Sunlight filters in golden through reaching trees. It’s a forest, of course, as only a forest has so many trees – but never has any forest looked like this. There are pine trees and oaks and mangroves; tall redwoods and baobabs that reach to the sky and tiny, spindly redbuds and dogwoods branching out. There are trees from the taiga and trees from the rainforest, and by all means none of them should ever exist in the same space. Some are flowering and some have lost their leaves but as he walks through this disjointed jungle the oddity of its inhabitants does not register. It’s the sound.A forest should be quiet, he thinks – not silent, no, but perhaps the gentle noise of wind through leaves and branches. Instead there is an endless cacophony as trunks creek and branches whip and leaves roar. The trees are screaming and at first he can handle the din but as it goes on and on his heart beats faster and faster and his hooves begin to pound. Jagged branches whip his face and body as he runs without endpoint, without care except to get away from this loud hell.
It’s a sharp BANG that signals his crash headfirst into rough bark. He’s dazed as he stares up into green leaves. He was running, wasn’t he? There was something he was running from – or was it to something? He can’t remember, but it’s quiet here underneath this tall tree. Whatever he was fleeing from or escaping to can wait. It’s an alder tree he thinks, though where that though comes from he knows not (it’s whispered in the leaves, softly into sleeping ears as the leaves rustle in the wind).