Rachel had to teleport twice more before she found the Dome Shield. Each time it took her almost an hour to figure out which direction she wanted to go. She would focus on a concept only to have it slip from her mind at the last moment. When she imagined the Dome Shield she saw it from the more familiar inside rather than outside. Only when she imagined it from outside was she able to get anywhere near it. There was a skill to blind teleporting and she was pretty sure she didn't have it.
When she finally appeared in a desert with the Dome Shield standing before her she felt a strange pang in her heart. It looked so small from outside - just a bubble on the landscape - but she had spent her whole life living inside it. She remembered all the people that she had grown up with, the merchants and the guilds and the people of the Old Quarter in their brightly-coloured box cabins. She wondered how Parker was managing without her and what the other commanders were doing. She hoped her friends had enjoyed peace since she had left the Orange Zone. They had seen more than enough of war already.
The Dome Shield kept the people safe inside. It had always been there, through her formative years and all through her adult life. It was something they had all taken for granted. She had never really thought about how important it was until she had gone outside.
It looked so fragile now, knowing what she did about the Blasted Lands. The world outside the Dome Shield was a cruel place, full of self-interested lords with twisted agendas.
Lord Malkor had conquered this world during the Iridium Wars, leaving the people of the Orange Zone to last only because the Dome Shield had prevented him from entering. He had already broken through it once, attacking her in the White Spear. Now that Lisa had challenged him with the song of her quickening, Rachel knew he would stop at nothing until he had destroyed everything that she held dear.
He wouldn't rest until he had destroyed the Dome Shield and everything in it. Memories stirred from past lives. Malkor had often taken people as his slaves, working them to the bone until they died of exhaustion or disease. So many lives had been used up and thrown away without a second thought.
The cleric army was heading this way, thousands upon thousands of them. She had seen them with her own eyes. She didn't know how they planned to break through the Dome Shield but she couldn't allow them to try. She had to stop them before they destroyed her home and brought ruin to everything she cared about.
Focussing on the Grand Plaza, she closed her eyes and tried to teleport inside. She had imagined appearing in front of the White Spear, but instead she found herself a few paces away from where she had been standing. Cursing her own foolishness, she tried again but appeared a few metres to her right. It wasn't working. What was she doing wrong?
She had used the same techniques that Lisa had taught her, calming her mind and focussing on the destination before reaching into herself, grasping her own essence as though clenching it in both hands. She had done everything right but it still hadn't worked. What had she forgotten?
Rachel brushed a hand through her hair, trying not to allow herself to get frustrated. Was it something to do with the gemstone that Lord Hades had given her? It was different from the others. It had been modified by the clerics to allow entry into the Dome Shield. Could that be part of the problem? Maybe Lisa hadn't thought about that. She had never tried to teleport into the Dome Shield from outside. It was something new to them all. Frustration built up inside her. She had come so far, leaving her daughter to come back to their home, and now she wasn't even able to deliver the warning. What was she going to do?
She loved her daughter. She loved Cinnamon City and its glorious mix of people. She would do everything in her power to keep them safe from whatever Malkor was planning.