, her body sprawled across the ground, smooshing the "rocks" beneath her.
If she'd been aware, she would've quickly understood her mistake. She would've realized the "rocks" were actually mushrooms, and, as an herbalist, she would've kicked herself for touching the poisonous things to begin with, let alone eating them. It was the stupidest of mistakes.
The mushrooms began to expand and grow, surrounding and covering Arrabelle until she disappeared underneath them. Unconsciousness settled over her and, for all intents and purposes, she appeared to be dead and buried . . . even though she was not.
She was merely sleeping the sleep of the dreamlands.
Lizbeth
Lizbeth stood by the edge of a lake filled with grape Nehi (the only soft drink she liked), watching as three glowing suns, the size and color of a trio of blood oranges, began to set on the eastern horizon. Three suns and a grape soda lake . . . ? Just another indicator of how bizarre things were in the dreamlands. It was like stepping into a world where the only limitations were your imagination.