Skye is the Limit by Phenomenal Pen (best time to read books txt) 📕

They journeyed north because, according to Mage, Heliopolis was in that direction. Fortunately, Ranger’s Anima bracelet was equipped with a form of compass. He had caught himself wishing he had one. He knew how to create one if they ever found the materials: a needle, a magnet, a bowl of water and a piece of cork. But as soon as he started thinking these things, the lion wire sculpture on his arm transformed into a cross that indicated the four cardinal dimensions, with cartoony, exaggerated arrows no less; all tinged with the golden hue of the base.

In a remote corner of his brain, Ranger also had arcane knowledge of handheld GPS devices of the future, but between those and good old-fashioned compass, he’d take the compass any day.

He couldn’t for the life of him imagine how he had set out with his present company without any preparation. He had never before left for a hiking or mountaineering trip without at least a map. There were many other suspicious and risk-laden things about his situation, he found out as they trekked across the rolling hills and when he had more chance to study the lay of the land. It was definitely not New Zealand. What gave it away was the explosion of colors that greeted them. It was as though the god in that world was a teenager who had free rein with poster colors.

Ranger knew Mother Nature followed patterns: leaves were green while the ground was brown. Nature followed patterns so a ranger like him would know how to camouflage himself amid the foliage and when to expect the seasons’ changing. Leaves were not black or purple although they could be, probably on another planet. Earth leaves were green because of chlorophyll. Flowers, on the other hand, needed to attract pollinators such as bees and so they were blue, violet, red, pink, fuchsia, yellow and orange.

That was the creepiest thing about the place so far. It was as though they had stepped into a giant Venus flytrap. The colors were so bright they were almost outlandish, gaudy. Like a house made of candy, sickly sweet and rotting inside.    

Ranger was reminded of the uncanny valley effect, a hypothesis in aesthetics which identified the revulsion that humans felt towards robots and dolls that appeared almost, but not quite, human. He decided to assign the same name to the actual valley they were traversing, which was visually noisy and craving of attention, too eager to prove that it was real. In a word, the Uncanny Valley was a creepy funhouse-mirror likeness of Earth.

As every fiber of Ranger’s being contradicted the alarm bells inside his head, he picked a berry-like fruit from a row of hedges that they were passing. It was bright red and exactly the size of a playing-marble, as was each fruit in the cluster. He identified it as cerisier de Virginie (scientific name: Prunus Virginiana) but he had to be extra careful because earlier he saw a willow tree bearing grapes.

“No one eat anything from this place!” he shouted to the others. “It’s not safe.”

And just in time too because Warrior was about to sink his teeth into a fruit that was striped yellow, green and red.

As for himself, he gingerly bit through the juicy cherry for a taste test. It wasn’t too sour, which meant that it was edible. It was actually quite delicious. It had an organic, bitter-sweet and acidic taste, and for a moment Ranger was transported back to a blissful moment of his childhood.

An excited trumpeting sound jolted him back to the present. From a distance, a herd of majestic Indostan olifants were lumbering on their tall and spindly legs. They were passing across the valley, emerging from their two o’clock and heading southwest. They were no threat. But a young calf had spotted them and peeled away from the others. He was as tall as a human stiltwalker at a parade while the adults towered as high as buildings. His mother let out low grunts to scold him back to the herd.

The Dreamwalkers held their breaths at the sight. At the point where their paths were the closest, they felt an infrasonic rumble, a physical buzzing inside their chests. Men and beasts went on their separate ways and the sensation was gone.

They encountered other curious species the farther they trekked along the trail. First, a family of chickens crossed their path and beamed at them with perfectly human teeth. Next, a supercilious black cat with curling horns sat by licking its front paw and pointedly ignoring them.

Overhead, a flock of crows flew upside-down, followed by a winged cow and donkeys that had no wings but nevertheless floated like balloons. Back on the ground, a crawfish with miniature mountain-climbing equipment on its back crept along whistling.

Ranger and the rest of the Dreamwalkers gaped in awe at these oddities but inexplicably,  passively accepted their existence and moved on.

****

Jayla was having the grandest time. All her life she had been different: the weak one, the slow one, the weird one. Now she was still different but in a cool way. She was the smallest but she was also the fastest and the prettiest.

Humans were stupid, lumbering giants. She could see their freckles, pores and dead skin cells. She could see UV light now, which opened up a whole new world for her. She could perceive miniscule things such as trichomes and pollen and nectar, which were almost invisible to humans.