“What just happened?” Dante asked from above me, still gazing around uneasily.
“I don’t know.” I gasped for air once I’d quenched my thirst. Wiping excess water from my lips on my sleeve, I stood back up. “Something you did with that boulder…changed things. Brought us here.”
“But I don’t even know how I—”
Everything blurred and shifted again, and we stood at the foot of a volcano as lava rolled freely down the side of a scorched mountain, tumbling directly toward us.
Eyes wide and frantic, we turned and ran.
“Adrian!” Dante screamed as we sped away from the encroaching wave.
“Just keep running! Wait for the shift!”
“Is that a village?” He pointed ahead.
I looked forward. A settlement of wooden huts, poorly constructed but standing tall among the long blades of grass which surrounded them, drew nearer. A small ceramic lantern hung on a post at the entrance to the village. Dante and I exchanged a glance and pushed our legs harder, sprinting right for it.
Another blur, another shift. I stumbled in the chaos, tripping over my own feet and rolling head over heels into a busy, modern marketplace. I leaped back up, blinking around at all of the strange looking people shopping at the stalls where merchants sold their wares. None of them paid any attention to us, despite having just barreled into the market at full speed.
“Excuse me, sir?” Dante attempted to talk to a nearby merchant. But he couldn’t hear him. He simply continued tospeak to the woman he was trying to tempt into buying his clearly fake jewelry. Dante cast a frenzied glance to me. “How are we ever going to figure this out if everything keeps changing?”
I studied the market again. Stall after stall, merchant after merchant. Children ran rampant down the thoroughfare while women called after them and men shoved them out of the way. It was busy, loud, distracting. But at the very end of the lane, almost a hundred yards away, rested a small ceramic lantern.
Everything shifted again, and cold, hard flecks of snow bit into my face. My feet were instantly soaked through to the bone, freezing more and more by the moment. I held my arm up to shield my eyes, but I couldn’t see Dante where he stood only a few feet away in the blizzard.
“Dante!” I screamed.
“Adrian,” he cried back, but he sounded even further away than I remembered.
“The lantern,” I shouted. “Find the lantern!”
“What?”
The la—
Another shift, and I fell sideways onto a forest floor, enormous trees standing sentry hundreds of feet above me. My lips parted in surprise as I gazed up at their magnificence, having never seen such a thing before.
“There you are.” Dante grabbed my arm and lifted me. “What were you trying to tell me before?”
“The lantern.”
“Lantern?” He frowned.
“The one from the village. Didn’t you see it?”
“I was a bit preoccupied by the lava.”
Another blur and a shift, and we stood on a tropical beach, waves lapping over the hot sand toward our toes.
“I’m getting sick of this,” Dante growled in frustration.
“There’s a lantern,” I told him, turning and frantically searching our surroundings. It had to be here somewhere. It wasn’t merely a coincidence that it had already been in two of the places we’d been sent so far. “Small, ceramic thing. White. It was lit.”
“But that was back in the village. What are you—”
“It was in the market too. I saw it.”
Dante’s lips parted in surprise as he slowly understood. “A constant. Brilliant.”
