Dragon Hunter

Chapter 34: Lost

The dragon hunter barely had time to register the words before his entire body was filled to overflowing with the pins and needles sensation of returning circulation and numbed nerves reawakening. Every centimeter of skin, muscle, guts, and even his bones erupted with furious burning and itching. Cooper tried to scream again, this time against the tingling sensation in an attempt to somehow force it to fade. Only to find the sensation had stolen his voice.

Just when he thought he would go insane from the manic tingling, there was a soft multi-tonal chime of music. Then a cooling rush washed over him and the maddening tingling was gone.

"What ...?" he began thickly, his voice suddenly his to control once more, his eyes blinking rapidly to clear his blurred vision.

"What the fuck was that??"

"That was your body reassembling itself on that coherence disc," the alien voice replied in an almost off-hand manner. "Particle by particle, pulled from the echo of an echo, to be reconstructed right down to the last flake of skin and sticky tear before your essence is forcefully reunited with it."

One last blink then Cooper could see, his vision filling with worn gray stone etched with unrecognizable symbols. Symbols that were just starting to lose the golden light they had been filled with.

"Reassembled?? Where?" Cooper asked with a voice that was still reluctant to work.

"Ah, now that's the question, isn't it? This place has many names, usually given by some religious sort that thinks they've glimpsed the true after life ..."

"WHERE??" Cooper snarled as a surge of anger and frustration rushed through him.

"Ahem. No need to be rude," the voice replied. "Those that live here, call it the Eternal Forest."

"The Eternal Forest," the human repeated hoarsely. "And just how the exact fuck did I get here?"

"Got yourself banished, if I were to guess," the voice said.

"Banished?" Cooper thickly repeated before coughing and clearing his throat.

"Indeed. Pushed by powerful magic out of the realm you were just in and into this one."

"The Garden," Cooper said with a grimace. He then turned his head to look in the speaker's direction. And, for the briefest of moments he saw what appeared to be a blue blob of gelatin hanging suspended in a cocoon of billowing white clouds.

"Oops," the blob said before the space in front of Cooper's face swam with more golden symbols to the point they obscured his vision of the blue mass.

Cooper tried staring through them to get more detail. But the harder he looked, the more his eyes wanted to shut. Until, with a shiver that went through his entire body, his eyelids slammed down with almost palpable force.

Thankfully they weren't forced to stay closed by whatever magic closed them and they immediately flew open again. To a view radically different from the one dominated by the blue blob and billowing white clouds.

From his kneeling, head-turned viewpoint, all Cooper could see were the trees. Giants that reached kilometers into the sky, their roots hidden beneath a thick layer of mist, or fog that moved as if it were alive. Their canopies, when not hidden in the clouds themselves, were dozens of kilometers wide, vast umbrellas of emerald green through which multiple light sources shone through to throw the whole scene into an early morning level of illumination.

"What the actual fuck!?" he muttered as he tried to wrap his mind around just how vast and expansive the giant forest stretching out in every direction actually was. Tried and failed.