Page 78 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
I spring to my feet before my eyes even finish flashing open, my inner dragon roaring. Aurelia. Where isNa’therya?
I cannot see her. I cannot smell her. I cannot sense her.
The bond between us is…gone.
Pink roses surround me. Everywhere I look, there are pink roses. Wilting roses. Rotting roses. They droop on their vines and drip their blackened petals underfoot.
Where the roses end, the thorns begin. Thorns as thick as my thighs and twice as long. Walls of thorns that rise far overhead, nearly blotting out the sky.
“Dear Weaver,” I whisper under my breath as I stare up at a strange, new heaven filled with dark green clouds and the crackle of lightning. “Where am I?”
“Oh, look, he’s awake,” Brisa’s voice sounds from just behind me. “Finished with your beauty sleep, then,Theryn’kai?”
Some small sense of relief cuts through my confusion as I whirl around and find myself face to face with both Brisa and Glorana. At least I am not alone in this bizarre place.
“Where are we?” I ask.
Brisa throws up her hands and loudly proclaims, “Nowhere!”
But Glorana is quick to point out, “One is alwayssomewhere, sister. We just do not yet know where that somewhere is.” Adjusting her spectacles, she adds, “But if I were to make an educated guess, I would say we are trapped in some sort of dreamscape.”
“Dreamscape?” I echo.
And suddenly, it all comes rushing back.
The storm. The river. Aurelia. Malice. His sleeping curse.
I bare my teeth in a bestial snarl as I slowly turn about again and survey my prison. Finally, I recognize it.
It is Aurelia’s childhood garden rendered in nightmarish proportions.
Glorana is speaking again. I try to listen even while I hunt for a way out, but it is hard to focus on her words while she waxes poetic on her various hypotheses.
The old apple tree is now a grotesque snarl of blackened limbs, standing nearly as tall as the walls of thorns. But any hope of climbing it dissipates in the next moment as I realize that when I reach for the branches just above my head, they seem to keep growing further and further away.
I growl to myself and reach out with my mind, hunting for threads of Earth that I might weave into something useful, like a ladder. I freeze when nothing at all rises to greet me.
There is no magic here.
“… and then I realized we must be trapped in the mind of some utterlyderangedindividual. Like Malice,” Glorana finally finishes.
“I’d wager we’re trapped in my mind, actually,” I absentmindedly correct as I return to pacing the perimeter, looking for any weak points in the brambles. “This is one of my memories. Or some version of it, at least.”
Brisa stares at me. “Where in the world did you come by a memory likethis?”
“It is the garden where I first met Aurelia seventeen years ago,” I briskly explain. “But it never looked like this in real life.”
Glorana blinks once. “Well, one would hope not.”
I sigh and drag my fingers through my hair while I continue to hunt, seemingly in vain, for a break in the thorns. Everywhere I look, there are more—an endless sea of thorns waiting to impale us on their wicked points.
Cold tendrils of despair grip my heart.
Where is Aurelia? Where is Velda? Are they trapped here as well?
Or are they somewhere else… withhim?
As if in answer to my questions, a sudden voice cries out in the distance. A voice that stops my heart and sends it racing all in the same breath.
