Snippets and Shorter Stories in a Hostile Forest

Day Twenty-Five: This has been a nice, relaxing day. Too bad it can't last.

Plague

Something was wrong with the forest. Syrana, spirit of the forest, sensed a hostile force creeping into the edges of the outer trees. She woke from her magical slumber in her cave under the great Life Tree of the forest and sniffed the air. Something foul was coming from the east. She ran, her footsteps mere ghosts and shadows on the leafy, damp floor.  She wasn’t a creature of this world and so she had no body unless the forest was in danger. Syranna must investigate what was was happening to the trees. They weren’t dying; their life energy was still there, but it had changed somehow.

As she neared the edge the uneasy feeling grew until she felt the beginning tingles of a body forming. With a final leap, she reached the edge, a sleek orange fox. Something was definitely wrong with the trees; their trunks and branches had gone gray and black with bone-white leaves. Countless objects scattered around the trunks and the bones just outside the forest led Syrana to the conclusion that the trees had killed those brave enough to draw near the forest. “What is the meaning of this treachery and abominations?” Syrana snapped and growled at the trees. They simply reached their cracking limbs toward her, laughing with their dead leaves.