Page 213 of Hunters and Prey

He opened his eyes.

He opened his eyes, blinking into too-bright light.

Sunlight blinded him, made him squint, even as he lifted his hands, blocking it from his face. He wondered how late he’d slept in, that so much sun was streaming through their windows. He wondered if it had already woken up Miri…

The straps were off his wrists.

He was lying on something hard.

Something that definitely wasn’t his bed.

He got his eyes all the way open. He stared up at a deep blue sky, decorated here and there with white clouds that looked like thunderheads. He blinked up at them, weirdly unconcerned with moving, at least in the first few seconds he was awake.

Slowly, he sat up.

Slowly, he looked down at his body.

He was naked.

He was also lying on a dense layer of short-bladed grass.

The grass was surprisingly soft, almost comfortable under the bare skin of his thighs and calves, despite tickling a little. It was softer than any grass he could remember sitting on, soft enough to be confusing, to make him wonder if it was really grass at all.

It was also a strange hue.

While primarily a sharp, new-growth green, the blades shone with iridescent blue where the sun hit them just right. Turning his head, he looked over the rolling hills around him, watching those highlights move like liquid under a light breeze.

The breeze was cool. He wasn’t cold, though.

For a moment he just sat there, blinking around at his surroundings.

His mind absorbed details––quietly at first, but with increasing unease.

Well… maybe not unease.

Not exactly.

He had a lot of fucking questions, though.

He stared at the line of trees that started to the right of him, rimming the edges of the soft, rolling field on which his seated form made up a small dot.

The trees were strange.

White-skinned, they had no branches on the lower two-thirds of their trunks, but scaled up, extraordinarily high, before a dense canopy erupted anywhere from forty to a few hundred feet off the ground. He stared up at those dark green canopies, noting the bluish highlights of the leaves, mirroring the tint of the grass.

Some kind of chemical reaction? An excess of chlorophyll?

He frowned up at them, wishing he’d spent more time studying botany.

He was pretty sure he was dreaming now.

It was so quiet, he could hear the grass move under that silent breeze. He could hear every one of his breaths. The steady thump of his heart behind his ribs sounded loud, oddly loud, but it didn’t bother him really.

He gazed around where he sat, and wondered what this dream was supposed to mean.

Was this peace? Was his mind giving him peace?

Pain jabbed at his hand.

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