Dreamweaver

Chapter 12

I have no idea how we managed to sleep that night.

Amirra and I spoke little, but lay side by side, afraid to venture out by ourselves. All I know is one minute I was staring up into the endless grey that stretched overhead, and the next Amirra was shaking me awake.

I opened my eyes to see her leaning over me and, past her, a clear blue sky. The first thought I had was that I hadn’t dreamed. Wonderful, I’d traded my nightmare for reality. The second was the realization that there was no way the sky was supposed to be blue. I sat up quickly, stumbling to my feet. The grey expanse was cut off about twenty feet above my head, meeting a solid wall of still blue sky, very bright considering I couldn’t see a sun, and looking incredibly out of place.

The vision overhead was completely void of clouds, and with its suspicious lack of sun, the blazing blue looked less like a sky than a backdrop to one of michaelangelo’s paintings. Amirra and I stood in silence, not quite believing this fairly ordinary site in such an extraordinary place.

“Why is…” I didn’t finish, didn’t have to. “I don’t know.” Amirra said curtly, but with a slight tremor in her voice. A moment of silence, both of us still craning our necks, then “Where’s Tiu, anyway?” I looked around, I had forgotten Ganymede’s promise that another player in this sick game was coming to ‘help’ us.

Great.

“I don’t know.” I finally answered, seeing no sign of any great mythological figure, “Maybe… maybe we missed him? Could he have come before we woke up?” Amirra didn’t get a chance to respond, because at that moment, a three foot long spear whistled through the air at an impossible speed, landing inches from my feet.

Amirra didn’t flinch, I, on the other hand, yelled out and nearly fell over backwards. Amirra snickered, but just then another spear, similar to the first, flew through the air, straight down this time, and directly into the hood of Amirra’s coat. The arrow caught the jacket with such force that Amirra was thrown violently to the ground, letting out a shrill shriek as she fell.

We stared wide eyed at each other for a moment, she still lying on the hard ground, half obscured by mist, and me standing, shocked, above her. Then she yanked the spear from her hood and got up shakily. I followed suit, pulling the first spear from the ground.

It was silver steel, laced with veins of shimmering gold, with a sharp and lethal looking tip. Amirra’s was identical, except the body was solid gold, with veins of silver running from end to tip instead. “It’s beautiful…” Amirra said, both admiring and suspicious of the weapon that could have taken her life. We looked up, waiting for the next attack.