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“All right then.” Angus turns the wheel a bit to the right.
Yeah, this ship has a wheel.
Tammy and Anthony are still debating the difference between an island and a continent.
After only a minute or so, Angus turns the wheel back.
Maple zooms into the bridge. “Keep going this way. Almost close enough.”
For some reason, I get anxious all of a sudden.
There’s barely enough time for me to wonder what’s making me feel like that before a massive boom happens outside. Paxton screams. So do some of the shipmates. I don’t scream; instead, I run out onto the deck.
“What happened?” I shout.
Pax points out toward the ocean. Ahead of us, several miles away in the ocean, a standing wall of lightning stretches as far as we can see to either side. Thousands of continuous arcs of electricity snap down from the sky to the ocean’s surface in a straight line. Looks like an enormous fence. I’ve never seen anything like this before—probably because it’s extremely unnatural.
“Is that the boundary between Thelmora and the outside world?” asks Tammy. “Are we seeing the magic that hides it?”
Before anyone can answer her, it gets dark. This is pretty serious dark, too. Like, out in the deep country dark. Angus and the crew scramble to their stations as if they’re expecting some serious badness to go down. There’s a good chance daylight does not turn into midnight in a split second without something extreme coming soon after.
The weather radar is showing a solid mass of… something all over the place. I don’t know how to read a weather radar, but two seconds ago, the screen was blank. Red lights suddenly come on overhead, along with a blaring alarm.
“That doesn’t sound good,” yells Tammy.
“Engine’s died,” grumbles Angus.
“I’m on it!” Anthony runs out of the bridge.
Whoa. My son doesn’t know how to repair a ship’s engine. He’s probably assuming we have shadow beings on board messing with it.
“We’ve crossed through!” shouts Maple.
“But we didn’t cross the lightning wall,” says Tammy, confused. “Heck, we didn’t even get close to it!”
Maple shrugs. “Guess that wasn’t the barrier after all.”
I look out the front and gasp. Not only is the lightning wall no longer raging there… a vast expanse of land lies ahead of us. No one else—well, maybe the two werewolves can—see it in the dark. Can’t make out too much detail from this distance other than it appears to be the silhouette of a heavily forested land mass, the trees almost going straight to the coastline. It’s so big I couldn’t tell the difference between this and approaching the West Coast of the US. My guess is something is quite wrong. That land mass should not look like it’s entirely made of darkness.
“I’m on team continent,” I mutter.
“What?” asks Tammy.
“I see land out there.” I move up to the front console and stare out the window. “It’s still far off, but it definitely looks bigger than an island.”
Angus’s eyes turn yellow and give off a faint glow. “Och, aye, that’s no small rock.”
Maple zooms out to the deck and returns seconds later. “We need to get out of here. We’re in the wrong place!”
“What do you mean the wrong place?” I ask.
“We’re in the shadow realm now!” Maple flails her arms. “This is bad!”
Kingsley stumbles as if gravity stopped working on him for a moment, then grabs onto me. At that instant, I realize we’re falling. As in, the entire ship is dropping as if we’ve hit a hole in the ocean. Seconds later, we crash down at the bottom of the swell and ride up the other side. It’s not a hole… just a big wave.
“Seas are getting rough,” calls Angus. “Hold ontae yer hats!”
“I’m not wearing a hat.” Tammy wraps herself around one of the steel-clad columns in the bridge.
