Page 5 of Wingless Crow: Part 1

Then, the chilly sensation of the water lapping against my face vanished. Pink light shimmered beyond my closed eyelids.

“Take a breath,” Trez said, allowing me to release the air I held.

I opened my eyes, but all I could see was the milky-pink mist surrounding us. We were suspended in it. I kept smiling, but mostly because Trez never told me to stop. Deep under the thick blanket of artificial joy, however, dread stirred inside me.

This place was like nothing I knew. Holding tight to each other, Trez and I floated in the pinknothingness. There was no up or down here, no solid ground, not even gravity. But there was some sense of direction in the pink mist. It seemed to move in a slow, barely discernible current.

“Get ready.” Trez shifted me to his left side, freeing his right arm.

Ready for what?

There was no time to ask.

A blast of wind tore the pink mist to shreds. Gray clouds moved in. The lazy peace of the pink, misty stream was gone, replaced by the howling wind and screeching birds.

“Hold on,” Trez gritted through his teeth, hooking his right arm over a rocky cliff.

Gravity returned with a vengeance, dragging us down, down to…

My feet dangled in the air. One had a shoe on, the other didn’t. Both were wet and covered in mud. And below my feet, there was nothing but patches of gloomy gray clouds. As the clouds parted, the ground came into view.

Far, far below, stretched the bird's-eye view of a landscape with black mountains, green valleys, and hair-thin silvery ribbons of rivers.

Trez was hanging by one arm from a sharp, rocky drop high above the world. This wasn’t a mountain peak. It was not connected to the world below, hovering high above it, like an island of rock above the clouds. Trez’s arm around my middle was the only thing keeping me from plunging to a certain death.

“I’ll swing you up, and you climb onto the bank,” he said casually, as if hanging high above the clouds was a very normal thing to do.

Not waiting for my response, he swung his entire body forward, shoving me up. For once, I was glad for the muddling fog in my head. It left very little place for fear. I simply did what Trez told me to do. Letting go of his t-shirt, I gripped the rock of the cliff and climbed up and up until there was nowhere to climb anymore. The steep rock wall plateaued, and I sat on it, waiting for Trez to tell me what to do next.

He climbed up the cliff, too, then yanked me up by my arm.

“Let’s go.”

I got up without a word of protest, but I hoped we didn’t have to go too far. Whatever this place was, the weather here was colder than where we came from. A biting wind blew incessantly, chilling my skin through my wet clothes. But of course, I followed Trez without arguing, limping in my one shoe along the rocky path.

Either the effects of the shimmering drink were wearing off, or the shock of what was happening helped to thin the haze in my head, but curiosity broke through the numb indifference inside me.

Falling slightly behind Trez, I threw a furtive look around, trying to figure out where we were.

Somehow, it was day now, but the sun remained hidden behind a thick cloud cover above us. The cliff we’d climbed up was a bank of a river with the opposite bank barely visible in the distance. Instead of water, however, gray clouds rolled and churned between the two rocky banks. In the middle of the river, the clouds shimmered pink in a thin continuous ribbon of mist.

The duck pond and the park with the parking lot were now gone. A thick forest grew on each bank of the river.

Trez led me to a path between the trees, moving with the confidence that told me he’d been here before. The path started from a stone bridge built across the river of clouds and slithered between the trees, disappearing into the forest.

Trez dragged me by my arm, leading me away from the bridge and the river.

“Almost there,” he assured me.

My bare foot ached, hitting the rocks that stuck out from the packed dirt of the path. The high heel of the shoe on my other foot made me limp. I didn’t care about any of that, though, still under the effects of Trez’s drink.

A tiny part of me had gotten free from the hazy feeling somehow. And it was fascinated by the place we’d come to.

The tall trees on either side of the path had gnarly, twisted branches, but that didn’t make them look scary. Rather, it gave them unusual artistic shapes. They rose into the gray sky like fantastic sculptures with their lush crowns of green, glossy leaves. Tall leafy vegetation grew at the base of the tree trunks. I spotted a few colorful mushroom caps and a sprinkle of berries here and there.

Some things seemed familiar. The leaves on the trees had the shape of oak tree leaves. The plants on the ground looked like ferns with patches of grass and moss in between.

But other things were so different, they looked like props—pretty but not real. The brightly colored mushroom caps were dotted with neon colors or decorated with fluorescent spirals. The moths fluttering in the shade had wings that glistened as if dusted with silver-blue glitter.

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