The Forest Opens Its Eyes, Part 1, The Remembering

With the sound of crunching leaves, you recognize a scent, though you can’t say from when or where. Damp cedar. Crushed moss. Cold tobacco smoke curling from a fire long gone. These woods are timeless. The roots grow in the air where roots shouldn’t be. The air folds time inward. This first chapter reveals the oldest signs: branches shaped like limbs, eyes watching from within the bark, spirits passing between shadow and stone. The Spark finds us here. A flicker that seems to remember you beneath the canopy, gliding just ahead. Its light guides you deeper into the ancient forest. Deep within the sanctum, color returns. A single nerve stirs in the soil. The forest is waking. So are you.

Grain of Memory
This is how the forest keeps record.
Each line a season. Each split a silence broken.
Time held in the grain until the bark can no longer bear it.
Inverted
An upside-down tree reaches toward the sky like it remembers something.
Warden of the Clearing
The forest keeps watch.
This one crouched for centuries, horned and hollow-eyed, waiting for a name.
It remembers when the canopy was ferns and the air was full of thunder.
The Spark
The Spark finds us here.
Alive, watching, born of fire and rain.
It moves through leaf rot and memory, unafraid.
You followed it without knowing why.
The Eye
The old ones saw from heights we no longer reach.
This is no branch. This is bone.
A watching thing from before the mammals came.
The Ancient
The forest once moved like this.
Arm, antler, bone.
A gesture paused mid-sentence.
Twisting in the Shadows
No growth comes without struggle.
One form twisting around another.
A memory knotted so tightly it forgets which root came first.
Roots of Struggle
Roots claw through rot and stone to hold their place.
Every shadow here earned its shape.
This is where memory digs deepest.
Dragonwood
It curled once.
Maybe in sleep. Maybe in pain.
Now it remains like this—watching.
A fossil still tethered to breath.
Tangled
Deep within the sanctum, color returns.
A single nerve stirs in the soil.
The forest is waking. So are you.
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