Green Sky in the Morning complete (eBook)

Sacred D. Blackrose, Delaney Kaster (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
58 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-109636-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Beatrice Terrence is kidnapped by a flower, and taken to an uncanny 'enchanted' forest where she is subjected to trials and observed by catboy aliens. It's sort of like if Maximum Ride landed in Wonderland with her wings clipped and got chased around by angry plants- but like, if the scientists had cat ears and superpowers.

Textauszug

Chapter 2) What, No White Rabbits?

Consciousness brought with it a killer headache. At least she was awake now. The nightmares couldn’t follow her into the waking world. Beatrice groaned, deciding not to get up. The sky above was green and splotched with oblong stars that created daylight all around her. The stars were too big, too bright, too consistently shaped, and they seemed to free-float, swaying in concert as if being blown around. The expanse of sky they covered seemed lower than normal, and white foliage skirted her focus. Thick, white vines clung to the green sky, glowing dully in the light of day as they reached down toward her. She turned her head to shield her eyes from the light and found that a huge, metallic, golden tree trunk encompassed her entire line of sight. White, fur-soft grass caressed her cheek, and spongy soil cradled her body. This wasn’t home.

But where was she? How had she gotten here? She struggled to remember what had happened. From where she lay, Beatrice saw that there were silver and gold trees everywhere with white leaves, and even the smallest ones of them were bigger than redwoods.

What’s with all these vines, and why is everything glowing? Beatrice propped herself up on her elbows, preparing to sit. As her legs and torso came into view, she froze. Beatrice didn’t recognize the clothes she now wore and had most certainly never dressed herself in them. Her shoes were nowhere to be found. The dress had a single, long sleeve and flowed down her barely-curves like water, amassing fabric just below the largest part of her hips. Her skirts lay in rumpled heaps across her thighs where thrashing legs had tossed them in the throes of her nightmare. The material was soft, thin and weightless like the petals of a flower. She blinked. The colors moved.

Her guts folded in on themselves, buzzing with nerves. She jumped to her feet, patting herself down as if she expected her original outfit to be hidden somewhere on her person. Her skirts fell to her ankles, billowing and flowing with her movements “Wh–WHAT?! How? Why? I liked that shirt, dang it! What’s going—Who? Where did my—Wait a second!” A thought occurred to her, and she blushed and instinctively covered herself. How exactly did I get into these clothes? Her dress glowed purple as shades of red seeped into it from the seams as if to blush with her. Lace crawled up her neck and down her bare arm to cover it.

“What are you-?” The dress turned white with little purple beads of lights tracking her pulse, stopped changing and lay still. Beatrice took yet another deep breath. “Okay. That’s different.”

An unexpected sense of familiarity pulled at her peripheral vision, and she lifted her eyes from the dress to the forest in search of it. As her perception hit the trees at just the right angle, a bit of glowing lichen clinging to a branch triggered a thought so vivid that it blotted out reality:

A cut on her pinky. A satisfying sting. She could see the lichen but was thinking about something else. Someone. A smudge that should have been a face. It was a face for a moment, but the memory had gone, and she couldn’t recall it. Then she remembered that she had always attracted strays. It felt relevant, but she didn’t know why. ‘This is just like where we– No.’ The thought was hers, but she didn’t recognize it. Beatrice felt a strange obligation to bury it fast and deep so that it would not resurface again until the proper time, whatever that meant.

She was shaking.

What just happened? Nothing made any sense. All Beatrice knew for sure was that she needed to get out of the woods as soon as possible before- before what? Nothing. Just get out. She buried it. But she couldn’t just set off in some random direction. With her luck, she would only lead herself deeper into the woods. She listened hard for the sound of a distant highway, or bustling town.

A rustling caught her attention, and she ventured around a tree to find it. A huge, spindly, green stag with a spider’s web glistening between his tree-branch antlers and his harem of shrubby doe grazed nearby. When he saw that she was looking at him, the stag lifted its head and snorted at her. She laughed, thinking about how she must have messed up his peaceful lunch. The stag grunted at his doe to signal them, and they all looked at her too, pausing, and slowly bobbed their heads. Then they trotted past her at a leisurely pace, close enough to touch on all sides. After experiencing something so elegant, Beatrice found her spirits lifted. She would find her way home eventually, but when would she ever get to experience a forest like this one again?

She sighed, watching them fade into the glinting trunks.

Beatrice heard the soft chortle of moving water. It sounded close, so she followed her ear. At least traveling down a bank would keep her from going in circles. Maybe there would be a pond or even a lake at the end. Besides, people tend to settle near water. In a place as beautiful as this one, surely she wasn’t the only person around.

Beatrice found a creek that carved an embankment into the landscape about twenty feet across and six feet deep. The river bed, much like the grass, was the wrong color. Glittering chrome sand bordered the river and coated its bed. At the bottom, corals and plant life grew in brilliant colors. She neared the edge of the water, then stopped dead. A gasp crammed itself down her throat. “Wha-?”

A fluffy, white, boy-shaped creature with black stripes, catlike ears, huge eyes, and a squirrely tail leaned against one of the trees on the other side of the embankment. She jumped behind one of the trees on her own side, feeling sort of silly. He had clearly already seen her. The boy watched, shaking his head.

He wasn’t wearing clothes, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have nipples or even a belly button, much less, anything else. He had a small, but sturdy frame. His ears peeked out from underneath the messy, white mop of a mane that added three inches to his otherwise underwhelming height. His face looked mostly human, except that the bridge of his nose widened out like a cat’s, and he had very large, dual-irised, amber eyes. One had amber in the center where the pupil should be and black around it. The other looked like one might expect, but larger.

He had a full, bushy tail, the end of which was a time and a half his body’s width and looked as if a triangle had been cut into the end of it like a ribbon.

The boy seemed curious. He stayed attentive to her movements, his second set of irises spinning as they orbited the normal-looking ones. This creature may not have been human, but he was definitely a person. Beatrice could see it in his strange eyes. He was not just an animal.

He was both adorable and frightening at the same time. She wondered if he would attack her given the opportunity. The creature cocked his head and raised an eyebrow with a mischievous, wide-mouthed grin. Fangs. Perfect.

Suddenly she felt something ripple across her skin, and looking down, found that she wore a suit of armor that hugged her body like a second skin. Plates of leathery padding were placed in strategic shapes so that very little of her was left uncovered, yet she could still move with ease.

She observed the creature, expecting a reaction. He seemed unperturbed. The stubbornness etched into the squaring of his shoulders and the goading energy about him struck a familiar chord. She could have sworn she knew that look from somewhere. His smug little ‘I dare you’ face. The longer she observed, the more certain she became—but how could she possibly have known him?

Maybe it was just a bad high. Whatever chemical combination it might take to make pink fog probably didn’t belong in a person’s lungs. She had never been high before but decided that she didn’t like it. Either way, she was thirsty. Beatrice slid down the embankment on her heels and approached the edge of the water. When the creature did not follow suit, she knelt by the river’s edge, cupping her hands and watching the boy over her fingers, as she drank. The water was clear and tasted clean, as far as she could tell.

He did not attack her, and she guessed that either he was not confident in his ability to catch her from this distance, lazy, not hungry or he didn’t eat human. The padding of her suit diminished as her guard fell. “Hey you!” She called him out, more annoyed than afraid at this point. The boy smiled, amused, and then disappeared behind the tree he had been leaning on.

Beatrice regarded the now-vacant trunk for a minute. That was about the weirdest thing she had ever seen, and the list of weird was significantly longer now that it had been yesterday. But had it only been that long? Beatrice’s breath caught in her throat. She had no concept of how long she might have been lying on the forest floor before waking up, or what had happened to put her there. Beatrice could feel her lungs shrinking again. How would she get home?

She caught herself. None of that is going to help me at this point. She turned away, following the creek in a daze. Maybe she had heard or even seen something while knocked out. Of course, knocked out, she wouldn’t really have known what was happening to her, but what about subconsciously? Why did this place look so much like her painting? It wasn’t quite the same, but the trees and the grass and the and the sand were just as she had pictured them. And what about the tiger-boy? He had seemed so familiar. She paused and raised a hand to her hip, staring out across the water at another tree, as...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• ISBN-10: 0-00-109636-2 / 0001096362
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-109636-3 / 9780001096363