Another journal

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What had pissed her off so much and kept her walking fuelled by anger for most of the first day hadn’t been that the dryad had spirited her off, or that it prevented Emily from asking questions and getting a feel for the Sidhe. It was that she’d woken up in the middle of absolutely nowhere and now had to walk for ages with no sense of where to find anyone.

The small compass she pulled from her pack steadily pointed somewhere not north and for lack of any other idea where to aim herself, Emily walked in the general direction it pointed, using the sun to check that the direction held steady—something that proved easier than she expected. There was absolutely nothing magical about anything she encountered. Not the tall grass that was unexpectedly matted at the base and kept snagging her feet, or the sweat that pooled beneath her pack. She’d stripped down to a tanktop and long pants. It was warm enough for shorts but the grass would have whipped her legs raw.

There was an incredible lack of landmarks and Emily’s battered plastic Casio sputtered LED runes between giving her a blank screen. Even the wind-up pocket watch she’d brought along “just in case” was useless.

With no real way to guess how long she’d been walking, it took Emily a while to realise that her pack wasn’t hanging heavy on her shoulders after she’d been carrying it for some time. She’d expected that getting used to carrying a heavy pack of supplies would be one of the more challenging physical aspects of the entire trip. It was a nice pack, with a chest strap and padding for the shoulders but no pack was nice enough to make it feel like you weren’t carrying anything. Emily didn’t have much time to think about it before she realised that a slow buzzing had been building up as she walked. The sound had reached a thrumming, heavy volume and she stopped, looking around for the source.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.