The Kingdom of Eternal Sorrow (The Golden Mage Book 1) (2 page)

She turned to a red-faced Kat and whispered, afraid to disturb the
unnatural silence, “Kat, do you notice anything strange about the park right
now?”

Looking suspiciously at her, Kat demanded rather loudly, “What the hell
are you talking about? And why are you whispering?”

Allison blinked in surprise at the coldness in her sister’s voice. She
opened her mouth to reply but quickly shut it when she saw the icy glare Kat
directed at her.

“You’re just trying to change the subject so you don’t have to deal
with what I said, aren’t you?” she accused. “You don’t believe that I would
really do—”

Her voice broke off abruptly, the pissed off look on her face melting
into first, confusion, then alarm. A wave of relief washed through Allison at
her sister’s reaction. She
noticed
. If Kat was hearing, or rather
not
hearing, the same thing, then Allison couldn’t be crazy. What was happening was
real and not just in her head.

For a long moment, Kat stood frozen and listened, seemingly not even
daring to breathe as if she, too, was scared to disturb that unnatural silence.
Her eyes had slowly widened in what could have been fear or wonder, but the
tremble in her voice as she spoke pointed towards the former.

“The silence,” Kat said nervously, her anger long forgotten. “The
silence is what you’re talking about isn’t it? It’s not—
right
.”

“Exactly,” Allison confirmed, more to herself than to her sister.
“Birds should be singing, people talking and laughing, a breeze blowing, but
they all stopped when things got heated between us. That’s why I noticed it. My
voice suddenly sounded ten times louder than it should have, even raised in
panic. It’s as if nature is expecting something unnatural or catastrophic to
happen, like the animals they say sense earthquakes days before they happen in California. They sudden begin to act strange, and I think we can qualify what’s happening
right now as strange.”

“Are you sure that the reason why the birds stopped singing wasn’t
because of my shouting?” Kat asked. “That could’ve scared them into silence,
couldn’t it?”

“Maybe so,” Allison answered without conviction, “but the breeze also
stopped. Your shouting wouldn’t have affected
that
. This isn’t the first
time this has happened, either. Several minutes ago, I noticed that everything
was
too
quiet, even for this particular park, but I dismissed it as
nothing, a coincidence. Now I’m not so sure.”

Allison paused for a moment, torn between wanting to confide her
earlier feelings of being watched with her sister, but then afraid of Kat’s
reaction to something that sounded like no more than a case of paranoia.
But
I need to know if she felt the staring, too, or if that part really was me
making something out of nothing. If she also felt it, then maybe it has
something to do with what’s happening now.

“Kat, I’m going to tell you something that may seem as if I’ve finally
gone off the deep end and am drowning alongside your dad, but just hear me out
before you laugh in my face.”

Kat eyed her with something akin to fear, shifting her feet uneasily
and glancing over her shoulder once as if expecting an attack before she nodded
reluctantly.

Feeling somewhat foolish, Allison began, “All morning, ever since your
pounding woke me up, I’ve been feeling as if someone was watching me. I ignored
it at first, thinking it was just my imagination, then it kept happening over
and over until I could actually feel something like fingertips brushing against
the back of my neck. It made me feel like I was under your dad’s gaze all those
times when he was deciding if I should be punished or not—you know, small and
helpless. The last time was in the car. That’s why I was so quiet. I’m sorry if
it seemed like I was totally ignoring you just to spite you, but I was just
trying to figure out what was happening to me. What I want to know is if you’ve
been experiencing something similar to that?”

Kat didn’t answer her right away. Her expression was thoughtful, and Allison
wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t have been better if Kat had laughed in her face. Was
she remembering something? Allison shifted her weight from foot to foot
nervously in the suffocating silence, waiting for her sister to speak with the
air of a defendant waiting for a jury’s verdict.

“Well, I haven’t felt like anyone was watching me,” Kat finally replied
quietly, “but now that you mention the ride over here, I did notice that it got
cold all of a sudden. In fact, I was just about to ask if your air-conditioner
was being wonky, but the cold just suddenly went away.”

“I noticed that, too,” Allison whispered.

“This is getting really creepy, Allie,” Kat said uneasily, her eyes
flitting around the park. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t care where we go, as
long as it’s far away from here!”

“I agree.”

Allison turned around and began retracing her steps across the park,
Kat walking so close that their hips occasional brushed. However, she only
managed to walk a few feet, when without warning, a brilliant light as potent
as looking directly into the sun flashed a couple of steps in front of them.

Kat was instantly struck mid-scream with a force so great that it caused
her to fly back about twenty feet, landing in a crumbled heap at the foot of a
tree, while at the same time, Allison was brutally knocked to her knees as that
same force hit her legs, crying out as pain reverberated up her legs from
landing hard on both kneecaps and momentarily blinded by the searing light that
had seemed to materialize out of thin air.

What the hell…?
Allison’s mind echoed those words a split-second
before she felt a violent tug on her body that jerked her towards the source of
that brilliant flash, and half-blinded, she frantically dug her fingers into
the moist ground and hung on for dear life.

***

Kat cried out in shock as an unexpected flash of light blinded her, and a
tremendous force, like the fist of God, crashed into her body, flinging her
back though the air. She squeezed burning, tear-filled eyes shut a split-second
before she felt the bone-crushing impact of her body slamming unmercifully to
the ground. A blinding pain shot up the length of her arm from her forearm,
feeling as though it had been bent in half. She choked on her scream, her mind
instantly filling with a blackness that promised a painless oblivion.

No!
Gritting her teeth, Kat fought off the welcoming darkness
and the bile rising to her throat. Had a bomb just gone off? Allie—where was
Allie? She opened her eyes wide and blinked them rapidly to try to clear the
colorful lights of blue, red, green, and yellow that clouded her vision.

Once she had focused her blurry vision enough to see the scene before
her, she gasped in horror when she finally spotted her sister. Where the flash
of light first appeared now stood a luminous, circular light, undulating like
small waves across a lake and reflecting every color of the spectrum that was
visible to the human eye and even some that Kat’s mind couldn’t make sense of,
that made her head hurt, and the darkness already threatening her with oblivion
expand when she tried to focus on them. The mind-bending phenomenon appeared as
though someone or something had torn a hole in the very fabric of the world,
allowing the illumination of another world to shine through.

However, the light was not what horrified Kat. What really turned her
blood cold was the sight of Allison and the fact that half of her body had
already disappeared into that rippling brilliance. She had dug her fingers into
the grass and earth in front of her and was clinging with all her might,
sobbing in terror, and desperately calling out Kat’s name.

“Allie!
No
!” Kat heard herself scream as if she was listening to
someone else.

As Allison’s body abruptly lurched back, she frantically clawed at the
grass, at the earth,
anything
to prevent herself from being sucked into
that rip of light, Kat struggled to sit up, trying to unsuccessfully ignore the
bleached-white bone that had splintered out through the skin of her arm and now
lay exposed in a mixture of gushing blood and torn muscle.

“Katherine! For God’s sake,
help me
!” Allison screamed
hysterically as she slipped farther back into the rip, clawing desperately for
anything to prevent the light from swallowing more of her body than it had
already claimed.

Trying to ignore the pain that seemed to grow more unbearable by the
second, Kat staggered to her feet and almost immediately nearly collapsed, weakened
from both shock and the alarming amount of blood flowing from her
compound-fractured arm. She swayed dizzily for a second or two before she
regained enough of her balance to keep her feet.

Cradling her mangled arm with the other, the teen stumbled as quickly
to the aid of her sister as the threatening blackness and weakness allowed. Time
drastically slowed until Kat felt as though she was stumbling against the
high-powered current of a rain-swollen river. Allison seemed to be miles away.
The world had become as surreal as a dream.

That light could suck me in too!
her mind screamed frantically
at her, but she ignored it. Her entire being was focused on reaching Allison
before that light swallowed her whole.

Then Allison suddenly lost her grip on the moist earth and was drawn,
screaming, back into the light and the unknown. In a last frantic attempt to
save her sister, Kat dove forward, ignoring her injured limb totally, and
reached out her good arm to snatch at Allison’s frantically scrabbling fingers.

When Kat hit the ground, a wave of unbearable pain flashed up her arm
and through her body simultaneously with the realization that her fingertips
had maddeningly only brushed the tips of her doomed sister’s. This time she
went willingly into the black oblivion that awaited her, taking with her the
terrible image of her sister’s face twisted with terror as she disappeared into
the mysterious rip of light and the distant sound of footsteps pounding towards
her. A last fleeting thought comforted her as she lost consciousness, assuring
her that all she had just witnessed had to have been a nightmare and not
reality.

Disorientation greeted Allison the moment the blinding light had
completely pulled her body into its shimmering chaos by an unexplainable force
that had seemed to grab at her body almost hungrily with its greedy, invisible
hands. She immediately felt the light, itself, as a presence, a living entity.
It surrounded her, penetrated her entire body with a heat that was almost unbearable,
a fiery ocean ready to drown her, to devour her. The essence of the light
completely saturated her very atoms, forcing them to pull away from each other
until she no longer had a physical body and only the separated particles
remained.

Although she was merely a seemingly infinite amount of detached atoms,
she still felt an essence of herself—her thoughts and emotions—still aware and
attached to every one of those microscopic units that had once been her body.
It was as if her atoms were the grains of sand that made up the beach and the
light, the incoming tide that saturated it.

Terrified, Allison tried to scream, but in her present state, it was
impossible. Nor could she hear anything while inside that world of white-hot light
she “saw” only through her mind’s eye. She could only feel the sole emotion of
fear radiating throughout her entire being.

I’m dead
, she thought frantically, grasping at anything that
sounded even remotely rational to her frightened mind that helped to explain
what was happening to her. Death seemed the only logical explanation, though
her mind instantly railed at the thought of having her life so abruptly and
inexplicable snuffed out.

Then terror became madness.

Without warning, her newly separated atoms rushed forward within that
strange realm of light at an impossible speed, weaving in and out of perceived bright
showers and pulsing swirls of light that were filled with every color of the
spectrum and even a few that weren’t ordinarily visible to human eyes.

Reason completely left Allison at that point of her preternatural journey,
along with her conscious awareness of everything that she was experiencing. It
was as if she had lost her abilities to think, feel, to function at all, while
she was in her current state of being. All she had were momentary images of her
surroundings and places she had never seen flashing rapidly in her mind like
the incoherent dream images of a fevered mind.

Then phantom voices broke through the silence. They seemed to surround
her, to penetrate her, feeding information into her being so rapidly that she
could not grasp any of it. She was no longer Allison, but only a cluster of cognate
particles pulsing with their own radiant life.

Mercifully, the trek ended almost as quickly as it had begun. Her
separated atoms violently combined once again in a whirl of glistening chaos to
reform her physical body. A blinding, white light illuminated her entire world,
and Allison soon found herself once again alert and gasping desperately for
breath as if she had abruptly been revived after drowning.

Dizzy and lightheaded, Allison realized with a start that she was
standing on firm ground, and her knees were beginning to buckle. With a cry of
dismay, she crumbled to the ground.

Lying sprawled out on her stomach in what felt and smelled like grass,
her face pressed uncomfortable into the thick growth, Allison finally noticed
that a vast darkness embraced her instead of the brilliant light of that
strange realm.

Dear God, I’m blind!

Panic threatened to wash over her for a minute or two before she
noticed that she had yet to even open her eyes. If circumstances had not been
what they were, she would have burst out laughing at her absentmindedness, but
she only sighed inwardly with extreme relief that the experience had not
blinded her.

Allison cautiously lifted her head, which felt as if it weighed a
thousand pounds, and gingerly opened her eyes.

Immediately, she wished that she had just kept them shut. The world
spun aimlessly before her in an array of greens, blues, and flashing yellows,
causing an insistent pounding to begin in her temples and her stomach to lurch.
Allison moaned miserably and squeezed her eyes tightly shut until the drums in
her head ceased to beat so strongly.

God, what happened? Did I just experience death? No—that can’t be
right. I’m still breathing, and my body hurts too damned much for me to be
dead. Maybe it was a near-death experience—

Her thoughts froze as the sound of whispering abruptly reached her ears
as if a couple dozen people had suddenly surrounded her. Her eyes flew open
again at the sound, and she hastily rose. This time the pounding in her head
did not resume, and though she still felt a bit dizzy and woozy, the world was
no longer spinning in circles before her as though she was riding an
out-of-control merry-go-round.

It can’t be—

There was no circle of curious onlookers surrounding her, nor was
anyone in sight, but that wasn’t what had her staring dumbly with rapidly
widening eyes at the scene before her. She knew within a heartbeat that she was
no longer in the park, or for that matter, in California. What she saw before
her—her mind stubbornly refused to believe.

A vast, highly intimidating forest with a species of trees that she had
never seen replaced the cypress and pines that had dotted the landscape before
that oval light had appeared out of nowhere to claim her.

These trees were enormous—larger even than the familiar redwood trees
of California, but their size was not the main characteristic of them that had
caught her eye. It was the appearance of the peculiar structure of the limbs
and the strangeness of the leaves they sported. Bent at unnatural angles in
every possible direction imaginable, the trunk and branches of these trees
reminded her immensely of the Okinawan
bonsai
tree one of her roommates
kept in their living room.

“It’s almost as if someone multiplied the size of that little tree by a
hundred,” Allison muttered wondrously under her breath.

That’s where the resemblance to the
bonsai
tree ended and the
unfamiliarity began. The leaves—if they were in fact leaves—were a shade of
green so deep that they were almost black. From where she sat, the leaves
appeared to be like the blossoms of a monstrous rose that had mutated to be ten
times its normal size. Hundreds of these rose-like leaves littered the many
twisted branches of the trees.

On their own accord, her eyes darted from the trees to the ground. She
gasped in surprise. What she had believed was grass when she had felt it
earlier, was in a sense,
not
grass as she knew. It had three times the
width of ordinary crab grass and was a pale green in comparison to the
green-black of the leaves above.

It was then that Allison noticed that something in the air was—wrong.
It smelled heavily of nature, a scent unfamiliar to her city-bred nose, but
that was not the reason for her sense of wrongness. Some essential element was
missing, something she could not quite grasp completely. It even tasted
different.

This can’t be happening! Where in God’s name am I?

As Allison glanced wildly around in the vicinity of where she sat, she
noticed that she seemed to be in a small clearing within the forest that was no
more than fifty yards wide. There were no visible paths emerging from the trees
that suggested that anyone had ever visited this particular clearing, and she
didn’t know whether to feel relieved or distressed.

She squinted up into the sky and instantly cried out in shock at what
she saw. Not one, but
two
suns radiated down upon her. One was high in
the sky, about twice as small as Earth’s sun, but just as blinding. The other
was barely rising over what little of the horizon she could see through the
gaps in the trees. She noisily released a breath she hadn’t realized she was
holding and put her hands over her eyes to childishly block out the scene that
was right out of a sci-fi movie.

I didn’t see that—dear God, I couldn’t have seen that—

While she had been observing the alienness of her new surroundings,
Allison had completely forgotten about the faint whispers that initially had
caused her to open her eyes and sit up in alarm. They now returned to her, a
little more audible than before, and also, a little more insistent for her
attention.

Allison immediately dropped her hands from her eyes and scrambled to
her feet, whirling around from left to right still a bit unsteadily to try to
locate their source but spotting no one once again. There was only the forest
in every direction as far as the eye could see. The whispers seemed to be
coming from the air directly around her.

—or the inside of my head—

She shuddered uneasily and tried to banish that last, unnerving thought
from her mind, but it persisted no matter how hard she tried to shake it. It
was then, as her mind was frantically trying to find another line of thinking,
that she remembered Katherine. Had she been sucked into the light as well?
Allison was a bit alarmed that she couldn’t remember anything between the time
she had first seen Kat running towards her and right after she had been pulled
completely into the light.

“Kat!” she shouted urgently. Her voice sounded small and weak against
the magnitude of the trees that loomed all around her.

Only the whispers filled her ears.

“Kat! Are you here? Please
answer
me!” she shouted again through
a half-choked sob.

Still nothing.

Realizing that she was alone, a blow that was as affective as a fierce
kick to her stomach, Allison began to cry earnestly in fear and despair. She
didn’t know where she was or understand how being sucked into a light had
brought her here. All she knew was that this strange forest she now stood
sobbing in was completely foreign to her, and the whispering she heard was
growing frighteningly louder with every breath she took.

She sucked in several slow, deep breaths in an effort to stop the tears
as she stared out into the forest, convinced that the voices she heard originated
somewhere far back within the thicket. One minute, two, then she abruptly felt
something inside her head shatter as if it was a mirror shattering into a
thousand slivers of glass after striking the ground. There was no pain.

Before she could contemplate what the odd sensation could have been,
the incoherent babbling of a million voices suddenly swelled up in her mind,
filling it with a shrillness and volume that was impossible to bear. It was as
though she was wearing headphones and someone had abruptly turned up the volume
to an unholy maximum.

Allison screamed in sudden agony and fell to her knees, instinctively
throwing her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to silence the infinite
amount of voices that seemed to be booming all around her. A warm stickiness
began to run through her fingers. Still, the voices came, swelling in volume
and frequency with every passing second.

Screaming terribly at the top of her lungs, Allison’s mind mercifully
shut down a few moments later, no longer capable of bearing the trauma and pain
those voices caused. She fell over onto her face for the second time that day,
consumed into the darkness of an unfeeling unconsciousness that still harbored
the endless amount of voices that continued to swell in her mind.