Midnight Wonders

7.5.1. An Hour of Light

It seemed particularly dark inside the tree. It made sense and did not. It was a closed space, but it wasn't like the rest of Under-The-Green-Hill wasn't a closed space either. There was no light at all and nothing seemed to be seeping in from outside the hill, so it didn't make sense why there was enough for his eyes to begin to slowly adjust as he walked. He didn't know where he was walking. Into the tree, of course, seemed the obvious answer. Into the tree and where else, he didn't know.

Luc felt oddly...floaty. Perhaps he was dreaming after all. Perhaps he'd really gone back to bed after seeing to Lilias and Tam, perhaps he'd fallen asleep at the hill. The rain must have soaked into him and made him feverish and now he was hallucinating because the space around him didn't feel real. It was just so dark and empty and endless. He could hear his footsteps and graze his fingers along the rough interior of the tree and somewhat see the wall curving around him and smell the now-familiar scent of the tree (which was familiar yet different, because he was more familiar with the smell of the Sycamore, but it was a smell of a tree and that he knew), but none of it seemed real. If he could do everything in real life as his dreams then who could tell the difference? What even was the difference? Real life was seen through his eyes, filtered through his thoughts, and if his brain showed him a world of delusions then how different was it from a dream?

He didn't know how he could flip between feeling perfectly grounded and flying in seconds. He felt as if he should have been at an age already where his emotions didn't feel like a roller coaster anymore and he was mature about everything, but he supposed that he had been stuck feeling the same thing for so long that even the slightest change felt like an earthquake. It occurred to him that he didn't even know what age he was for certain. Because no one in Under-The-Green-Hill seemed to keep track.

His vision was getting better in the darkness. Luc peered over the top of his glasses for no reason but found that it looked better when it was blurry. Everything felt a little less real. But it made his eyes hurt a bit so he stopped and looked normally around him. He didn't even know if he was even getting anywhere. Everywhere there was just more tree and endless path.

A face appeared in the tree. Luc paused. He blinked, wondering briefly if he had walked all the way through the tree and made it to the other side and kept going all the way to the edge of Under-The-Green-Hill and met a mirror wall, but no. He was still in the tree. He could reach out and touch it and it felt like a tree. The face had crept back into the darkness after jumping out to startle him, but he felt around until he found it. It was...cold. Smooth. Hard. It didn't feel like flesh; more like bone. He felt around more and his finger fell into a depression. It was where the eyes would be, but instead, he felt...tree.

Luc stared, trying to get his eyes to adjust to what little, nonsensical light there was. The face was there. He was touching it. He was seeing it. It was a face, but not a real face. It couldn't be from a person. It was a mask.

He looked ahead and saw another face. Another mask. All at once they all leapt off the darkened walls and he thought he could see all of them. He walked. And they kept appearing. Masks, and they weren't identical, but there was something about them that was. The eeriness. How uncanny and unexpected they continued to be even as they became more and more expected.

Luc paused. He looked behind him and couldn't be sure how far he had gone. But where was he going? He was looking for Kay. But seeing as it was most likely that this was what it meant for the tree to consume a person, how was he to know that he hadn't walked past Kay? He couldn't even know when or where the trail of masks had started. Or where they might end.

And what did he plan to do if he found Kay? That sounded impossible enough. Perhaps the tree only could consume organic materials, and it had spit out the masks it could not degrade.