Instead of leading the way out, the silver fox came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder-- or, he tried. She ducked away from him with a warning growl. "Fine, I won't touch you," he said mildly. "Just come this way a bit."

Wary, mistrusting these two creatures, Ranshee crept forward slowly. The air smelled strange, unlike anything she'd smelled before, and she couldn't put a name on the scent. Something flower-ish, perhaps, but not like any Chytonian flower. Beneath that, though, was the smell of magic-- and that made her even more wary. "Magic?" she hissed at the silver fox, who looked quickly at his partner as if in surprise. Ranshee followed his gaze and found, to her surprise and disconcertion, that the gold-colored fox was glowing. Not brightly, but still obviously, especially so in the dim lair and to Ranshee's eyes.

"This will only take a moment," she answered, sounding distracted, though the words were hardly an answer. For a moment a look of fierce concentration passed over her muzzle, but then her eyes fixed on Ranshee again and she sounded as irritable as before: "If you didn't have that annoying aversion to being touched, I'd be done already."

"Done?" Ranshee snarled, tensing to leap back. "What? What this? Magic!" She wasn't letting them work magic on her-- she'd fight them, if she had to!

But before she could jump back, or lash out, or anything in her own defense, something touched her from behind-- the silver fox!-- and the room was quite suddenly gone. Nothing came up in its place; it seemed as if she'd simply lost her senses for a moment. A very long moment. She thought she'd roared, or maybe screamed, or at least squeaked, but when the surrounding nothingness solidified again, she couldn't do anything but blink dizzily, she was so disoriented. It felt like she'd just gone through that black chyrith's portal again, only to tumble out someplace even more alien than before. It even took her a moment to register that the silver fox was still touching her, and even then it took another moment to wrench herself away with a protesting growl.

The foxes just watched her a moment, making no move to come closer, while she backed away from them and looked wildly around the room. It was full of things she had never seen before, or had seen only since she'd come here: furniture, books, globes of light called lamps. Ranshee felt suddenly cramped, for the room wasn't very big, not compared to the one they'd left.

"Where?" she rasped anxiously at the foxes, eyes still moving, half expecting those rows of "books" to come toppling down on her, or that skin-covered "chair" to jump out in front of her, or that globe of light to suddenly flare and blind her.

"The Aerd-Lady's office," the silver fox answered.

What in the world was an office?

"So are you coming, or aren't you?" the gold fox demanded.

"Where?" Ranshee snorted. They'd already taken here here, to who-knew-where, with, as far as she could tell, no way to get back... where else were they going to take her? She couldn't even imagine. This all felt like some elaborate trap, but she had no way to go back.

"Down to meet Lady Drakiera, where else?" the gold fox snapped, pointing to a wall-- which quite suddenly slid open into a door. Ranshee tried not to gape. If she'd thought this room was small, that one was little more than a hole in the wall, and it wasn't even lined with dark wood and burgundy fabric like the "office", but rather something silvery and metallic that looked completely unnatural.

"You did agree to go," the silver fox reminded her patiently.

She didn't agree to all this! She agreed to walk-- walk!-- to some room, hopefully a near one, to talk to this person! Not to be magicked away and stuffed into tiny metal rooms! All she did was growl at him.

"If you want to stay here all day, be our guest," the gold fox said with an air of absolute disgust. "But don't expect us to come get you out again. Come on, Gin. We don't have time for this."

Would they really just abandon her here? It looked like they were going to. The gold one took her partner's elbow and drew him towards the metal room. They disappeared inside, and the wall slid shut again, leaving Ranshee alone in the "office". For a long moment, she stared after them with narrowed eyes, waiting for the wall to slide open again and the gold fox to come back out and snap at her some more. When it didn't and she didn't, she looked around the "office" again, looking for some other kind of exit. If they were going to just leave her there, she'd have to find her own way out.

The only problem was there weren't any other exits. Ranshee prowled the whole room, sniffing at the furniture, poking at the walls, tugging on the curtains, even pulling out a book or two to peer behind it. There was nothing, no way out, not even one of those annoying doors that blocked exits. The foxes had left her alone in a room with only one exit: the one they had taken, leading into that tiny metal room that, as far as she could tell, had no other exits of its own.

But it was the only way out of this "office", and she was already starting to feel slightly panicked at the prospect of being stuck there any longer. The longer she prowled the enclosed space, the more certain she felt that it was getting smaller each time she crossed it. So she stopped in front of the part of the wall that had moved before, and stared hard at it. It didn't look like anything special, or even all that different from the rest of the wall, aside from it not being covered with books or rocks or odd things she had no name for. She stared at it for a very long time, waiting, but it didn't move.

"Open," she told it finally, and watched expectantly. Still, it did nothing. "Open!" she growled, but nothing happened again. Only when she hit it soundly with her fist, snarling with frustration and a growing desperation to get out, did it slip aside with silent innocence. She snorted at it, and peered into the small-- smaller than she'd even thought-- metal room beyond, and her lip curled in distaste. The foxes were gone, so there had to be some way out of it-- but it was so brightly lit that she couldn't tell how solid those silvered walls were, or if there was another hidden door within them. She'd have to go in to find out.

Seeing no other alternative, besides staying in the office, Ranshee stepped cautiously forward and into the metal room, squinting in the bright light, and reached out a hand to brush her fingers against the far wall. It was cold, and very, very solid-- and as she did so, the opening behind her shut with a very final-sounding click. She whirled, throwing herself at it with a furious snarl, but only met more of the chill metal. She howled with frustration and fear, scrabbling against the walls encircling her, stuck now inside a room too small for her to even pace, with no way out! She knew it had to have been a trap! Why hadn't she run away when she could have!

A tremor in the little metal room made her freeze, then drop to a crouch on the floor, against the wall. Was it an earthquake? Or some new terror these Aerd-people were visiting on her because of her intrusion into their lives? It took her a moment to figure out just what had changed, but when she realized, she thought it might have to have been the latter.

The room, the whole room, was moving.

Chapter Five

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