Erika and Mershad sat silently as the mist continued to surround them with its cool embrace. The thick vapors had fully obstructed their vision of the trees that were less than ten feet away.
“This is some fog,” Erika commented in a low voice.
“We’ll have to take it slow, when we head out of here,” Mershad said.
Erika looked over at him. “Probably won’t vanish anytime soon, knowing my luck. Good thing we know the lay of the land.”
“Yes, good for us that we do,” Mershad responded, grinning at her though he felt a little nervous about blundering about in the dense haze.
“The cars must be slowed to a crawl as they come through up there,” Erika stated, as she gestured upward towards where the roadway was. “Or they’ve stopped.”
Mershad then noticed that a permeating silence had blanketed the area, with no sound of anyone or anything coming from the normally active street above them.
“I sure don’t hear anything either,” Mershad remarked. He slowly rose up to his feet, pulling his satchel over one shoulder. “Want to try and start navigating out of this?”
Erika nodded, getting up off the ground herself. “Otherwise we are going to be here all night. I think that this stuff is here to stay for awhile.”
Mershad agreed with her, though he held no objections to spending more time talking with Erika. The lack of visibility simply made him nervous. At the very least the process of getting out of there would be easier to navigate with a friend.
“We’ll have to go slowly,” Mershad cautioned, taking the first step forward, grasping his satchel strap with his right hand. “Work our way to the sidewalk, and from there it should be easy enough.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erika replied.
Erika walked closely by his side. They went painstakingly, step by step. There was just enough visibility that they became aware of trees before they smacked their faces into the hard trunks.
After they had moved about twenty arduous paces, Mershad noticed that their visibility was gradually increasing. He made no comment, continuing to press onward.
Looking down, he perceived that there were more leaves and twigs on the ground than he had observed before, even a fallen branch that he had not noticed on his way in. The university’s maintenance staff usually kept the grounds around the student center very well groomed.
“We must have gotten changed around,” Mershad said with some discomfort. “We should have hit the sidewalk by now. I know that we’ve been walking in the right direction.”
“Well, this place is not that big, we’ll run into it sooner or later,” Erika added. “Besides, it looks like our visibility is increasing.”
“Yes it is,” Mershad replied, glad that she was noticing the improving visibility as well. It meant that it was not just his hopeful imagination.
He took a couple more steps, when he suddenly tripped and fell forward. With a startled outcry, he slung his hands forward in reflex, casting his satchel ahead as he braced for the expected impact.
“Are you okay?” Erika said in great concern, dropping to her knees next to him.
Groaning, Mershad shook his head as he brought himself up to his knees slowly. He had caught his fall at the last moment, and was not injured other than a few light scratches.
Brushing his chest off, he looked behind him. A large tree branch lay across his path.
“Wonderful,” Mershad muttered, not wanting to know what had happened to his laptop. He looked sheepishly to Erika, highly embarrassed. “I didn’t think there was anything on the ground. Didn’t notice any fallen branches coming in here.”
“It’s okay. As long as you are okay,” Erika said quickly, her eyes full of worry. “Let’s find your satchel.”
They both looked all around, but could see no sign of the satchel. Mershad was perplexed, as he knew that it could not have fallen very far from where he stood.
More than ever, the ground that Mershad could see beneath his feet looked markedly different than it had seemed before when he visited the area. There was a sprawling cover of debris, of fallen leaves, dirt, twigs, and grasses all about them, as if the surface of a wild forest. It was not the well-cropped, rich green lawn that he had walked through numerous times before. The feeling of unease grew faster within him.
Even stranger, the rate of improved visibility was accelerating, along with the emergence of a steady breeze that flowed all around them. It was as if the fog was reversing itself, departing as quickly as it had come.
Mershad and Erika remained wordless, fixed in place, their attentions captured by the bizarre phenomenon. Their range of sight increased by twenty, thirty, and then forty feet.
Trees began to appear out of the misty air, and the uneven contours of the ground, with the rough covering upon it, spread out in all directions around them. Mershad struggled to comprehend what was happening.
There was no sign of the sidewalk, the student center, or even a small patch of the rich, trimmed grass turf that they had been sitting on just minutes before. He barely moved a muscle as the fog steadily fell away, continuing to reveal the unexpected environment.
“What is going on here?” Mershad stammered, his eyes widened in trepidation as he looked around.
Erika shook her head in disbelief, staring ahead. Her voice was uncharacteristically full of anxiety. “I just don’t know. I just don’t know.”
The fog proceeded to thin out on all sides. Strong rays of light began to cut through to them from above, a multitude of beams piercing the diminishing fog as they reached through the leaves and branches of the surrounding trees.
“What is this? What in the world is…” Erika began, her words trailing off as the air above them finally cleared up.
The strong light of a mid-day sun was revealed, cascading down from a nearly cloudless sky spread out far above the trees. It was a uniquely blue-greenish sky, like nothing that Mershad had ever seen before.
Mershad and Erika now found themselves in the midst of a great forest, with matured trees of several varieties rising up high all around them. The bright chirping of birds met their ears, coming from all around, amongst the lofty branches, but it was the surreal sky above that transfixed his initial attention.