Jamyria: The Entering (The Jamyria Series Book 1) (4 page)

A spasm throbs up Margo’s arm.

“Gah!”

Frostbite? She doesn’t know all of the symptoms but is sure muscle spasms are on the list. But how can this happen now? As she faces her death.

There is a new dullness in the cat’s eyes as if she’s grown bored of her prey. Fur stands on her arched back. In a deliberate crouch, she rocks back one last time before propelling herself forward. Her feet leave the ground as she sails through the air with claws out and paws spread. She pulls her lips back to expose her teeth for a fatal strike.

The liquid, tingling runs down Margo’s arm to the tip of her fingers. She shrieks, turning her head to shield it with her arm. The other flails out wildly behind her. A crushing weight hits her back arm, threatening to snap the bones. Margo is suddenly gripping something cold until her knuckles hurt. It is met with a hot liquid. The crashing
boom
followed by a whimper is the last sound of the attack.

Margo sits there trembling, not knowing what happened, why she isn’t dead. Slowly, she turns around and carefully pulls her protective arm away from her head. In her other hand is a long icicle, piercing through the cat’s chest. An icicle she knows for a fact she was not holding before.

She releases it, staggering away from the animal.

The cat slowly moves as if attempting to sit back up, but the burden overwhelms her and her body falls limp, crystal eyes glossy and empty. Her luscious white fur, which Margo now sees has faint gray stripes, ripples in the wind and is painted in red.

Margo falls to her knees, her hands shaking and unable to peel her eyes away from what she has done. The last bit of the weapon melts from the warm blood of the cat’s side. Without the intent of the hunt, she suddenly holds the innocence of any ordinary house cat with her silky black lips, pink tongue rough like sandpaper, even a collection of grey whiskers. How could she have seen her as a beast?

A hand involuntarily reaches for her nearby gut disappearing into a layer of fluff. Her fingers instantly thaw. There is no stopping it; Margo melts into the side of the cat’s body. It still holds much warmth. She pulls her arms into its side feeling the goose bumps disappear. The numbness soon follows.

What a strange place I’ve discovered
, Margo thinks to herself. She knows she should be more concerned with nearly losing her life, but mountains of questions seem to fill her mind once again. She is desperate to unlock the mysteries of this icy forest and longs to discover its secrets and more of its fascinating creatures. Or maybe this is just hypothermia talking.

Her mind wanders through wintry woods in hopes of forgetting the beast whose life she’s taken. She closes her eyes and involuntarily snuggles closer to the cat.

Icy branches clatter above. She cracks her eyes open, unsure of how long she’s slept next to the animal, to find herself lying in the middle of the forest.

Limbs sore from sleeping stiffly for so long, she eases to her feet. The wind hits her cold, wet side. She was so warm a moment ago that she hadn’t realized her nap took place in a pool of the cat’s blood. She shivers in the breeze. Perhaps her indulgence caused more harm than good.

She decides that since she is somewhere between the clearing with the stones and the road, she would to take a risk and search for the road. The cold envelopes her as she leaves the cat alone in the woods. Her hair drips cold blood as she makes her way through the crystallized forest, leaving a speckled trail of red behind her.

Conflicting thoughts battle on within. One side believes this is all just a strange coincidence and that she’ll soon be home snuggled up on the couch with her mom and a cup of hot cocoa. The other part of her knows something greater had occurred.

The fight for the first option presses her to keep searching for the dirt road. There has to be a way back home. She’ll search through the night if she has to. No matter how thick the air is, or how chilling the winds. At least for the time being the winds have died, decreasing the chance of falling ice.

An upcoming tree is split in its center creating a distinguishable fork in its trunk that Margo is certain she’s seen before. On the way into the woods, she remembers taking a left so if this time she takes a right
—

Her hand thrusts backward wrapping around the trunk of a tree as she nearly loses her balance. A wave of vertigo sweeps through her causing her to cling tighter to the limb. Margo teeters over the edge of a cliff that she is certain is nowhere near her home. The woods should continue on, not drop off into a rocky descent.

This confirms her greatest fear.

Hanging onto the tree for dear life, she uses her feet as leverage in order to pull herself back up. She scoots around until she is safely behind the trunk of tree.

The clean drop off is completely out of place. Her forest would never have ended so abruptly.

Margo gasps.

Light! Below a layer of fog sits rows of little structures that appear carved in ice. And within them is light. Puffing chimneys. Life. Warmth.

The streets of the little town are empty, but it is obvious people reside below. If only she can manage a way down to the warmth. But the only apparent way is to slide with the hopes of surviving. The sheer drop has to be at least thirty feet down.

Margo backs into a tree and slides to the ground with a painful crunch, and before she’s able to stop it, she is crying. Her willpower is gone. The severity of the cold takes over. Not to mention, the odds seem to be against her.

She lays on the hard grass with her eyes closed, losing feeling. Tears freeze halfway down her cheeks.

Margo has thought of herself as a brave girl having been through enough to call herself that. But now she is scared.
Actually
scared. She lays flat and motionless. A drop of warm water hits her cheek.

Stop crying.

The droplets spread across her cheek to her neck, her arms, sprinkling lightly and warming her even more than the cat had.

An illusion
, she tells herself. Rain doesn’t fall warm, especially when surrounded by ice. It isn’t real.

But then something else happens: her eyelids begin to glow red. She pops them open in confusion and a powerful ray cast above causes her to shield her eyes. The warmth is satisfying, but the magnitude slightly overwhelming.

She squints. The sky above the trees is clear. Not rain but showers of warm, melting ice beat down on her skin, confronting the goose bumps. Each drop sizzles away the cold.

The rest of the forest remains in darkness and frozen. The light is only cast upon her. She decides not to let it bother her — the fact that the light is only focused on her. After all, she deserves a moment to soak in every ounce of heat available and relax.

Chapter Four: The Welcoming Woman

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?

The smells of dust and burning wood fill her nostrils. She chokes as a gust of wind spreads sand past her. It is disorienting to experience the humidity the moist forest offered only moments ago disappear into this dry wasteland. The ground below is more sand than soil and slips beneath her feet, which only adds to her weariness. At least most of the sun has fallen behind the tall cliffs.

The wall doesn’t have the look of machine-construction. Mix-matched rocks in different shades of gray, tan, and brown are held together with what looks like mud. The door is made of unstained wood and has a rough, natural texture to it. There is no handle.

She’s unsure whether it would be appropriate to just push the door open or knock first but eventually opts to give a courteous knock. She holds up her fist and taps lightly a few times, hardly creating a sound through the thick wood. That does not stop her from being heard. The door swings open.

A small man with a curved back grips the frame of the door with stubby fingers blackened in grime. His eyes are sunken into his leathery face and do not seem to follow one another properly. He has no teeth which causes his grimace to disappear into his face. What’s left of his paper-white hair grazes the top of his shoulders and wisps in the wind.

After the brief look over, Margo realizes he is glaring at her. “Come in, come in,” he fusses.

Suddenly, she feels a bit uneasy and reconsiders. She cannot be sure that if she goes in there she won’t come out looking like him — if she is to come out at all.

He grows impatient with her hesitation and reaches out for her hand, giving it a tug.

He freezes, staring down at her, eyebrows tightening. Margo doesn’t know what he sees, but grows even more uncomfortable with his boorish staring.

Suddenly, his eyes widen in realization, slightly popping a vein out of his temple. His good eye jumps from Margo’s face to whatever it is he is gawking at.

“Could it be?” he whispers to himself. “Already…?”

Margo tries to hold it together, but is unable to control her features.

Instead of pulling her into the city, he quickly steps out with her. A few clumsy tugs on his poncho, and he shoves the heap into Margo’s arms.

“Put this on,” he says urgently. He glances around nervously.

It smells like stale dirt and body odor, but Margo is too frightened to do anything but obey — and pray she doesn’t catch anything. She breathes through her mouth.

“Follow me.” He is whispering again. “Quickly. Keep your eyes down.”

He takes her by the arm again but only long enough to pull her through the open door. Once they are in the village, he lets her go and scurries off into the streets.

His request to keep her eyes down proves difficult. There is much to see. Now that the ice has vanished, the streets are full of peculiar people. Most stay busy with their tasks or hustle on their way to where ever it is they are going. Some shop from the little kiosks set up along the streets, chatting about. Others pop in and out of buildings. On occasion, Margo receives an unwelcoming, sneering expression.

Something is very wrong here.

There are even fewer plants inside the walls, not even the shrubs that grow on the other side. The sandy roads are packed down harder than outside the gate, and every time the wind blows, a cloud of dust swirls through the air. Margo is reminded of an old western movie. She almost expects to see a bar fight in one of the buildings or a lone tumbleweed flipping down the road.

The graying buildings stand no more than six feet apart. A short set of steps lead to each door, and a small sign hangs outward from above every doorway with a name carved on it and a number hung beneath. She passes ‘Herbs and Plants, Number 23’ and ‘Fruit, Number 27’ before nearly losing sight of the little man in the crowds. She quickens her stride.

The people here are wrong, Margo notices as a couple duck out of a shop labeled ‘Eyewear, Number 21.’ That’s when she realizes what is bothering her: their attire. They are all dressed in different styles of clothing. Some are from a different era. Those wear anything from tattered bell-bottoms to long ruffled dresses that could have easily been from the early twentieth, maybe even nineteenth, century. The others, though fewer in numbers, are dressed more modern — jeans, short trendy dresses, business suits, or graphic tees.