Free The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer Page A

listened closely enough, she could hear a tiny stream in the distance.
    Alex spun around, looking in all directions. Her breathing increased as she took in her new surroundings. Was she overreacting or not reacting enough to what had just happened? And what exactly
had
just happened?
    She looked up to see if there was an opening she had fallen through, hoping to see some sort of window into her bedroom, but all she saw were tree branches and the sky above her.
    “Where am I?” she asked herself.
    “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!” As if he had fallen right out of thin air, Conner landed hard on the groundbeside his sister. He was pale and screaming, and his limbs were stretched out in all directions. “Am I alive? Am I dying? Am I dead?” he asked from the ground with his eyes tightly closed.
    “You’re alive!” Alex told him. She had never been so happy to see him.
    “Alex, is that you?” Conner asked. He slowly opened his eyes one at a time and looked around. “Where are we?” he asked as she helped him to his feet.
    “It looks like some kind of… forest,” she said.
    It was unlike any forest they had ever seen—in real life, at least. The colors were so vivid and the air was so crisp. It was as if they had fallen into a painting, a painting Alex was positive she had seen before.
    “Look,” Conner said, pointing at the ground. “All of our pencils!”
    The path was littered with the pencils Alex had been dropping into the book all week. She also found her school bag and a few of her dirty socks in the middle of the mess. But where were all the books she had dropped into
The Land of Stories
?
    “So this is where they all went!” Alex said.
    “But where is
here
?” Conner asked. “How far away from home are we?”
    Alex couldn’t answer him. She was starting to become just as worried as he was. They were worse than lost.
    “This is all your fault, Alex!” he said.
    “My fault?” Alex yelled. “We wouldn’t be here if youhad just knocked on my door instead of barging in like the house was on fire!”
    “I knew you were planning this,” Conner said. “I had to stop you!”
    “I wasn’t planning on going into the book. I was just testing it out!” Alex explained. “You didn’t have to follow me here.”
    “Oh, sure! Was I just supposed to leave you in the book by yourself ?” he exclaimed. “What was I supposed tell Mom when she got home? ‘Hi, Mom, hope you had a good day at work. Alex fell through a book. By the way, what’s for dinner?’ Give me a break!”
    Conner began jumping upward as high as he could.
    “What are you doing?” Alex asked.
    “We fell. From. Somewhere. Up here. There’s. Got. To be. A way. Back,” he said, but all his jumping was pointless. Conner eventually tired himself out, and he took a seat on the ground against a tree trunk.
    “What if we were transported to another country or something?” Conner asked; his forehead became more wrinkled the further he thought about it. “What if it took us to Canada or Mongolia or somewhere? How long is it gonna take for Mom or someone to find us?”
    Suddenly, the ground started shaking. A powerful rumbling had consumed the forest. The branches of the trees shook, and the small rocks on the ground began jumping as something massive moved closer toward them.
    “What’s happening now?” Conner yelled.
    “Let’s take cover!” Alex said.
    She grabbed her bag, and the twins ran off the path and into the forest a little way and took refuge behind a particularly wide tree.
    They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. A huge cavalcade of soldiers on white horses rode past them. Their armor was clean and shiny. They carried green-and-silver shields with large red apples painted on them and waved flags with the same design.
    “Alex, did we go back in time?” Conner anxiously asked his sister. “That looks like something straight out of medieval times!”
    The pencils were all obliterated under the horses’ hooves. The