Her feet lifted off the ground.
The elves gasped from afar, though none dared to interfere. The branch's touch was warm, the texture smooth as silk despite its bark-like form. It carried her upward, through a curtain of glowing leaves that shimmered with emerald light, and as she rose higher, the world below grew distant, blurred into abstraction.
Then came the pull, gentle but absolute.
The light enveloped her fully, swallowing the forest, the sky, the air—everything. Her consciousness blurred for a heartbeat, and when her eyes opened again, she was no longer standing beneath the World Tree.
She was inside it.
—
It was a world of white.
Endless, blinding white.
The air shimmered faintly, and the ground under her feet was neither earth nor light; it was something in between, soft yet solid. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness, carrying through the vast expanse where no horizon existed. It was like walking through the inside of a dream.
