The Arena - The Moon Trilogy - Book #2

Chapter thirty-eight:

Huge purplish-blue-gray clouds billowed around in the stormy sky overhead, but there was no rain. The very air seemed dark. Everything was impossibly still, as if it was just waiting for the storm to break. She imagined it was holding its breath in fearful anticipation. But though a long while passed, the storm remained within the bounds of its own roiling clouds.

Clarity was sitting on the damp grass, the chill of the air clawing its way deeper and deeper-through her clothes and down into her bones.

She had no idea how she'd arrived, but there she was. She couldn't remember much of anything before the wide expanse. Vague snippets of memory swam like millions of tiny, flashing minnows through her mind's eye, but each one swam by so quickly that she could hardly see it before it was gone.

There was no one else in sight. She was alone on the prarie with no one to keep her company but the strangely frozen blades of grass.

She watched the clouds as they boiled within themselves. She had no desire to be caught out in the open when the storm finally broke, but she could see no shelter. She would try to take some sort of action when something else happened, but she was almost comfortable in the numb stillness.

But it was wrong... something was missing. She couldn't put her finger on what exactly. And it wasn't even the unearthly frozenness that plagued the land. That seemed rather normal, but there was just a strange void that should have been filled with something, but wasn't.

The thoughts passed out of her head before she was quite finished with them as if the walls that normally shored them in had been broken, and the contents of her mind were left to stream out like water from a cracked dam.

Why was she here, again?

As far as she could see, there was only perfectly level, perfectly green, grass. It didn't sway in the breeze that didn't exist. The clouds, so close yet so far overhead, were the only thing that moved. The atmosphere was thick to the point of being suffocating, while also so thin that she felt as if she couldn't quite get a full breath.

But something was missing, something very important. She knew it had something to do with the storm that was trapped overhead, but she couldn't remember what. Had she ever even known? She wasn't sure.

Still, she sat there.

It felt like days had passed as the dewy chill swept further into her soul.

Nothing happened. There was no wildlife, no other people, not even a stiff wind that should have come with the massive bank of clouds above her. Just grass, for miles.

She looked up again, still anticipating the clouds to start their downpour any minute, but the world remained absolutely frozen. It almost looked as if the mass of dark storm clouds was trapped behind a thick sheet of glass-some invisible barrier that kept it from releasing the fury that was pent up for so long within.

She tried to shift, to bring at least a little bit of movement to the barren grassland, but she was paralyzed. Why hadn't she figured this out before? Or had she?

She scanned the area with her eyes again... still nothing.

That vitally important piece of the puzzle was still achingly missing. She knew she had to know what it was. Something to do with the storm, with the land itself. And as long as it was gone, the place would continue on in the strange limbo that she now found herself trapped in.

It was on the very tip of her tongue. The thing that would free the land from its slumber; fill the void.

Then she realized what was missing with an almost-audible noise of triumph. August.