When she felt strong enough to do so, she sat up and looked around. She was sitting in woods, the trees alive and well, their canopy thick and leafy and their limbs dark arms linked in the gray light. She could see birds darting here and there, as gray and colorless as the landscape itself. She caught glimpses of tiny creatures moving through the foliage and flitting through the trees. Sounds rose in tiny bursts, calls and cries that signaled hidden presences. In the distance, just barely visible through the screen of the forest, a wall of dark and craggy mountain peaks rose.

Where was she?

There was only one way to find out. She climbed to her feet, waited a few moments to see if there was any dizziness or weakness, and found none. She brushed pine needles and bits of grass and dirt from her pants, and looked around some more, trying to decide which way she should go. She was a skilled Tracker, and she could find her way even in darkness. But she could not do so now. Everything looked strange to her. Different. The shadings of shadows and light didn’t look right; the casting of light and dark was skewed in some way.

Then suddenly a flash of bright scarlet appeared through the branches of the trees, skimming close to the ground, soaring to gain the open spaces between the dark trunks. It was the first bit of color she had seen, and it was so unexpected that for a moment she just stood there and watched it as it flew.

It was a bird of some sort.

It was a scarlet dove.

But there were no scarlet doves in her world, only in the world of the King of the Silver River. Why was she seeing one here? Unless she was still in the Faerie creature’s world and hadn’t returned to her own after all. But how could that be, when the whole reason for her agreeing to chance an infusion of deep magic was to come back and help Pan?

Then she realized something else, something so astonishing that it froze her in place. Forgetting for a moment the question of which world she was in or what she was supposed to be doing—why could she see the bright scarlet of the dove but not see colors anywhere else?

She blinked rapidly, closed her eyes tightly, and opened them again. The world around her was still washed of any color but gray and black, light and dark. Nothing else. She searched the landscape, trying to find something that would yield even a small dab of color.

Nothing. Anywhere.