The forest began before she knew she had entered it.
No gate, no edge—only a shift in the air, the way a thought turns toward hunger before you've named it. The moss across her shoulders warmed, sensing it. The sap crown dripped in a slower rhythm now, as though listening.
Beneath her bare feet, the ground was not soil but a weave of roots and veins, each one trembling faintly, like an animal holding its breath.
The first sound came softly—a sigh, high and deep at once. Not wind. Not beast. Something between breath and memory. Then another, lower, from the left. Then another, closer, directly in front of her.
The trees were moaning.
L
At first the sound was gentle, a tide of longing that rolled through the canopy. But as she walked, it shifted—responding to her pace, her inhale, her quiet pulse. Every breath she released came back to her amplified, thickened, weighted with a desire she could not yet recognize as her own.