The temperature dropped significantly as a breeze of cold hair rushed into the circle clearing and somehow was contained entirely in that space. The air blew from the center out in every direction.

Me and Adram stood on the outskirts of the circle, our hair flipping wildly.

“Take my hand,” Adram offered. I held onto it. His skin was warm and smooth but undeniably firm. It felt reassuring to me.

We stood in some sort of vortex, that was the only way I could describe it. I could no longer see beyond the clearing and the colors lost all vibrancy, as if light was caught in this place and denied vision to the rest of the forest while containing us in a twilight glow as soft as a firefly.

The bright mushrooms were vibrating, producing a low whirring sound in the process. The speed at which they shook made them blurry.

Adram led me forward towards the center of the clearing.

“What’s happening!” I had to shout over all the noise of the wind and the mushrooms.

“We’re standing in a faerie circle!” Adram shouted back. I’m not sure what I expected him to say but it somehow didn’t explain anything.

“When we get to the center, close your eyes.” He had turned to give me those instructions, his face was close to mine.

I nodded my understanding. The wind threatened to knock me over but Adram anchored his hand to mine.

“Now!” He declared.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt a fleeting sense of vertigo, like everything around me was spinning except for me. What made this particular sensation so strange is that the vertigo feeling was entirely visual, yet my eyes were closed.

Adram let go of my hand. “Okay, you can open your eyes now.”

I had no words. We were in someplace reminiscent of earth but distinctly alien. There were trees, sure, but they weren’t like any tree on earth. The bark alone ran from greens to purples but was very unsaturated. The colors were dull and the atmosphere in general was very faded and plain. Come to think of it, the mood of this place reminded me of Adram’s eyes. All grayish and unsettling.

The trees themselves tended to grow more horizontally than vertically except when one tree grew over the other, in which case they formed great knots contorting and snaking around each other in a competition that saw some trees reaching improbable heights.

Fog surrounded everything, but it was a very solid and wispy sort of fog. A wave of my hand moved it and dragged nearby fog with it. They were like giant sheets of clouds, as soft as spider silk but each strand or blanket was separate from the others, creating different levels of the fog, some low on the ground and others above my head. It was cool to the touch as I swirled some around my finger.

“Faerie trails.” Adram explained.

“Is this some sort of faerie land? Are there faeries here right now?” I asked, still adjusting to the bizarre setting.

“It is the void. We are in a faerie forest, though, just one of many… biome’s I guess you could call it. As for the faerie trails, these could be hundreds of years old. A faerie trail never disappears on its own, but some things like to consume them. There’s no way of knowing for sure,” Adram concluded.

“How did we get here? I get that we went through like a portal, but is this earth? A different dimension?” I had a million questions.

“This isn’t a different dimension. Dimensions don’t exist. This is a place, like the forest we were in.”

I don’t get it.”

“And you won’t for a while. I know you have a lot of questions, but for now just take it all in. We need to get going.” I noticed Adram kept a watchful eye.

“This place is dangerous.” It wasn’t a question.

“Highly.” he agreed.

We started to hike in this faerie forest, still dressed in our black and white school uniforms.

“What flower are we looking for?” I realized there was little vegetation on the forest floor. Only the spiraling roots of the great trees. The footing proved to be easily navigable despite walking mainly on horizontal trees. The logs extended wide enough to walk surely. You could probably fit three or four people in a line comfortably, that’s how massive the radius of these trees were.

I followed Adram, allowing him to pick out the path.

“Blue Stein, it is called. They have thick blue petals filled with water. You can bite the tips off and drink it.”

“You came here for water?” I was only half teasing. I was getting used to this place and starting to feel grounded again.

“It has properties I need for something.”

“Something? Care to elaborate?”

Adram rubbed his forehead. “No, it’s best I don’t.”

Not surprised. He likes his secrets.

“You said this place is dangerous but it feels empty and lifeless.” I didn’t get the sense that anything lived here, even the trees felt inanimate.

“You could spend a lifetime in the void and never encounter a single creature or entity. That’s how vast the void is. On the other hand, you could be devoured within the first five seconds of arriving.”

We continued to travel through the intricate root and tree system. No sign of a change of scenery.

“This feels like a dream.”

“Just wait until you start to dream of this,” he added.

“I can’t believe this exists.” I couldn’t get over the awe of being here. Just the concept of being in the void was enough to make my head spin. There were all kinds of deeper questions I dared not entertain.

I focused on Adram’s distinct sulfuric scent, the burnt match smell allowing me to stay connected to reality.

“Are we lost?” I wondered. “Won’t we have to go back the way we came in?” I just realized we could be stuck here, I wasn’t paying attention to our direction and even if I had been, the vast mesmerizing tree system would make it impossible to reference.

“To be in the void is to be lost. Faerie circles open and close randomly. It could be a year before the one we went through opens again. We’ll find a different one and return there.”

“Will we end up someplace else?”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“No, why should we?” he replied.

“I guess I figured we’re in the equivalent of somewhere on earth.”

Adram shook his head and explained. “We went through a doorway to a specific location in the void that will always lead to that same location. Wherever we exit here, the doorway will be the same as the entrance, location-wise.”

“How curious.”

“You are more fascinated than terrified.” Adram observed. “I assumed you would be. Most people would either be having an existential crisis or panicking to get back. But you’ve got the look of someone already bored with this location.”

I smiled, though he was still walking in front of me and didn’t see it. This place wasn’t boring. It was more amazing than anything I’d ever seen in my trips around the world. The problem was I wasn’t a very visual person. My cynical eyes sought qualities of depth and danger rather than surrealism.

“I’m not easily impressed for long. I want more.” Adram turned to see my eyes full of wanderlust.

“I like you, Jienne. You’ve got spunk.” He started again.

“Spunk is an ugly word.” I scowled.

“True. I’m not very good with compliments..” Adram admitted.

No you’re not, I thought to myself, amused. Was that his way of saying he likes me? Intrigued at the very least.

“Aha!’ he exclaimed. He pointed down, beneath the tree we stood on was a blue speck. I hadn’t realized how high up we were, though I swore we hadn’t been going up an incline. I looked back and sure enough the tree we came from was flat. That means the ground had dipped beneath us. Trippy.

“How do we get down?” I posed the obvious question.

“Easy.” Adram squatted down and began feeling with his hands around the bark. “Here we go.” He pulled up a piece of bark and peeled it off. Another piece came loose and several more. It looked easy. Were these massive trees all so delicate?

“The trees are hollow you see. We can just go inside to the bottom and jump from there.” He gestured for me to come. I looked into the hollow tree. This is where the color of the trees came from! Inside were patches of glowing moss. Greens, purples, blues, oranges.

“Careful not to touch them. They burn.”

“Noted.”

Thanks to the glowing moss, the inside of the tree was clearly visible and Adram went down first, lowering himself carefully. It wasn’t quite like a tube where it was just an open cylinder. There were bumps and curves and thicker portions. Adram found footing on one side that slowly sloped to the flooring of the tree’s belly so to speak.

I came down after him, careful not to touch the glowing mossy stuff. I was highly aware of his hand touching my waste, guiding me to the foothold. He wasn’t being intrusive, despite the fact I was wearing a skirt. Falling from this height would be painful as it was ten or fifteen feet down and that was assuming the bark would hold because it’d be another fifteen feet plunge, I estimated.

“Got it?” He made sure before letting me go.

I nodded. He was being protective which is nice, though I was entirely capable of climbing down on my own. I imagine he felt responsible for me since this place wasn’t exactly terrestrial.

We descended slowly to the floor of the tree, stepping over moss. I was tempted to see the interaction of my shoe against it but thought better of it. I didn’t want it to melt my shoes or anything like that. Still, it looked squishy and satisfying to step into.

We reached the bottom and Adram found a patch without moss a few feet further into the tree and started hitting it with his palm. Once he made a hole, he started to peel the bark out and dropped it below. We were maybe less than ten feet to the ground. “It’s closer than I thought.” I said, leaning over the edge he created.

“Yeah, just make sure to hang before you drop. Don’t want to twist your ankle landing on a root.” he adviced.

He dropped first and I shortly after. I landed deftly and my skirt somehow didn’t flap up thankfully.

Adram reoriented himself and spotted the flower he saw from above.

“The Blue Stein. Some call it faerie nettle.” I leaned down with him to see it up close. It was a single plant with several petals, all looked full of liquid.

I’m not sure what he meant by ‘some’ but I guess there is a small community of occultists like Adram exploring these things.

Adram pulled out a sealed bag from his pocket and unfolded it.

“Won’t it burst or pop?” I asked.

“Touch it. They are surprisingly durable. You’d have to tear at it for a while or jump on it to break the petal.”

I reached out and felt it. The petal was soft and fibrous. I pinched at it and rubbed it with my fingers. It reminded me of rubber, something flexible and stretchy but able to take abuse.

“All I need is the petals so I won’t kill the plant.” Adram pulled out a small pocket knife and sawed at the stem before each petal.

I refrained from commenting how that pocket knife would fail to stop the supposed highly dangerous creatures of the void.

“All done. We should get back.” he announced.

“I’m glad I could help.” I said sarcastically.

“We didn’t find nearly as much as I’d hoped. Still, some is better than none.”

We stuck to the forest floor and navigated the roots and tree trunks that wormed in and around.

“I actually just realized something.” I began.

“What’s that?”

“You said the faerie circles open randomly, sometimes not for a year. So how did you know the one we entered would be open when it did?”

He repeated my question to himself out loud, apparently I over worded it. “Oh I just get the sense for it. Like for example, we’re going to go this way and we’ll see a portal soon enough. Just have a knack for feeling the energy.” he shrugged as if that explanation was sufficient for himself and should be for anyone else.

“Why don’t you take some of the glowing moss?” I suggested.

“I tried before. It shrivels up as soon as we leave here.”

“Why doesn’t the faerie nettle do that either?”

“I think the moss is part of the trees. It’s the nervous system of the trees. I don’t know if it's a symbiosis or just the actual nerves of the trees.” Adram offered that as an explanation.

“The trees are not trees at all, are they?”

Adram commended me. “You’ve got a very perceptive eye.”

“What are they?” I demanded to know.

“Petrificatus vermis is what it is usually referred to.”

That was Latin. “Petrified worm?”

Adram kept it short. “yeah.”

I looked at the trees again. “Have they been moving the whole time?”

“They? This is one petrified worm.”

I was shocked at this. “What! How large is it?”

“Bigger than you can imagine.” Which was basically saying nobody knows.

“Does it eat?”

“There isn’t exactly a lot of information on them. Your guess is as good as I’m mine.” Adram confessed.

“Okay, last question.”

“Shoot,” he encouraged.

“What do faeries have to do with this place? Aren’t they woodland creatures or something like that?”

“Okay, this is the most popular theory, from a seventeen-hundreds occultist. He believed the faerie circles led to a petrified worm, which grows based on the age of the forest that leads to it. An ancient forest will have a massive petrified worm in the void. Faeries, he goes on to say, are the cultivators of the petrified worm, protecting the forest from both ends. The petrified worm, therefore, is the underground cerebrum of the forest.”

I found myself excited at the realization, “the mushrooms! They make the faerie circles. They connect to the trees underground.”

Adram nodded “It seems that occultist had the right idea. How the petrified worm relates to the mushrooms is a mystery and the purpose of the petrified worm on top of the role of faeries is all up for debate.”

I was too busy trying to think it through to ask any more questions.

“See that over there?” He pointed up ahead to a patch of darkness.

“Faerie circle?”

“Yeah, let's hurry and catch it.” He started moving with haste, though he wasn’t quite running. I kept up without a problem.

We made it to the circle of blackness. “Do I close my eyes again?” I asked.

“Yeah you better.”

He took my hand again and we stepped into the darkness. This time there was no wind or vibrating. I got the feeling I was falling upwards hundreds of feet. The paradoxical sensation again only felt in my closed eyes.

“Open.” Adram told me. He let go of my hand again and I opened my eyes. Back exactly where we started in the forest, only it was early dawn the next day.

“Wow we were gone the entire day.” I said. It felt like an hour or two.

“In the void, there’s nothing actively draining us and no change of lighting. You won’t get hungry or tired as fast because your body uses less resources.”

“Well now I am thirsty and we have school soon.”

“Care for some coffee?” Adram offered.

I said sure and we left the faerie circle, coming back onto the trail.

I was lost in thought.

I want you to show me more, Adram. You’ve proven to me your world exists. Now I want to see it all!