The woods were quiet. The only sounds came from the bubbling creek and a few birds chirping. There were no butterflies, no sounds of battle, no police sirens. In fact, the subdivision wasn't even there anymore. Beyond the stand of trees was an empty field.
Zoe sat down. The dirt was soft and cold. Where was she now? The creek looked the same—or so she thought. She hadn't gotten a good look at it.
Grey had said she was supposed to catch a train. Where was this train supposed to be? The closest train station in her town—if that was even where she was—was downtown, a long ways away.
That couldn't be what Grey had meant. He would have mentioned having to walk to a train station. And what sort of train station would have a train that led to an Amethyst Castle?
A red fox regarded her from a distance. It held its bushy tail up in the air and sniffed. Suddenly Zoe felt very vulnerable. She had done something wrong, she was sure of it. She wasn't supposed to be here, she was supposed to be near a train track. She was lost. And that fox looked suspicious—was it an aurisha too? Was she being hunted?
Envision yourself near a winding track... Zoe held up her fulgurite to the light. The last two times she had looked through it, she felt as though her vision was being pulled. She had went along with it; she was too surprised to try to tug at the current. But now she thought it might be possible to push her vision another way, to paddle against the current and look for something in particular—like a train track. Could that be what Grey meant?
She held the fulgurite up to her eye again, determined not to take the path of least resistance. She breathed in and out, concentrating. For a third time she saw the pattern of nothingness and being. She pushed her consciousness as it was pulled, and felt the momentum of the vision give a little. Train tracks she thought. And then something locked in her mind, and the vision was off again—galaxies, stars, planets, a blue planet, like earth, with the same continents. And yet somehow she knew this planet was very different from her own. She was looking for something—a train track, in the shape of the creek—and then she saw it, zooming through the clouds. A curve of glimmering train tracks in a forest, and a girl standing next to them, looking through a fulgurite.
Zoe pulled the fulgurite away from her eye and looked around her. The trees were larger than before, with greener, thicker leaves. The forest stretched out in all directions. The train tracks, she noticed, were not the usual rusty iron and rough wood. Each crossbar was made out of polished hardwood. The rails were gleaming steel with flowery engraving that flowed down their entire length. There was no wind, and even though the tracks rested on a loamy forest floor, neither the wooden planks nor the rails had a speck of dirt on them.
It occured to her that she was not at a train station. How was she supposed to get on the train—if it ever came? The track wound through the forest and quickly disappeared on either side in the thick trees. There was no station in sight.
Zoe
Left or right?
