Glossy silver leaves trembled gently in a cool breeze. Elinyra gazed up at the blue sky between the canopies of the two trees she lay beneath, wondering if the scene before her was yet another dream, or what waited beyond dying moments. They looked like chestnut trees, except that their long, elegant leaves were the color of gleaming moonlight. The branches were covered with small white flowers that bobbed and deformed as she looked at them. They looked like - eyes. Hundreds of blinking eyes.
She bolted up to a sitting position, her movement disturbing the "flowers", which swarmed and flew away in a flurry of buzzing white wings. She took in a deep breath of air as the world swayed. She quickly realized the sensation was from the hammock beneath her, woven from what looked like vines and roots, strung between the bulbous black trunks of the silver-leafed trees.
The world around her wasn't the world she'd known. The
plants weren't just unknown to her - they were alien. Some of the tree trunks looked like sinew and muscle twisted together and petrified, others were smooth and almost translucent with enormous, disk-shaped leaves traced in deep violet. Even nature's palette had been warped into deep shades and cool bioluminescent glow. Beautiful, horrible, as if a dream and a nightmare had melted together.
No, not the afterlife. Bringing her blighted arm up to touch the callous-like bark on one side of her face, she knew. At least the shroud of shadows that had overcome her had vanished. In fact, she couldn't feel any lifeforce being drawn into her.
She tried to remember what had happened between now and that lonely cave, but she only remembered the bard and the face of a warrior, twisted in anger and fear. Then a white light and... nothing. A dull pain flared in her shoulder as she stretched, like an old wound not quite forgotten.
Her perch was situated in a grove of sorts at the edge of a clearing where a riot of warm colors vied for the morning sunlight: golds, pinks, reds in a sea of tall turquoise grass. Out in the middle of the clearing, like an island, a bizarre array of plants were growing around a blighted tree. The tree was moving.
Elinyra started towards it but quickly doubled back when she met the grass and discovered that the blades were as sharp as broken glass. She looked at the tiny slashes on her left arm in surprise.
"Ah ah.... " tsked a voice that carried with sweet sympathy through the ground beneath her feet. The tree turned towards Elinyra, and she could see that it had a face. It reached out with its branches as if to part the grass, and it responded by bowing away to create a path.
Reluctantly, Elinyra followed the path through the deceptively beautiful grass towards the tree until her feet came up from the grass onto a mound of moss and earth. Up close, the towering figure looked like a feminine dryad with soft flowing hair, but her body was completely composed of the black bark that covered part of Elinyra.
"Welcome,
mer'fille," she said in a friendly tone, spreading her branch-like arms wide. Her mouth creaked up into a smile made disturbing by the violet glow she emanated. Elinyra frowned at being called
daughter by this creature.
"Who are you?" Elinyra asked, glancing around at the carefully-tended beds of mushrooms, flowers and stranger things neither
plant nor animal.
"I am the Seed Mother,
mer'fille. I care for my children, and they provide. Please, you are hungry, aren't you?" She reached out towards a conglomerate of bulbous sacs, breaking one, and tried to give Elinyra its contents. The elf stared at the ooze-covered round objects in disgust.
"Where am I?" she asked, trying to wave away the morsels that the seed mother pressed into her hands.
"You are in my garden," said Seed Mother with a wide grin
, gesturing to the growth around her. Elinyra noticed the bones near their roots, the eye socket of a skull that hosted a growing tendril. She'd hoped she'd see a mountain or some other landmark in the distance, but there were none to be found beyond the visible trees.
"No, I mean where
on Arethil am I?"
The Seed Mother pressed the strange food into Elinyra's hands more forcefully, her violet-lit eyes narrowing. "You need to regain your strength,
mer'fille. Eat."
The elf looked down at the unappetizing-looking blobs in her hands, then up at the looming tree. She had to know.
"Fine, as long as you tell me where I am."
The Seed Mother stared at her, then pantomimed eating with one hand. Elinyra swallowed, sighed and lifted one of the offerings to her mouth.
"He said you would ask," cooed the talking tree sweetly as Elinyra ate. Actually, it was sweet, almost like a plum but with the texture of a boiled egg.
"And he told me to tell you this. Welcome to the First World."
Zakarias
