the crack between the worlds

A Chapter by Scisenheart

natalie dumberck finds herelf thrust into a new world she does not understand

Natalie Dumbreck felt her newly chopped dirty blonde shoulder length hair dampen as she wandered out of the hairdresser's house (the back way that led to the hair salon) into the lane. She felt the light drizzle caress her pale pink freckled skin as she clambered onto the tree trunk to get a better view of the lane, and mainly, to pretend. Pretend that there was a door in the walls cloaked in ivy, or that she would suddenly understand the words to the song of the birds perched on the trees that still stood, or that there was something hiding in the gaping scar in the tree trunk. She peered into it, her ice green eyes searching its hollow depths, half-afraid of its earthy darkness. She had reason, albeit subconscious, to fear it.

She suddenly felt a breeze ripple through the rain. She could smell something...peculiar, an earthy, woody scent. She could feel the heat of a warm autumn sun glaring down on her white school shirt, yet around her there was nothing but the spring's drizzle and grey clouds. Another breeze ripped through the lane, though the birds seemed oblivious to it. She could taste salt as the wind caught on her tongue; could hear the sea roaring in the distance and birds that sang sweeter than any she had heard before. The lane around her blurred into a green haze.

Though she could not tell how, for she swore that she could have barely fit up to her elbow through it before, she fell through the hole.

At first, there was nothing but black, not even the green haze she had left behind through the hole in the stump, which must be rather large by now. She could hear neither the birds from the lane nor the cars on the street parallel to it, but that strange phenomenon that dominated her senses still lingered, it grew stronger. The blackness melted into yet another blur, this one filled with the colours of a day in early autumn, where the sun still believed it to be summer. It grew clearer and she began to make out the shaped of stout oak trees and the obscure shape of mountains far in the distance, a jumble of purple, black and ice white. Clearer still, she saw the trees’ auburn leaves rustle in the same breeze she had felt in the lane. The lane….Where was she? How did she get here? This could not be beneath the tree stump, could it? Argh! This didn’t make any sense! The forest glade, in which she stood, was now perfectly clear; she did not notice until later that her vision was much clearer in this…other world? Though she still did not have a clue what was going on, after weighing up her options, she decided her best bet was too walk, eventually she would meet someone, she hoped.

She was now very different from the girl in the lane, physically at least. Her dirty blonde naturally poker straight locks began to glisten with hints of gold, and a slight wave had quivered through them leaving soft ripples in the blonde sea. Her sense of smell grew more powerful, she could now smell the distant sea without the aid of the wind. She came across a fierce knot of brambles. She crouched down and raised one of the midnight black berries to her eager lips. The sensation that erupted in her mouth was nothing like the dull taste of the blackberries in the world where she had come from. The forget-me-not blue sky had turned violently black. The last thing she saw before her head hit the sand paper rough blanket of leaves was a malicious bolt of lightning ripping apart the night sky as if it were no more than a scrap of cloth.

When she woke to the crisp autumn morning, she was surrounded, by what looked to be a small regiment of soldiers, clad in slimy green armour. By armour, I mean proper Arthurian legend chain mail, visors and swords. Who knows what she had been expecting, but it was not this!

They began to hiss, a dull malicious tone. They advanced menacingly towards her. She screamed in protest as two of them clamped their claw like hands around her arms and yanked me to my feet. She was in another world, like the ones she had always dreamed of going to, and nothing was going the way she had expected! They couldn’t understand her cries of injustice, nor she the darkly melodic hiss that emanated from their mouths filled with their snake like forked tongues. And so, despite her insistent objections, they marched her up the intimidating mountain, to their enthralling mist white fortress…