Jamyria: The Entering (The Jamyria Series Book 1) by Madeline Meekins Read Free Book Online Page A

The Welcoming Woman
     
    The light touches the earth heating a perfect ring of fresh grass that livens the stark wintry forest. Sunlight filters through the trees overhead casting an emerald glow upon Margo, the canopy showering warm drops. She nestles into the soft grass with her arms stretched over her head to bask in warmth. Her muscles lose stiffness and blood pumps regularly again. All thoughts of white monsters and icicles slip far from her memory….
    The sun grows warmer and prickles at her skin until all of the drops overhead have sizzled away. She expects a sunburn by now but doesn’t bother to check. Not with the comfort of heat in her bones again. No more tingling or numbness, only the toasty warmth that somehow seems to be increasing still. The warm, burning… Scorching even…
    It is suddenly too hot. Overwhelmingly and unbearably hot. In a matter of seconds, it strengthens from a day at the beach to the Sahara deserts to the belly of Mount St. Helens. Margo’s blood boils in fury, violently pumping through her veins.
    She jumps to her feet covering her face, protecting what she can. She has to move — but to where? The only place to go is back into the biting cold.
    Whoosh!
    The ground slips out from under her feet sending a painful echo through her head when it meets the soil. The air in her lungs escapes, and heat stabs her face as the invisible force flattens her.
    Her eyes dart about in search of what caused her collapse. The woods are empty.
    The spotlight intensifies growing into a cloud of heat focused solely upon her. Her body is bound to the earth as if gravity has magnified. She cannot escape; to budge is even impossible.
    The air around her stirs. Not wind, but more a violent charge of energy, a furious swarm of invisible bees whirling around her. And she is forced to remain still and broken and take the invisible beating.
    Her head spins as the light above grows as blinding as the snow globe had. The motion is nauseating, but she keeps her eyes open this time. She has learned throughout the day’s events that closing them will only make it worse.
    A bolt echoes throughout the sky as the source of the light above explodes. Showers of illuminated rain fall, splattering down on Margo’s face and tearing through her flesh like scorching drops of molten metal. She screams and writhes from the impact. Oddly, the places that hurt the most are the inner part of her arms and the back of her neck. The intensity brings tears to her eyes. Like razors digging into her spine. Daggers carving out the core of her arms.
    Margo’s screams do nothing. Nothing but lose oxygen.
    The pressure lifts, the invisible weight no more. Margo slowly looks around expecting to find pieces of her body, pieces of her own flesh, strewn about after this last beating, but she doesn’t. In fact, she feels…good.
    She rises shakily to her feet. Margo stands within the same forest she was in after following that flaming bird, the same forest that had been covered in ice and snow, and it has somehow changed yet again. To look inside this forest is to explore the works of a dream in hard form, granted a chance to see imagination. The colors are hardly hues found in ordinary woods but are more vivid and saturated. The leaves not quite a lime green nor the woodsy hunter green they’re expected to be. Flowers are scattered throughout the branches painted in vibrant neon. Even the cloudless sky is a shade closer to turquoise. It is as if she’s walked into someone’s realism painting in which the artist has slightly mixed the wrong colors, throwing off the whole mood.
    But — and this realization churns her stomach — this is wrong. This feels like someone has played God, and the forest is the result of not mixing the colors just right. Abnormal plants and trees fill the woods. Spiky bits of moss cling to trees like sea urchins. The tree trunks are more russet than brown, some with unusually smooth bark. Wild-looking flowers wear