Hi, people! If you haven’t read my other story, please do. If you have, then yay! Thanks for reading this too!

This is going to be a lot different from The Book, though. But I think it’s gonna turn out really cool, if I do say so myself.

Anyways…enjoy! And review!

Chapter 1

Fifteen-year-old Naria bent her head closer to the paper she was drawing on, her blue eyes narrowed in complete concentration. Every curve, every line, every dot had to be absolutely perfect. Naria was a huge perfectionist and this trait showed especially strongly through her drawings. This evening she was drawing a dark, sinister-looking castle on top of white, puffy clouds in a bright blue sky. And it had to be perfect.

The phone next to Naria’s bed rang at that moment, piercing through the still silence like a knife through innocent skin, startling Naria and forcing her hand to make a stray mark right across the entire castle.

“Ugh!” Naria growled in frustration.

She tore the picture she had been working on for almost an hour in half and threw it over the side of the bed. There was no way it could be perfect now. She reached over to her nightstand and roughly grabbed the phone.

“Hi,” she said into the receiver, not bothering to try to cover up her exasperation.

“Someone’s in a bad mood,” came the voice of Naria’s best friend Siana, into Naria’s ear.

Naria forced herself to calm down. “Sorry…what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing really. How’s your summer going?”

“It’s ok. Much better than school.”

“Much,” Siana agreed.

Naria leaned back against the headboard of her bed and relaxed. It was summer after all, so she had plenty of time to draw the picture. She pulled her long, dark hair back behind her ear and unconsciously smiled. School was over for two whole months. No more homework, no more having to deal with the annoying, conceited cheerleaders, no more teachers, no more tests…

“Have you done anything interesting yet?” Siana asked.

“Nah, just stayed home and slept.”

Siana laughed. “Me too.”

“Well…I’ve been drawing, too,” Naria added.

“Of course,” Siana said and Naria could practically see her friend rolling her eyes.

Naria was always drawing, even back when she and Siana first met seven years ago. She’d draw anything from a portrait to a sketch to a tiny doodle on the corner of her English essay.

“What’ve you done to entertain yourself? Besides sleep, of course,” Naria said.

“I made a girl,” Siana said “She has purple skin, orange hair, neon green eyes, –”

“Where’d you make her?” Naria interrupted.

Siana giggled. “My mind.”

Naria laughed, thinking this was some kind of joke.

“She can fight really well, too. Her favorite weapons are spears and arrows.”

“Oh? Does she fight a lot?” Naria asked, playing along.

“Sometimes…but I think she fights more when she’s not in my mind.” Siana’s voice lowered to a whisper. “And I think there’s more. I think that she and a whole bunch of others live in a completely different universe when they’re not being thought about. Where else would they go? I wonder what they do…I wish I could live in their universe. Don’t you? Don’t you ever wonder what it’d be like?” Siana’s low whisper was full of excitement and she sounded like a small child asking how Santa Claus’s magic worked.

Shivers ran up Naria’s spine. Siana wasn’t joking.

“Do you think they can get into our world?” Siana continued. “I hope not…they could be really dangerous, you know.”

In all of the seven years Naria had known Siana, she had never acted like this.

“Are you ok?” Naria asked weakly.

“Of course,” Siana asked in her normal voice.

“I…I have to go…” Naria said slowly because she was so freaked out that she couldn’t possibly think of anything else to talk about.

“So soon?” Siana asked curiously.

“Yeah…I need to clean my room,” Naria lied.

“Oh, ok. Well, call me later then, ok?”

“Ok. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Naria hung up and for the first time inthe past seven yearsfelt like she didn’t really know everything about Siana.