Yesterday I was an ordinary and normal salary man, working my boring 8-5 job every weekday, resting on weekends by myself. No goals, no direction in life, no purpose. My life had always been pretty normal, childhood with my family, a little brother who had certainly more freedom than me at his age, a mom and dad who divorced in my teenage years. A highschool life of a low profile, without any attention whatsoever. I was never bullied, nor was I a bully. Later in life I never stood out either, no friends, my family grew apart and I haven’t spoken with them in years. In short, I was a John Doe, just a cog in a machine called “World”. That was it until this morning.

Today I woke up feeling dizzy. This Sunday I had no plans, like any other Sunday, but when I stood up everything around me started to spin, I got nauseous, and had to lay back in bed. 

“Great, now I have to waste my Sunday going to the doctor.” I had no plans whatsoever, maybe play some games on the pc or watch a movie, maybe read a web novel.

As I was laying down in bed I started to drift off, my consciousness returning to sleep, and I started to dream, but it was really vivid. Never had I had such a dream, I was surrounded by trees, laying down on a little clearing in a forest. The feeling of grass beneath me, and blue skies without a single cloud above.

And a woman, or what I thought was a woman, showed up in the corner of my vision. “Hello, youngling” Said the woman, she was a humanoid being, with dark-blue skin, yellow lines tracing all her body in a symmetric fashion forming beautiful patterns, breasts covered in such patterns the only hint at her gender. Her head had a crown of perfectly-shaped hexagonal purple colored gems, and her dark hair had strands of light intertwined, as if it was glowing. But the one thing that caught my attention were her eyes. There were two huge black sockets on her head, no light reflected nor was there anything visible in them, they were pure darkness. She was smiling, the most relaxed smile I’ve ever seen, as if she had expected me to be there and it was the most natural thing in the word,

She extended her hand to me and instinctively extended my hand to her, as if it were the only thing I could do, she helped me up and spoke.

“Welcome” still, that perfect smile while those terrifying eyes looked at me.”This is an unexpected event, it’s been some time since an outsider was here”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I stayed silent, not knowing what she was talking about.

“This is Anyia, the forest of stars, here my people come to talk to the heavens”. She turned around, my hand still in their grasp, and started walking towards the trees. “I sense that your presence is really faint, you must not have much time left in here”. And as we reached the closest treeline she lifted my hand and placed it on the side of the tree.

“Remember this feeling and visit again”. And as I touched the tree, which looked to my eyes as a normal pine with green leaves and a big trunk with brown-colored bark, my hand went through it and it started to melt, that is the only thing I can describe at this point. My hand was fine, but the feeling was as if it had started to dissolve inside a current of lava flowing inside it. I pulled my hand out and stared at it, I didn't know whether to shout in fear or smile from the cozy feeling I was having in my hand.

“It's ok.” The woman said, shoving her hand inside the tree. “This is our great spirit, the whole forest is like this, it's all connected. It’s why we come here.”

Without speaking back to her I placed my hand again near the tree, this time with more wariness. As I was about to touch the wood the feeling was like pushing my hand through water, but it instantly started to feel like it was melting again. This time I knew it was fine, so I explored that feeling a bit more, and started to feel a beating. It was like pulses that came from the floor, from its roots.

“See you again sometime, youngling” In my 40 years of age it was very weird for me to be called a youngling, I turned around to see her and as I was about to ask her a question I found her hand placed on my chest and shoved me, with an inimaginable force, inside the tree.

I started to feel my whole body melting and in the distance I heard a faint “Remember the feeling.”

The feeling of my body becoming liquid was quite horrifying, it was like my very existence started to clump into little beads of liquid which clumped together. The pulsing feeling I had felt started to grow, to feel every moment more intense, closer. I started to feel its echo, shaping the tree, sensing its roots, sensing how its roots reached ever deeper into the bottoms of the earth, and how every tree was connected with each other. For some reason the concept “mycelial network” came to my mind, as if every tree was a separate entity of each other, but at the same time part of a unique being, which was formed from the sum of all of them intertwined. And I was becoming part of it. Every pulse melted my self further and further, until I was a group of drops scattered all around the trees, and at the same time I was the trees themselves.

That’s when I opened my eyes again and I was lying on my bed again.