The forest hums with latent energy. At the center stands an oak as wide as a house, twisted and gnarled, its bark shivering with faint emerald light beneath the dying sun. A rent, black as space, rips two feet down the trunk, and space warps within it, like it were alive, breathing.
Faint, pulsing radiance shines out through the rent, a tenuous thread of possibility in a world run out of wonders. The visitor stays there for quite some time, then hunch through.
When s/he emerges, the air strikes them like a shockwave. The world outside is now raw and jagged, a place where geometry has come unraveled. Trees are titanic constructs of twisted root-masses and coursing, glowing filaments, their tops a neural web which crackles with light. The ground beneath is a juddering lattice of semi-organic matter, pulsating faintly with a rhythm which seems maddeningly close to a heartbeat. Above them all, the sky is a fractured purple roof, endless in its extent but rent here and there with cracks of brilliant white light.
It is shapes that move, at first vague, distant, hazy pieces of background-but then one sweeps up to break apart. There is something deeply alien to its structure: transparent overlays of its being reveal events and thoughts that flash faster than a nervous heartbeat; its eyes are firmament stars blazing in fictitious orbits.
The visitor’s throat constricts.
The oak is a portal, but it is no sanctuary. It is a mirror. What s/he sees here is what their world may be.
For a moment, translucent layers flicker with images: collapsing spires, blackened forests, and desolate wastes.
With savage force, the ground buckles beneath them, and the visitor is flung backward. Landing with a thud on the forest floor, s/he gasps for air. The oak rises before him, unchanged—the jagged opening now sealed, as if it had never existed.
The forest is silent again.