Sage leaped to his feet on the other side of the desk, his face almost comical y surprised. "Elena?" he exclaimed.
"Bonnie? Matt? What's going on? Qu'est-ce qui arrive?"
Usual y, Elena would have been relieved to see Sage, who had always been kind and helpful to her, but she had to get to Damon. She knew where he must be. She could almost hear him cal ing to her.
She strode across the empty room with barely a glance at the startled gatekeeper, pul ing Matt and Bonnie along with her.
"Sorry, Sage," she said as she reached the door she wanted. "We've got to find Damon."
"Damon?" he said. "He's back again?" and then they passed through, ignoring Sage's shouts of "Stop! Arretezvous!"
The door closed behind them, and they found themselves in a landscape of ash. Nothing grew here, and there were no landmarks. Harsh winds had blown the fine black ash into shifting hil s and val eys. As they watched, a strong gust caught at the light top layer of ash and sent it flying in a cloud that soon settled into new shapes. Below the lighter ash, they could see swamps of wet, muddy ash. Nearby was an ash-choked pool of stil water. Nothing but ash and mud, except for an occasional scorched and blackened bit of wood.
Above them was a twilit sky in which hung a huge planet and two great moons, one a swirling bluish white, the other silvery.
"Where are we?" said Matt, gaping up at the sky.
"Once this was a world - a moon, technical y - that was shaded by a huge tree," Elena told him, walking steadily forward. "Until I destroyed it. This is where Damon died."
She felt rather than saw Matt and Bonnie exchange a glance. "But, uh, then he came back, right? You saw him in Fel 's Church the other night, didn't you?" Matt said hesitantly. "Why are we here now?"
"I know that Damon's close," Elena said impatiently. "I can feel him. He's come back here. Maybe this is where he began his search for the phantom." They kept walking. Soon they were not so much walking as wading through black ash that stuck to their legs in nasty thick clumps. The mud underneath the ash clung to their shoes, releasing them at each step with a wet sucking sound.
They were almost there. She could feel it. Elena picked up the pace, and the others, stil linked to her, hurried to keep up. The ash was thicker and deeper here because they were approaching where the trunk had been, the very center of this world. Elena remembered it exploding, shooting up into the sky like a rocket, disintegrating as it went. Damon's body had lain underneath and had been completely buried in the fal ing ash.
Elena stopped. There was a thick, drifting pile of ash that looked like it would be at least as high as her waist in places. She thought she could see where Damon had awoken - the ash was disturbed and caved in, as if someone had tunneled out of one of the deeper drifts. But there was no one around except themselves. A cold wind blew up a spray of ash, and Bonnie coughed. Elena, kneedeep in cold, sticky ash, dropped Bonnie's hand and wrapped her arms around herself.
"He's not here," she said blankly. "I was so sure he would be here."
"He must be somewhere else, then," said Matt logical y.
"I'm sure he's fighting the phantom, like you said he was going to. The Dark Dimension's a big place."
Bonnie shivered and huddled closer to Matt, her brown eyes huge and ful of pathos, like a hungry puppy's. "Can we go home now? Please? Sage can send us back again, can't he?"
"I just don't understand," Elena said, staring at the empty space where the great trunk of the tree had once been. "I just knew he would be here. I could practical y hear him cal ing me."
Just then a low, musical laugh cut through the silence. It was a beautiful sound, but there was something chil y and alien about it, something that made Elena shudder.
"Elena," Bonnie whispered, her eyes wide. "That's the thing I heard before the fog took me."
They turned.
Behind them stood a woman. A woman-shaped being, anyway, Elena amended quickly. This was no woman. And, like its laugh, this woman-shaped being was beautiful, but frightening. She - it - was huge, more than one and a half times the size of a human, but perfectly proportioned, and it looked like it was made of ice and mist in blues and greens like the purest glacier, its eyes were clear with just a touch of pale green. As they watched, its solid, icytranslucent h*ps and legs shifted and blurred, changing to a swirl of mist.
A long wave of blue-green hair drifted behind it, its shape like a gradual y roiling cloud. It smiled at Elena, and its sharp teeth shone like silvery icicles. There was something in its chest, though, that wasn't ice, something solid and roundish and dark, dark red.
Elena saw al of this in an instant before her attention was ful y riveted on what hung from the ice-woman-thing's outstretched hand.
"Damon." She gasped.
The ice-woman was holding him casual y around the neck, ignoring his struggles as he dangled in the air. It held him so easily that he looked like a toy. The black-clad vampire swung out with his leg, kicking at the ice-woman's side, but his foot simply passed through mist.
"Elena," Damon said in a choked, thin voice. The ice-woman - the phantom - cocked its head to one side and looked at Damon, then squeezed his neck a little tighter.
"I don't need to breathe, you... idiot phantom," he gasped defiantly.
The phantom's smile widened and it said in a sweet, cold voice, like crystals chiming together, "But your head can pop off, can't it? That'l do just as wel ." It shook him a little, and then transferred its smile to Elena, Bonnie, and Matt. Elena instinctively stepped back as the glacier-cold eyes found her.