I throw my corpse-puppet into the open air, wings working frantically to catch the decaying body as I give chase. But the best I can do is to keep her in sight as she diminishes toward a jutting peak at the archipelago's northern end. I veer unevenly around the mountain's curve, broken-feathered wings nearly failing me as the gate comes into sight.

Twice the height of UNI's, it glows to shadowy life at the heron-woman's approach, her own power flaring out to meet it. Five Petran guards and five Crimson stand watch in a circle about the monolith, umbra-rifles raised—but their hands shake, and their faces are unsure.

"Don't shoot!" Shrieks the Crimson who must be their captain. "That's her." The rifle barrels lower, and my stolen heart races. I feel the press of the Crimson's power in the air, but my abductor is untouched. The woman dips low, my body hanging limp in her arms, and I realize she's going to land just past their line.

She's going to take me through the gate.

I shriek, pressing my wings back to hurtle after her, ragged talons outstretched. Umbrabolts at full power hiss through the air, one of them catching my left wing and blasting away half the feathers there. But momentum carries me forward. I hit the woman in the back like a meaty cannon just as she steps into the radiant darkness.

My second passage is nothing like the first.

Instead of the overwhelming pain, my spirit seems to glow with relief. Instead of disorientation, my surroundings seem to come into greater focus. It feels so good that, although I cross to the other side in under a heartbeat, it takes several moments for the reality of my situation to begin to sink in. And even then—it's a nebulous thing.

Though parts of me are still trying to deny it, my deep, instinctive self knows for certain. The world spread out around me is not the same as the one I last drew breath in.

An entire layer of reality separates E.J. and I, and she has no idea where I am.

Another cold, blank state of shock settles over me.

The kidnapper is already on her feet, my body still bundled up in her arms. She looks down where my damaged puppet struggles in the dirt and detritus, and smirks. Stooping, she shifts my human form into the crook of one arm and with her free hand snatches my eagle one about the ankles to let dangle at her side.

Turning, she starts along the winding path down the mountain of ink-black stone—both like and entirely unlike the one we'd just come from. Scarlet moss and burgundy lichen cling to the shadowed cracks in the rock, spill out across the narrow road, as though the stones themselves are bleeding. The sky is black and strewn with the brightest and most abundant array of stars I've ever seen, and a huge pink moon is crawling up over the toothy edge of the mountain.

Behind us, guards very different from the ones who shot me resume their places around the gate. Their eyes follow us with interest, bodies and milky-bladed spears held upright and rigid. Something swoops across the bottom half of my inverted field of vision, and I twist the eagle's head for a better view.

It's enormous. Black but with streaks of violet luminescence. Six bat-like wings, a long whipping tail. A skull full of glowing eyes.

A sight that—more than anything else I've seen here until now—simply doesn't, couldn't exist in my world.

Suddenly I feel deadly, maddeningly sick. My cold state of calm fractures and breaks away. Before I know it I'm shrieking, thrashing, biting at the woman. She hisses something in her language, snapping her wrist to dash my eagle's body against the stone. Its bones crunch, its beak breaks, and half its ribs cave in. The sensation isn't exactly painful, but it's shocking— compounding the sensation of gut-wrenching nausea coursing through my stolen body. I hang limp in her hold once more, reeling.

Giving up on outward movement, I focus my mind and energy on traveling back across the threads to my body. But the harder I push, the denser the resistance between myself and my body seems to become.

We're far from the mountain's base when I see firelights flickering in the near distance.

We approach an arched opening yawning in the mountain's side, ringed all around with oil lanterns and gem-filled pictographs in a style I recognize immediately as resembling those from Hama Oyabi's cavern. More guards—or perhaps attendants—flank the entrance, armed with nothing more than the crimson warning of their eyes and dressed in robes to match.

Their gaze goes first to my disconnected body, and one of them turns to whistle into the entrance. Then both new pairs of eyes catch sight of my carcass-prison. The woman says something to them in her language of flowing syllables and sudden halts, and one of the Crimsons replies in the same.

More figures hurry from the mountain's interior, these ones Petrans clad in gray leather. Two of them carry a stretcher between them. The woman lays my body out across it, freeing her other hand to help her in carrying my eagle form. The Crimson who spoke before does again, and the two argue for a moment before the Stormstruck woman, brows drawn together in a hard line, hands my feathery carcass off to the third of the Petrans.

"Al-Ahkt" says the Crimson, in what sounds to me like a sardonic "thank you." Then he bows deeply to her, gesturing for her to precede him down the hall in the opposite direction.

The Petrans start forward, carrying both my current bodies through the labyrinthine warren of halls and chambers, traveling—I think—ever deeper into the heart of the mountain. Occasionally I hear music—drums and voices and something resonant and thrumming I can't identify.

For the entire journey, I try to fight my way back into my body, panic rising like tidewater in my broken and borrowed veins. But after a passage of time warped by fear, shock and impatience, we come to a stop before a heavy door in a dark hall. Another guard, this one a Shifter, hurries from the other end of the corridor to open the way for them. They lay my disconnected body out carefully on the sparse pallet at its other side. The one in which I'm currently stuck they dump unceremoniously on the cold stone floor beside it. Then they shuffle out, shutting the door behind them to leave me alone in absolute darkness.

With nothing to hear, nothing to see, and no way to return to my body, I'm reduced to terror. To panic. I steep in it, melt into it. Lose myself in it.

An eternity later, the door drags open again and greasy lantern light pours through. A small coven of Viridian women enters, all of them hooded. I bristle with frustrated rage as one of them undresses and then begins to clean me. Another works at oiling my hair with nectar from flowers budding in her palms, while a third tips some amber fluid into my mouth. None of them spare a glance for the body from which I watch them.

All that done, they dress me once more in a silvery garment somewhere between a robe and a dress, with a broad sash laced tight around my waist. And then, for what might as well be an eternity, I'm left with only my self for company.

With the eventual return of light and fresh air comes the reappearance of the stretcher-bearers. My bodies are lifted again and carried back out of the horrible darkness. Something that resembles relief sparks at my core. Another twisting journey, and then we step out into into a great space with walls carved from the towering mountain stone to all sides, and nothing but the star-strewn sky for a roof.

We pass strange and twisted trees and dark pools disturbed by flashing fins to stop before a throne carved into the wall at the far end of the open space. I twist the eagle's neck in an attempt to peer up at the face of the figure seated above, but I can't muster the strength to lift it high enough.

A deep voice exclaims, and from the sudden rush of air and flowing of fabric it seems he's jumped to his feet. then he's practically tumbling down the stairs. He curls over my de-spirited form, reaching out to cradle my cheek in one enormous hand.

A hand whose skin is different than all else on him that I can see but that around his mouth. Almost ghostly pale, where the rest of him is dark. Again I struggle for command of the eagle's faculties, craning my neck upward to get a better view of his golden eyes.

My eyes.

~~~

End of Part Two: Rabbit-Fox!

To be continued soon in Part Three: Dragon-Doe