My brain brandishes a white mercury sword against the hunger, the gloom.

No.

We’re fighting the guilt this time. To the teeth.

To the death.

The thunderclouds choose that moment to finally open up, a gentle pitter-patter pattering down harder until it’s entire sheets of water dumping on us, completely drenching the bleached and thirsty ruins. We wait, and wait again, a string of sick-wet moments, until my ears pop with that familiar nothingness, the world dimming to rushing blackness, and light and sound coming back in all at once.

Thunder replaced by rushing wind. Not the sort I’m used to—through trees or bushes or the grasslands. Lighter than that. Freer than that. Wind without boundaries, unhindered, howling against and with itself. The light is the near-dying sort, the sun hanging low and silver on the horizon.

But I see it clearly.

Just the horizon. Just the sun, and stretched out before us are nothing but puffy white clouds. A quilt of them, as far as the eye can see. We’re high, so high. We’re standing and dripping water on a small platform of what looks like dirt and stone, overgrown with moss and grass. It looks like land, but it isn’t. It can’t be, because there are clouds simmering just inches away, the drop down hundreds of miles.

“Windonhigh,” I hear Fione mutter next to me, and I turn to face her direction.

There, on top of the endless sea of cotton clouds, is green. Green land, rife with trees, and between them sandstone spires like lighthouses, like the tallest lighthouses in existence, stretching so high they seem impossible. Impossible too in the way they’re twisted, smooth and hollow with hundreds of windows and yet bent around each other organically, like stone trees grown side-by-side. The stone spires end somewhere, the green trees end somewhere, sheer cliff-faces peeking from white fluff. The land looks like it’s been lifted from the ground, torn out, dirt and stone and roots dangling down into sheer blue sky.

A city.

It’s a city in the sky.

And the crows.

White crows everywhere—in the trees, in the spires, flying and nesting and chattering. White deer, eating from the little meadows dotting the city. Pure white bears, sunning themselves in the afternoon light filtered through the trees, fishing in little rivers that start somewhere I can’t see and drip diamond water over the edge of the land and down into the sky.

White animals, this many—witches. Witches shapeshifted.