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“Ahh!” I spun around.
The corn creature stood behind me on all fours, belly pointed to the sky, head twisted at an unnatural angle as it. She? Walked on hands and feet in an upside-down arch. She wore the same multicolored tights she’d worn last time, with a tank top. The gems in her gages on her ears were different though. Green emeralds with yellow topaz on top filled the holes, reminding me of an ear of corn. Her tattoos shifted on her skin, changing from the designs I remembered from before, to the weird vines and stocks of corn that still stalked my nightmares, and back again.
“Princess,” she said again. “It is decided. I will guide you.”
“Guide me?”
“Through the nothing, around the corn, and to the princes.”
“And my knight.”
She tilted her head back and forth for a moment as if listening to a radio transmission only she could hear.
“The knight is not necessary.”
“The knight is the most necessary. Geraint first, or I’m out.”
The creature froze, eyes riveted to me in an uncomfortably predatory way.
“I’m the princess.” I stamped my foot, realizing how ridiculous and pouty it was but also, damn it, I was the royalty here. “Guide me to Geraint, Nic, and Dio, or get out of my way and I’ll find them on my own.”
She turned her body, gaze remaining glued to me as her neck swiveled a hundred and eighty degrees.
“Your highness,” she hissed with a slight dip, then scuttled forward, her head belatedly turning to match her direction of travel.
Hopefully, that meant she was doing what I said.
I followed.
The creature led me to the edge of the swatch of grass I’d followed. She stopped just short of the gray blank space and scuttled around like an agitated spider for a moment before settling.
“We go in through here.”
For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what she meant. Were we just to step off into the gray? I a step to the side, as she had, and saw what she meant. The very air was fractured like a broken mirror, much like the interior of the storms had been.
She skittered around again before tapping a larger piece of the glass with her toe. “Here.”
The creature looked at me.
I nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Stay close, princess.”
I focused on the corn creature instead of my surroundings and what I was about to do. She was less terrifying than reentering the nothingness but I had to retrieve my men.
It felt much like entering a mirror when we went into the shattered fragment of Dream that led to the storm. This was less disorienting than getting caught in the wave front though.
We stepped into that same space I’d been in before with all the shards of glass twinkling in the vast space. I turned and the shard we’d just stepped through spun away. I saw a few flashes of green and blue before it became just one more tiny speck in the distance.
“This way.”
Again, I followed. Though I put one foot in front of the other, I didn’t feel like I was moving. More that the world moved around me. Flashes of light and glass swirling and flitting around, while I stayed still.
The creature and I walked for an endless amount of time until she stopped in front of a shard and tapped it with a toe like a spider reaching out with a foot. “The knight.”
“What do I do?”
“Take it.”
