This Place Is Magic

There is a gentle sway to Lyra's hips as music plays from some unseen source. It should confuse her, but it barely registers as strange. It is an eerie melody, like a warbling saw ebbing and flowing from the treetops, filling the swirling, blue fog surrounding her. She moves to it instinctively, letting its unearthly hum puppeteer her. She should find this all very odd, but instead she feels nothing but a rare peace. It barely registers that she is being watched by spectral eyes.

The eyes hang there in the mists, azure and glowing, and they blink out a code that Lyra can somehow decipher. This, too, should confuse the girl, but it doesn't. She just accepts it, and reads what the eyes, disembodied and alight, spell out for her.

"This is a special place, girl," the eyes blink to her. "This place is magic."

Lyra knows that. Even without the supernatural trappings, without the ghostly music and whispering fog and disembodied eyes, Lyra could tell that there was something special about this little grove of birch and beech trees. It had always called out to her, but in a sideways fashion... in a dark manner that had always vaguely frightened her as a child.

She would walk a path nearby, many nights, flashlight in hand and chills running the length of her back. She was afraid, so much, when she was young. The moonlight cast dire shadows out along the leaf-strewn ground and those shadows danced in ways that froze up her heart and instilled her with quick-breath panic that took hours to burn away. The whole of the woods had left her terrified, and she hated that she had to walk that dirt road alone. Owls would scream out their warning cries, various things would skitter through the fallen leaves... even the trees would bend and cackle as she made her way past them. It was always Halloween in that forest, always sinister and foreboding. But it was real. It was nature that frightened her. The fear of a wildcat in the underbrush or a rabid raccoon lurking behind a twisted stump or sandy knoll made each trek through the trees a miniature nightmare. As she walked that dark path, sometimes not even lit by the moon, she felt like prey. It was overly dramatic, to be sure, but also founded and valid. To the things that made their home in the forest, she was an easy target.

But there was something more. Beyond the rational fears that accompanied her, there was one particular spot that loomed larger and more horribly in her anxiety. It was a small thatch of trees that seemed abnormal, although she could never pinpoint the reason. It was different, though, palpably so, and she didn't want anything to do with it. It lay, at least, a bit off the path, but it was still within sight and she would hurry her pace just to cross it quickly and leave it behind as soon as was possible. She heard whispers from it, but not in any way that she would admit to. It called out to her, telling her just how out of the ordinary it was. And she didn't like it. She didn't like what she felt spilling from it, radiating out from it like gnarled roots veined from the center of the place in all directions.

It wasn't long before things had changed, and there was no reason to traverse the path anymore. Lyra moved far away from the woods, the dirt road and the eerie grove of trees that gave her such discomfort. She ended her youth in a place where grass was replaced by concrete and trees were torn down to make way for steel and glass. There was no worry of survival in that place. Everything was easy and brightly lit. Everything was stripped of its hardship and coated in glossy paint and chrome. There was nothing to run from on the sidewalk, no midnight stalking beasts to hunt her down. She became accustomed to the suburbs and she forgot about the thatch of trees that inordinately worried her as a child.

Nostalgia is powerful, though, and Lyra found herself, many years later, desiring to revisit a childhood spent in a different sort of place. She remembered the way there better than she thought she would, and on a vacation from her world, she reentered the forest that she walked through as a little girl.

The path was still there and so were the feelings of dread. It was a backwards comfort, but a comfort all the same to know that those lost worries still had a home inside her. It was dark as she crossed the path, looking up at the moonlight shredded by black limbs and fractals of fluttering leaves. She was nervous and elated, moving with catlike precision through the forest as her heart began beating crazily near that enchanted grove of birch and beech trees that had so unnervingly traumatized her as a child.

And then she went into a sort of trance.

Moving from the path, called into the woods, Lyra flitted like a faerie spirit, light on her feet and nearly floating to that strange congregation of trees. What had frightened her before now spoke to her, called to her, lured her in like a siren song. She smiled as it happened. She was surprised by it, surprised by herself and not at all aware of the blue fog that poured in as she entered the grove.

And Lyra is here, amongst those trees, watching blinking, disembodied eyes and realizing just how magic this place really is. The eerie sawblade fanfare sways her and her dark hair blows about in a warm and pleasant breeze. It's all very sedate, very lush and unreal. She feels wonderful, here, as if she'd been waiting to be here for her whole life. Crickets chirp over the wobbling notes of the unseen music. The fog swirls prettily around her. The eyes keep blinking.

"You've been away so long," the eyes blink. "But you've returned to us."

And Lyra knows that this is right. She was of this place. She was born in this thatch of trees and ousted into a world of mundane threat and dull innovation. The circumstances elude her, but the eyes are blinking the truth to her. She wonders, now, at her fear as a child, at the misplaced terror that accompanied this magic spot. It was the fear she felt upon exile, she realizes, the fear of being tossed into that monochromatic world... it was tethered, in her mind, to her birthplace, her magic home. She feels silly, embarrassed... but only a touch. She is too happy at her return to feel much else at all.

"Welcome back," the eyes blink.

Lyra takes off her shoes, then, and lets her feet sink into the soft earth. She feels so alive, so perfect. The unseen music hits a crescendo, and Lyra lifts her lithe arms upward, into the bustling leaves of the birch and beech trees. She lets the leaves touch her palms and an electric trill crackles down her spine, down her thighs, into her ankles and deep into the ground. She is connected. Rooted. Her dark hair grows, a wild thing now alive and moving of its own volition. She smiles and sighs as tendrils of it wrap around her, silken and soft. She builds, for herself, a cocoon from her own slinking hair. She is mummified in it, wholly entombed by herself. And inside, she is still smiling, still sighing. Hair snakes from the base of her, from her bound ankles, and it crawls up the side of a leaning birch. It creeps along a low hanging branch and wraps itself, tight, against the papery bark. With a quick jerk, Lyra is pulled, feet first and upside down, hung from the branch and still swaying to the dying, unseen music. She is nestled, there in her cocoon, purring and content. Her eyes shut and she dips into a serene lulled slumber.

Where she awakens isn't mundane in the least.