"Your chariot awaits," he said, gesturing to the boat.
"But who sent for a boat?" she asked.
"Neither of us, at least not consciously," he replied, "but the dreamlands sensed our need and acted accordingly. Now we really do need to shake a leg. A storm is coming."
He offered her his hand, and she took it, letting him help her into the boat. The dinghy took her weight easily, barely swaying as Tem climbed in beside her. They sat side by side on the little wooden bench seat, their arms and legs touching. It was all very intimate and Lizbeth felt herself blushing as the boat began to glide silently across the top of the water, propelled by absolutely nothing.
"Are you comfortable?" he asked.
She nodded and the dinghy picked up speed, the wind ruffling her long hair. A drop of rain fell on her nose and she wiped it away.
"So what now?" she asked.
"We stay in the dreamlands for as long as we can. It's safer for you . . . and there are things you can only learn here."
"Like what?" she asked, the rain beginning in earnest.
It fell in sheets so thick it was hard to believe they were made up of individual raindrops. She shivered, finally feeling cold for the first time since they'd arrived.
"Here," Tem said, pulling an umbrella from the ether. He opened it, the slick black fabric canopy large enough to cover them both. "And that's what I meant by learning."
"Making an umbrella appear out of nowhere?" she asked.
"Exactly."
As more and more rainwater fell, the water around them began to rise. Lizbeth only knew this because when she looked down past the mini-ripples made by the raindrops, she could see that a vast ocean lay beneath them. There were massive reefs made of red and purple coral and filled with swaying green kelp and multicolored fish. She gasped when she saw the silhouette of a mermaid streak past them.
"It's so beautiful," she murmured-then shrieked as a giant bright pink tentacle broke the surface of the water and slammed across their path, narrowly missing the front end of the dinghy.
"And dangerous," Tem said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. "Even for us magicians."
"You said that before, when we first met."
"I did," he agreed.
"What did you mean?"
"My brother, Thomas, and I come from a universe similar to yours, but different in many ways. The darkness that has seeped into your world overtook ours. There were some who fought back, but, in the end, it wasn't enough."
He sighed and scratched at his nose with a long, delicate finger.
"Unlike you, we had magic. It hadn't been hidden away and forgotten, stripped from the very fabric of our existence," he continued. "Not like in your world. Where I come from, we know that many different universes coexist, vibrating so closely together that they seem to rest on top of one another. For those of us who are born lucky-like Thomas and me-we can travel between the different alternate realities using the dreamlands as a conduit . . . because they connect everything and everyone together."
"So why is my world different?" Lizbeth asked.
Tem shrugged, then shook his head. He lowered the umbrella, the rain having finally stopped.
"It's all in the details. Major events occur that cause a divergence-like maybe there was a war and in my world one side was victorious, but in yours the other side won. Whatever happened that made magic disappear from your world? Well, it just didn't happen in my universe."
The boat was beginning to slow down now that they'd outrun the storm, and they drifted on the endless sea, no land in sight. There was only a blanket of fog ahead of them, a fine white mist that they seemed to be heading straight toward.
"And what I did? It brought that magic back into my world?"
"It was never wholly gone," Tem said. "But you've unbound it again. You dreamed its return and you can't put that genie back in a bottle."
"And now what? That's the end of The Flood?"
Tem snorted.
"Hardly. The Flood is only a manifestation of the darkness that's been sweeping across all of the worlds. But for some reason, your universe has become a pivotal holdout. If you fall, I don't know what will become of everything else."
"I feel like all I'm doing is asking questions," Lizbeth murmured, then sighed; she was tired and emotionally wrung out. She wished she could just close her eyes and sleep for a thousand years.
"That's how you get answers," Tem said, smiling, as the dinghy bumped into something under the water and came to a stop.