The space behind him warped, not with a sudden flash, but with a slow, suffocating distortion, like heat mirage over black water. At first, the thing that rose was just a column, thick and slick with something that was not sap and not blood. It pulsed in arrhythmic throbs, veins the color of rotting bruise spreading upward as if in search of a sky that had no business looking upon it.
Then the tip split not as a branch breaks, but as flesh parts, peeling outward in wet layers that unfurled into something resembling a canopy. Tendrils fanned and knotted together into the shape of limbs, though they writhed faintly, betraying their unwillingness to ever be still. Eyes, lidless and milk-pale, blinked open along the thicker boughs, their pupils swimming as if they dreamed. The smell came next, a dense, cloying mix of saltwater and something sweet left too long in the heat.
With the final twitch of those newborn branches, the world simply… stopped making sound.
