"I take to the sky
I look back from high above
I am on target
For something beyond
I take to the sky
Still grounded on Mother Earth
Thankful for strong wings to fly
I will take to the sky"
As the door opens and I'm finally able to see the outside, I feel the cold coming in, making me shiver. This is much colder than anything I ever felt at the boys' floor. Now I understand why she gave me clothes as thick as she did.
"Pay attention, there's a step." I hear her say, and I try my best to ignore the cold. I give my attention to the step, and this time I manage to get past it without even feeling afraid. She stops immediately after. "Hold onto my clothes, I have to lock the door." I do as I'm told, and as I wait for her I take another bite of bread and look around.
We're standing on a white path, made with the same stone the palace is made of, but every now and then there's something sticking out of it. They look like tufts of thin strands, almost like hair, and some tufts are bigger than others. All the area outside of the white path is covered in those tufts that resemble the strange thing that covers the garden, but I can't tell for sure as now I'm looking at it from a much shorter distance.
A bit further away there's some kind of wall, but just like the floor, it's not like the white and smooth walls of the palace. This one is dark, and seems to be irregular all over. In some places, where the light is a bit stronger, I see that there are shapes that vaguely remind me of the decorations on the boys' floor windows.
"Let's go!" The woman says as I'm about to look at the ceiling, and I feel her taking my hand again, directing me to leave the white stone path and start going through the hair-like thing covering the floor. As I take the first step I trip on a bump of the floor. Luckily the woman is holding my hand, so I manage to stay on my feet.
"You alright?" she asks, and I answer squeezing her hand. It would be impolite to speak as I still have bread in my mouth, plus she would be able to tell that I bit my tongue as I tripped. "Cautious, we are walking on grass here, the ground is not as even as it is inside." As I think that it could have helped to tell me beforehand, I swallow what I still have in my mouth and decide to wait until we'll be back on a smooth floor before taking another bite.
We walk through this 'grass' and I pay extra attention to the floor's height to avoid tripping again. There are bumps but there are also holes, both laid out without any order, and it seems that not even the irregular height of the grass can be used to guess what to expect under it. After taking many steps and realizing I just need to be cautious and walk without rushing, I start to enjoy the movement of the grass around my feet.
When we reach the wall, the woman stops in front of it and once again tells me to hold onto her clothes. I can feel her moving but, since I can't see her, I have no idea what she's doing. As I wait, I take another bite of bread and look at the wall carefully. It's made of thousands of similar flat shapes, resembling the window decorations I am used to. Some of the shapes are as small as my fingertip, some are bigger than my palm, and it seems the smaller ones are lighter in color. No matter the size, every one of them has thin lines going from the outer part to the strand-like thing that keeps them attached to the rest of the wall. Despite their lack of order, the shapes have some kind of harmony that makes the wall pleasant to look at.
"Found it!" I hear the woman say. As she makes a movement wider than before, I realize that without thinking I have been leaning against her, searching for warmth. I straighten myself, afraid that she might consider me a hindrance, but she just grabs my hand again, directing me to take a step back. A part of the wall moves, just like the doors did when she opened them, and as we move past the wall I can see even more unknown things.
"Don't move now, here the terrain is even more uneven than before." she warns me as she stops again. I'm not sure what a 'terrain' is, but it's not like I'd go anywhere without her. I'm almost expecting to have to grab her clothes, but this time she keeps holding my hand and, since she didn't seem to mind, I lean against her as I watch this new outside. I can see many trees not so distant from us; I've always seen them from above, both the few that are in the garden and the others that are further away and look very small from the boys' floor, but I can recognize them straight away. They look a lot more beautiful from here.
Before I can take a better look at the trees, I see light coming from behind me. I turn around, but I can only see a green light where the wall opened. The sight is so beautiful that I can do nothing but stare in awe at it, and only after hearing the woman's gentle laugh I realize that I must have gasped in surprise.
"This is healing magic." she explains "I had to cut the hedge to get in, and now I'm healing it so it won't start to wither and nobody will know that I came to get you."
I have no clue what 'hedge' or 'wither' mean, nor I can understand why a wall would need to be healed, but I can tell that she's taking extra care to make sure we are safe, and this gives me a strange sensation of warmth in my chest. I squeeze her hand, what little I can, not even sure myself what it is that I want to tell her. When she squeezes it back, I feel the corners of my mouth rise up in that strange expression that I've been making so often tonight.
I watch closely how the light of the 'healing magic' works on the wall. All the similar shapes seem to be attached to something looking like thin sticks, that are in turn attached to thicker, crooked sticks. Some of them appear to be cut, but the two parts are now slowly getting back together. When the light fades out, the woman reaches for the magic tool standing between our hands. "I'll be taking this back. We are far enough that nobody will hear us as long as we don't raise our voices." She says, and I see the little stone float for a moment before turning invisible.
"Also, give me the bread, I'll give it back as soon as we get past all the trees. The ground here is all rough, you may need to support yourself." I don't really want to give back the bread, but after taking a quick look at the floor I agree that I'll need to support myself. At the very least, I'll risk biting my tongue again if I eat while walking. After a few tries, I manage to pass the bread to her. "You ate this much in such a short time? That was some hunger..." She sounds surprised, but I think I was fairly slow, since my cheeks were hurting.
After she makes the bread disappear, we start moving through the trees. The first few steps are easy enough, but soon we encounter the first obstacle: there are many crooked sticks in the floor, looking even more irregular than the ones the woman repaired in the wall. Walking on them seems to be much more difficult than going down the stairs or walking through the grass. I squeeze the woman's hand, hoping she'll guide me and tell me what to do.
"Look at the ground, those lights that resemble fireflies are the back of my shoes."
I look down even though I don't know what 'fireflies' are, but I see no lights. Soon, she whispers something I can't understand and faint little lights appear on the ground.
"Put your feet where I do, and you should be fine. Make sure your footing is stable before moving ahead. Let's go."
Easy for her to say. How do I make sure of it? I already had enough problems going through the grass... As I'm lost trying to figure what to do, I see her foot moving and I feel her pulling on my hand. Afraid she might get too far ahead, I rush to put my feet where the lights have been, but after just a few steps I feel my foot slip the moment I start moving my weight forward. I grip the woman's hand to hold my balance and somehow I manage not to fall on the ground, even though I have to touch it with my hand. It's cold, damp and it gives me an unpleasant sensation, but I'm unhurt.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes, I'm-" I stop before I can finish my answer. Lifting my hand from the ground, I see there's something dark and wet sticking to it. I hear myself making an indistinct sound. That thing is disgusting!
"Are you hurt? Where? Did you get cut? You broke something?" The woman starts to panic, and I can feel her other hand touching my shoulder.
"My hand..." I whine, caring for nothing but the dirty thing on my skin.
"I'm taking this off!" I feel the amulet she gave me earlier being slipped away over my head, and as soon as it's off I feel my hand being grabbed by the woman and turned so my palm faces her. "There's dirt on your hand, I'll clean it first." She says, and I force myself to endure a bit longer, waiting for the 'dirt' to be taken away.
She repeats the same trick she did earlier to wash me, but this time she only does it to my hand. The moment the water dissolves I breathe in relief, feeling clean again. The woman, however, seems to be still panicking. "There are no cuts here... did you break it?" She starts touching my hand in various places, squeezing with her fingers, "Does it hurt here?" she asks.
"No, I..." she moves her fingers, squeezing and asking the same question over and over. "I... just couldn't stand the dirt!" I forcefully say between her questions, feeling suddenly embarrassed for making her worry so much.
"The dirt? It was just the dirt?" she asks and I start worrying that, this time, I might have actually succeeded in making her angry. If she leaves me here between the trees, I won't even be able to return to the palace.
Unexpectedly, she lets out a long, relieved sigh and a moment later I feel her hand behind my head and her forehead against mine. "You got me worried, good thing nothing happened to you."
"Sorry..." I whisper. Now I really feel like an idiot for making such a scene about the dirt. It was disgusting, but she took care of it so perfectly and in such a short time that I can't help but feel ashamed of my behavior. That, once again, made us waste precious time.
"Don't worry, all that matters is that you're fine." She moves her head away from me, taking my hand in hers. I realize she did let go again, but at this point, it's not even worth worrying about it. "Let's hurry now, I might have raised my voice a bit too much..."
She starts leading the way again, walking a bit slower than before. I briefly wonder why she doesn't take off the amulet that makes her invisible -or why she doesn't put mine back on- but I don't have time for this if I want to keep up with her walking. As now I have a fair idea of what happens when footing is bad, I manage to adjust it a few times when I'm about to slip again, and we move through the trees without any other accidents, even though we are going fairly slow.
After a while the distance between the trees starts to grow and the floor gets easier to walk on, until at some point there are no more trees, but only grass. "We've done it. Now grab onto me as I prepare Lessy to go away." The woman says, and I absentmindedly grab onto her clothes as I keep my eyes on the pavement with the grass, trying to take a good look at it all.
It's... incredibly big...
I thought that the room with the windows was large -well, it was larger than anything else I had seen before- but this... I can't even compare it with the common room, how many of those would be needed to make something as big as what I'm seeing right now?
I turn my eyes from left to right, and there's grass as far as I can see. The floor here is all uneven, so much that there are bumps and holes visible even from afar, but grass covers everything nonetheless. For something so thin and tiny to cover such a big floor, there must be an incredible number of those hair-like things.
Suddenly I feel like something's pushing me and the cold gets more intense on one side of my face than the other, making me close my eyes and wrap my arms around myself in search of warmth. It's a strange feeling, sometimes I've felt something similar being near the windows at the boys' floor, like moving air, but this is much colder and much stronger. When I open my eyes, I see something incredible: the grass is moving.
Every strand seems to be waving together, making the grass on the floor appear lighter in some places and darker in others. My eyes follow the movement of one part of grass darker than the rest, and soon I find myself staring at something far away, that I had not noticed until now. Straight in front of me, past all the grass, there is something I can't identify. Is that a wall? I can only see it's dark and its upper part is much more uneven than the floor. There are smooth parts and pointy parts and above it...
"Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh" I hear myself let out an incredibly long gasp as my eyes are caught by all the shiny dots that populate the ceiling above that strange wall.
The ceiling is dark, a dark blue almost black that gets even darker as I move my eyes higher, but the thousands of shiny dots make it look like it's made of nothing but light. I open my eyes wide, trying to look at the biggest possible part of it, trying to look at it as whole, but no matter how wide my eyes get or how high I turn my head, there is no end to this splendid thing.
I feel my eyes being filled by this incredible sight, I inhale deeply as I stare up at it in amazement, feeling my heart beat fast as my chest swells. Right now, there is nothing else for me but what I'm seeing, and I feel myself become big, boundless, as big as I need to reach this black thing and become a part of it.
I turn around, my head in the air, eager to discover how much bigger this work of art is. I feel something soft and thin grazing my hands and, despite not knowing what it is, I let it brush against my fingertips, enjoying the sensation. As I turn around a bright object enters my vision. I recognize it, it's the Moon, the same Moon that I've gazed at countless times through the grates of the boys' floor, only much brighter. Then, this dark shining thing more beautiful than anything I've seen before... is nothing else than the sky, that dull-looking thing with just a few dots here and there?
It has been under my nose for so long... how could I never realize it was this beautiful?
Would I have even realized, if I hadn't run away from the palace? I... I suppose I owe the woman more than just my life, do I?
"Fe- Quinta!" I hear her calling me. I turn around to where her voice comes from, only to see her taking off the amulet that made her invisible as she rushes toward me.
My breath gets caught in my throat.
I stare at her hair, the same shiny blue-black as the sky, gently swaying behind her. Then I look at her face, and I can't help but think that her eyes are just as big and beautiful as the Moon that shines on her. I feel that my words aren't enough to describe her beauty.
When she reaches me, she kneels down and wraps her arms around me. "I almost had a heart attack when I couldn't find you anymore... for a moment I thought a guard had reached us and taken you back..." she speaks, breathlessly, in my ear. I lean against her, enjoying the warmth of her body and her soothing scent. Looking past her shoulder, I see the trees quite a distance away.
When did I walk so far? Rather... did I walk alone, without her helping me, without holding her hand?
She moves back, staring me in the eyes. "I'm glad you aren't afraid to move around alone, but you have to tell me if you plan to do something like this..." I can tell by the expression of her eyes that she's worried about me, but even now I see no anger in her eyes, only a warmth I had never seen before.
For the first time in my life, I feel like someone really cares about me. My chest gets warm and my heart starts beating fast as I can only stare at her.
Can someone as beautiful as her actually exist in this world?
No, I answer myself, she must not be of this world. The caretakers told us something about the gods, how they rule the world and the sky. She appeared out of nowhere to save me and take me away from the palace, allowing me not only to live, but also to see the true beauty of the sky. And that beauty pales in comparison to hers.
I realize my vision has gotten blurry and I blink repeatedly, trying to adjust it. There must be something strange with my eyes, because tears keep gathering there, even though I feel no pain, so I'm not crying.
The woman's hands move on both of my cheeks. She pets them as she looks at me with her worried and caring expression. Her thumbs pet my eyes gently, and the tears in them fall down. "What's wrong?"
I shake my head. I want to say that nothing is wrong, but more tears keep falling from my eyes. My mouth distorts in that expression I started doing when this woman appeared in my room and saved my life, and my hand reaches for her sleeve on its own, as if to make sure she won't go away. I want her to stay by my side and keep me safe, to show me many other beautiful things, I want to know how big this... this... everything is.
"The sky, the... the grass... the... it's all so beautiful... I never... A feystone... I'd have never seen..." all the fear I experienced in the past years suddenly hits me at full force, and for some reason tears keep gathering in my eyes. "Thank you... living... owe you... so beautiful." There's a knot in my throat that makes the words stick there, but I have to tell her she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, even if the words come out incomplete.
Her eyes open wide and then turn in a sad and worried expression. The moment I stop talking to wipe my eyes with my sleeve, she wraps her arms around me, pulling me almost forcibly against her. I just manage to turn my head before I found it pressed against her chest by a hand that doesn't pet me, but just stays in place. Even though she's holding me so tight that I can't even move, her warmth and her calming scent make me feel at ease as I've never been before, as if every fear and every worry were melting away. I can feel a steady thumping in my ear, and after a while I realize it must be her heartbeat. Such a pleasant sound...
'I wish we could stay like this forever...'
"Don't thank me, please..." she starts whispering in my ear. "All children should be able to play outside, look at the sky... be loved and live without worrying for their lives." Her words seem like a dream to me, something that I had not even dared to hope before. I have no idea what 'loved' means, but if it's as amazing as the other things she showed me, then I'm looking forward to being 'loved'.
"I wish I could give you all those things from now on, but it will take some years for me to be able to do that. You'll have to be strong, Ferdinand. Never give up. I promise one day you'll find true happiness, I'll personally make sure of it."
In a moment, my heart falls down to my stomach and all the pleasant sensations I was feeling for being held by her leave my body all at once.
Who is this 'Ferdinand'?
Did she mistake me for another? Did she mean to save this 'Ferdinand' instead of me, even though there is no 'Ferdinand' on the boys' floor? Is she going to leave me here, alone, if I tell her I'm not 'Ferdinand'? Or will she take me back to the palace, to the captain, and go save this 'Ferdinand' in my stead?
But... She called my name many times... She must know who I am. Could 'Ferdinand' be one of those strange words she had been saying when doing her tricks? But it really felt like she was calling my name...
I might be doing something very stupid now, but I need to tell her I'm not 'Ferdinand'.
I don't want her to save anyone else but me...
"I... am Quinta..." I whisper, afraid of what might await me once she realizes the mistake, afraid to be told that she doesn't care for me if I'm not 'Ferdinand'.
"Uh..." She makes an indistinct sound, as if my words surprised her. I can hear her muttering "I let it slip..." and many other words I don't understand. At some point she suddenly nods and moves away, grabbing my shoulders and looking at my face with determined eyes.
"Quinta was your name in that place, but it's not a good name for a person. You'll need a new one, a name that everyone will come to know and respect. Ferdinand is the name of the most amazing man Yurgenschmidt ever knew. I'm giving you this name, because I know you will become an amazing man."
She really came to save me. She won't cast me aside or take me back to the palace. Relief, elation, joy... Many emotions hit me at the same time, even a slight annoyance toward this 'Ferdinand' she praises so much.
"Do you like it, Ferdinand?" she asks me with the corners of her mouth turned upward, making me finally realize that I am also 'Ferdinand' now. Does this mean her praise also extends to me?
"Ferdinand..." I repeat. A name given to me by someone who cares about me. One of the many things that would have never been possible had she not come to save me earlier. There's no way I wouldn't like this name.
I look at her and nod eagerly, excited at the idea of carrying this name and becoming amazing enough to be praised by...
'...What is her name?' I suddenly realize that I've been calling her 'this woman' all along. I never bothered learning the names of the caretakers, they themselves say it's easier if we don't know them, but this is different. She gave me a name, I want to use hers as well. I want her to be special.
"What is your name?" I ask, and her eyes open wide as if she was surprised, then narrow again, her being clearly in thought.
I am amazed at how exceedingly easy it is to tell what she feels by her expressions. The caretakers would always tell us to hide our emotions and not make them show on our faces, but could it be that it was just something that was done at the boys' floor, like always keeping the doors open? Do the people from outside show their feelings as much as she does?
She stands up, taking my hand in hers, and slowly starts to move, giving me enough time to follow her. Didn't she hear my question? Or was she thinking so much about it for some reason? What... what if she has a name that is not good, like 'Quinta' was? If that was the case, I'd like to give her a name, but... I don't know what a good name for a person is.
"Seradina." she says at last. I can't tell what her expression is, as she is looking away from me. "You can call me Seradina. Think of it as your mother's name."
A 'mother'... she said earlier that a mother is someone who looks after children... it makes sense, that's what she has been doing since she arrived at my room.
"So you are my mother?"
"...You could think of me like that..." she says. I nod at her words, but since she's still not looking at me, I squeeze her hand.
We keep walking toward the trees, and I'm actually amazed that I managed to go so far in the grass without help and without tripping. We stop just a little away from a tree and she starts moving her hands around, as if searching for something invisible. And it looks like she found it, because she moves as if to open a door and, out of nowhere, I can see the inside of a small room with only two soft looking chairs and a strange round object in front of one of them. What is even more amazing is that, even though I can see the room's interior, I can't see the outside at all.
"This is Lessy, I used on it the same amulet we used to become invisible, so nobody will see us going away." She -Seradina- explains, although I can't understand neither why a room with chairs needs a name, nor what it has to do with going away.
"Get inside." She urges me, and after climbing the tall step with her help and sitting down, I realize that the chairs don't only look soft, they are actually much, much softer than anything I've ever tried before. As I marvel at the softness, she pulls some kind of ribbon from near the door and, moving above me, she blocks it on the other side of me. All on its own, the ribbon moves back toward the door, sticking to me.
"This will keep you safe." She tells me before closing the door. I look around the room. Other than the one on the door, there's a big window in front of me, one behind and one on the other side, and none of them has decorations to block the view. I can see quite a good part of the sky from them.
The door on the opposite side opens and Seradina grabs the brown ribbon that is attached to her pocket pulling it above her shoulders and past her head, and I stare as I see her pocket separate from her clothes. She sees me staring and stares back, obviously wondering about something.
"Ah!" she said suddenly "You still hungry?" She asks, and I'm reminded about the bread we took from the kitchen. She takes a white piece of cloth and opens it, revealing the bread and offering it to me. I had forgotten about it until a moment ago, but now that it's in front of my eyes I eagerly grab it and give it a bite.
She sits on the other chair after putting the pocket behind it, then closes the door and pulls another ribbon from there, blocking it between us.
She looks at me for a while, the corners of her mouth moving up. Despite her expression, with her staring at me while I'm eating so greedily, I can't help but feel self conscious of my lack of manners. I slowly gulp down what is in my mouth. "I'm sorry..."
She opens her eyes wide and starts waving her hands between us. "No no no no... I'm the one who's sorry, I didn't mean to stare at you and make you uncomfortable... It's so rare to see you eat so voraciously." Once again, she speaks as if she already knows me, even though it's impossible that we might have met before.
"Please continue, otherwise I'd feel guilty for interrupting you." She says, her worried face telling me she really is sorry. I resume eating so she won't feel uncomfortable, but this time I try my best to do it with as much grace as I can, despite the hardness of the bread.
I hear Seradina sigh. She turns to face the round thing in front of her seat, grabbing it with both hands. "It's time to get going. Is your seat comfortable? Do you want me to raise it so you can see ahead?"
I like what I can see, but I am curious about how a seat can be raised, so I nod. The moment I do, I feel the chair move up, and I open my eyes wide in surprise. I look at both sides of the chair, wondering how she can make it move without touching it. As I keep looking left and right, I notice there's something in front of the window. It's round, and the same light yellow color as the walls.
"What is that?" I ask, curious. It doesn't seem to be something to block the view.
"That's Lessy's head." Seradina replies with a satisfied expression.
She used that name before, but there's only the two of us here. "Who is Lessy?"
She puts her hand on the wall, under the window, "Lessy is the thing we're sitting in. It's my highbeast."
I wonder why a room should have a name. Or why it should have a head. But what I am most curious about is: "What is a highbeast?"
Her eyebrows move up quickly, then she lowers them as she answers me. "It's a magic tool to move from one place to another. Mine is a special case, though... they're usually shaped like animals."
"...what are animals?"
This time her eyebrows rise slowly, and she also opens her eyes wide. She looks at me for a moment, then her eyes start moving around and she distorts her lips in various forms. As I wait for my answer, I can't help but be amazed at the great variety of expressions that she makes. I'm sure I could look at her face for one bell and not get bored.
When she finally speaks, she's making a troubled face. "...that's a bit more difficult to explain, especially if you have never seen one. I can show you some drawings once we get to our destination, if you want."
"What are drawings?" I ask, again. Seeing so many new things and knowing that there's still so much that I don't know is giving me a strange feeling of eagerness. I want Seradina to teach me all the things that I don't know.
"You don't know drawings?" She looks at me as if I said something impossible. "What about art? Have you ever seen a painting?"
"I know paintings!" There are a few of them in the common room. "Are drawings like paintings?" I say, happy that I was able to figure out an unknown thing.
"Similar enough, they lack colors though... Well, I suppose they would, at least..."
I try to imagine paintings without colors, but the images that come to my mind are all ridiculous. At some point I feel her hand on top of my head, petting me back and forth, and I realize I was looking at the floor, with my free hand on my chin.
"Such a focused face..." she sounds amused, and raising my eyes to look at her I wonder why she finds my focus amusing. "...already a [mad scientist] at heart..."
"What is a [mad scientist]?" I ask, in part also to know if I have to take offense, though by now I'm fairly sure that won't be the case.
She looks at me with an unreadable expression, and quickly turns to face the big window and grabs the round thing in front of her seat with both her hands. "Don't worry about it. Once we reach our destination, I can answer all the questions you have. Now let's go."
I'm a bit disappointed that she doesn't answer me now, but what she says last makes me drop a question for another. 'Go where? We are sitting...'
Just as I think that we can go nowhere as we are now, the room starts to shake. Frightened, I turn left and right to understand what is happening, but I find no answer. As I turn my head around, I notice something incredible and frightful.
"The trees! The trees are moving!" I say, my fear clearly evident in my voice, but when I look at Seradina, she doesn't share the same feeling at all.
"We are the ones moving." She says, the corners of her mouth moving up. "And the best is yet to come!" She seems quite excited, and I'm at a loss at what I should expect next.
Suddenly, I feel myself being pressed against the chair, and the last trees that could be seen from the window start moving down, quickly disappearing. I can feel my heart beating as fast as it never did as I watch the sky -the only thing I can see now- shake from side to side. It's not a wide movement, but the fact itself that the sky moves is so incredible that I can't help but be frightened.
Just as suddenly as I was pressed down, I feel myself being lifted. It's an unknown feeling, as if my limbs, my head but also everything that is in my belly had been thrown ahead. I feel the ribbon that Seradina tied around me press against my chest, keeping me down. Soon enough, the feeling is gone and I'm sitting on my chair just like I was before the room started to shake.
I grip both sides of the chair with my hands, looking straight ahead for fear of turning my head and seeing other moving things.
That was so scary!
"Do you like the view?" Seradina calls out to me in her inciting tone. I turn toward her with my eyes wide in fear. Does she really expect me to enjoy the view during one of the scariest moments of my life?
"Are you scared?" she asks, almost as if it was something strange. What is strange is that she can stay calm when everything around is moving.
"What was that?" I ask, nearly shouting, after some moments. I am aware that my manners are severely lacking right now, but I can't control my emotions so well in circumstances so extreme.
She puts her hand on my shoulder, petting it gently. The feeling is enough to stop the light shaking of my hands, but it doesn't calm me completely.
"I'm sorry, I underestimated the fact that you never went outside..." She says, but I'm not sure I understand what it has to do with being scared. "I'll be more careful when going down..."
"Going down?"
She nods. "We are flying now. Why don't you look out of the window?" She points at the one to my left. I slowly turn my head toward it, wondering what I will see. As I'm turning my body to get closer to the window, she adds: "Don't worry, you can't fall down." ...that actually makes me worry more.
Trying not to think too much about her words, I press my face against the see-through part. 'There's nothing outside.' I think, but then I remember the trees moved down. I straighten my back to take a better look, and I see another incredible thing.
The trees are so small that it's difficult to tell them apart, and what I can only guess is the grass seems to have become one single, smooth surface. I feel a mix of unease and amazement at how incredibly high we are right now, but the intense fear from before has gone away.
"Do you want me to make the whole door glass-like? It's safe." I hear a knock-knock sound and when I turn my head I see her loosely closed fist near the front window. She hits the glass with the back of her fingers, making the same noise again. It surely sounds sturdy.
I think about it for a moment. As high as we are now, if the door was completely made of glass I'm sure I would be scared, but on the other hand I really want to look at all the trees and the grass. What I could see earlier was so big, but I can only see a little bit like this.
I stare at her for a moment, and then I nod. If Seradina is here with me I don't need to be scared.
The corners of her mouth turn up in that way that has become familiar to me, and soon the light yellow color starts fading from all the walls of the room, not only from my door. I stare in awe as everything around me becomes visible, all the trees, the big grass floor, that dark irregular wall that can be seen very far away.
As the front part of the room loses colors as well, I can see a few objects that look different from the rest. White, their shape is made of straight lines. I point to them, wishing I could not see them.
"Is that the palace?"
"The palace is the other way." She points her thumb behind us. "All the places where people live are made with that stone. That is actually our destination, the gazebo. If you look between the trees you can find other white buildings." She now points to the trees on her right.
I try looking, and even if they are well hidden between the trees, the white stands out in the darkness of the night. There really are many 'buildings' like that. Feeling relieved that what I'm seeing is not the palace, I suddenly realize how small all the buildings are.
I stretch one arm, comparing the buildings to my hand. They look smaller than my thumb. Something as big as the palace, looking as small as my thumb.
Then, what I'm looking at is much, much bigger than what I would have been able to imagine.
I lower my hand in my lap and stare, speechless.
I turn my head left and right, trying to grasp how big everything is, when my eyes are caught by the room's ceiling, that has lost its color and is now see-through like the walls are.
I stare at the sky, and despite how high we are, I realize that the dots that are scattered all around are not bigger than before.
"The sky is not closer." I say, feeling a bit let down.
"It is. But, you see, the sky is something so big and so far away that even moving this high won't make any difference. See those mountains far, far away?" She points to the irregular wall past the grass, the trees and everything else.
"We moved this far, but they don't look any closer, do they?" She asks. I shake my head, they look exactly as they did earlier.
"If we wanted to, we could get there in half a day, but the sky and the stars are a thousand, a million times farther away. So far that it's actually impossible to reach them. That's why they don't look closer." She looks at me with her sweet expression. "Are you disappointed?"
I silently shake my head. In reality I am a bit disappointed that we won't ever be able to reach those 'stars', but if the sky is really that big, just thinking about it makes me feel dizzy. Dizzy and... without ties, limits, bounds. No matter how high we go, not even the sky can contain us. It's a feeling extraneous to me, but extremely pleasant.
And Seradina is the only reason I'm able to feel like this.
"Are you from the sky?" I ask, before I can stop myself.
She raises her eyebrows at my question, covering her mouth with her hand and making noises as if she's amused. "Well, I guess we can say I came from one of those stars. But it's so far away that I can't even tell the right direction anymore."
I look at her, speechless once again. She comes from the sky. No wonder she can do anything. I rest my back against my chair, looking at the stars. After some moments, I point at one of them.
"You came from there." I tell her, completely sure of my statement. "It's the brightest of all!"
She reaches for my head, petting me. The feeling is enough to make me relax, and yawn deeply, realizing that I should have covered my mouth only afterward.
"Sleep now, I bet you must be very tired after discovering a whole new world."
Her sweet voice makes me feel even more sleepy. Wondering what a 'world' is, I feel my consciousness slip away from me.