Flight of the Blue Serpent by Tony Abbott

Author:Tony Abbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2016-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

As Eric watched, all the lines came together into the outline of a low, round-topped door.

He trembled when he recalled the wizard’s words — “Oh! Light!” — and his strange last look at him.

Then, all of a sudden, Eric’s fingers sank into the rock and he fell headlong through the solid wall.

Eric fell past the thick icy wall and into a space as blue as the evening sky.

He staggered but stayed on his feet, and was stunned at what he saw.

It was another room, but a room as enormous in size as it was impossible. The walls were several stories high and tapered to a rounded peak, as if he were standing inside a giant dome. Eric knew that the walls were hewn from ice, yet they were pearly smooth to the touch.

Overhead, innumerable jewels, crystals, lights — things — twinkled across the ceiling’s broad blue surface like stars.

When Eric took a step, the room hummed, as if the air itself were musical and his movement set it humming.

“Where am I —”

Swit! Swit! Swit! A bird — no, two birds — no, three birds! — glistening with crystalline wings swooped and banked around the ceiling, then settled into the limbs of a great tree he had not noticed before but that rose from floor to ceiling in the room’s distant center.

As Eric approached the tree, it seemed to come nearer to him with each step, so that even though at first it seemed far away, in a very few steps, he was standing by its trunk.

“Okay, this is weird,” he said.

The tree was leafless and sculpted, Eric imagined, of ice. But it was so intricate and detailed that its limbs, branches, and even twigs quivered from the movement of the bird’s flight as if the tree were as impossibly alive as the birds.

“The enchanted room!” he whispered, afraid to raise his voice over the sound of the room’s music. “I’m in the enchanted room the snowfolk told us about. But how could I be here? I fell through the ice miles from Krone. Did I fall so far? Have I actually found it? But … how is it possible …?”

“A question I ask myself, too!” said a voice.

Eric whirled on his heels to see a blue-cloaked figure sitting cross-legged on the ground behind him. When the figure raised his head, Eric saw that it was Galen himself!

“Galen!” he exclaimed. He was sure he had passed the very same spot but had seen no one there. “But … how … I just …”

“I know,” said the wizard. “I think you’ll find that we keep moving around, much faster than is possible — oh, here we go!”

And suddenly, both he and Galen were sitting on a stout branch of the tree. It reminded Eric of the apple trees in his yard at home — trees that his dream vision had shown him only minutes before.

He blinked. “Where exactly are we?”

“I wonder,” said Galen. “I fell through that wall — you saw me — and I ended up here.

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