Darkness surrounded Claire once again, enveloping her mind and her senses as she fell. But then she stopped falling. Everything was still dark.

Claire panicked for a moment before she realized that her eyes were closed. She laughed at herself a little for being scared and opened them, but the sight that met her silenced her laughter.

There were shadows everywhere. Even though she could tell she was out of of the Shadow Lands, standing near the tar pit she had jumped through, there were hundreds of shadows surrounding her and watching her movements with their glowing eyes.

She heard a whinny and turned to see Plenty pacing some distance away, surrounded by shadows that blocked her from reaching him. Owen sat on Plenty's back, awake, looking with both confusion and fear between the strange horse he was riding and the shadows that encompassed them.

"Claire!" he shouted, not seeing her.

She waved her hands in the air. "I'm over here!"

A shadow reached toward her with a spindly hand. She shrieked when she felt its freezing touch and tried to bat it away.

"Are you all right?" Owen called. The shadows were pressing more tightly toward him and Plenty too.

"Yes," Claire answered, backing away from one that had tried to swipe at her. "These things are just terrifying!"

"I know." Owen drew his sword and swung it at a few shadows, which dissolved into the air as the blade went through them. He looked down at Plenty. "What's this horse I'm sitting on?"

Claire would have laughed, but she was preoccupied with staying away from the shadows. "His name is Plenty. He's Honeyflower's horse."

"That would explain the flowers."

The shadows were getting too close. Claire ducked down to avoid another shadowy limb and picked a rock off the ground while she was down. She tried to turn it into a sword, but nothing happened. A cold feeling of disappointment settled into her stomach. "I can't use dream magic anymore," she thought, terrified. She held the rock for a few more seconds before throwing it at one of the shadows, which broke into hissing wisps and disappeared.

She heard Owen cry out and turned to see that the shadows had knocked him off Plenty. He had pulled himself to his feet and was struggling to keep the shadows back with his sword. Although he was able to swing the weapon through some of them, there were still too many.

Claire gathered several more rocks from the ground and hurled them fiercely at the dark creatures. They only came closer--three feet away, two, one. They were in her face. She shouted and thrashed against them with her arms and legs, but soon all she could see was blackness.

~*~

The shadows had overwhelmed Owen not long after Claire had disappeared into their dark masses. He had seen nothing but darkness for what felt like hours as they carried him to an unknown place.

When the shadows at last fell away, the surroundings that Owen could see were not much brighter. He was standing in a dark, cavernous room with walls made up of stone and twisting vines. There were colorful gems embedded in the walls, each with a slight glow. Something at the far end of the room was producing a brighter, blueish light, but Owen had no time to see what it was before he spotted Claire.

He ran to her and took her hand in his. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Claire didn't answer. She glanced at him briefly before turning her fearful eyes back to whatever was at the far end of the room.

"How sweet," a deep, melodic voice surrounded them. Owen looked and saw a fairy sitting on a throne, her white hair streaming around her shoulders and her lips twisted into a triumphant smirk.

"Lumbia," Owen whispered, taking a step back. She looked just like her reflection from the real world, but he could feel the evil emanating from her.

"So you know who I am. Good," Lumbia said, her icy eyes glinting with a dangerous light. "I already know of you as well, and your fair lady. I know what you've been doing in my land, and I must say I am very disappointed."

"What exactly did we do?" Claire questioned, her voice shaking.

Lumbia clicked her tongue. "The humans don't even know their crimes! This is exactly why you don't belong in my world."

"She asked you a question," Owen said.

"What a saucy boy," Lumbia said, her eyebrows high. "I'll start with you. Your crimes are as follows: You intruded in my land, the land that is only meant for magical beings or dreams, of which you are neither; you fought my poor pet, Black Wolf; and you annoyed me."

"Annoyed you?" Owen repeated incredulously. "That's not a crime."

"Silence!" Lumbia commanded. She pointed a finger at Claire. "And you. You are here in your dreams, but you have overstayed your welcome. You have manipulated the magic of this land for your own devices. You also fought Black Wolf and dared to wield fire near him. You not only angered me, but also many of the fairies in Etherea. You have also annoyed me. And you freed my prisoner from the Shadow Lands..."

"Good," Claire said in quiet defiance.

Lumbia's glow deepened. She leaned forward slightly. "What did you say?" she growled.

"I said good!" Claire repeated more loudly. "If you're so evil, I'm glad I was able to annoy you."

"Claire..." Owen started.

"Impudent child!" Lumbia hissed at Claire. "Do you even know why you were able to save him?"

"Yes. I had my own courage and help from a good fairy."

Lumbia laughed. "And you never stopped once to wonder why you were able to stay in Etherea for long enough to accomplish it, why you were never pulled away from your dreams?"

Owen and Claire glanced at each other. That was exactly the question they had not been able to answer.

Lumbia tilted her chin up slightly and grinned. "It was me, child. I kept you in Etherea."

Claire's eyes widened. "Why? You...I..."

"I wanted both of you here," Lumbia said in a low voice, "so I can personally destroy you both."

Owen drew his sword and Claire tightened her fists as the fairy's laugh filled the room, bouncing off the walls around them. Lumbia swirled her fingers in the air, a silvery blue light starting in her hand and growing. When the ball of light was about as large as the fairy's head, she leveled her hand in their direction.

Owen realized what was about to happen. "Watch out!" He pushed Claire out of the way as the light exploded from Lumbia's hand and rocketed toward them, hitting Owen instead and sending him flying back. He only stopped when he hit the wall, slamming into it so hard that the crystals that decorated it shattered around him.

Claire gasped and turned to face the fairy. "Stop it!" she cried.

"I'm the queen of Etherea," Lumbia said, drawing up her power for another blow. "I don't take orders from dreams."

She launched another orb of energy, but Claire was able to run and dive out of the way, slightly singed.

Meanwhile, Owen struggled to pull himself up, trying to blink the blur of pain from his eyes. He wanted to watch the action to make sure Claire didn't get hit too, but he was distracted by a soft whistling noise. Looking down, he saw that the crystals that he had shattered were emitting colorful clouds of air. Colorful fog.

"Not this again," Owen muttered. He pushed himself quickly away from the fog, but not before a green patch reached his left thumb and made it start twitching uncontrollably.

While Owen was still orienting himself, Claire ducked out of the way of another light blast and readied herself for a third. As the energy swelled in Lumbia's hand, Claire noticed that the fairy held it away from her face, purposefully not looking at it.

"Lumbia likes the dark," Plenty's words from before entered her mind. Claire looked back up at the fairy and smiled. "She doesn't even like her own light," Claire said under her breath.

After Claire had successfully dodged the third ball of light, and Owen had pulled himself off the floor, Lumbia dropped her hands and rose from her throne. "This is taking too long," she said. Her glow expanded, and the ground began to shake. "Let's finish this more swiftly, shall we?"

The area underneath Owen's feet broke apart from the rest of the floor and began to rise. His stomach lurched and he tried to get off, but by the time he had reached the edge, he was already too high up to jump. Claire was also lifted into the air.

Lumbia watched them go up ten feet, then thirty, then forty--as high as the towering room would go. When they finally stopped rising, they only had enough room to stand without scraping their heads against the ceiling.

"This is my land!" Lumbia called up at them. Her wings beat at the air and lifted her off the ground until she was floating in front of them, grinning wickedly from ear to ear. "It is not for you to do as you please, it is not for you to travel through for convenience. It is only mine to own and mine to control!"

Owen's platform trembled, and a large piece from its corner broke off and plummeted to the floor below, shattering in a million pieces. More pieces crumbled away, destroying the only things keeping Owen and Claire from falling to their deaths.

There was only a small piece of ground left under Claire's feet. "What are we going to do?" she shouted.

Owen looked around for something that could help, working hard to not let fear cloud his judgement. At first the situation looked hopeless, but then his eyes caught on something. "The vines!" he exclaimed.

Just before the last piece tumbled from under his feet, he leaped off, pushing for the wall. He grabbed onto the vines that covered it, slipping farther down before finally stopping, dangling above the ground. His thumb was still twitching from the green fog, but he held on.

"Jump!" he called out to Claire, who was still on her disintegrating platform.

Claire nodded and started to jump, but she let out a surprised cry and hurtled forward as a ball of energy from Lumbia's hand struck the platform. She fell, flailing and screaming, reaching for the vines on the wall but too far away to take hold of them.

Owen yanked a vine loose from the wall and kicked off, swinging in the air toward her. He reached out as far as he could, wishing his arm could be longer. "Take my hand!"

Claire just barely grasped his fingers. She held on for a second before slipping and falling again, but he had brought her closer to the wall, and she was able to catch herself on the vines.

"Let's climb down fast!" Owen called to Claire. She nodded and scurried down as he did, not wanting Lumbia to have time to strike again.

When they reached the ground, they saw that Lumbia had floated down already. "It would have been amusing watching you cling onto the vines like terrified squirrels," Lumbia intoned, "if I were not so mad that you're not dead yet." She launched another ball of energy with an angry shout. Owen raised his sword, the force of the magic deflecting off the blade making him stumble back.

Lumbia started laughing. Claire bent down and grabbed a piece of stone rubble, weighed it in her hand, and hurled it toward the fairy.

The rock hit the fairy on her left forehead, hard enough to momentarily daze her.

Owen took that moment to rush up to the fairy and level the point of his sword at her.

Lumbia blinked, then turned her steely gaze down at him. She studied the blade held against her, first with a frown, and then with an amused grin. "Oh, you ignorant humans," she said, chuckling and shaking her head. "You can't kill me."

"Why not?" Owen asked, tightening his grip on the sword's hilt.

"Think for a moment. Am I the only Lumbia? No. There's my reflection, too, who lives in your world. Is she evil? No. Does she, according to you, deserve to die? No. But what will happen to her if you kill me?"

"You're bluffing," Owen said, though he pulled back slightly.

"Not at all. Think of a person gazing at herself in the mirror. What happens if she steps away? The reflection disappears. What happens if she is dead?"

"The reflection's dead," Owen muttered.

"Very good. I see you understand," she crooned.

Owen and Claire were stunned with horror. They didn't want to hurt the good reflection of Lumbia. How were they going to defeat the evil one now?