The Waking Green
The first sensation was cold.
It seeped through her cheek, soaked into the fabric at her shoulder, pressed damp fingers against her ribs. Moss, she would later understand, though in that first long moment she knew only that the world was wet and dark and smelled of crushed green things. Her body registered the ache before her mind registered anything at all — a dull throb behind her eyes, a stiffness in her neck as though she had slept wrong for a very long time, the pins-and-needles burn of an arm pinned beneath her.
She lay still, breathing in the mulch and rot and something sweeter underneath, some flowering scent she couldn't name, and waited for the world to arrange itself into sense.
It didn't.
She opened her eyes.
Green. That was the first thing — an overwhelming, saturated green, so deep it seemed to hum, pressing in from every direction like the inside of some vast living throat. She lifted her head an inch from the moss and the green resolved into shapes: ferns taller than she could have stood, their fronds curled and dripping; trunks wide as houses, ridged and buttressed, climbing up and up until her eyes lost them in a tangle of vines. Far above, the canopy knit…