[TrizzyTreke]

Sky had no idea where she was.

Her vision was clouded, no matter where she tried to look. The air was made of smoke and fumes and shadows. Her heart beat faster as she began to panic. The only comfort she found was the semi-solid ground beneath her feet. Something freaky was going on. She'd never been lost in this forest before. There was no reason this should be happening. The air was so thick she felt as if she wasn't moving when she took a step or put out her hand.

The smoke grew dark and turned a deathly shade of every color. Then the ground became smoke, and she was hanging in midair. Not falling. Not rising. Stuck.

Then a voice grabbed her.

[TrizzyTreke]

Sky began to feel pain. The voice was like a liquid disease that trickled over her skin and made her blood a sick temperature. She couldn't understand why, but sorrow was flowing through her. Then anger, fear, and hatred. She wanted to pass out.

A shadowy halfway-formed shape emerged from the smoke, and the voice spoke. Of death and grief. And power. The power that resulted from creating misery. The voice was drunk with it. But the smog before her had control over its slurred purr. It terrified her.

The voice was trying to coax her and caress her. But it made her sick to feel. She wanted to push it away. She had to. She had to get out of this place.

[TrizzyTreke]

"I scare you," the voice suddenly boomed. "An easy thing to do, when one is as powerful as me. And there is only one as powerful as me: me."

Sky felt a spark of warmth in her. "You're wrong. I am as powerful as you. Maybe more. That's why you're trying to get inside my head...my head. This is all in my head! Typical plot. And let me guess, I have to fight you or overcome the villain somehow to return to reality?" The spark was a hot fire now. "Bring it on!"

The voice cooked and the chills returned. "Very good, child." The shape in the smoke stopped moving and disappeared. New shapes formed in the smoke to become trees, and Sky found herself standing in a forest with pale green leaves and gray air. Oh great. Now what was she supposed to do? The voice was gone, so she had to find her own way out of the forest.

This experience was not real. She knew that, and she knew whoever the voice belonged to might show up. That was how these things worked, right? You're caught in a bad guy's dimension, so you find the bad guy and beat him. Problem was, she had no idea where the bad guy was. In cases like these, the only thing you can safely assume is the bad guy knows where you are, since you are on their terrain. Sky was being hunted. That needed to change.

[TrizzyTreke]

A sound began building in the distance. It was a snarling, frightening roar. More horrible sounds followed, becoming worse and worse. The degree of pain rose with the decibels for each sound. Sky realized she could move her legs, and she wasted no time. There was her bad guy. She ran toward the sounds, because she was just that kind of girl.

She stopped at a clearing where the earth was dry rock and the trees were twigs. She could see the source of the noises. A black dragon came between two trees into the clearing. As it moved past them, the trees dissolved into smoke. Sky could see every fiber becoming a thick smoke, which the dragon absorbed through the thin crevices in its armor. Smoke came from everything the dragon touched as it crawled toward her.

But Sky decided as long as she could control her body, she would not stand still. She and the dragon began to circle, and she considered how to extinguish the worm's fire. This wasn't reality, after all, so she could fight however she imagined. She started with a sword made of water.

The crevices in the dragon's armor gleamed red, and fire forced its mouth open to fly at Sky. She swung her weapon in an arc, and a pulsing wave of water countered the burst. The dragon's talons stabbed the earth, and smoke bubbled through the cracks in the ground. The smoke collected on the dragon's body, and there was an instant of darkness. When the light returned, the dragon was covered in a newer, spiky armor. Four monstrous wings unfurled, and the dragon flew at Sky.

Sky made her sword bigger, but it held its original weight. Each swipe the dragon made was kept back by her swings, and she sliced the fireballs it breathed in midair.

"You cannot defeat the devil," the voice from before seeped through the dragon's sharp white smile.

"True," Sky admitted. "But I can dance with him." She lunged and knocked the dragon backwards. It spread its four wings and beat the air to regain its balance, hurling Sky to the ground. The sword left her hands, and the dragon grabbed her in one of its claws. "Well," she said. "That was a short dance."

"You put on a brave face, child. But I am everything you fear." Cold flames licked the dragon's teeth, so cold that Sky was chilled to the bone from being held near the dragon. She felt even colder than before. "Fear is a power stronger than anything you can hit me with. It dissolves. It destroys. It devours."

Then the dragon picked up the sword of water and Sky watched it disintegrate in its claw.

[TrizzyTreke]

"This is the end of my visit, child," the dragon snarled. "Learn to fear the devil as you should."

Sky struggled in the dragon's claw. Then she had a thought. "This is a dream, Crack-Face. You planned to scare me by visiting me in a dream like a fairy? Get real!"

The dragon's maw cracked a smile. "'Get real?' What an appealing idea." Then everything became smoke.

Sky woke with goosebumps all over her body.