** Author’s note – This is the third book in my series and is currently in production. It is due to be released in April, 2008!

The first thing she realized was she was alone and it was no longer dark. Instead of sleeping beneath a black sky filled with tiny, glittering stars, she was now surrounded by a gray light with thick clouds overhead. Was it almost morning already? She felt like she’d barely slept at all!The next thing she realized about her odd situation was she was also surrounded by silence. Where were the crickets that had so quickly put her to sleep with their songs, which her mind refused to believe happened any longer than just a few seconds before?Her worried eyes darted left, then right, as she looked for her friends, but they were nowhere to be seen in the gloomy, pre-dawn light. In an instant, she was on her feet, her sword drawn. The little voice that had been whispering to her just seconds before that something wasn’t right was now nearly screaming in her head.

She took a few steps forward, dried leaves audibly crunching beneath her feet as she did so. She heard this sound as if was a vague, distant noise, almost ignoring it as she carefully looked around for any signs of her friends.

A swarm of nervous butterflies filled her stomach, threatening to assist her with the complete loss of her dinner from a few hours before. She closed her eyes and took another deep breath, counting to ten as she did so. When she opened them, she was still nervous but at least felt as though the nausea was at bay…

For now.

She looked around her gloomy surroundings once again, suddenly noticing shadows passing across the countless leaves scattered everywhere around her. She looked up, half expecting to see the sun trying to shine through the clouds, creating the dancing shadows on the ground. The sun, however, was well hidden behind the thick cloud cover.

She looked back at the shadows on the ground… they continued to dance as if they were alive, darting across the leaves and each other in an effort to get wherever it was they were going to. As she watched, they slowly faded away until there were no shadows left on the ground at all.

She shrugged to herself, unconcerned about the shadows. Instead, her thoughts took her back to her sleep, and her body reacted by working up a yawn.

She rubbed her eyes in an effort to wipe the sleep away, hoping when she opened them again, her friends would be nearby.

She wasn’t surprised when she opened them to a disappointing sight… nothing had changed.

Gone were the grassy area where they’d stopped for the night, her friends, and her backpack. Instead of the tall, brown grass she had fallen asleep in, she now saw many unfamiliar tall, dark shapes all around her. Her first thought was that these shapes were people, but as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, she saw they weren’t people at all… they were trees. Dozens of tall, leafless trees littered the area around her and on the horizon, with branches jutting outward as they reached both for each other and the sunless sky.

She scolded herself for her growing fear. They were just trees! Wouldn’t Micah laugh at her for being afraid of silly old trees! She smiled as she thought of her joke-loving brother.

Dragging herself back to the present, she lowered her eyes to the ground in search of any sign of the others. Instead, she only saw countless shapes and sizes of brown leaves everywhere.

She wished she had her bag. If she did, the first thing she would do would be to pull out a torch and light it with a pair of rock sparkers. Sure it might be a danger to have a fire, especially because she was surrounded by an unending horizon of dried leaves, but she would feel a whole lot safer here in this eerie place if she had a fire, even a small one!

“Diam?” she whispered.

Silence.

“Kaileen?”

No sound answered her questions, not even that of a curious insect. Her friends and her things were nowhere to be seen.

She remained where she was as she struggled with questions about what had happened and what she should do.

Where had the others gone, and how had she gotten here?

As the gloom surrounding her began to lighten up a little, she finally decided to walk around and explore the area. Although she appeared to be surrounded by nothing but crunching leaves, maybe she would get lucky and find some sign, any sign, of her friends.

After surveying the area, she decided to head toward two clusters of trees over to her right, thinking it was possible that Diam had gone behind one of them for some necessary private time. She didn’t like the thought of interrupting her friend, especially during personal times, but she was starting to get a feeling in the pit of her stomach that she didn’t like and finding Diam was quickly becoming more important to her than her friend’s modesty.

As she approached the trees, she called out quietly, “Diam? Are you over here?”

Silence once again. Tonia looked around and shivered. As the seconds passed, she grew more and more uncomfortable about not seeing any signs of life at all.

She could see no birds anywhere in the trees and could hear none of the usual insect sounds she was used to hearing. It was almost as if she had been mysteriously thrown into the middle of a ghostly, deserted forest.

She looked upward, into the tops of the cluster of trees closest to her. Some of them grew so close together that their long, leafless branches intertwined wildly as if they were trying to hold onto each other. Many of the trunks appeared to be solid, not even offering any hint of shelter to birds or squirrels.

About ten feet away was another cluster of trees. These were smaller than the first but they were so close together she could see no signs of a gap between them and formed an odd-looking, natural wall.

And a wall would be a good place to hide from your sleepy friend…

She began making her way toward it, not watching where she was going. Without warning, she stepped on a raised object on the ground that was quickly followed by an awful crunching sound.

“Uh, oh,” she thought…Had something broken?

She immediately raised her foot and stepped aside, then nervously looked down to see what she had stepped on.

Lying partially covered by leaves was the gray skeleton of a bird. She bent down to take a closer look at it, brushing the remaining leaves covering it away from the decayed body as she did so.

She bent down and examined the damage created by her careless step. As far as she could tell she had stepped on the brittle, dry bones of one of its wings and part of the lower section of its body. The head, with its hollow eyes and empty, black nostril holes, was completely intact. The entire skeleton was about a foot long but she was unable to determine what kind of bird it had been or what had happened to it.

She surveyed the area around the lifeless creature and could see no signs of feathers or skin. It looked as though it had been quite a long time since the bird had breathed air.

Suddenly she heard a noise. It wasn’t a voice exactly, but sounded more muffled, as if someone might be trying to say something quietly behind their hand.

She quickly stood up and looked around, almost expecting to see Diam standing next to a tree, watching Tonia do what she loved, exploring wildlife. Her friend could be a prankster at times, much like her brother Micah, but not quite as bad. She could picture Diam standing there, laughing at her, half-heartedly trying to hide her laughter.

Diam, however, was still nowhere to be seen.

“Diam, Kaileen, come on,” she said in an exasperated voice. “I don’t feel like playing games right now. Come out, please?”

As she expected, she received no answer.

She continued making her way towards the wall of tree trunks, almost certain now that this was where her friends were hiding. As she walked, she realized it didn’t really make a difference about how carefully she stepped… the leaves on the ground continued to crunch loudly beneath her feet every time.

So much for a quiet approach…

She stopped for a moment and just listened. Sure enough after a few seconds, she heard the sound once again. Her eyes scanned the trees around her but she was unable to determine what direction it was coming from. Because of the amount of time she’d spent during her lifetime playing in the woods, looking for wildlife and tracking animals with Uncle Andar, this surprised her.

For now, however, she had more important things to dwell on.

“Diam, I’m not kidding,” she said nervously as she continued holding her sword out in front of her. The last thing she wanted to do was stab her friend if she jumped out at her from around the tree.

“Seriously, Diam! Come out, please?”

Diam liked to play around, just like they all did, but she knew Tonia very well, and could usually tell whether Tonia was serious or joking.

This time she wasn’t joking.

Hoping to avoid accidentally hurting her friend with her sword, Tonia began walking toward the wooden wall again, making a wide arc around the cluster of trees as she did so. When she finally got to a place where she could see around the barricade of nature, she began to see a shape in the shadows.

She quickened her pace around the wall, a little smile creased at the corner of her eyes. Her expression, however, changed quickly when she realized just what she was looking at.The dark shape behind the wall was not her friend, crouching in an attempt to hide from her… it was a large, leafless bush.She stopped where she was and closed her eyes in frustration. She had been sure she was going to find Kaileen and Diam hiding there!

She opened her eyes and sighed, then looked around. There were a few other small bushes in the distance, but whatever place this was that she found herself in consisted mostly of dark, tall trees. Her friends, however, were nowhere around. They had completely disappeared.

Her roving eyes slowly brought her back to the bush behind the wall, where a sudden movement among the cluster of long, thin branches caught her attention. She strained her eyes in an attempt to see just what had moved, but stood too far away to tell. She waited, and sure enough in a few seconds, it moved again.

With nervous caution, she slowly began making her way towards the bush, her right hand gripping her sword tightly.

The bush measured about five feet wide at its widest point with branches jutting out in all directions, tangled amongst themselves like a cluster of children all grabbing for a single piece of pie back in the village. Each slow, nervous step took her closer to it until she was finally able to make out just what it was laying among the branches that had caught her eye.

She stopped, still a few feet away from it, as a knot began to form in the pit of her stomach.

There, strung craftily among the innermost branches of the leafless bush, were tiny, thin tendrils of white lines. They extended from this branch to that, left to right, up and down, and were connected to each other by one narrow circle after another. The outermost of these circles was large and round, but they became smaller and smaller ringlets as they wound inward and approached the center of the artist’s creation.

The creation that was built among the branches of the dead, leafless bush was exactly that which she’d first suspected, a giant spider web. As she stood staring at it with nervous silence, movement in one area of the web caught her attention. There, trapped forlornly within the sticky strings of gossamer, was a large insect.

For a moment Tonia stood frozen, unable to move. As her mind reacted to the web, her palms began to sweat and her hands shook slightly. Her eyes ignored the struggling creature in the web for a moment as she nervously inspected the branches of the bush, looking for the owner of the silky trap. She was only slightly relieved when she could see no sign of the creature that lived there, knowing from experience that it could jump out at her at any time from any number of unknown and unseen hiding places.

Her experiences from exploring the woods near her home had also shown her that all wild creatures, insects included, could be sneaky when they wanted to be, especially in regards to a potential meal. She had no intention of approaching the bush until she was absolutely certain it was safe for her to do so.

Warily, she turned her eyes toward the thick wall of tall trees in front of the dwarfed bush. If the web’s owner wasn’t in its home, surely it must be hiding expectantly in one of the nearby trees, just waiting for her to try to rescue the trapped insect. She was almost certain that the web’s creator must know the insect lay struggling within its creation and wouldn’t venture far…

But as her eyes passed slowly over the nearby wall of wood, she detected no movement or evidence of life.

Slowly her eyes returned to the still struggling green insect.

“Mmm, mmmmmmmmm!” it mumbled as it continued to exert itself within the glistening strands of web, becoming more entangled by the second.

Tonia stepped around the bush and away from the trees, slowly making her way toward the web. When she was less than a foot away from the edge of the bush, she stopped.

On first glance, the trapped bug appeared to be just some unfortunate insect that was struggling to release itself from its entanglement. Now, however, she could see more than that.

The trapped creature had somehow maneuvered itself so that it was lying on its back. Its wings were stuck in a fully opened position behind it as if it had been blown by a gust of wind into the trap, freezing it while in mid-flight. The few areas of the unfortunate insect’s body she could see were a pale green color, but other parts had been covered with thick, clusters of webbing. As she looked at it more closely, she could see that the lower abdomen area had been wrapped up in much the same way as the bat had been in the cave where they’d found the turtles, magical stones, and red amulet.

Her eyes slowly made their way up the insect’s body moving towards the head, but suddenly widened as she got her first close up look at the struggling creature’s face…

It was Diam.