The light touches the earth heating a perfect ring of fresh grass that livens the stark wintry forest. Sunlight filters through the trees overhead casting an emerald glow upon Margo, the canopy showering warm drops. She nestles into the soft grass with her arms stretched over her head to bask in warmth. Her muscles lose stiffness and blood pumps regularly again. All thoughts of white monsters and icicles slip far from her memory….
The sun grows warmer and prickles at her skin until all of the drops overhead have sizzled away. She expects a sunburn by now but doesn’t bother to check. Not with the comfort of heat in her bones again. No more tingling or numbness, only the toasty warmth that somehow seems to be increasing still. The warm, burning… Scorching even…
It is suddenly too hot. Overwhelmingly and unbearably hot. In a matter of seconds, it strengthens from a day at the beach to the Sahara deserts to the belly of Mount St. Helens. Margo’s blood boils in fury, violently pumping through her veins.
She jumps to her feet covering her face, protecting what she can. She has to move — but to where? The only place to go is back into the biting cold.
Whoosh!
The ground slips out from under her feet sending a painful echo through her head when it meets the soil. The air in her lungs escapes, and heat stabs her face as the invisible force flattens her.
Her eyes dart about in search of what caused her collapse. The woods are empty.
The spotlight intensifies growing into a cloud of heat focused solely upon her. Her body is bound to the earth as if gravity has magnified. She cannot escape; to budge is even impossible.
The air around her stirs. Not wind, but more a violent charge of energy, a furious swarm of invisible bees whirling around her. And she is forced to remain still and broken and take the invisible beating.
Her head spins as the light above grows as blinding as the snow globe had. The motion is nauseating, but she keeps her eyes open this time. She has learned throughout the day’s events that closing them will only make it worse.
A bolt echoes throughout the sky as the source of the light above explodes. Showers of illuminated rain fall, splattering down on Margo’s face and tearing through her flesh like scorching drops of molten metal. She screams and writhes from the impact. Oddly, the places that hurt the most are the inner part of her arms and the back of her neck. The intensity brings tears to her eyes. Like razors digging into her spine. Daggers carving out the core of her arms.
Margo’s screams do nothing. Nothing but lose oxygen.
The pressure lifts, the invisible weight no more. Margo slowly looks around expecting to find pieces of her body, pieces of her own flesh, strewn about after this last beating, but she doesn’t. In fact, she feels…good.
She rises shakily to her feet. Margo stands within the same forest she was in after following that flaming bird, the same forest that had been covered in ice and snow, and it has somehow changed yet again. To look inside this forest is to explore the works of a dream in hard form, granted a chance to see imagination. The colors are hardly hues found in ordinary woods but are more vivid and saturated. The leaves not quite a lime green nor the woodsy hunter green they’re expected to be. Flowers are scattered throughout the branches painted in vibrant neon. Even the cloudless sky is a shade closer to turquoise. It is as if she’s walked into someone’s realism painting in which the artist has slightly mixed the wrong colors, throwing off the whole mood.
But — and this realization churns her stomach — this is wrong. This feels like someone has played God, and the forest is the result of not mixing the colors just right. Abnormal plants and trees fill the woods. Spiky bits of moss cling to trees like sea urchins. The tree trunks are more russet than brown, some with unusually smooth bark. Wild-looking flowers wear large, exotic petals. Even little things she notices — the soil she walks on being too fluffy or a patch of weeds she brushes against too slick against her skin — are strangely off-putting.
The great vast of turquoise sky peeks through break in the trees ahead, attracting her attention. She suddenly remembers the city below and sprints to the edge of the cliff to capture the full view of the valley.
Expecting to find the village as oddly hued as the forest, Margo is surprised to find the opposite. The town is drained of color. The grassless land of dust has a few dozen rows of shacks running down its center. There is little vegetation, which appears to be only several acres of crops and a few trees, though even these plants are gray. There are small plots of land with pitiful tufts of grass to feed unrecognizable animals. The buildings are constructed of what appear to sea-bleached logs, but there is no ocean in sight.
The sadness Margo feels for the deadened town lifts when she notices movement below. The villagers hurry about as if simply getting on with their lives, not taking notice to the vanishing ice and lava-spewing spotlight from moments ago.
The arduous drop will pose a problem. She cannot make it safely down from such height. Searching the edge of the cliff for some sort of pathway, her mouth gapes. What she stands on is not merely a valley but a crater, a circular chunk sliced clean out of the ground. The cliff wraps around the city with a several miles between Margo and the other side.
She scans the entire lap, but can find no obvious way below. She does notice something; though, it is not nearly as safe as she had hoped. A tree grows from the valley below extending above top of the cliff. Its branches brush against the side of the bluff and grow into the wall of the cliff, forming a perfect ladder. It must have been planted for this very reason, she decides.
She reaches out and grabs onto a sturdy limb about eye level and peeps over the edge. The ground below sways. Margo and heights are not exactly on good terms. But she only needs to step a few feet over and then climb down.
Something catches her attention causing her to freeze in place. The inside of Margo’s left arm is covered in congealed blood. She runs her fingers over the area flaking off some of the loose pieces and looks down to finds various blood splatters all over her clothes. From the cat, maybe?
It wasn’t. It was from her.
Looking closer at her arm, she finds a series of oddly shaped cuts, almost pattern-like. Her other arm has similar cuts, too. What’s strange is that they don’t hurt. If Margo hadn’t looked, she wouldn’t have even known they were there. Strange, yes, but the questions will have to wait until she is on lower ground, or at least not halfway hanging off a cliff.
Margo gulps back her fears and pulls herself onto the tree, focusing on the injuries on her arms rather than the jagged rocks below.
As she climbs down, she tries thinking back to what might have happened to get the cuts. The cat did jump at her, but she didn’t feel anything from the impact. She was already dead by the time she hit Margo. The first time she struck, her claws weren’t even out. Even if it were from the cat, these cuts are not in the shape of claws but more like…etchings.
There isn’t much else Margo can think of as she lowers herself down the tree. The branches hold their form as she drops down onto each one below. The gray stone of the cliff runs parallel to her with veins swirling a design on its exposed surface.
Margo freezes mid-step as she remembers something.
The light, the explosion, it had hurt her arms. Actually, it was the very spot of these cuts. The back of her neck hurt as well, and, as she thinks this, she reaches her hand back to where she had felt the pain. And there it is: another grouping of slightly healed gashes. But what can this mean? Is this one of the unusual punishments received when someone enters this place, whatever this place may be?
Margo lowers herself onto the next branch, taking another glance at the strange cuts. Her mind is overloaded with questions. And still with no one available to answer them. She can hardly keep up with the events that have occurred.
She reaches the bottom limb, still about five feet from the ground, and slings herself down without missing a beat, landing in a low crouch.
“Huh?” she says out loud, somewhat surprised at herself.
She shakes away the thought and turns to look at this new part of the land. Margo has never been to Arizona, but this is what she pictures it to look like: hardly any green, the minimal shrubs, dull colors, dust and sand fading into the distance, the bare cliffs….
Looking up, she can see the stretch of unnaturally turquoise sky, a glorious sea whose shores are broken off by the cliff’s edge. The few rays of sunlight that shine from above cast eerie shadows into the valley.
A stone wall wraps around the strange city, exposing only a cluster of rickety, gray rooftops. Directly in front of Margo is a looming door, and she is thankful for her first bit of luck. She only hopes that once she reaches the village she will be able to get the answers she needs. Most importantly, what happened when she touched that globe?
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