Cinderella Dressed in Ashes ( Book #2 in the Grimm Diaries ) by Cameron Jace

dream?
    Shew lay on her back, staring at the blue sky above. It was barely visible, blocked by a veil of endless ashes. They looked like a large black dress filled with tiny holes that occasionally let the thin light of the moon pass through.
    Ashes stuck to Shew’s hands as she tried to wave some of them away.  She coughed. They were getting in her mouth, too.
    She propped herself up on her elbow, discovering she’d been transported to a cornfield glowing with a faint magnificent color—a bright shade of gold.
    Is this the afterlife? A cornfield?
    A breeze of wind passed through Shew like a ghost, rattling the plants and brushing her skin. She needed to stand up to get the whole picture.
    On her feet, she saw the cornfield was huge, encircled by the Wall of Thorns on all ends, all except a small gap in the distance that had burned to ashes. The wind puffed the ashes and sent them hanging in the air all over the corn.
    “This is the Field of Dreams,” Shew mumbled. “How did I get here? Who burned the Wall of Thorns?”
    Shew turned around in a full circle, looking for Cerené but couldn’t find her. Shew summoned her as loud as she could. Her voice didn’t even echo, blocked by the ashes saturating the air.
    “Oh, dear God,” Shew said. “Don’t let anything bad happen to Cerené.”
    Shew ran like a mad girl through the Field of Dreams. Had Cerené passed out and become buried in the corn? The cornstalks stood high enough that she had to crouch down to look for her.
    Shew ran in every direction. The cornfield was like a maze. Its yellow color was alarming to the eyes, misleading, insinuating a sense of being eternally lost, in contrast with the black ashes falling from above.
    Suddenly, Shew stopped in front of something amidst the cornstalks. She’d never seen anything like it. There was a girl lying on her back, floating upon a small puddle of water. The girl wore a red dress, hands folded upon her chest like a mummy.
    Shew knelt down and saw the girl was breathing and in a deep sleep. She had never seen someone sleeping so deeply, as if dead.
    You slept like this girl once before, Shew. Try to remember. The whole Snow White story is about a moment when you slept in a coffin and were kissed awake by a prince. This girl reminds you of yourself!
    Shew quieted the voice in her head. She couldn’t remember being kissed by a prince, nor sleeping in a coffin in the forest—the only coffin she’d known was the glass one in the Schloss.
    There were two glass urns on the sleeping girl’s sides, just like the one Cerené was holding. One urn held a small amount of water in it, the other was filled with grains of sand which were more greenish than yellow.
    Shew looked closer. The sand was rather sticky, and when she curiously tasted the water, it was salty—she spat it out.
    Looking back to the girl, she saw that some of the same greenish sand stuck to her sleepy eyes.
    “Hey!” Shew shook her. “Wake up. Did you see Cerené? Do you know if I am alive or dead?”
    The girl didn’t respond. She was a comatose sleeping beauty.
    Strides away, she came across another girl dressed in red, sleeping on a bed of water with urns on her sides.
    A few steps later, she found another girl, then another.
    The Field of Dreams was filled with girls.
    “Cerené!” Shew yelled, panicking now.
    Somewhere amidst the corn, Shew heard a voice chanting what seemed like nonsense. It was Cerené. The quality of her voice implied she was shivering.
    “London Bridge is falling down,” Cerené chanted as it to a baby in a cradle. “ Falling down. Burning down. ”
    “Where are you, Cerené?” Shew yelled, still running hysterically and avoiding the sleeping beauties she came across.
    “Ring-a-round the rosie. A pocket full of posies. Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down ,” Cerené was hallucinating. She sounded like she had suffered a blow to her head or something. “London Bridge is falling down.”
    “Keep singing,” Shew said.