On the other side of the portal, a horn blew three times. It was distant, but we all heard it.
“There are hundreds of portals opening,” Safira said, appearing beside us. She seemed alarmed and worried. Worse even, she looked utterly confused. I had never seen a Daughter of Eritopia at a loss for words like this before. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“They’re getting brighter, too!” Kailani observed as the light brightened sharply, spilled out into our world like a bucket of white paint splashed against The Shade’s green canvas. Her grandmother’s voice came through my earpiece, shaking with concern and shock.
“Sofia, are you seeing this?”
“I am… What’s going on?!” I managed.
Derek held me close as we tried to find shelter from the growing light. The portals seemed to be screeching, growing unbearably loud. The brightness was so dense and thick and difficult to move through.
And then we couldn’t move at all. It was as if the nearby portal had swallowed us. Through the confusion, I heard us give a collective scream, unable to help ourselves.
In the middle of this whiteness and beyond it, I could see it. The Shade… or something eerily similar. It didn’t make sense. Nothing did.
But then we faded. The Shade faded.
I woke up on the ground, every bone and muscle in my body aching. I remembered being blinded. A familiar smell invaded my lungs. The crisp dance of redwood leaves overheard, whispering and rustling. I opened my eyes. Derek was with me.
And Kailani. Ben and Rose, too. Kalon and Esme. Safira. We were outside the Great Dome, except it looked different. There was something about the metallic structure and the color of the glass panels that was off-kilter.
“Are you okay?” Derek asked. He scrambled back up and helped me stand, then wrapped his arms around me and held me tight for a precious, sweet minute.
“Yeah, I’m just out of it. What’s going on?” I replied.
“Mom, what happened?” Rose asked, resting a hand on my shoulder as she came back to her senses. She’d gotten up before fully readjusting to her environment and was wobbling slightly. Ben was quick to join us and hold his sister up.
“The light. The shimmering portals. I’m confused,” he said.
Safira was the only one who wasn’t. No, she understood something we had not. She could see something we had missed, and the look on her face scared me beyond repair. “Safira,” I said. “What is it?”
“Look up,” she replied, staring at the redwood canopy overhead.
It didn’t take long to notice the greens were off. The shapes of the leaves were slightly different too. Everything about this place felt wrong. We weren’t home anymore. This wasn’t our island. And the realization made my stomach clump into a painful blob as I gripped my husband’s arm. “Derek, I think… I think we were taken,” I said.
“Not just us,” Safira murmured.
“What do you mean?!” Derek asked, increasingly agitated as his gaze darted all over the place. “Where the hell are we?”
Safira gave us a calm smile. “Wherever this is, it’s where Viola and Astra are. I can feel them again. They’re close.”
The minutes that followed were a complete haze as we began to piece together the elements of the great shining that had brought us into this strange realm. This was The Shade, but also it wasn’t. We weren’t the only ones who’d been brought here either. Derek sent out a wide call through the comms system and summoned all who could hear him back to the dome.
Soon the entire Novak clan was reunited—with the exception of Thayen, Isabelle, Astra, Viola, Richard, Voss, Chantal, Soph, Dafne, and Jericho. Our friends and allies were here. Everyone the Reapers had marked found us by the Great Dome, equally distraught and confused. It got even weirder when Nethissis, Seeley, Sidyan, the Soul Crusher, Kelara, and the Time Master emerged from the woods, accompanied by Lumi and their service ghouls. The Reapers were blank as sheets of paper, just as dazed and out of it as we were.
This entire incident had thrown us off completely, and we had no idea where to even begin. We went over what we remembered, we advised our crews and family members to stay calm and take deep breaths, though it was rather difficult to organize in a place that looked so much like our Shade but wasn’t. This realm was disconcerting, and its mere existence troubled me deeply.
I did find comfort in knowing one thing. “Safira, you said you can feel Astra and Viola again,” I said, shifting my focus back to the Daughter. Chana and the others joined her, huddling close together as the hard truth settled in. This wasn’t their world, and it wasn’t ours, either. For the first time, they seemed vulnerable.
“We can feel them, yes,” Rubia replied. “They… they’ve been here. This whole time.”
“What is ‘here,’ exactly?” Seeley cut in, brow furrowed and lips pressed into a tiny thin line. Nethissis had Rudolph practically glued to her leg. The ghoul was confused, if not a little scared, much like the others.
Safira sighed. “I don’t know.”
“But you feel Astra,” I said. “It means Thayen and the others, they could be here too.”
As if summoned by my desperate heart and rambling thoughts, Viola appeared in the middle of the clearing with our missing Shadians, Astra and Thayen among them. In a split second, I squealed and forgot about everyone and everything else. It was Thayen alright, and not a clone. Astra couldn’t be copied, since we’d seen clones of almost everybody except her, so I knew she was real. By extension, it made Thayen real, too. I ran to my beloved boy and took him in my arms, my handsome young man, and I held on like there’d be no tomorrow.
We’d found Thayen. We’d finally found him.
Thayen
It was an emotional and deeply disturbing reunion. I welcomed my parents’ embrace, my mother’s kisses and tears of
