Melanie couldn’t be sure, but she thought she felt the door shiver. Then she went to push the door open, after turning the knob, it didn’t budge. So she pulled it, and when she did she saw nothing but another wall, with this painted on it:

            “HaHa!”

            In many different colours over and over again, in all directions and fonts and sizes imaginable. Not understanding why there was nothing there, she closed the door, and the faintest sigh came from within.

            She walked a little further, and pulled open a door on her right only to have the door viciously retaliate by trying to devour her hand. After a few minutes of haggling the door, she pulled out, unscathed, and the door returned to its normal status.

            “This place is weird.”

            She walked a little further and picked a door to her right again. She got close to it, and put her ear as close to it without touching it, as close as she could. She could hear what sounded like flowing water. No, that’s not right, sand. Flowing sand!

            Confused, Melanie went to touch the knob, but it disintegrated as she neared, and pulled into the door as would a pile of dry sand on a dry beach to the touch of a small child. Melanie extended both arms, palms out, and pushed on the door lightly. She felt sand flowing over her fingers, it was tickling her, the millions of tiny sand granules running over her fingers. She dared to push even further.

            To her surprise she didn’t stop, she just kept pushing further, slowly walking forward. Once she was about elbow deep, she stopped, her middle finger touched something. Or was it that she touched nothing at all?

            As she stood, sand coursing over her arms, she felt what she thought was frigid wind on her fingertips. Melanie made to step into the sand, and as she did so, pushed her whole body into it. Only giving second thought once inside, holding her breath, she walked forward, eyes closed, mouth shut tight.

            When the sand fell away from her face she was hit with a blast of freezing air that made her intake very suddenly. She snapped her eyes open, and before her laid a vast white sea. With what looked like rocks and snow mounds near her. Not dressed for such weather, her tight clothing began to transfer her body heat out of her, and into the air, making her feel very cold very fast.

            But she was interested, Melanie took a step out of the fall of sand, and her foot sank a half an inch into the snow, with a soft crunch. She could see further ahead, more snow was falling. As she departed the wall of sand entirely, she looked back and the sand wall vanished before her eyes. Getting scared that she might be trapped, she reached out in a panic to touch it again, to her surprise, it materialized from where she touched it and began to spread outward as if she had just broken the sky itself.

            When she removed her finger, it dissolved again into thin air. As Melanie breathed, she watched her breath come in great clouds. She bent down and drew a line and arrow in the ground with her finger, then noticing she would lose that if it started to snow, used her foot and dug a huge arrow into the ground, all the way to the earthy undergrowth. She left trenches of brownish dirt clearly visible in the snowy ground.

            With confidence Melanie stepped away towards the mounds. She couldn’t see anything but the horizon for what seemed like miles. As if the grounds were almost completely flat. As she approached the mounds of snow that reached up to her knee’s, Melanie got down and sat on one of them. To her surprise, it wasn’t a snow mound at all, no it was a rock, just covered in snow.

            It wasn’t so comfy, but it was better than nothing. She took in her surroundings better now that she was lower to the ground. She bundled together to keep herself from losing too much warmth, as she decided what to do next.

            Melanie looked behind her, and she could see what looked like an entire field of raised snow far off, so she set off towards it, every now and then dragging her foot leaving a trail of dark brown. When she got closer, the new snow was odd. It was very, very fluffy and full of air. As she walked nearer to it, it just seemed to continue on forever. Patches broken here and there leaving shadows cast eerily all over the place.

            Melanie used her foot and tapped the snow, and it collapsed like normal snow. So there was nothing special about it, she thought. Melanie decided it was nothing but a trick of her eyes, so she kept walking. But after her first few steps into the new snow patch, she was beginning to feel very, very cold. However, she was distracted by her feet. They weren’t crushing normal snow. This confused her yet again, (“Quite a weird day this is turning out to be.”)

            Melanie decided to look more closely at where she was going, she got down, still on her feet, but down low. Using her hand she swept the snow. And to her surprise, a thousand needles pricked her, pulling her hand away quickly, she watched the damage she caused. Grass.

            But this wasn’t like any grass she had ever seen before. “Where the heck am I?” She said as she reached out and plucked a blade of grass up with her fingers, and to her stark amazement, it resembled a pine tree.

            “What in the world?”

            Melanie felt something scamper onto her finger. It was a squirrel! “Cute!” She let it run around her huge hand until she lowered it onto the ground and it vanished.

            “Well… How odd.” Melanie finally put two and two together, however much slower than normal because of the panging cold; she was in some weird place in which she was huge. She stood up and got a horrible rush of cold air. “Sheesh, its freaking cold here. I wonder how far north I am.”

            Her nose had turned red, her fingers were numb, her feet were warm, but rapidly beginning to lose heat as her sneakers finally began to freeze. Melanie’s thin green shirt wasn’t doing that much to conserve her heat either, she was losing all her heat really, really quickly, and she had to get out of there, no matter how much she wanted to stay and explore. She took another step, and now she recognized it, the strange crunch from under her shoe wasn’t snow, but was in fact a small patch of trees and vegetation.

            I am really enjoying that feeling… But I am just far too cold! Melanie thought to herself, not daring to open her mouth anymore. She was going to be in some trouble if she didn’t leave soon. The only problem was, as she walked, she got too carried away with crushing the forest she was walking through that she lost track of where she was.

            As she turned around and looked at her tracks, the snow storm that she had watched earlier, that was really miles off, had finally blown in, and was dumping snow like crazy. Melanie quickly stepped in the direction she came, making sure not to step in her footprints, for she wanted the crunch, but after a while the snow became too violent, and her footprints outside the forest were masked.

            As she neared the end of the forest, she saw that simple fact. Her once deep footprints were nowhere to be found, and she couldn’t see her trail, for her eye sight had been cut severely by the blinding snowfall. Flakes so small, a quadrillion could fit on her massive tongue. She stuck it out and tried to catch some, but try she didn’t need to, for her tongue instantly began to attract hundreds of thousand, each melting instantly even before getting close enough to her warm muscle.

            Melanie quickly got bored of this, reminded by her freezing abdomen, and she got low and started squinting. As she looked left, she saw nothing, but as she looked right, she saw something that caught her eye. A flashing glimmer of light, and snow floating upwards. She investigated.

            As she neared, she noticed the snow was actually not snow, but smoke, and the flashing glimmer was a fire. Melanie got on her knees and quickly got very low to look around. She saw a horse, the tiny little thing looked up at her, and went absolutely rigid. Melanie smiled at it as her hair was strewn about the ground when she stopped moving. The house wasn’t alone, Melanie knew that. The horse couldn’t have made the fire. So she reached forward, the horse scampered, and skimmed her hand right below the tree line, uprooting everything in her path.

            Then she saw it, movement. She moved like lightning, and trapped something very small, and she could hear something, a voice. It was a someone, not a thing. Not being able to properly grab them, she dug her fingers into the ground and picked them up, along with a hand full of the ground beneath them.

            When the person had noticed they were flying upwards, however still standing on the ground, they looked back up at the giantess.

            “B-b-b… Beast!” Cried the stranger, wearing a grayish blue cloak with its hood drawn, who began to quiver.

            “Oh that’s not nice!” Melanie whispered, “I’m not a beast, I’m just lost.”

            “Lost be good, d-d-die you will! B-be-gone from this place or d-die!”

            “Oh don’t talk like that. You’ll make me think I’m unwanted.” Melanie pouted, but it had no effect on he who wore the cloak. “Oh fine, if you could only tell me which way I came from when I first arrived at the forest, I will leave.”

            The stranger was obviously taken aback. “WH-What?” Obviously getting hoarse, he continued to yell, “You not be here for m-m…” He stumbled on the word, “meat?”

            Melanie almost chuckled, “No, not now. I’m cold and I want to leave. Where did I come from?”

            The stranger pointed behind Melanie, and she looked, when she did, because of her lower altitude, she saw two mounds on either side of a ravine, “Ah, must be my trail!” She looked back at her stranger, “Well thank you, I will let you go now. But don’t go calling everyone ‘beast,’ or one of them might just eat you.” She exposed her mouth to him, blowing her breath at him at that, and he squealed.

            Laughing to herself, she put the mound back where she found it, and he vanished into the underbrush screaming. Melanie however, wasted no time in quickly making a run for the wall. The storm was getting worse now, snow was now blowing in sideways, and was stinging her eyes. Melanie followed the trail until she found a huge arrow, and reached out in front of her, not a moment too soon, and the flowing wall of sand began to materialize in front of her.

            She plunged forward before it even finished showing itself, and she felt sand wash over her body as she tried to get back to where she whence came. Finally she made it and was greeted by a warmth of like she had never felt before. Finally leaving the sand wall, the knob returned, and she could no longer hear the flowing. Out of curiosity, she tried to press the door again, but it was solid wood. “Hum… Weird.”

            As Melanie walked down the corridor again, she tried to warm up, which was a slow process. However eventually she did. After she did, she approached a door on her left, trying the wood, it was solid, then trying the knob, it was cold and metallic. She turned it slowly, click… click… click… She pushed the door open slowly, and a blast of a smell so odd struck her. It smelled like… Old books.

            She peered into the room, it was even darker than the one she just exited, but the walls, ceiling, and floor were all stone, and there were two book cases, covered with books. There was a candle lit on the far end, with a book open on a wooden desk. Just lying there. Melanie looked again, no one was in the room. She strode across the room carefully, and picked up the book.