Prophecy of the Most Beautiful (27 page)

She gulped. "Is it one of those things where the name speaks for itself?"

"Pretty much." They made their way up a second and third flight of stairs.

By flight twenty, her thigh muscles were screaming and she was scared stupid. "I hope wherever we're going is worth it," She breathed. But no one bothered to respond.

When the air started to turn foggy, she got a little worried. It was around flight forty, maybe fifty, she had lost count. There was still no railing and she couldn't see as well now. Above her, or below.

Soon the air turned dense with white wisps of something and Strafford called for a quick break, his voice echoing off the tower walls at this elevation. Everyone, except him, collapsed onto the stair they were standing on, careful not to sit too close to the edges.

"Is there truly a point to walking up a neverending flight of stairs?" Dropper asked, peeking up. He saw her watching him and smiled. She let the floating white wisps cover her eyes so she couldn't see him.

"Let's hope so," Swindle responded, looking a bit tuckered out for someone so athletic. He had told her about the
swift
, his ability to run fast, and she had assumed with a gift like that, he would never get tired.

"So what are the Billows?" She asked, hoping someone would finally answer her.

"In simple terms,
transportation
," Ace replied.

"What?"

He leaned back against a step. "The Billows of Elsewhere can literally take you anywhere in the universe. And I do mean anywhere. There's jus' a few problems with tha' though."

"Like…"

"Like one," he held up a finger, "anywhere means
anywhere
. Like a deserted island in the middle of the ocean or the North Pole. Or stranded on a rock floatin' down a river of lava in some volcano on the verge of explodin'. And you don't get to pick where."

She swallowed. "And? What else?"

"Second," two fingers, "anywhere can also mean
any time
. We could end up back in the stone age with the bloody dinosaurs all for muckin' around in the Billows. I swear, I'd much rather let Varney Bane drag me down to the Underworld than fumble around like a blind git up here."

"You've never even been in the Billows," Strafford said, cracking his knuckles by opening and closing his fingers and applying pressure at the same time. The movement made the muscles in his arms flex, which made each breath she took quiver.

"But you have and I've heard the stories," Ace replied, "I
know
I don't want to be up here."

"Maybe we could come up with another plan," She suggested.

Strafford shook his head. "We're going." He started climbing again. With reluctance, they all followed, their legs crazy wobbly at this elevation.

Time and flights passed and a point came when Chloe couldn't feel the stairs beneath her feet. She felt a terrible lack of inertia and grabbed onto Strafford's tattooed arm as he offered it.

He looked at her. "We're here."

With eyes as wide as saucers, she observed.

It was quiet, silent as a graveyard, and everywhere she looked there was white wispy stuff settling around them like a thick fog. She swiped her hand at it to clear her way, but more would only replace it. She held onto Strafford for dear life, scared that she might lose him in it. She got the strange feeling that she was floating, but with more control over her limbs and where she was going. She looked down. More wispy stuff swirled around beneath her feet and when she realized the truth of where she was, she let out a little squeak.

"We're in the clouds!"

Strafford nodded and put his arm around her waist to help hold her steady.

"But I thought we were already in the sky."

"We are. The heavens are in the stratosphere. The Billows are in the mesosphere. One layer up. Jus' like you learned in your lil' human geography class.
Myth
reaches far beyond the provinces, wan."

"Yeah…but…" Her mind was a boggled mess. "But…
how
? Why are we here?"

"I didn't think abou' it until Chiron mentioned it, tha' maybe this curly-haired wanker fell from an upper layer. Maybe he fell out of the Billows. It's possible."

"But what would I have been doing
here
?" Dropper asked. His eyes were sparkling like crazy and she realized it must mean he was as spooked as she was about all of this.

"Nothin' tha' you
wanted
to do, I can tell you tha'," said Ace.

"The Billows operate like a maze in a way," Swindle said, looking around them, "Since there is no clear direction, you have to use your instincts to guide you along."

Instincts she had, and hers were telling her not to take on the Billows without a little assurance that they were coming out of this minus the splatter.

Goddesses of Fate,
she thought,
I need your help
.

Not entirely, dear,
Madame Cee responded so quickly Chloe was sure the goddess had been waiting inside her conscious for the chance to assist,
You have all that you need to guide you and your companions to safety. Live with confidence, Pythia, for the path you shall walk has already been laid and lit before you.

Chloe waited.
Am I supposed to know what that means?

The Madame chuckled.
Maybe
.

And she felt the Madame leave her conscious mind. The tension in her head that had been so prevalent a second before, vanished.

The metaphors and hidden meanings are driving me insane
, she thought to herself, feeling a bit resentful that the Madame hadn't offered her more.

"Wha' was tha', Red?"

She only then realized that she had spoken out loud. "Um, nothing. Just…nothing." But Strafford didn't looked convinced and she knew that he knew that she was hiding something.

"So are we gonna stand here all day or are we gonna get movin'?" Ace questioned, saving her from having to explain. "We've already lost the staircase. There's no going back now. Only forward."

Sure enough, he was right. The Neverending Tower had completely vanished, leaving nothing but a vast field of clouds.

"Forward it is then," Strafford said, removing his arm from her waist to take her hand. Together, they started off into the Billows.

Chloe wasn't sure if anyone else noticed, but after about fifteen minutes of walking, she could make out distinct paths of clouds and even tall walls of wispy condensation. It was just like Swindle had said, a maze. The path they were on was long and narrow. Every twenty feet or so, another path would veer off sometimes leading to dead ends and other times leading to more paths. But none of the paths seemed right and deep in her gut she knew they would lead them nowhere.

"I think we should jus' chance it and make a turn somewhere," Ace said from behind. "It's not like we know where we're going anyway."

"No," She said, speaking with more abruptness than she had meant to, "Let's stay on this path. Most of the others are dead ends anyway."

Strafford stopped and made her turn to face him. "Wha' are you talkin' abou'? Wha' other paths?" The others gathered around to listen, surprised that she could see something they couldn't.

She explained what she could see. She was happy that her friends seemed so impressed.

Strafford folded his arms and listened. When she had stopped speaking, he smiled a little. "So wha' you're sayin' is,
you
should be leadin' this mission instead of me."

"No. I don't want to lead. But I'll walk beside you and make sure we're going the right way."

Strafford held out his hand. "Fine by me." Taking it, they started forward again, the others behind them.

It wasn't long before Chloe noticed a path lit golden yellow veering off to her right. "There!" She pointed. "That's the way."
The path you shall walk has already been laid and lit before you
, and she suddenly understood.

Of course, the others couldn't see anything.

"What does it look like?" Swindle asked, obviously wanting to add the knowledge to his database. So she described it for him.

"Where do you think it might lead?" Dropper asked. Now
that
, she didn't know and told him so.

In the end, however, they followed Chloe down the lit path, Strafford right behind her, mumbling curses about how much he hated the Billows, that it was all the bloody Dropper's fault that they had to be there, and how, at the first opportunity, he was "pushin' the fecker off of a cloud". She smiled at his childish bellyaching, finding it cute, but the smile turned into a horrified scream when the path abruptly ended, she lost her footing and slipped through a gaping hole in the Billows.

"
RED!
" She felt Strafford's hand brush against her arm as he tried to grab her, but she was gone…falling…and falling…through the air…

She had never screamed so loud and long in her life. She felt the sunlight on her skin and knew she was falling through the open sky, but kept her eyes closed, not wanting to be aware of how close the ground was getting. Eventually, she ran out of screams and there was only a silence to match the darkness she had imposed on herself. The wind whistled in her ears, but soon they became deafened to it and all she had were her thoughts of death.

She wrapped her arms around her chest and willed herself not to breathe. Maybe if she held her breath long enough she would pass out before she was smashed into a gazillion pieces. But her desire to survive outweighed her willingness to make death as painless as possible. Yet, she saw no way to save herself, nothing to grab onto, she wasn't slowing down, and she conceded back to the fact that she was about to die. She continued to fall through the air, even picking up speed. She had to accept that this was the end for her. It was over. She closed her tear-blinded eyes and braced for impact.

Do not surrender to death so soon, dear
, Madame Cee said.
Your journey has only just begun.

At that precise moment, she fell through a mass of something hard and thorny, and she spit out whatever had gotten into her mouth. It felt like a leaf but she was too freaked out to open her eyes to confirm.

Seconds later, she came to a screeching halt, midair.

Stunned, she opened one eye, then the other. She dared to look down…to find the ground only two feet below her.

"Oh my––" and she landed with a
thump
in the soft grass beneath her, her backpack absorbing the impact.

She laid still for a moment, trying to comprehend what had just happened. She had landed with zero splatter, she was
alive
. After a moment, she laughed, not believing that she had just survived a fall from the freaking clouds. She looked up through the tree tops that had pricked her on the way down, but could only see the sunny sky above and nothing of her friends. A kind of fear crept up on her when she realized how alone she was.

She sat up slow and unhurried, taking in the forest around her. To her right, was an endless grove of trees, bright green and full of life. Wherever she was, it wasn't winter there like back home. Colored birds flitted from limb to limb, building nests out of twigs or feeding baby birds nestled together in ones that had already been constructed. A fox was digging a burrow nearby and about twenty feet in front of her, a deer was grazing on another patch of grass, not even cognizant of Chloe's presence. A couple of wild dogs ventured close by, scaring away the fox and deer, and she wished she had her own dagger already. But seeming uninterested in her, the mangy dogs disappeared into the forest only moments later.

The weather was warm and clear––spring weather, or even summer. The air, she thought, smelled of salt and water, and she could even taste it when she inhaled. She got to her feet and brushed the grass from her pants, trying to gather some sense about where in the world she could be. She remembered that Ace had said the Billows could take them anywhere…and to any time. But this was just a forest to her and it gave away no details about its exact location.

She heard a clattering noise to her left and ducked behind a tree to watch for the cause of it, unseen. There was a dirt path about thirty feet or so away from her and slowly rumbling down it was a wooden wagon with spoked wheels and an oddly dressed man driving it. Beside him sat a plain-looking woman with limp brown hair and in the back of the wagon were three children, a girl and two boys. They were all dressed in drab tunics of brown, the woman and girl in long tunics, the boys in short ones and their father in a swathed tunic that left his bare, sun-baked chest exposed. The woman had managed to make hers look less drab by adding pins at the shoulder and a wide band of golden fabric that fit snug around her waist––like a girdle––and caused the tunic to scrunch up and billow over the top of it. The little girl's tunic, however, almost swallowed the thin child, but the smiling little girl hardly seemed to care. She said something to her mother in an excited voice. Chloe recognized the language she spoke at once. She had heard Strafford speaking it several times.

It was
Greek
.

The mother responded with a smile and the children squealed with joy. One of the little boys asked a question and the name "Aphrodite" caught her attention, but in Greek it sounded more like
ah-fro-dee-tee.
His father laughed. The mother playfully hit at her husband, but answered the boy with cheer. Him and his brother snickered at the answer and the little girl threw a handful of hay from the back of the wagon at them. Chloe stared after them until the family had rumbled out of sight towards the music she hadn't heard until now.

And then out of nowhere, there was a
whoosh
and someone dropped down through the trees. Like her, they stopped two feet above the ground then landed with a solid thump.

"Strafford!" She cried, crawling to his side.

"Red, thank the gods." He reached up to touch her hair, but he was pushing her away a second later. "Move now. The others are comin'." He barely made it out of the way as Dropper came barreling towards them, stopping two feet above ground, then landing. Ace followed, then Swindle. Bill seemed to have flown down––lucky bastard. They were all ecstatic to see that she was okay, though not so ecstatic about the plunge through the sky.