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- Going with Lea wasn't the best way to get what I wanted - it was just the only way. I took a breath and took her hand. Her skin felt like cool silk, untouched by the rain. "All right. And after them, I need to see the Mothers."
- Lea gave me an oblique glance and said, "Survive the flood before hurling yourself into the fire, child. Close your eyes."
- "Why?"
- Annoyance flickered over her eyebrows. "Child, stop wasting time with questions. You have given me your hand. Close your eyes."
- I muttered a curse to myself and did it. My godmother spoke something, a string of liquid syllables in a tongue I could not understand - but it made my knees turn rubbery and my fingers suddenly feel weak. A wave of disorientation, dizzying but not unpleasantly so, scrambled my sense of direction. I felt a breeze on my face, a sense of movement, but I couldn't have said whether I was falling or rising or moving forward.
- The movement stopped, and the whirling sensations passed. Thunder rumbled again, very loudly, and the surface I stood on shook with it. Light played against my closed eyelids.
- "We are here," Lea said, her voice hushed.
- I opened my eyes.
- I stood on a solid surface among grey and drifting mist. The mist covered whatever ground I was on, and though I poked at it with my foot, I couldn't tell if it was earth, wood, or concrete. The landscape around me rolled in hills and shallow valleys, all of it covered in ground fog. I frowned up at the skies. They were clear. Stars glittered impossibly bright against the velvet curtain of night, sparkling in dozens of colors, instead of in the usual pale silver, jewels against the blackness of the void. Thunder rumbled again, and the ground shook beneath the mist. Lightning flashed along with it, and the ground all around us lit with a sudden angry blue fire that slowly faded away.
- The truth dawned on me slowly. I pushed my foot at the ground again, and then in a circle around me. "We're ..." I choked. "We're on ... we're on ..."
- "The clouds," my godmother said, nodding. "Or so it would seem to you. We are no longer in the mortal world."
- "The Nevernever, then. Faerie?"
- She shook her head and spoke, her voice still hushed, almost reverent. "No. This is the world between, the sometimes place. Where Chicago and Faerie meet, overlap. Chicago-Over-Chicago, if you will. This is the place the Queens call forth when the Sidhe desire to spill blood."
- "They call it forth?" I asked in a quiet voice. "They create it?"
- "Even so," Lea said, her voice similarly low. "They prepare for war."
- I turned slowly, taking it in. We stood on a rise of ground in a broad, shallow valley. I could make out what looked like a mist-shrouded lake shore not far away. A river cut through the cloudscape.
- "Wait a minute," I said. "This is ... familiar." Chicago-Over-Chicago, she had said. I started adding in mental images of buildings, streets, lights, cars, people. "This is Chicago. The land."
- "A model of it," Lea agreed. "Crafted from clouds and mist."
- I kept turning and found behind me a stone, grey and ominous and enormous, startlingly solid amid all the drifting white. I took a step back from it and saw the shape of it - a table, made of a massive slab of rock, the legs made of more stones as thick as the pillars at Stonehenge. Writing writhed across the surface of the stone, runes that looked a little familiar. Norse, maybe? Some of them looked more like Egyptian. They seemed to take something from several different sources, leaving them unreadable. Lightning flashed again through the ground, and a wave of blue-white light flooded over the table, through the runes, lighting them like Las Vegas neon for a moment.
- "I've heard of this," I said after a moment. "A long time ago. Ebenezar called it the Stone Table."
- Summer Knight Chapter 23, Page 270-271
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