"Fuck," Morgana exclaimed, turning around as fast as possible. However, when she looked back behind her, instead of the Gate she saw jungle.

  The other two women turned around as well, surprised by Morgana's reaction, and saw the same thing. However, when Hermione turned back again to get a sense of her surroundings, she noticed the jungle ahead of them was subtly different from before she turned.

  Both Hermione and Rowena already had their wands out, and when Hermione raised hers to cast...

  "Wait, everyone freeze." Hermione froze at Morgana's command, slowly turning her head to look at her mentor.

  "Don't turn your head," Morgana told her, causing Hermione to stop moving once again. "Just keep your eyes out," Morgana continued as she moved the other two in a way that the backs of the three women were touching. "We have to make sure to cover all around us in our line of sight."

  "What's going on, Morgana?" Rowena asked, having never seen Morgana so tense ever since meeting her roughly four years ago.

  "I fucked up. I should have known there was something wrong when we couldn't see into the Gate." Morgana was rambling; it wasn't every day the Grand Witch made such monumental, careless mistakes.

  "Morgana! What. Is. Going. On?" Rowena asked again, emphasizing every word.

  Morgana stopped, keeping her eyes out and open despite wanting to close them and sigh. "We're in Fairy. I'm sure you haven't noticed it yet, but if you focus you'll realize all the flora are shining or sparkling—or the more obvious one, which you might not have taken as weird, but if you look around you'll notice... it's not dark here."

  At Morgana's words it was like a fog had disappeared from the minds of the other two. Looking around more closely, everything was perfectly lit; there were no shadows to speak of, but the sky was the kind of starry night that you could only see in photos taken by specialized cameras.

  Rowena stared at the stars, the nebulae, the galaxies, and more—able to make them out with surprising detail despite their supposed distance, as if looking through the gaze of an orbital telescope.

  For Hermione, though, her attention was on the flora. Having worked with Neville for the last year or so , she was very familiar with a lot of magical and mundane plants, but as she looked closer she saw the weirdness. There were flowers with colors she could not entirely understand; there were pines, spruces, and firs with broad leaves; there were strawberries growing on trees and cherries hanging upwards from bushes.

  All of it was only subtly weird at first, but the more she looked, the more weirdness she found.

  "Rowena! Pay attention. Did you get lost in the stars?"

  "Uhh, there's a lake here now," Rowena said, having extricated herself from her stargazing.

  "That's why I said to not take your eyes off the surroundings. Also, Hermione! Don't think too hard about it—the more you think, the weirder it's going to get," Morgana said, breaking Hermione out of her own mental paradoxes.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "So, some ground rules. First, do not eat or drink anything. Two, do not agree or disagree to anything, no matter who you think it's from—whether by words or gestures—so no nodding or shaking your head either and don't make any promises to anyone about anything. Three, the both of you are accomplished enough in Occlumancy, so make sure not to think about any place you've been to in the real world, especially if they're natural environments."

  After Morgana was finished, they took a couple of minutes to collect their thoughts while keeping their eyes out.

  "So," Morgana said suddenly while clapping her hands, "First, keep the rules in mind so I don't need confirmation from either of you. We can still go to where we need to. Just keep your hands linked and think about going to a spacious hidden place from which we can all observe the ritual together. Keep the thought in your mind, and blink after three. One. Two. Three."

  After a blink, the three opened their eyes to see they were high up in the air and falling. Hermione first looked at the now small-looking trees getting closer under her, then turned her head to gaze at the infinitely expanding sea of unnaturally bright, unreal greens and blues.

  The trees under them at least still looked rather normal, but the further away they were, the weirder they got.

  "Mione!" Morgana yelled again, pulling Hermione out of her thoughts. "Pay attention! You're so banned from my private library until you get your Occlumancy up!"

  "Wha—" Before she could complain, Morgana cut her off again. "Not the time. Like before, but think of where we were . On three. One. Two. Three."

  With a blink of an eye, the three were once again standing at a lakeside jungle.

  "What happened? Why did we move? And why were we up in the air?" Rowena was both excited upon coming across things she had no idea about one after the other, and scared at the same time—she was, after all, an inside witch.

  Hermione was on her knees, still keeping her eyes out like before, but otherwise her mind felt scrambled. The things she had seen were...They felt like a dream disappearing as she thought of them after waking.

  "This place," Morgana started, "isn't a fully physical existence. As you have seen, our thoughts affect it. That's because Fairy is for all intents and purposes a place between consciousness and reality."

  Taking a deep breath, Morgana waited for the other two to say something, but when they didn't she continued. "Ok, I'll tell you all about this place when we go back. For now, once more, like last time—but also keep in mind that we want to see the goblin's artifact-empowering ritual, and we want a continuously safe place to watch them from. One. Two. Three."

  With another blink, the three of them were standing on the branches of an impossibly tall tree, looking down at what looked like a little more than a half-finished ritual circle and a lot of goblins moving around purposefully but not hurriedly, as the three women had thought.

  "What the hell? They're barely a two thirds of the way done with only the primary ritual circle." Morgana was bewildered. Why were they still so far off? The equinox was close—about two or three weeks away. For a ritual of this size that was nothing; they should have been almost done with the secondary components, but now...

  Not only that, why would they have bought the gold at that price if they didn't urgently need it?

  Despite the shock of the incomplete ritual, Hermione and Rowena were still quite fascinated by it, with Rowena taking out her sketchbook to record everything she could see. Despite her near-perfect memory, she had developed this habit after making some rather embarrassing mistakes when she was younger.

  "Let's go back! You promised to tell me all about this place, and I can't wait!"

  Morgana was a bit disappointed by her disciple's lack of wanderlust. Who would want to go back so soon when encountering this place, regardless of how dangerous it actually was? Thankfully, they hadn't run into any Fae though.

  Except... Morgana turned around, seeing a small mossy, green little... Something floating beside her, urging her to leave so she could start to tell it things.

  "FUUCK!"