I woke up to the smell of mud and rain.
Cold.
Damp.
Heavy.
Something wet was dripping down my face and sliding along my neck, soaking into my shirt. For a second, I thought it was blood. It would've been a very normal start to my day, honestly. But when I wiped it with the back of my hand, it was just water mixed with dirt.
Comforting.
I opened my eyes and stared upward.
The sky was… gone.
Completely swallowed by a canopy of twisted, writhing branches, if you could even call these limb-like tree appendages that. The trees above me weren't normal. They looked like something pulled from the nightmares I used to have before Bastard took them.
Their bark was spotted, white, gray, black, like they'd been bleached, charred, and rotted all at the same time. Their leaves shimmered with the color of the night sky, a deep cosmic black that seemed to swallow the light around them.
And the trunks…
The trunks had mouths.
Mouths with crooked smiles carved directly into the wood.
