[The Forest, Book 3] Part One (IT'S HAPPENING!!)

This currently untitled book is the the third and final installment in the Forest trilogy, the first book of which you can read for free here.

Part One

For a long time, there was only darkness, and the sensation of accumulating dew. Sometimes things moved in the darkness, but they were dim, shapeless, and far away. Water trickled. Small creatures with hundreds of legs moved across the bones, looking for scraps and finding none.

The bones had long since been slurped clean. Had there been any light, they would have shone. This was disturbing to the watcher. The watcher preferred not to think about the bones.

In the darkness there was nothing to do but think. Or at least that’s how it seemed at first. An interminable period elapsed in silence. Then connections began to form.

Connections began to form between the watcher and her environment. The nature of the connections was unclear. The nature of the environment was unclear. That connections were forming, however, was clear. They progressed, inexorably, like rainwater seeping through cracks in old pavement.

The watcher did not resist the connections. She merely observed. Then, when the web was sufficiently advanced, she began to change.

With this change came shocking knowledge. She was unnatural. She had thought herself a part of the darkness she’d awoken in, but this was not the case. Surrounding her was an entity so incomprehensibly large and old that she was nothing in comparison.

She was an intruder. A microscopic foreign body. If she was ever detected, she would instantly be destroyed.

The watcher thought about what to do. She had not been found, which meant no one had been looking for her.

Carefully, with the greatest discretion, she gathered the connections that had formed. They bundled before her like fiber-optic cable. The pain of gathering the connections was unlike any she had ever felt, but she held on even as the lightning pouring through began to erase her.

And yet: some sliver of her could not be erased, no matter the lightning raging against it. When the blue-white light faded, and the bundled connections lay before her, responsive as captive sky-eels, she opened her cavernous eyes and found that she could see.

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