The Silent Forest

The forest on the surface is unnaturally quiet. No insect song, no birds, no breathing rhythm of any large animal—the background noise a mature ecosystem ought to have is simply absent.

Stranger still are the plants themselves. Every leaf sways in too-perfect synchrony, as if directed by a single thing rather than blown each on its own by the wind.

The forest is not dead. It moves—but the way it moves does not look like many lives each living on their own. It looks more like one vast thing, breathing evenly.