From above, the forest had no end.
Hell's Paradise Island's second geography ran unbroken from the quiet rim of the Legacy city southward until the land itself forgot to continue — sixty-foot boles standing shoulder to shoulder in their uncounted thousands, canopies interwoven so densely that moonlight reached the moss in thin apologetic filaments, the whole great green mantle older than the concept of its own surveying.
Cartographers who had tried had come away calling it indefinite and wisely stopped trying.
Tonight it was quiet.
The obscene quiet of a forest that had registered something in its interior and was choosing, across all its uncounted acres, not to comment.
But then a wave passed through it.
The first pulse originated from a single hollow twenty miles from the nearest legible trail — a silent hard displacement expanding through the canopy in a perfect ring, and a hundred thousand branches curtseyed simultaneously in the direction of its travel.
