This first instalment is world building. It’ll heat up, I promise.
——————–
The world was sideways, and half buried in darkness. He stared lazily out across the flat white expanse that seemed to stretch for hundreds of metres into the distance. He blinked and stirred, lifting his left cheek and opening his other eye, the world now righting itself and emptying itself of the darkness he had seen with half his face buried in the night’s snowfall. He leaned on his left elbow, seeing now that he was catching snow as it fell, and that it blanketed him in a white haze.
He pressed his back into the tree behind him, feeling the ridges and grooves press through the fabric caught between he and it, savouring the massaging pressures and sturdiness of it against him as the first haptic deliverance of the day. The enormous oak that he had picked for the night’s slumber was ancient and wide. At its spreading base, it was covered with leaves and creased gnarls that were impossible to distinguish as being either part of the tree itself or whole other beings that had clung to the tree as a life force and grown on their own from its enormous girth, parasites on its tenebrous body. It was cloudy above, with the morning light of the sun being so crushed into obscurity that the light was dull and hoary. He felt the softest breath of breeze against his newly bared left cheek.