Ashlynn woke to the sound of water dripping on leaves. Like a quiet forest after a long rain, the air was filled with the sound of dozens of droplets falling on leaves that were just wide enough to catch them.
When she opened her eyes, she was greeted by the sight of a towering olive tree, easily thirty feet tall with a trunk wider than her outstretched arms.
There was nothing else. No forest, no sky, no horizon. Just the tree, and a pale grey mist that pressed in close on every side, along with the soft ground beneath her bare feet.
The ground was wrong. It gave beneath her weight like a sodden mattress, and when Ashlynn shifted her feet, the earth let out a moist -squelch- that she had heard once before, in a bed in Lothian City. Mud welled up between her toes. Warm mud instead of the chill of a forest floor after the rain.
-twap-
