The Territorial

It was the last day of Autumn, and you watched as the final leaf fell from the tree in your yard, towards the grass, and then everything shifted. You didn’t notice it right away.

It began in the small ways, the quiet wrongness of air and light. The crisp scent of dying leaves faded into something sterile, like dust in a long-forgotten room. The color drained from the world.

The golds, reds, and browns of Autumn dulled into gray, and the sound of the wind stopped. Not slowed, stopped.

You blinked, half-convinced it was some trick of the eye, a passing cloud, or a dizzy spell. But when you opened your eyes again, the leaf you’d watched drop was suspended in midair, inches above the ground.

Then, the ground itself rippled. It was as if the lawn were no longer solid matter but a reflection cast on water.

The grass undulated in smooth, oily waves, yet no sound accompanied the motion. You should have felt the vibration through your shoes, but you felt nothing at all.

The silence was complete, suffocating. And then, just as suddenly, the leaf finished its descent.

When it touched the ground, everything snapped back into place. The world regained its color, the breeze returned, and sound came rushing in with the faint creak of tree limbs and the far-off drone of traffic.

You exhaled a breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding, but there was something new in the air, a low hum, deep enough that you felt it in your chest more than you heard it. It seemed to come from the ground itself, pulsing in slow, rhythmic intervals, like the beating of an enormous heart buried beneath the soil.

You told yourself you were imagining it. You went inside, made tea, tried to shake off the sensation that the world had hiccupped. The kettle whistled, the light flickered, and for a while, you managed to forget.

Until that night.

You woke to the sound of rustling outside your window. The wind was still, yet the tree moved violently, its branches swaying and twitching in erratic spasms. The moonlight painted the bark silver, but the color seemed to crawl, as though the light itself were alive, slipping over the surface like liquid mercury.

You should have looked away. You didn’t.

You saw the tree breathe.

The trunk expanded and contracted with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The bark flexed as skin stretched over muscle.

You stumbled backward from the window, knocking over the lamp. When you dared to look again, the tree was perfectly still.

But the leaves, those few that remained, were gone.

You stepped outside before you could talk yourself out of it. The air was heavy, electric, as though a storm were about to break.

The grass beneath your feet pulsed faintly with the same rhythm as the hum from before. It was stronger now, and you realized it wasn’t just under the tree, but everywhere.

You crouched, pressing your hand to the ground. It was warm and alive.

The moment your skin made contact, the world tilted. You fell, but not downward. It felt like falling sideways, through layers of thin, invisible fabric that peeled back as you passed through them.

There was no sound. No air.

Only motion and light, a light that wasn’t light at all but a color you couldn’t name, something your eyes could see but your mind refused to process. It filled everything, this color-that-was-not-a-color, and within it, shapes moved, vast, slow, deliberate.

You caught only fragments: the curve of something impossibly large, a glimmer like scales that weren’t scales, the suggestion of countless eyes, or maybe just the illusion of them, blinking in unison. And then a voice, not spoken, not heard, but understood, unfurled inside your mind.

You have seen the ending before it began.

The words were meaningless and yet absolute. You wanted to ask what it meant, to scream, to wake up, but the concept of a body, of a voice, of you, no longer seemed real. You become folded into something larger, drawn into the pulse of that color, that rhythm, that infinite hum.

Then, as abruptly as it began, you were back.

On the grass. Beneath the tree.

Morning sunlight filtered through bare branches. The hum was gone, the warmth had vanished, and everything looked ordinary again.

But when you stood, the grass where your hand had touched was blackened. Not burned, exactly, but void of color, the pigment erased.

You’ve tried to tell yourself it was a dream. A hallucination. Sleep paralysis, maybe, but every day since, you’ve noticed the same thing happen to others.

Trees gone bare too soon. Leaves frozen in midair for an impossible second before dropping. People pausing in the street, their faces tilted skyward, eyes wide and unblinking as though hearing something only they can detect.

The hum is faint now, almost imperceptible. You only notice it when the world grows quiet.

But the seasons haven’t changed. The air is still cool, the light still gold. The calendar insists it’s winter now, but the trees disagree, like it’s still the last day of Fall.

And that leaf, the one that fell, —is still there in the grass, untouched, unmoving, waiting for something you can no longer name.