Violet and combinations of coral and bright red light filter through her eyelids. Orbs roll right and left beneath the skin, scrunching up her lids into barely noticeable squints as the intruding glow brightens and prods her towards a flickering state of consciousness; it is the only sign that life lay within her. A tremor washes through her body, coaxing with it a creeping shiver that prickles hair all over and leaves her under a blanket of goosebumps. It’s only noted through close observation, but it can be determined that her chest rises gently, falters, and falls again. In that rhythm it repeats. She breathes through her nose because her lips are drawn into a purse and her jaw has been chained into a rigid clench. She is tense all throughout. She feels undead.
With every inward breath that is sent to her lungs, more of her awakens, and more of what surrounds her is being recorded by a stirring state of sensory awareness.
Her fingers twitch, tips brushing against material familiar enough to submerge her with the likeness of a morning in bed. The sheets are downy, persuading her hands to palm the material and curl fingers around a clutch of it. She grips the blanket with clasped fists for a reason she isn't fully comprehensive of just yet. Her knuckles pulse.
Something is in the air. It hangs there, dissolved into the atmosphere of the space. She’s not roused enough yet to fully understand what it is that’s tickling her senses and is compelled to take in a deep breath. It hooks onto her chest and becks her to hold it as a wave of the atmosphere courses throughout her. Her eyes open in a flash.
Wood is the first thing she can distinguish from the rush of scent that she’s inhaled. Vanilla and warmth are next, filling not only her lungs but leaking into every fiber of her body. For a second she feels weightless, as if the velvety sheets she lay against are a gust of warm summer breeze instead.
As it settles she can pick out a distinct sweetness in the air, soon after paired with a stark hint of spice. It reminds her of red and white swirls and cold breath - peppermint. Summer is pushed aside; it is winter around her now. It is cool and brisk. The sharp aroma plunges into her and if she wasn’t fully awake before, she is now. She is buzzing and alert, her pupils dilating with the spirals of the candy canes she’s now envisioning. Her chest is still elevated. She doesn’t realize until she’s about to burst that she needs to exhale. She’s half expecting to see her breath mist into the air before her.
As she sighs out her held breath, a current of relief washes into her rigid veins and the stiffened position she’d maintained melts away. She slumps into the mattress now, letting the scent swaddle her. It’s rich and earthy, of damp pine the way an autumn morning in the forest might be. It is creamy and delicate.
It is everything all at once, and for some reason it is all too familiar. A word manifests between her variety of thoughts: Sandalwood.
She is relaxed.
She's breathing steadily now, her lungs fresh and welcoming the air around her. She notes that she can hear birds outside. Her eyes sweep the space she’s in for the first time.
The first thing she notices is, again, wood. It surrounds her in every direction. The walls are a rich cherry color, brightened in some areas by rays of sunlight that her eyes follow to a round window across the room to her right. She notes that the room itself is also lacking corners. Only the floor seems to be completely flat.
Upon first glance her eyes overlook just how large the room is; it is cluttered with items she can't quite take in all at once, objects of everything everywhere, and it retracts from the vastness of it at first. With flickering eyes she glimpses countless books of different shapes and sizes, stacked in what appears to be random order and height atop a desk, on a shelf, in various spots on the floor so that they served as tables of their own. She glances briefly at a skull with a beak set upon one of the stacks, then a framed collection of feathery blurs and small splats of colour behind a pane of glass shaped to accommodate the rondure of the room. Her eyes catch more feathers joined by beads dangling from what she can discern are dreamcatchers hanging from the center of the arched ceiling. She sees more apparently arbitrary items strewn across the room, but she's having a hard time registering more than a couple at a time. It strikes her as an orderly chaos, as if the clutter around her were all carefully planned.
