[Message from Aardya a’Kerinth (Kerr) to Rissa Latimer]

Rissa,

I’ve made it back to Berinath from Asihanya. I’ll meet you at the Pearwood Inn, it’s the one closest to the Harrow portal. We need to find a new route, travel across Asihanya is an even worse idea than Raz suggested it might be.

Have you heard from Serenity? He hasn’t replied to my messages. I know he was supposed to be in a dungeon, but I expected him out by now. We’re getting close to the earliest possible arrival date.

Kerr

A Dome Crossing was a difficult thing to arrange. Rissa was grateful that they had a guide and even more grateful that Blaze had been to Berinath before; while she picked out an engagement gift for Serenity, he’d been busy buying everything they needed for the crossing.

It wasn’t a short list.

Even with all the necessary supplies, they needed permission to travel, which meant joining a caravan already planning to move between the dome they were in and the one with the portal they needed to reach. While it was possible to hire a caravan for an individual or small group to almost any dome, it was far cheaper to join one hosting a number of groups, and Harrow was a popular destination.

Popular enough that a caravan left almost every day. They’d have left even more often if there were more caravan guides; as it was, they were warned that their guide would not be able to “provide the usual services and security” due to the number of people in the caravan, whatever that meant.

They weren’t able to get positions on the one that left the day they arrived on Berinath, but their guide Emi was able to buy slots on one leaving the following day.

They met the rest of the caravan in a desolate section of the giant glass bubble protecting them from the outside. It was an odd place, since it was right next to a far smaller bubble that seemed to interrupt the large one, supporting it where they intersected.

Rissa’s first thought was that it was an airlock, but in that case why was it so large? It looked like the top third of a sphere, but the circle where it met the actual ground was at least a hundred feet in diameter. Rissa wasn’t certain how tall that made it in the middle, but it was far too large to be an airlock, wasn’t it?

There were at least fifty people gathered when a man with green skin and darker green hair arrived; he looked almost like a more extreme version of Emi, and by now Rissa knew that meant he was a “true dryad”, or at least closer to it than Emi was.

“Looks like we’re missing one group. Well, there’s always someone who’s late; everyone who is here, please get out your Transit Bubbles. If you have a Crossing-capable flyer, do not take it out until we’re in the Crossing Dome. I’m your crossing guide. You can call me Guide or you can call me D’ackt; either will get my attention.” The green man looked around then shook his head.

“For those who haven’t made this Crossing before, I’m the only guide you’re going to get, which means that if you don’t have a domebush, you will be spending time on the crawler. Next time, get a domebush and a Crossing-capable flyer. They’re both worth it. Now, I’m going to go ahead and open up the Crossing Dome; your entire group needs to be here when you enter, and make sure you’re with them. I’ll check off your names when you enter. If you leave, you will need to pay for another Dome Crossing, so don’t do that.” He sounded positively tired by the end of the spiel. It was clear he’d given it many times before and expected people to violate the instructions. “Remember that you’re responsible for your safety. It’s been ten days since I lost someone, and I’d like to make that last longer, so be careful.”

Ten days? Rissa had the feeling she’d need to be very careful; this was clearly not even close to as safe as what she was used to.

Guide D’ackt turned and walked over to the smaller dome. Once he reached it, a large mobile vine with only a few visible leaves lifted from the soil inside the smaller dome and outlined an arch in its wall that had to be twenty feet wide at the base. The portion of the bubble below the vine disappeared. The guide pulled a small notebook out of a pocket and started checking off groups as he waved them into the partial bubble.

Once they were inside the bubble, Rissa could see that it was unlike the space just outside; there was a mat of greenery covering the ground instead of the dry dust that was all she’d seen elsewhere. She looked over at Emi, puzzled. “Why is this so different?”

Emi chortled. “There’s no life in bubbles without plants! Miniature bubbles like this one could fit trees, but we’d have to make them bigger to move everything around them. There are also three crawlers in here, so it’s a bit crowded right now.”

A bit crowded was an understatement; they were all standing on greenery because there was nowhere else to stand. Rissa looked around, but she didn’t see anything that would be called a “crawler”. “Where?”

Emi gave another breathy laugh. “You’ll see.”

D’ackt was almost done letting everyone into the small bubble when three people came running from the direction of the marketplace. They skidded to a halt right behind the last group. D’ackt didn’t say anything to them about being late, but he also didn’t repeat the instructions he’d given the entire group.

Once he waved the last group in, D’ackt stepped into the bubble himself. The mobile vine lowered itself to the floor; Rissa noticed that the leaves seemed to flutter a bit more and it moved down than they had when it moved up. Or was that simply an optical illusion?

Blaze pulled their group, including Emi, to one side before pulling something that looked a lot like an ordinary flyer token out of a pocket. They’d used them while crossing several planets before, and Rissa was beginning to know what they looked like, but she hadn’t realized that Blaze had one. He didn’t enlarge it; instead he watched D’ackt.

Rissa’s eyes glanced over the others in the bubble with them. About half of the people present had separated themselves the way Blaze had; the others were still clustered near the entrance.

“I see we have some newcomers and some people who’ve been through this before. Those of you with flyers, go ahead and set them up. Those of you without flyers, you’ll be traveling on the crawler with me.” A set of vines rose up from the ground in the area near D’ackt’s. One of them wrapped around the Crossing Guide and lifted him a little into the air before shifting around to form a seat of sorts. “Find yourself a seat and let’s get moving.”

Rissa watched as the “newcomers” tried. Other than a couple of people who had green hair like Emi’s, none of them seemed at all comfortable with the process.

“That’s why we have a flyer,” Blaze commented. “Hop on, but don’t disturb the domebush. I made sure to get one big enough for all of us.”

There was a circular platform floating a few inches off the ground. Now that it was expanded, it didn’t look anything like an ordinary flyer; instead, it was a simple two-inch-thick piece of wood that looked very much like it had once been a tree; Rissa could see the growth rings, though the bark was no longer present. Sitting at the center of the slice was a bush with long, thin dark green leaves; Rissa could barely see over it, so she guessed it was somewhere between four and five feet tall, since the disk was several inches from the ground.

There were several feet of space on the disk surrounding the bush. There ought to be plenty of space for the five of them. There would probably have been plenty of room for them to sleep if the bush weren’t there, but it might be a bit tight with as much space as the bush took up; it wasn’t as wide as it was tall, but it wasn’t a tree either.

Emi hopped up without any hesitation. When the platform didn’t waver at all under her weight, Rissa climbed on as well. Blaze waited until both Sillon and Ita were on as well before he climbed on himself. “Make sure you’re not near the edge; I shouldn’t activate the flyer’s bubble yet but you don’t want to be in the way when I do.”

Rissa was already not particularly close to the edge but she scooted several inches closer to the bush anyway.

When D’ackt finally told them to “go ahead and turn on your bubbles then follow me out,” their flyer rose several feet into the air and a bubble formed at the edge, rising in a half-sphere. When Rissa checked out the other flyers, she could see that they had near-perfect spheres; theirs must only look like a half-sphere because she couldn’t see the portion below the wooden disk.

A vine very much like the one that had let them into the “small” bubble lifted up and opened up a section leading outside the city-bubble. D’ackt waved the flyers through then had the crawler follow. It wasn’t until they were through that Rissa realized that the vines creating the opening were from the crawler.

The crawler’s bubble looked more like a cylinder than a sphere. Unlike the flyers, it literally crawled on foot-thick vines; they seemed to pass through its bubble without leaving holes.

It wasn’t until hours into the trip that Rissa would realize what the worst part of traveling on the crawler was. It wasn’t actually the vines turning into chairs, even though that did look a little uncomfortable; it was the fact that you couldn’t get up and move around. Each “chair” was individually formed by the vines, so there was nothing to walk on, and D’ackt didn’t call any halts until they’d traveled for about eleven hours. During that time, Rissa was able to stand up and move around; the bubble walls were a little low at the edges but towards the center they were easily tall enough to stand and walk.

The scenery was an interesting sort of desolate. It was only the second time she’d had a chance to see the sky without large trees in the way, so it was the first time she’d seen that nearly a quarter of the sky was blocked by a blue-and-white planet that seemed far too large and close. She could only make out a few details of the planet’s surface, but there was an obvious long scar filled with water in the middle of the one tan-colored land mass she could see. “What planet is that?”

Emi followed Rissa’s gaze, then shrugged. “No one knows. It might be Asihanya, since several portals go there, but it could just as easily be Lyka or T’cherna. No one’s ever been able to find Berinath in the sky over any of those worlds, but they’re the ones we have the most portals to.”

“I don’t think it’s any of them. I’ve seen maps of all three planets, and none of them have a continent like that.” Blaze didn’t seem to look away from his flying, but he must have glanced at the planet to be able to talk about its appearance. “Unless it’s unmapped, of course. That’s always possible.”