Convulsion

✿ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴛᴡᴇɴᴛʏ ꜱᴇᴠᴇɴ ✿

Lily

"You liar," I groan, dropping to my knees and clutching my stomach as I look up at Brayden. "I thought you said it would be a smooth ride?" The darkness was just like before. It was all around me, pressing against me, almost like a solid object. It was pulling me in every direction, sliding through me, torturing me. But there was a tiny trail of warmth that I could feel despite my pain, one that I followed until I came back to the light. Every bit of that trip was painful, but then everything became normal again and my vision returned.

"What do you mean? It shouldn't be painful now that you have a Tydor."

"Yeah, then why does it hurt so much?" The confident smirk Brayden wore before the darkness swallowed me is gone now.

"I'm not sure... sorry," he mumbles. I stand up, rubbing my stomach softly with the palm of my hand as I start to observe my surroundings. We're standing in some sort of a town square, and the Transfer Point that we're standing on seems like the center of it all. The thing that's strange about this place is that the buildings seem relatively normal... for maybe the seventeenth century.

The buildings are a mix of stone and wood, and they're all connected as if it's all one building, stretching along the edges of different cobblestone paths like huge barriers. They all look like two story buildings, but most of these old fashioned houses have some sort of store as the first floor, so there are a fair amount of people strolling around the different paths. It kind of reminds me of Venice, Italy, except there are no boats and no water.

"Where are we?" I question. Vashti shrugs at me as everyone moves to follow Ethan. He takes us away from the Transfer Point, which is made of stone and covered in vines rather than cut into grass like back at the Keep of Elementals. We follow him down a narrow cobblestone path, one that was hidden off to our side. It's so narrow that we have to walk in a single file line, squished between two different lines of buildings that are only a few feet away from each other. Ethan is in the front with Luna behind him, followed by me, Vashti, and then Brayden. 

"We're at Clouds End, and we're heading to the Health Center here."

"Oh," I reply, sliding past a thick patch of ivy on the wall to my left. Once I'm past the clump of vines on the wall I have to walk sideways, my back scraping against the cement wall across from the ivy as the alley gets thinner and thinner.

"Are we there yet?" Vashti groans from behind me. I can't turn to look at her without scratching my head against the wall, so I don't respond. I'd rather deal with squeezing through this squished place than deal with Vashti and her unknown attitude.

"Ethan, would you walk faster?" Brayden snaps after a few more agonizing minutes. To my surprise, Ethan does speed up. The alley widens and I'm able to turn my body from its sideway position back to its normal one as I continue to follow in Luna and Ethan's footsteps. The walls to my sides eventually start to get shorter, and after a while I start to realize that they aren't the walls of houses anymore, they're the fences along the sides of this new path.

We're walking down a wide dirt road now, with uniform rock walls to either side of us. All I can see past the rocky fences of this path are blue sky and clouds, which makes me feel as if I'm walking on a bridge in the middle of the sky. I find myself walking beside Luna, with enough space now to actually move my body freely again. As we walk and the others fall into a steady conversation I find myself looking around, squinting at everything nearby. 

"Do you feel like there's something wrong with this place?" I whisper to Luna, who raises her eyebrows when she realizes I'm talking to her. She widens her eyes, looking around herself.