We both starting looking for the lantern.
“There!” He shouted, A boat sailed toward the shore, and at its helm, a small ceramic lantern lit the way.
We sprinted for it but only made it a quarter of the way there before the next shift occurred, and we landed in an abandoned mine shaft, dark walls of hard stone reinforced with wooden beams looming up on either side of us. We searched for a light and found a dim one emanating from the tunnel nearest us. We made a run for it.
The world shifted again, and we cried out in frustration, then set about our task of finding that simple, small lantern again in what was now a meadow covered in beautiful yellow daisies.
One more shift brought us closer to the lantern than we’d ever been before. The top of a mountain, the wind blew hard against us as we fought it on our climb to the top where the lantern sat, glowing softly in the fog.
Dante slipped but scrambled to his feet and dove, clinging to the side of the mountain. I forced my legs to push onward. I was so close to the lantern, the warmth of its fire kissed my fingertips. I stretched out my arm and touched it.
The world spun away again and reappeared. A jungle of some sort. The wind was replaced by a deep, suffocating humidity. Dante shoved vines aside and reached out to the lantern himself.
I’d expected something to happen. I assumed the moment we touched the lantern, it would stop. The foreign, shifting surroundings would fade away, and we’d be standing in front of those glowing blue rings. Instead, absolutely nothing happened. We clung to the lantern for a moment, then another. Slowly, Dante dropped his hand away.
We were thrown to the ground as the shifts returned. This time, I hardly even had time to register my surroundings past the gravel beneath my feet before Dante screamed.
“It’s gone!” he cried, whirling around desperately in search of our constant. “It disappeared!”
Shoulders slumped in equal parts irritation and exhaustion, I rose. “Well, we’ll have to find it again.”
I wiped rocks from where they were embedded in my knees.
“But where do we even look?” He asked, irritated. “It was here, it was just here. How could it have—”
I scanned our new environment. Some gravel road leading up to a beautiful white house amid a simple farmland. I squinted when I spotted movement. A scrap of an apron and swill of skirts as someone darted behind the house.
“Dante,” I said, silencing his ranting.
He met my gaze. I held a finger up to my lips and bid him to follow me as I creeped forward toward the house.
I set a steady pace, wanting to solve the mystery before we spun away again, somehow feeling like this was important in some way. As we reached the corner of the house from behind which the girl had vanished, though, someone spoke from behind us.
“Follow me.”
Dante and I both jumped and spun around. A little girl stood on the gravel road we’d just left. She wore an apron over a plain gray dress and her dull hair was tied up in a simple bonnet. Butshe looked right at us, and her voice seemed to come from all around and yet nowhere at the same time.
A chill rippled through me.
“She can see us,” Dante whispered, stunned. “Adrian, none of the others—”
“I know.”
“What do we do?”
“I guess…follow her?”
The little girl turned slowly away, and the ground fell out from beneath our feet again.
We were on a boat being thrown side to side by the tumultuous waves beneath us. Hanging above us, high upon a post, was the lantern. I looked to Dante, then moved toward it.
“Leave it,” the girl’s voice rang out, thundering over the waves.
Dante and I glanced around, wide eyed, but we didn’t see her. A moment later, I spotted the corner of an apron disappearing behind the helm. I took a step forward to follow the girl, but Dante stilled me with a hand on my arm.
“What are you doing?” I asked over the roaring waves.
“I think we should go for the lantern.”
