* * * * *
Gerin took one hard breath, his palm raising to brush against the very outer edge of Sayassa. Lightning bolts from every corner and each far end immediately drew in and grounded off his hand. To his surprise, the General didn't feel a shock, or any pain at all—only a cool, misty breeze. "No sense in prolonging this." He assured, closing his eyes and taking one deep stride to lead him in.
When he opened them, for a time, he believed he had been led out. Gerin was not surrounded by dismal fog and disembodied souls as he predicted, rather he found himself on a steep sloping hill, covered from peak to pasture in wheat, bending to the force of the wind. A long, white trail twisted its way along the base of the mountain, leading up to a tiny cottage protected by a frail wooden fence.
The General's first instinct was to turn around, assuming the mist would be behind him now, but he found only the other side of the hill. Sayassa was gone. It wasn't possible that they had moved him this far, as to where they weren't even visible. "Was it?" he asked himself, and when he looked down at the farm and that long winding road to see a woman—the same woman that he saw in his vision the first time he was here so many years ago—it dawned on him: No matter where he looked, Sayassa would not be found. He was inside it.
The deception had already begun.
And now, instead of continuing his search, he made his way down the hill, along the same trail the illusional woman had just walked.
In A Time Of Darkness Page 98
