Silently we came into the circle, with Seppo looking down uneasily at the flames before also crossing through. They didn’t burn when they touched my flesh, but they still were … off somehow. Not cold, not hot … wrong. This entire thing wriggled in my gut like worms crawling to the surface of the earth.

Diaval looked around at us, pulling Rose’s sleeve so he stood closer to the center. She handed off one of the bags she was carrying to him. When she finally approved of us, she gave a sharp nod and clasped her hands together. Dark blue light flared from her fingertips as she muttered one final word: “Laskeutua.”

The world turned, my stomach dropped, and for a single terrifying moment, I was weightless. Right-side up, upside down, left, right, and every which way in between. My body fell like a rag doll, down and down but also up and up, as I crashed through the primordial darkness that swallowed my entire body. One second I was falling, and then the next I was floating in the blackness only to fall once more. At first my heart rate spiked at the sheer terror that flooded through me, but the terror was chased away by the pure darkness that surrounded me. It cradled me for a moment like a mother might her child, and I hung in what might’ve been midair or underground or beneath the water. It could’ve been seconds or minutes or hours, and I’d have no way to tell until my body finally crashed down onto the muddy embankment of two large rivers.

I lay on my side for a moment, panting to recover my breath after the fall—was it even a fall?—that had brought me into this realm. Around me the others, save Diaval, were also catching their breath. When I finally rose, my eyes caught sight of how massive the two rivers were.

They were connected together in the middle as if to form one giant, impossible river. Ice floes littered the incredibly large body of water like plains, and they crashed and churned in the rapidly moving, dark water. Something clenched deep in my gut; this wasn’t a place designed for any fast movement, any escape for the people who crossed it if they survived the crossing at all. Again the wrongness of the entire thing lay heavily inside of me, but try as I might, I couldn’t shake it off. Even if we got through the river, how in the world would we be able to go back? I smelled the protections on the river, the source that it came from, and the stories of my childhood many, many years ago echoed; a voice spoke in my head—not Lydian’s, not mine, but a voice all the same—and whispered the name of the massive river. Gjall.