Kre blinked his eyes open, sat up, and immediately groaned. The landscape around him was a vast sea of clear blue water interspersed with large ice floes. Though he found himself resting on one of these large sheets of ice, he felt no chill from it.
“Another dream world,” he muttered to himself. His mind thought back briefly as to the most recent events that transpired prior to his sudden shift to this pseudo world and the next thought that crossed his mind gave him a mild panic attack. “Did the goblin kill me? Am I dead?” He looked around again quickly before adding, “Is this the afterlife?”
“No, no, and… it’s difficult to explain,” came the soft-spoken response in a voice that was both familiar to Kre while still being vastly different from that which he knew before.
Kre turned to face Lady Bel but did not find her standing behind him as he was expecting.
“Where are you?” he called out to the oddly quiet and serene landscape about him.
“I am here,” she responded, her voice still oddly distant yet hauntingly close to his ear. It was almost like hearing someone speak quietly in an empty room and hearing the whisper of the echo as clearly as if they were next to you. “Though you cannot see me, I am here.”
“Why can’t I see you? How did we come to be here?” He paused a moment and tried to slow his own internal thoughts. “Let’s start with… where is here?”
“So many questions,” she mused, and Kre could hear the smile behind her words. “As for here… this is my place. My home.”
“I’ll be honest,” Kre replied, climbing to his feet and holding a hand above his eyes to needlessly shield them from the non-existent sun. “It’s a pretty bleak home.”
“I suppose you could say that,” she agreed. “But this is where I go when I need to rest and recover from the trials of your world.”
“How did I come to be here?” he asked, oddly calm despite the fact that he was apparently in another place entirely from where he started.
“I called you here,” was the simple, yet not at all helpful response. “We have been searching for you for a few weeks now. I and that Ylveryan friend of yours. She has been quite worried for you, but I cannot read her emotions enough to know if it is genuine concern, or if there is a different motive behind her anxiety.”
“That… yeah, that about sums her up I suppose.” He stretched out his arms and legs but didn’t feel any relief from the action given that he wasn’t in the real world. “Where did you guys end up?”
“Not too far from where you emerged,” she responded. It always seemed to Kre as if her voice was always coming from somewhere behind him, no matter which way he turned. “The difference was simply a matter of timing.”
Her other comment jumped to the forefront of Kre’s mind almost immediately when she offered that last bit. “Wait, what do you mean that you’ve been searching for me for a few weeks? I couldn’t have been delayed by more than a few hours.”