Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,68
hold them against her thighs. “Can’t we just skim low under the fog, and search for Peter that way?”
One does not simply fly into the Land of the First.
“I don’t suppose it should have been that easy,” Wendy said with a sigh. She landed fairly elegantly and slowly—she thought—touching her tippy-toes down to the ground first the way Tinker Bell did. The two girls reluctantly regarded the strange, unwholesome smog before them as it coiled around itself like the intertwined bodies of mythic serpents. Jörmungandr or perhaps Ouroboros.
Though Wendy could not have possibly known it, the fairy and the human had the exact same expression on their faces: wonder, distrust, false bravery.
Tinker Bell tentatively reached a tiny, bauble-decorated toe into the mist—and then quickly pulled it out.
“I don’t want to suggest anything untoward,” Wendy said after a full moment’s hesitation, “but, since you said one shouldn’t fly here, well, if you don’t think it’s beneath you, perhaps you wouldn’t object to sitting—riding rather, on my shoulder? That way we will be on equal footing, together, with whatever comes at us. Also you wouldn’t be lost, or stepped on, or…”
But the fairy was already zooming up to her neck. She perched daintily on the crook of Wendy’s shoulder and held on to a lock of brown hair—but less like reins and more for balance and possible security. She did not tug.
“Very well then,” Wendy said, lifting her chin and trying to muster bravado and dignity appropriate to the moment—and to disguise how tickled she was at the closeness of the fairy, despite their circumstances. She could just feel the tiniest weight on her skin and the occasional brief heat of a speck of fairy dust.
Together, they entered the mists.
The first thing that struck Wendy was how it felt nothing at all like she had expected. The clouds were neither damp, nor moist, nor cold. They were hot, and somehow drier than the land around them. Yet they didn’t smell of smoke or smog or anything burning.
Strange noises streamed past her ear: whispers she couldn’t quite make out, the distant echo of something very large pounding off in the distance. A rhythmic beat whose direction she couldn’t put her finger on.
Then the flat yellow, white, and gray entirely surrounded her, masking the world. There was no distance or perspective. She closed her eyes and tried to put her feet in the same direction she had been heading. There was nothing else to do. And since nothing was touching her, there was no immediate threat to worry about.
After some period of time she couldn’t quite keep track of, the whispers quieted. She opened her eyes. Like tears after a good cry, the mists quickly dried and disappeared—or perhaps they rose up, joining the uncolored sky to make a complete dome of gray and beige around everything.
They stood in what appeared to be very much a desert.
Wendy, of course, had never seen one in real life but had read enough adventure novels and explorer’s narratives to recognize one when she saw it. Sadly, the ground was not quite as dramatic as the sands of Egypt were described; not an endless ocean of dunes and ripples, solid waves and particulate shores. There was sand, but it was gritty white here and streaked with yellow there, broken up with a band of gray beyond that, and red, red, red where the far-off ruby cliffs seemed to dissolve under their own weight into the floor of the planet.
There were also rocks strewn about everywhere untidily. Tiny rocks like pebbles, large rocks like you might build a wall out of, but in all the wrong shapes and colors. Perfectly black rounded rocks scattered randomly among the rest for no good reason. Countless flat, flaking red rocks that made more sense in the red-tinged landscape.
Keeping close to the ground were strange little plants. And though Wendy generally didn’t like imposing subjective opinions on defenseless inanimate objects, they were quite ugly. Thorny, narrow-twigged, bunched up tight, and miserly with leaves of dull colors. Some of them looked dead but apparently weren’t. There wasn’t a single “normal” cactus among them. No barrels with spikes, no tall ones with rounded branches like letters from another language.
Disappointing.
And then there were tall strange boulders that stood by themselves, spires or pinnacles dotting the landscape like bowling pins set up by a giant toddler. They were higher than buildings but narrow, their bodies striped with layers of red and white and tan like half-sucked peppermint