Audible sirens shrieked in the near distance, closing on them.Cha checked the side mirror.“At least a dozen hounds, closing fast.Or… law weasels?”The carriages kind of looked like ermines in winter mode, leaping sinuously along the ley line.“Very fast.”
“Hang on,” Dy said tossing Cha a quick grin at the belated warning, then tipped her head at the glowing orb sitting dead ahead and growing exponentially huger with every passing second.Physical space, like time, was apparently just as mutable in the fae realms.“No telling what this transition will feel like.”
“Can’t be worse than Obsidian to Moonstone,” Cha observed.
“Oh, yes it can.By an order of magnitude, would be my prediction,” Dy replied.“Each fae realm is an order of magnitude more powerful than the previous one, so I expect this crossing to be truly wrenching.”
She didn’t have to sound so gleeful.Cha braced herself, patting Katu’s head.Dy urged Big Betty to an even faster speed, which seemed imprudent since they didn’t know what hitting that big yellow yolk would be like.
“Ah, Goldilocks,” Cha began…
And they hit the border.
~13~
A Pocket Full of Sunshine
Instead of feelingturned inside out, Cha exploded into radiant light.It felt as if every cell in her body had been trapped in darkness and was liberated at last.She was coming apart and didn’t care because it felt so damn good, like the best orgasm ever, except it went on too long and she began to struggle to find herself again.
Through warping slow motion, Dy—a supernova of spiraling golden locks and exploding blue eyes—said “Touuuuuccchhhhh Waaaaarrrrggggg.”
“Eeeeeyyyyyewwwwww,” Cha replied, wondering why even their voices were distorted.
With surprising speed, given the weird warping, Dy seized Cha’s wrist and flattened her hand against Warg’s slimy side.Except it didn’t feel slimy for once.Instead he felt like a cool and solid drink of water in a searing desert.And her body drank that in, her cells reassembling into the correct size and sequence.Shrinking back into her body felt like closing the door on a dark and windowless room—but one she was happy to hide in for the next several hours.Cha had never considered herself a den animal, but she could see her way to it now.
“Wow,” Dy breathed in rare wonder.“High, pure yellow ley line.This is like flying into the sun.”
Cautiously, Cha squinched open the eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed.The windows gradually brightened as Dy removed the shading.
Spread before them was a landscape of butter yellow and sparkling gold.It looked like something out of a fairytale, the happy, childrens’ kind, with rolling hills of cloud-soft grass and occasional trees spreading gracious branches, leaves glittering as they fluttered as if they’d been made of beaten gold or copper.Cha had never seen such beautiful trees, the thick trunks a deep bronze and the elegant canopy supported by limbs finely etched against a sky pale as dawn when the cool colors of night first give way to warming sunrise.
Birds flew in vast flocks, darker points of copper against the soft sky, switching directions in one swirling moment to the next.Over the next hill, a herd of unicorns grazed peacefully, snowy white on the buttery grass, all lifting their heads to watch Big Betty sail past, gentle violet eyes doelike in wonder, their shining horns like exclamation points.
Beyond them the land sloped down, giving way to sand that glittered gold, lapped by the gentle waves of a sea that looked for all the world like molten gold.So much so that Cha would hesitate to touch it, for fear of having that part of her body immediately melted away.And yet she wanted to, with a longing that shocked her.Not at all unlike the burning desire for Azul she couldn’t seem to shake, the need for him outpacing all the shouted warnings of her sadly mortal nervous system.
Directly ahead, at the apparent destination of the ley line they traveled, a palace stood on a towering conical mountain overlooking the volcanic sea.It looked as if it had been carved from a yellow diamond—or from a citrine—Cha supposed, though she hadn’t seen many of those.They weren’t particularly valued by humans, though there had been some in Phinny’s box of bribery jewels.She couldn’t say why she got the impression it had been made from a single jewel, especially at this distance—though at the speed of the yellow ley line, that distance was diminishing rapidly—except that she somehow knew it had been.Or perhaps that it had been blown like a bubble from a tiny seed, fragile as a soap membrane and yet unbreakable.It blazed like a second sun on the cliff.Actually, she corrected herself, like theonlysun as—despite the pervasive, effervescent glow of the sky, there didn’t seem to be a sun visible.
“Is it nighttime here?”she asked, almost rhetorically.
“That would explain the lack of a sun,” Dy answered patiently like she might with one of her kids asking a stupid question.
“But it’s so bright.”
“Not as bright as Moonstone,” Dy replied.“Besides, you know unicorns are nocturnal.They wouldn’t have been out if it were daytime.”
Had Cha known that?Hmm.
“Well, it’s certainly beautiful.”Cha lifted her chin at Dy’s disbelieving look.“What?I can appreciate a beautiful landscape.”
“Take your hand off Warg,” Dy suggested with a twist of a knowing smile.
“Ugh.”Having forgotten she put it there, Cha lifted her now thoroughly slimed hand and emitted a little screech of shock for the shift in perspective.All that had been soft became sharp, the cloudlike grass like tiny shards of glass.The once gentle sea—still that volcanic shade of molten gold—seethed with malice.The flocks of birds dove and swooped with menacing grace, slicing across the sky.
It was all the same, but different.Certainly no longer what anyone would call beautiful.The shift made her wonder about Azul, and how he’d appear with a bit of lodestone grounding.Maybe she didn’t want to know, coward that she was.
The palace, looming ever larger in their field of vision, still shimmered like a soap bubble jewel, glowing like a sun.But now it clearly appeared to have been constructed, not so magical.Though that seemed odd.Clearly there was magic aplenty radiating out of this landscape.“It was glamoured?”she asked, somewhat unnecessarily, because why else would Warg’s grounding have changed what she saw?
“Yep,” Dy replied.She could see through glamour pretty easily.She’d once described it as like flicking sunshades on and off.