Chapter 1 The Black Flower #2
She had read about places like this. In the old texts that Aldric kept locked in the cabinet above his desk, the ones written in languages she was not supposed to be able to read but had taught herself anyway, there were descriptions of a realm that existed alongside the mortal world, a place where the barriers between the physical and the emotional were as thin as flower petals.
She had always assumed these were metaphors, poetic devices used by ancient scholars to describe states of consciousness or the landscapes of dreams. But the moss beneath her hands was real.
The air in her lungs was real. The flower in her grip was real, and its silver light was pointing, she realized with a start, toward a path that wound through the luminous undergrowth, a path that looked as though it had been waiting for someone to walk it.
Sera got to her feet. Her legs were unsteady, not from the fall but from the sheer sensory overload of this place.
Every breath brought new information: the scent of flowers that smelled like the memory of rain, the sound of water moving through channels she could not see, the feel of the air against her skin, which was warmer than it should have been and carried a faint electric charge that made the fine hairs on her arms stand at attention.
She clutched her satchel and the flower and forced herself to think.
She was a botanist. She observed. She catalogued.
She formed hypotheses and tested them against evidence.
She did not panic. She did not run. She did not scream, because screaming was a waste of breath and breath, in an unknown environment, might be the difference between life and death.