I remember well the wonder of my ever-so-beautiful forest. It was bright and crowded with life and colour. Wonderful flowers of awesome shades and hues adorned the forest floor and sprouted upwards, gladly vying for sunlight beneath the canopy of the mighty trees. Creatures of all kinds scuttled, buzzed, and flew about the paradise. Altogether, it induced an unparalleled sense of calm in me. It shrouded me with a comfort and a stillness that I could never experience elsewhere.
But in and amongst the crowd of trunks, in the centre of the forest, was some kind of repugnant body: a mass of pure energy—a hostile energy. The blue light it shone was bitter and blanketed all around. With it, the mass emanated a biting coldness and, simultaneously, a blistering heat, that touched the skin to make it crawl incessantly. Its scent—a foul and rotten indictment—slithered from its core to invade the surrounding air. The bliss was gone.
When I first encountered it, it was small. Yet, as time passed, the mass gradually began to expand, as if it were feeding upon some awful nature beyond the forest that encouraged its hideous growth.
The more the mass grew, the more hostile it appeared to be. All that lived immediately around the mass began to wither and decay. The plants and flowers shrivelled, and the trees lost their greenery and their life. The forest worked to contain the energy, but it was all in vain. Great limbs of energy oozed from the mass, piercing the forest’s natural wall of wood and timber. I worried it’d soon collapse into death, and that my world beyond the forest would become infested by this horror. This shameful, twisted horror.