The strange feeling of falling through, but yet not down, ends with a landing that is hard. Not hard enough to seriously injure her, but she is dazed by the transition. Still, the strawberry girl scrambles to her feet, blinking in the heat, and it is good that she has regained her footing because the ground splinters beneath her hooves and she has to skip forward, leaping nimbly over a chasm that threatens to yawn open beneath her. The air is thick and hard to breathe, and she looks around for the others. They are within sight of her, yes, but it seems the wormhole has scattered them across the broken landscape. The next wormhole is by the sea, comes the instruction, and she steps forward, inhaling the ash-filled air to find traces of salt water. Its – oh, there – and when she looks hard she can see the shimmer of water on the horizon. Gail, the tug on her soul says. Find Gail. It’s irresistible at this point, and so she steps off in the direction of the water.
The rumble and the voices, perhaps, should have warned her. They should have said, this place is no good. Even if the cracked, burning earth and the ash-filled air had not been problem enough, the girl should have taken heed of the voices and the grumbles of clearly discontent beings. Somehow, it is still a surprise as she takes long strides towards the ocean: where a moment ago the path was clear (well, other than the ground breaking up beneath her hooves), there is suddenly a swirling black vortex. The sound of beating wings fills her ears (not the comforting sound she associates with her grandfather’s flying arrival, but more as if a murder of crows has descended to smother her), the sky around her darkens, and her eyes sting from more than the ash on the air.
A more vocal creature might have yelped or cried out, but Kellyn has spent so many years voluntarily nearly silent that it is not her instinct to do so. No, when she scrambles backwards, she is silent but wide-eyed. Her eyes water: burning, stinging; and she closes them against the irritation. The sound of the wings grows louder and louder; the darkness threatening to engulf her is so deep that even with her eyes closed it presses against her. It’s hard to breathe, and the roan girl strikes out hard with forelimbs and hind, contorting her body in the air, but to no avail. With a thread of panic, she realizes that nothing she can physically do will send this thing away. Reaching for the last vestige of hope, the girl grasps hard at the lines of shifting time around her and pushes them away, moving backwards through the emergence of the swirling, shifting thing. With a snap she knows only she will feel, Kellyn releases time and this time as it moves forward she is prepared, throwing herself sideways and darting forward, scrambling and leaping up and over as a new chasm opens under her feet.
Still her eyes are burning, itching, watering; but the strawberry girl forces them open in time to land, stumbling a bit because of her momentum but recovering quickly, only to stumble again as a huge jaw snaps closed a hairs-breadth from her face, close enough that she can make out a forked tongue surrounded by a double row of jagged teeth. On her knees, she looks up (and up, and up) to see the head the mouth belongs to at the end of an impossibly long neck, casting a dark shadow over her. Kellyn has a moment of blankness, no thoughts at all, but then reality falls back into place when she realizes that the head is descending again from its great height, and she is motionless waiting to be snatched up. Pushing off from the ground, she gains her feet and lunges forward, but she’s not quite quick enough and she knows the sudden, tearing pain of teeth cutting through her hide as the creature tries to close its mouth on her hindquarters. It is pure luck that Kellyn is past its real range, and the teeth cut their devastating path through her skin before snapping closed on a good portion of her tail.
With an inaudible growl, Kellyn jerks what’s left of her tail out from between the creature’s teeth, losing quite a bit of the long red hair in the process. She fits neatly beneath the belly of the creature, though it becomes a tighter fit as she darts towards its hind end, where sensitive underbelly meets reptilian tail. Desperate, the girl strikes out at the flesh in front of her: again and again and again. She guesses she isn’t fast enough to run back the way she came unless its head is distracted doing something else. Though she isn’t causing major damage, the strawberry girl is annoying enough that the monster lowers its head, using its long neck to reach towards her. But it can’t quite reach, and she continues her rampage, darting back and forth just beyond snapping teeth. It screeches its unholy fury and reaches too far, overbalancing itself, and tumbles sideways off of its feet. She dodges the thrashing tail and runs again, sight of the sea making her brave despite the blood running down her hind legs. The dark red of the blood nearly blends into the red-pink of her hide.
Her breath catches in her throat as the dirt turns to sand beneath her hooves, wavering air over the gray-blue water her target. The shifting sands are hard to run on, but they are still a welcome change from the cracking, gaping earth she has left behind. A few more strides, stilted now because it hurts to move, and she hits the water. It hits back, the wave of water knocking her off of her feet. It’s hot – too hot, nearly scalding her – closing over her head, clogging her nostrils and her ears. Somehow, it feels good on her eyes, washing away the ash and the remaining irritation from the swirling black vortex. But she inhales on accident and the salt water burns in her lungs, her nostrils, threatening to choke her. Thankfully every wave has an end, and she scrambles upright, coughing and gasping for real air. Another wave rolls towards her but this time she is braced, splay-legged, and it breaks around her instead of throwing her down.
A splash inconsistent with the rhythm of the waves makes her turn her head, and in this new monster she can pick out familiar aspects. It has the tentacles of one of the squids that occasionally wash up in the Tundra – but magnified, each round sucker the size of her own head. And heads… it’s got several: the heads of fish and whales that she has often seen leap from the waves at home. Each part alone is familiar, almost comforting: together, they are horrifying. It creeps forward – it might have been stealthy, if it weren’t for the splash of each tentacle clearing and entering the water as it moves. It is big enough to move against the push of the water – but when Kellyn tries to flee it is a constant struggle, the water pushing her back almost as hard as she moves forward. A sense of despair sweeps through her – will she die like this, so close to her goal? It is followed by a sense of rage, and an eerie calm. Yes, the waves batter her towards the monster on the surface but something else tugs against her legs; tugs towards the shimmer of the wormhole.
Water reaches above her shoulder as she backs up, staring at the marine monster, knowing she is not able to fight it. She is no warrior – she has no magic armor, no wings, no super strength. But she is smart, and the tug near her feet is insistent. So with a smile, and a laugh so out of place, (these are the things she has inherited from her quite mad mother) the girl lets herself collapse into the water and for a moment she fears she has miscalculated – a wave sweeps her towards the hazy outline of tentacles beneath the water’s surface – and then the wave has passed and the other force takes her. The undercurrent sweeps her backwards, more powerful than the wave on the surface, and just when she thinks she cannot hold her breath a moment longer there is the now-familiar wrongness of the wormhole and she is falling again, gasping for breath. Out of range of the monsters. ’If we all die,’ she snarls the words in her head, uncertain whether He is listening, ‘If we all die, no-one will find her. Nobody will be left to find your Gail’.