(This little story of mine was originally made by me on AO3 and I decided to add it here too to reach a wider audience. This story updates there first then afterwards ill post here :) So be sure to check it out on AO3 if you have the time!)
You alre...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The little hike up the mountains ended up being a bust.
It took Sarah roughly five hours to realize two things; The first, that no matter how much she climbed up, she was no closer to the summit than where she began, she stopped when she realized she was passing by the exact same trees every ten minutes or so. Meaning some weird magic was keeping her from going any further. She tried going to the mountain next to it much to the same effect. Meaning that she was literally trapped in this area. The mountains acted as a barrier, trapping her within like a shitty videogame map.
The second thing she learned was that the sun doesn't set here.
She kept track of the amount of light throughout her day. No matter how many hours she spent climbing, it never grew darker nor changed in hue. The sky was the same muddy yellow as it had been when she arrived. She couldn't even see the source of light through the smog to confirm if the sun had moved at all.
Is there even a sun here?
She guessed that there probably wasn't, she couldn't put it past this strange place not to follow the rules of the real world after all.
The real world...
She was in shock still, she supposed, considering everything that had happened within the last 24 hours. She had gone from being in the happiest moments of her life on stage to being kidnapped along with her family and brought into a world that shouldn't even exist.
Did I have a mental breakdown or something and this is just a huge hallucination? Did I get in an accident and I'm now in a coma in some hospital?
She pinched herself to see if she could wake up to no avail. But even then, she knew her theories were just her being in denial over her current plight were wrong. She could smell the stale air, hear the crunch of rocks under her boots, feel the crumbling bark of the dead trees when she touched it. If this was a dream, then she must have been asleep her whole life...
A part of her, that inner child that had played in the woods so long ago, was excited. That inner part of her felt validated, so happy that magic and Fae really did exist.
She only wished she could enjoy that revelation, instead, it only caused her anxiety to worsen.
She rubbed sweat out of her eyes, tired and unbearably thirsty. Her legs had been complaining for a while about the lack of breaks she had taken, and her phone was running out of battery unbelievably fast. Something about this world must be stealing the charge from it. She turned it off once more, discarding it in her bag for future use. When she got back to the house, she'd have to grab a notebook or something to draw out the map she had before it went completely dead. But she was a terrible artist, so that sort of thing would be useless...
For the moment, she decided to rest on a fallen dead tree. She used her bag to cushion her back as well as keep the weird charcoal-y residue of the bark from getting on her clothes. She sat in the dirt, feeling the texture of it between her fingers. It felt like a mix of ash and sand.
