Changing Reality
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 4453
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Astra returned to consciousness to feel the tongue of a dog licking her
face. "Rebel,"
she murmured. Rebel had been her dog when she was a child. But no, she
realised, that couldn't be right,
for Rebel was long dead. Then her memory of recent events came back, and
she opened her
eyes. She saw it was Velus licking her face, trying to revive her. When
she sat up, Velus
barked in relief. "Thank you, Velus," she said.
She quickly checked her condition, and found that she had suffered nothing worse than minor cuts and bruises. Then she asked Velus: "Where are we? And where's Fred?" Velus barked in a fashion that she knew meant "don't know". "Well," she said, "he must be either upstream or downstream, so we have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. We'll go... upstream." So they began walking in what was the wrong direction. The underground river was held within a great tunnel that it had cut out of the rock, but fortunately there was just sufficient beach to make it possible to walk upstream without going into the raging water. They had been walking for about ten minutes, when Astra noticed something strange up ahead. The visibility in that direction seemed to be getting worse. There was a whiteness there that looked like - snow? But that was impossible. They were underground, after all, and anyway whilst not exactly warm it was certainly too warm for snow. As the strange whitness got closer, though, the temperature began to drop sharply. Fortunately Astra had had time to dry off from having been in the river, but even so she shivered. Then she noticed that the rock walls on either side of the river, along with the rock above them, seemed to be becoming strangely insubstantial. She thought she could make out the faint outlines of pine trees, becoming steadily more visible. Astra and Velus turned, and ran back downstream, hoping to outdistance the strange shift in reality that was heading towards them. They could feel a cold wind at their backs. The rock walls had almost entirely faded away in favour of the pine trees now. The first flurries of snow blew past them.
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JH
9/25/1999 7:25:25 AM
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