...
A kaleidoscope of colours streamed through my head the moment I gulped it down. The sky turned purple. No blue. No Green.
Prismatic and nauseating, everything I saw turned into the sheen off of an oil spill.
The sound of the gluttonous voice boomed in my head, reverberated, was altered and finally pitched down as if the voice as on autotune.
'I'm hallucinating...' I thought as I instantly regretted my decision.
Shadows. Rainbows. Snails. Clouds. Spiders. Trees. Bushes. Everything fused together and floated. They separated and came back together into an amorphous blob.
My whole sense of what was around me suddenly disappeared as my senses betrayed me.
Thud.
My head hit something hard as I slumped against the bark of the branch.
I was out.
I saw nothing.
Just black.
A complete blackness? Did I die? No. There was a light... Like I was being reincarnated I saw a small light. A dim light shone through the darkness.
It was familiar. Like a modified version of my personal mental world.
The floor was black like before, but the light didn't seem to come down from the ceiling anymore but in front of me.
'Interesting.' I thought as I looked towards the light as it gestured towards me. With nowhere to go, I moved towards its beckoning call.
Seconds passed and it didn't take long for me to slide up to and reach the light - to reach her.
Shining in the darkness like nothing had happened, as she didn't die, she stood there and waited.
Glowing warmly, the ancient snail stood there and glared at me. Was she massive? No. She was tiny. Like she shrunk her size to mine, she stood there in all her glory like she was a soul that was visiting me from the afterlife.
Her eyes, yellow and bright, continued to stare at me - staring straight through me and into my soul. I quivered a little as I mustered my confidence and approached her.
"Hello, ancestor," I called out.
Nothing happened. Silence. She didn't speak nor move. A statue made of glowing light.
I slid around her as I started to investigate.
'This just doesn't make sense.' It thought as I observed her.
Her eyes moved. They followed me. Like she was frozen within a block of ice, she remained still but continued to stare at me from within her prison.
Chills. Chills different from coolness entered my body as I heard a whisper.
"Child." the voice started.
I felt it deep within my soul and it shook me to the core.
"Child." It whispered quicker.
"Yes, ancestor?" I asked nervously as it was getting out of hand.
"Child... Child... Child... CHILD! CHILD! CHILD!" it continued. Coming from all directions, her whispers quickly turned into shouts that boomed into my head and shook the floor.
And then she just stopped.
Like she hit the 500 character limit on webnovel.com, she didn't continue.
Instead, she moved.
Like a stalking spectre, she disappeared and reappeared as she approached me.
I ran.
I didn't know what to do as she chased me from behind.
I looked back. Her eyes locked onto me and continued to stare. Reading her eyes, it looked like her goal was me and she needed to reach me.
'What did the ancient one say... memory? She'll show me the memory?' I asked myself as I slid away from her as quickly as I could. 'Why am I running then?'
The whole situation was abnormal and I didn't realize that I was just wasting time.
Sliding to a halt, I stopped.
Teleporting she phased directly on to my body.
It was warm... strangely pleasant.
Suddenly it got bright... brighter. The world turned bright. Brighter than anything that I had ever seen.
...
And I wasn't there anymore. I wasn't in the dark room anymore.
"Welcome child, welcome to the past." The ancient snail's voice said while the light that blocked my vision dimmed.
The hidden world behind the light revealed itself before me.
Blue, a wide blue sky appeared overhead. Green. the green so young field tall grasses. Small cracks and the sounds of chirping entered my head as the calls of beasts and insects cried in in the distance.
Like I had been teleported, I was now in the middle of a field. But it was different.
I floated in the middle of the sky like I was some sort of overlord in this new world... but it wasn't a new world.
I knew that it was familiar. The smaller bushes in the distance. The crater of a lake. The edges of the mountains. It was definitely my world, my forest... but it was just a little younger - just a memory of the past.
"Hundreds of years ago... there wasn't a forest where you were born." The ancient snail's voice began. "No... there were only fields... and an ancient tree." the ancient snail narrated.
Instantly the ground seemed to shift beneath me as I was moved toward the centre of our valley.
The crater of creation... some of the ancients had said... and at its centre lied a gigantic tree. Spanning from the ground straight through the clouds and into the sky it stood there like it had been there from the beginning.
Thousands of its twisted roots and branches stretched through the lands. Different creatures big and small lived under it... on its leaves, between its branches and on its leaves. Nothing was chaotic. And everything was peaceful.
It was different for sure.
I could faintly feel like it was home. Deep down I felt warm when I got closer to it. I felt at peace myself.
"The tree has lasted through the ages. It had always been here. Through the annals of history, it continued to stand... it takes from the land... gives to the creatures. Nurturing... it continued to nurture our valley as it grew and so did we." The ancient voice continued.
Slowly the tree shifted and the sky grew dark and bright rapidly. As if we were going forwards in time, the stars and the sky shifted into daylight only to be replaced on more by the night's sky.
Minutes seemed to pass until it finally stopped.
"And this is where your mother was born."
The voice paused for a moment.
"Child. This is the story of your mother and the destruction of our World Tree."
...