He grunted and neither one of us spoke again until we reached the edge of the Wild. If the Wild was withered compared to the Seelie kingdom, the Shadow Lands were positively desolate. Looking across the border, it appeared as if someone had used a black and white filter on half of a picture —one side green and alive, the other half a lifeless landscape painted in shades of grey. Where multiple suns shone in the Wild, the Shadow Land bore only a series of moons casting a luminescent glow over the landscape. The few trees that grew there seemed to produce leaves already dried up and cracking. The grasses were brown and brittle and the dirt beneath eroded and hard. I thought of the old western movies my dad used to watch and in my head I could hear the classic showdown melody and pictured a t
