either.’
‘Work harder, Ethan. Force a block.’
‘It’s no good, Isabel,’ Matt whispers hoarsely from between us. ‘Listen to them!’
Loser!
‘That’s what you should be trying not to do!’
Piercing through the voices, a scurrying sound makes all the nerves in my spine tingle. Ethan and Matt both glance at me, then each other. The scurrying sound grows into a furious rumble. Suddenly hundreds of animals, small like rats, come into view. Like a wave, they roll across the landscape towards us.
Ethan grabs my arm. ‘Quickly!’ He pulls Matt over, making us huddle together on the ground in the shape of a ball, our cloaks wedged tightly around us.
Beneath our feet the ground vibrates. In seconds the animals are on us, clambering over our backs with sharp claws and scrambling down the other side. Several force their way under our cloaks. They nip at our boots. One scurries up my arm. I scream, and it tries to claw into my hood. The look of its over-sized front teeth makes my blood curdle. Frantically we push them out. Finally they pass over, disappearing into the dark.
And with their passing, the voices come back in force, making my skin crawl with their eerie accusations. It’s as if someone’s been inside our heads and dug up our deepest feelings of doubt and guilt. Slowly we trudge forward, but every step gets harder. ‘How much more can we take of this, Ethan?’ My pace slows to a crawl.
Matt’s arm comes around my waist, but he’s hardly able to hold up his own weight. He shakes his head as if trying to clear it. But the voices don’t go away.
Ethan stops. ‘I have an idea.’
He closes his eyes and concentrates. He’s trying to create an illusion. How hard will it be to focus through this incessant screaming?
But somehow he does, creating an illusion of a beautiful forest just up ahead. Ethan lifts his torch, and the forest glistens as if a warm sun is shining on its moist leaves. The illusion is like a rope we cling to, pulling ourselves closer to safety with each step.
And suddenly we find ourselves standing at the edge of a fast-flowing river, the voices fading behind us.
But we have to step back quickly not to fall in. If we did, we’d die for sure. And quickly. This river doesn’t flow like any other that I know. It has many currents, all pulling it in different directions, forming several whirlpools, frightening rips and lengthy rapids. It also looks deep. And while I can just see over to the other shore, it’s quite a distance. The thought of having to cross it scares the life out of me. I fall back on to my heels with a feeling of despair. There must be another way, but which way is the correct one? Maybe we should never have crossed that valley. Maybe we should have headed in the opposite direction in the first place.
I glance up at Ethan and Matt. They look weary but relieved, slowly regaining their composure.
‘What’s wrong?’ Ethan squats down to ask me.
But all I can think is that if I don’t know the way, how can I find Arkarian? How can we survive in this place? I don’t want to ever hear those voices again. This place is harsh. It works on two levels – physical and emotional. I throw my head back and stare up at blank nothingness. ‘Oh where are you, Arkarian?’
Not expecting a reply, it’s a shock when my head fills with a blinding light and sharp stabbing pain.
‘Isabel?’ Ethan calls. But the pain in my head is too much right now and I ignore him.
‘Flow with it,’ he whispers close to my ear, understanding that I’m experiencing another vision, and that only by relaxing the tension, will the pain ease and the images come clearly.
I know he’s right, but accepting pain, accepting the blinding light, is a difficult task when in the midst of it. Eventually the pain and light reduces, revealing an image of a beautiful child. Her face is pale, but softly glowing, framed by a mass of black bouncing curls. It’s Sera! Ethan’s dead sister. She’s here, in this strange cold world, calling to me. My urge to fight the vision disappears as I understand that here is the help we desperately need. So I open my mind and embrace the images as they unfold for my viewing. As I do this, a surge of power thunders through me, making my whole body shudder.
‘Isabel?’ I