Chapter 3: Chapter 2 – The ever-fall forest

As Oliver lay sleeping on something hard, his bleary mind not quite knowing where, a piercing light shone through the darkness of his closed eyes. The light burned his tired eyes for a moment, but just before he awoke it disappeared, leaving him once more in the sweet embrace of oblivion, this, however, did not last either, and the piercing light soon returned. This cycle of harsh light and comforting darkness continued for minutes, taunting his tired mind by keeping it dancing on the twilight of consciousness. Right up until something new disturbed the cycle, namely when something small and light landed on his face, finally waking him. Did they restart that stupid game where they see how many napkins they can put on my face before I wake up? I mean honestly, I'm asleep, not dead. He thought as he reached up to brush the napkin off and go back to sleep, but instead of finding the soft paper he expected, he found the coarse, crisp feeling of an autumn leaf. That finally woke him up, as he wondered where they had found a recently fallen autumn leaf at the start of spring. He slowly sat up, rubbing at his eyes with one hand, and supporting himself against something… wooden? With the other. When he finally opened his eyes, his hand dropped to his side.

Before his eyes stretched a forest larger than any on earth, but that wasn’t right, no forest on earth could even slightly compare, they were too fundamentally different, especially when it came to sheer scale. The trees which stretched out as far as his eyes could see were monolithic. The trunks alone were majestic, each one being tens of kilometers thick, reaching up higher than he could see. When he looked up, he could not see how far they stretched, and when he looked down, he only saw layers upon layers of branches, becoming darker and darker as each stole just a little more light from the ones below. The branches were also simply colossal in their scope, each starting from the trunk as wide as the Nile, before stretching out and slowly splitting into smaller and smaller branches, like dark mahogany rivers flowing out into endless streams. They were so long that even from where Oliver sat at the very beginning of a branch there were still twigs from other trees swaying gently in the wind.

Then there were the plants all around him, sprouting from the very bark of the trees, nestled in every knot, nook, and cranny with light brown stalks and leaves in any shade of yellow, orange, and red, from pale pastel yellow to deep maroon reds. But even more intriguing than the plant life were the animals, there were entire herds of deer with bulls' horns to avoid getting tangled in the ever-present branches. They ran along the thicker branches at incredible speeds before leaping to a network of thinner branches where their small hooves still found purchase. Running even further until they came upon a pond of water where a branch once stood, tall and proud before something tore it off, allowing water to gather in the hollow created. And that was only one of the species running and living on the trees, there were also wolves with mahogany fur speckled with the colors of the plants and leaves, rabbits dragging fallen twigs and branches to the points where the thin branches met to create nests in the areas where only they could tread, and bears capable of camouflaging themselves with the bark before standing in the hollows made by fallen branches, waiting for prey to pass.

But the most amazing aspect of the forest was not the majestic trunks, nor the magnificent branches or the beautiful plants, not even the intriguing, new, and seemingly endless variety of animals. No, the most gorgeous aspect of the forest were the leaves. They were just as colorful as the plants, their colors shifting seemingly randomly between endless shades of red, orange, and yellow, dancing through the air as they fell from the branches. And they fell constantly. Their entire lifecycle took place in mere minutes, starting when they sprouted in the span of a few seconds before they fell from the branch after a minute of fluttering in the wind. Then they swirled through the air, dancing a complex unknowable waltz with the millions of other leaves falling at the same time, gracefully intertwining between each other and the countless branches they passed, flowing in a stunning wave of reds, yellows, and oranges when the wind blew, before they eventually disappeared into the darkness of the below.

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