Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:”23) Prompt: falling”

Another snippet of Facets of Dusk. 🙂

It was Xenia’s turn to hold Alexa’s hand, although they arranged such things without ever speaking about it. The world they were leaving was too unpleasant, too cold, for Josie to be any use at all, so she came in near the end, buffering Aerich and Alexa, focusing on his turmoil to avoid thinking too hard about her own.

Cole stepped through the mist, so comforting and incongruous inside the steel doorway, vanished into its embrace one limb at a time, until his hand jerked out of her grasp. Unbalanced (some would say she always was, but what did they know?), Josie tumbled after him, Aerich nearly atop her.

And they fell, nothing around them but grey storm clouds and one perplexed bird. There had to be a door; that was how the whole system worked. A door in the middle of thin air? She twisted to look up, trusting her teammates to manage the problem of landing.

Through the clouds, she could barely make out the darker grey of stone. A balcony? She moved the wind, carefully, not wanting to impact the climate more than she had to.

Next to her, still holding her wrist in his dry, firm grip, Aerich chanted, drawing glyphs in the air with his free hand. Below her, Cole swore, the sort of calm, rhythmic swearing that meant he had a plan and was working on it.

And stretching up above them all, taller, it seemed, than the skyscraper they’d stepped out of, was the ruin of an ancient tower, grey stone spiraling into the clouds.

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