The world was white and spinning, glowing with an ethereal light. Jade couldn't see anything, but she could hear screams around her and feel something pulling on her. Going with the pull was fairly painless, almost like sitting in the ocean and letting the waves lap over you. Trying to resist, however, was more like swimming against the current at high tide.

Something new exploded into vision- Jade's Compass. It snapped open, and its needles spun into a blur. Bright blue light wrapped itself around her arms and legs to pull her out of the whiteness. Her head emerged, and she saw a flash of hedge maze and stadium full of people before she was pulled from the other side back into the whiteness.

The in and out motion made Jade feel ill, but she couldn't make it stop. Her stomach was turning, and she was really regretting that morning's two cups of coffee and four slices of toast with strawberry jam. Every time she got a peek at reality, she was pulled a little further out, but then the cottony cloud would yank her back in again.

Something whistled through the air and lashed around her ankle, and began to pull- hard. Combined with the compass, the impetus was too strong to resist, so Jade put her all into trying to escape the snowy cloud.

Jade came down on the damp grass outside of the hedge maze, landing hard and yelping as the wind was knocked out of her.

West came running down from the stands, followed by a dripping wet Alana, and both hugged their reappeared friend. Jade, on the other hand, didn't feel too great, and pushed them away before retching into a bush.

"Glad to see you, too," Alana quipped. West elbowed her.

"Sorry, guys. What just happened?" Jade shot a little bit of water from her wand and poured it directly into her mouth.

"You were there, and then there was this explosion of light," Alana explained, simulating the explosion with her hands.

"And then you were kind of in and out and in and out," West continued, wrapping a blade of grass around her finger. "We decided you needed some help."

Jade looked down at the thing that had wrapped around her ankle. It was a vine of ivy, tied in a quick square knot and a little torn. Slowly, she looked up at West, then back down to her leg, then up to gaze into her friend's pollen-green eyes. "No," she breathed, a smile spreading over her face. "You didn't!"

West laughed. "It's not, like, a power or anything. It's more like- I can feel things growing, under the ground and above it. All I have to do is harness the growing power and kind of bend it along." Her eyes sparkled with excitement, and her cheeks flushed.

"Show us!" Alana bounced and clapped her hands, like a small child.

West obligingly placed her fingertips on the damp earth and hummed softly. Three white-green stems pushed through the dirt and quickly spread, leaves unfurling and buds opening slowly. One of the flowers was pale green and shaped like a star, with its yellow stamen bobbing in the faint wind. The second flower was like bluebells, a rich azure colored trio of blooms that seemed to chime as dewdrops formed on their surfaces. The third flower was a daylily, the color of the flames in a campfire. It seemed to flicker, in shades of vermilion and crimson, burnt orange and xanthous yellow.

"They're beautiful," Jade gasped, fingering the smooth and cool petals.

"Oh, I have detention when we get back to Eaglesclaw," Alana admitted, laughing.

"What did you do now?" Jade was beginning to get another headache.

"Okay, so there was this totally nasty, conceited girl in the stands today, and she's been getting on my nerves for the past couple of weeks. She said something to me, and I started giving her my opinion on what she'd said. So she goes 'I'm not listening to you, because you never have good ideas'. And I yell, 'I NEVER LIKED YOU!" And then I may have punched her in the face."

"Alana," Jade chastised, trying not to laugh. "You're going to be the death of us all, I swear."

Alana flipped her dark red hair over her shoulder. "You love me, admit it."