The forest grew stranger with each step. She realized there was an overgrown road underneath the foliage, with long chalky roots over the sides and bushes pressing in. Around her, insects she couldn't see buzzed and clicked. Bird calls she didn't recognize layered over each other. The light was midday-bright, warm but not oppressive. Everything kept existing around her like it was normal.

  The walls on either side of her were so crowded with life she couldn’t make much out. The forest smelled wrong too—not pine or oak or the familiar decay of leaf litter, but something sharper, almost citrus but not quite, underlaid with a mineral scent like wet stone.

  She kept moving, trying to notice things, catalog them, feel like she knew anything at all. Bulging blue-green sacs grew off some of the trees with open lips like wide, tubular pitcher plants. She stopped, looked closer, took a picture. Parasitic, probably. Maybe a source of water if she was desperate enough to risk poisoning herself.

  The roots of the trees looked so chalky and soft she didn’t expect to trip on one. Her flats weren't made for hiking. She crashed down, discovering with her palm that the trees were actually hard and rough like granite that scraped her palm and knee. The worst pain was two of her nails catching on the uneven texture and bending back.

  Noa almost cried from pure pain, nerve endings screaming as she crouched there breathing through her teeth and gathering up her purse contents that had spilled across the forest floor. Tissues, electrolyte powder packets, granola and protein bars, mints, disposable toothbrushes, wallet, keys, that ten-color pen, her phone’s cord. A catalogue of all the little things that made her coworkers laugh at her for carrying so much around like she was a mother of three.

  She used a tissue and some bandaids. Noa patched up her palm and knee. Who was laughing now? The thought felt hollow even as she had it.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Noa stood, uncertain. She had followed the light and now... where did she go? The dread was stifling, pressing down on her. Just heavy. Suffocating.

  She turned back towards the entrance. The building she'd left extended in either direction, massive, impossible to see the ends of through the trees. Maybe she should follow the side.

  Noa walked back a few steps, her eyes struggling to pick it out at first—the main chamber was so much brighter that the smaller trails were harder to see—but the ribbon of light that had been on the ceiling, that she could find no explanation for, was pouring out of the hallway.

  And flowing upward.

  Like some kind of reverse waterfall. Her eyes followed it up. And up. And the flow took a sharp turn when it hit the ceiling—hundreds of feet above her, architecturally impossible, a space that shouldn't be able to support itself. The light flowed away across it in rivers she couldn't track through the canopy, disappearing into branches and wrong-colored leaves.

  Noa stared at the corner, at the ceiling washed in light rivers, and despite everything she tried, she thought of her brother’s long-winded love of anime tropes.

  The last summer they'd had together, six years ago. When he'd pulled her out of her research for her PhD in geospatial science with questions about LED lights. Noa ended up spending three weeks helping him with his cosplay because she got interested in the technical details. Making matching costumes. Going to comic con with him—not because she cared about anime, but because Liam did.

  He'd spent hours talking about isekai. Characters transported to other worlds. Magic systems and quests and impossible things. And it hurt.

  He would be so mad it happened to her and not him.

  Because logic was gone. Fantasy bullshit was all that was left for Noa to grasp, and even then she was frozen, staring at rivers of rainbow color while her mind tried to reject anything like... magic. What science could explain what she was looking at? Experiencing?

  Something was wet on her cheek. She touched her face and her fingers came away damp with tears.

  Reality was breaking down. Noa felt vertigo after craning her neck to look at the trails of light for too long. How was she supposed to function? Everything in her ground to a halt. She sat down against one of the white trees, the bark rough and cool against her back, and finally felt acute, bitter grief. For Liam. For herself. For everything she'd lost and everything she was losing and the impossibility of all of it.