The girls got up early the next morning to start out after the bright spot on the horizon. It ended up being much further away than they anticipated: by the time they entered into the fog, it was already in stark contrast with the evening sky.

“I don’t know if ‘fog’ is the right word for this,” Lucy said, trying to touch the blank spots that surrounded them. “It’s more like…snow, suspended in mid-air. Or spider webs…”

“I can’t see anything…should we just keep walking?” Dreadli asked.

“Let’s look for the phantasms,” said Pitch. “Wherever they are, something else must be.”

A group of inky shadows were gathered around some object in the distance, clustered in a tight swarm. As soon as they realized they’d caught the attention of the trio, they dispersed, revealing a half-unwritten rose bush.

The girls approached the bush. Dreadlilocks picked up a fallen petal. “Hey…how come the phantasms ran away from us just now…?” she asked.

“They’re probably focused on someone else,” said Pitch. “They tend to unwrite just one thing at a time.”

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“Like how they unwrote my parents, but I just ended up in the well,” added Lucy. “Or how Dreadli ended up at my home…s-speaking of which: how do we know we aren’t gonna end up suddenly spirited away to heaven-knows-where??”

“We’ll just have to hope. As we’ll have to hope that they don’t finish with whatever they’re doing and turn their attention to us…” Pitch unhooked her cutlass from her belt. “Look there.”

Besides the rosebush, the white void that surrounded them contained one other immediately apparent feature: a thin section of boxwood hedge.

The trio crawled through it, one after the other: Pitch first, Lucy second, and Dreadlilocks third. And when they reached the other side, they found themselves in what appeared to be a completely different world.

“Look at all the flowers! They’re everywhere…!” Dreadli breathed.

And they really were. Thousands of blooms covered the crumbling walls of a dilapidated garden, crawling over trellises and fences, their petals scattered over a path leading to a dark, foreboding mansion.

It was a beautiful scene in a cursed sort of way, like a decorated casket.

“It seems this area hasn’t been completely erased yet,” Pitch mused. “The phantasms must be surrounding this house until they finally unwrite whoever’s holding them off here.”

“Or m-maybe they’ll unwrite this place right out from under their feet,” Lucy suggested. She pointed at a blank spot on the ground. “It l-looks like that’ll happen anyway, eventually.”

“Then we have to get them to follow us out of here,” said Dreadlilocks. “Let’s find them!”

With weapons drawn, they entered the recesses of the garden.