Fort Bladecross

The fort we built in the library as kids.

It was still intact. Upgraded from its smaller, cardboard frame when we were nine.

Wool blankets, navy, forest green, silver stars on gray, white and purple curtains and sheets were draped over a framework of broomsticks and mop handles, all lashed together with… shoelaces and zip-ties. The structure sagged dramatically in the middle, one corner supported by a massive stack of hardcover encyclopedias. A faded “KEEP OUT - PRINCESS PIPPI & ADMINISTRATOR ONLY” sign, written in colorful markers on construction paper, hung from the entrance flap held by several metal pins.

Shady made a small sound beside me, a purr entwined with a whine that escalated into a far too cute and happy “Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

We approached the tent slowly with reverence, as if moving too fast might collapse the fragile architecture of childhood memories surrounding it. I crouched down and lifted the entrance flap.

Inside was exactly as we’d left it thirteen years ago. Untouched by time. 

“Boy am I glad grandad never bothered cleaning this up.” I smiled.

“Me… too.” Shaddy nodded.

The interior of the tent wobbled my soul in unexpected ways, each item within jostling a long forgotten memory that detonated like fireworks from another happier, simpler place and time.

A nest of old pillows, flattened slightly. A red flashlight with dead batteries. A plastic crown with fake rubies. Dog-eared books in messy stacks. Crayon and marker drawings pinned to the blanket walls, depicting stick figures fighting dragons, exploring caves, and riding clouds. 

One large drawing showed a dark figure with little antlers holding hands with a brown-haired human boy. Written in slightly wobbly handwriting: “BEST FRENS FOREVAH!” A Dagaz rune behind the pair was drawn with a dark green marker.

A string of Christmas lights, long dead, was looped through the broomstick rafters.

“It’s so small,” Shady murmured.

“We were small.” I crawled inside. The pillows wheezed dust. The tent creaked ominously above me. I fit somewhat okay, knees drawn up, back against the encyclopedia stack.

Shady tried to follow. Her antlers immediately caught on the broomstick framework, almost collapsing the entire structure.

“Hold on, hold on,” she muttered, tucking her antlers sideways, then phasing them into shadows one arm braced against the blanket ceiling. She squeezed through the entrance like a Great Dane attempting to use a cat flap.

Her knee landed on my thigh. An elbow found my ribs. One antler failed to phase and snagged the Christmas lights. She tried to adjust, overcorrected, and fell directly on top of me.

“Oof.”

“Ouch.”

“Ugh, your tent is too smol for my bigness.”

“MY tent? You helped build Fort Bladecross.”

“I provided the VISION! You provided the labour and shoelace and broom engineering. I blame your structural calculations and lack of ahead-planning for this.”

“Yeah, okay.” I rolled my eyes at her. “Was I supposed to know that my human-sized, skinny bestie was going to turn into a freaking…”

“Bootilicious babe,” she finished for me, squirming and trying to find a position where her slightly flickering antlers weren’t perforating the blanket walls. 

The solution, apparently, was to lie fully on top of me, chin on my chest, antlers extending past my head on either side like a bony crown.

Her weight was warm, heavy and familiar. The incredibly soft fuzz of her cheeks brushed my jaw. Silver eyes and the constellation-forehead and cheeks glowed and sparkled inches from my face in the incredibly dim tent.

“Hi,” she said softly.

“Hi.”

“We’re in our fort.”

“We are.”

“Thirteen years.” She breathed out. “Eeeeee.”

“Shady.”

“Mm?”

“I missed you. So much. More than anything in the universe.”

My best friend’s eyes went wide at the confession looking like full moons of luminous silver.

“I missed you too, dummy,” she said. “Every single day. Missed you even when I didn’t remember who I was missing. So hard. The hardest.”

“Nu. I missed you more.” I reached out towards her face.

We started gentle and tentative. Jet-black lips formed over sharp teeth and found mine and… for a moment I lost myself in the rain of kisses.

Then a buzz and flicker interrupted our fun.

Above us, the string of long dead Christmas lightbulbs ignited. 

One by one, they stammered to life, each tiny bulb blinking like a startled firefly. Red, blue, green, gold. They had no business working. 

The long dead flashlight below flickered to life too, projecting a lopsided cutout of an antlered girl onto a wall, batman-summoning style.

It was as if, they simply… remembered. The string swayed gently as the broomstick frame creaked, casting colored light across the crayon drawings, the faded pillows, the construction paper signs, and a human boy and a wendigo girl tangled together in the ruins of a childhood that refused to end.

Shady’s tail curled around my ankle. Rubber-soft claws cradled the back of my head. I held onto her antlers and pulled her deeper into another kiss. Her tongue invaded my mouth.

The lights grew brighter. The tent fabric billowed as if caught in a warm breeze from somewhere far away. Colors I didn’t have names for danced in the weave of the old blankets like water caustics. For a moment, the entire library smelled like autumn leaves, sea salt and cotton-clouds.

The tent seemed to grow around us, space expanding. The pillows became softer, fluffier, the broom handles thickened.

“Always and forever,” Shady let out, peppering me with kisses and small bites. “Together forevah. Me and you. Back home… Eeeeeee!”

“Back home,” I let out, kissing her, eyes throbbing slightly from happy tears. “My Pippi. My Princess of Fort Bladecross.”

“My Peter Pan. My Ashikins. My stick knight.”

More kisses. Shady panting, mewling above me. Fox eyes flickering inside of the x-mas light bulbs, Sage and others probably watching us from wherever they were now.

When we finally broke apart, both breathing hard, the lights dimmed to a steady, soft glow. A tiny constellation strung across the ceiling of a collapsing blanket fort.

“Mmmmm,” Shady exhaled, silver eyes reflecting every color. “Waaaay better than licking the door.”

“Such a high standard.”

“The highest.” She bumped her forehead against mine, antlers framing my face. “Ashy?”

“Yeah?”

“The books. Are our books… here?”

Right. The mission.

“Probably. Get off my chest so I can look.”

We untangled ourselves with the grace of two drunken college students trying to solve a physical puzzle inside a phone booth. Shady’s antlers snagged the lights twice, one of her horns caught the “BEST FRENS” drawing and almost tore it, and my elbow knocked over a stack of picture books that created a miniature avalanche.

Eventually, I ended up on Shady’s lap, surrounded by the various debris of our childhood.

The Pippi Longstocking book sat where we abandoned it thirteen years ago, wedged between a Choose Your Own Adventure and a dog-eared copy of “The Phantom Tollbooth.” The spine was cracked, the cover stained with potentially ancient peanut butter or possibly enchanted tree sap. Colorful paint bits decorated the edges.

I exhumed the book from its resting place and smiled when I saw the cover.

The body and red hair of Pippi was fully drawn over with a black marker, blessed with antlers and dark feathers. Glitter was smeared across the dark face and forehead via liberal use of a glue stick. Only Pippi’s patchwork dress survived the makeover.

“Definitely your handiwork,” I said, smiling at the modded art and glitter.

“Yus. Pippi needed more pizzazz.”

I opened the old book. Pages riffled past, each one annotated in two sets of handwriting. Mine was small and neat, even for a kid. Shady’s was large, crooked and contained approximately zero respect for margins. She’d modified nearly every illustration, drawn antlers on every manifestation of Pippi and added speech bubbles saying things like “FEAR ME” and “needs more swords.”

The Peter Pan book sat beneath it, in slightly better condition. A green hardcover with gold lettering. Inside the front cover, my grandfather or perhaps someone else had written “Property of Archibald J. Clifford” in elegant cursive, and beneath it, in crayon: “ALSO PROPERTY OF SHADY AND ASH. DO NOT STEAL OR ELSE DEATH.”

I chortled at the “death” promise and opened it to the middle. Several sheets of folded paper fell out.

I unfolded the largest one. The creases were deep, the paper yellowish and fragile, a watercolor sheet. On it, in colored pencil and markers, was a map.

MY map.

Drawn with the obsessive hyperactive-ness of my kid self given unlimited art supplies by his grandfather and an imaginary… or perhaps real world to chart.

Neverland. Our island in Neverland.

It came flooding back.

The coastline drawn in careful blue pencil, every bay and inlet labeled. “Mermaid Cove (DO NOT SWIM)” in my handwriting. “Nu. Actually swim here, feesh-peeps are cool,” in Shady’s. The mountain range across the northern edge, peaked in white crayon, labeled “Cloud Mountains.” A forest covering the eastern half, individual trees painstakingly drawn. “Whispering Woods - Moths Live Here.” The central plains dotted with landmarks: “Rainbow Bridge,” “Pirate sky-ship wreck,” “Caterpillar Council Chamber,” “Pippi’s Stronghold,” “Fort Neverdie”. “THE ISLE OF SHADASHIA” in bold, written below the map.

And in the southeast corner, circled three times in red crayon with an arrow pointing to it:

“THE DOOR IN/OUT. DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT SHADY. ~A”

Beneath the circled words, in Shady’s handwriting:

“Yes. Together only. ~S”

I stared at the map. The Christmas lights flickered above us like candlelight.

I suddenly remembered drawing this. Every line. Every label. The afternoon sun through the library windows. Shady hovering over my shoulder, adding her own annotations, arguing about the placement of Mermaid Cove, insisting the Caterpillar Council deserved a bigger building.

And I remembered, with a sudden, breathtaking clarity that the antipsychotics buried for a decade… the day when we met the pirate and the day when… Shady died in my arms.

His skin was porcelain-white, slightly cracked at the edges like old pottery left too long in the sun. Every visible inch of him was in grayscale, as if someone had drained the color from a photograph and poured the remnants into the shape of a half-dead, skeletal man. A black spiral with a stylized eye decorated his glistening forehead.

He stood inside a bubble of monochrome air, a sphere roughly ten paces across where the autumn reds and golds of Neverland simply ceased to exist. Grass turned to ash-gray stubble at the boundary. The leaves on the trees nearest to him were silver.

Bald. Gaunt. Robes wrapped tight around a frame of very sharp angles of jutting bone, cloth strips bound at the wrists and ankles in the manner of an ascetic soldier, a wandering temple-keeper stripped of everything ornamental. He carried almost nothing. A cloth satchel slung across one shoulder. A length of black rope coiled at his hip. And… a blade.

The blade was the worst.

It ate light. A straight, short sword of absolute black, with a simple handle held loosely in one hand. The edge didn’t gleam like normal metal. Where steel should have caught the golden Neverland sunset, the sword simply ended, a line of absence carved into the world.

He held Shady by one small antler. She dangled, feet kicking six inches off the ground, small fists pounding against his forearm. Her white dress was torn at the hem. 

Seven-year-old Shady was all knees and elbows and oversized silver eyes in a dark little face, her feathered mane tangled with leaves and burrs from the chase. She snarled at him, showing white, sharp gremlin-teeth, snapping at his wrist and missing.

“Omnid spawnling,” the man said. His voice was flat. Colorless, like the rest of him. “Tell me the name of the Ascendant. The novitiate imbecile who let you through the gate.”

Shady spat. “I don’t KNOW any stupid Ascendant!”

“An unmarked Omnid spawnling does not stumble into Ascengard by accident.” He pulled harder on her antler, tilting her head so her neck stretched long and thin. “All of the gates to Ascengard belong to Ascendia. Some pitiful human opened a path for you. Someone with a key of the gods.”

“Lemme GO, you bald creep!”

I expected my Princess to use her incredible Pippi-strength, to throw the man down the cliffside, yet she did no such thing, seemed incapable of overpowering the skeletal baldie.

“The name.”

“My name is Princess Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii and I’m going to EAT YOUR WHOLE FACE AND YOUR STUPID ROBE AND YOUR DUMB SWORD AND YOUR UGLY HEAD AND-”

The black blade moved suddenly and with a dark purpose. The jet-black edge drew a line across Shady’s throat as if signing a legal document.

Shady let out a small whimper, eyes wide and filling with tears.

I was forty feet away, crouched in the bushes at the edge of the meadow clearing, and I saw every detail with awful hyper-clarity. The blade parting dark fur and darker skin. The seam it left behind, opening like a second mouth. 

Then the blood came. Inside the bubble, it ran black-gray and sparkling white down her chest, soaking into the white cotton dress.

Shady made a gargled, confused yelp, far more surprised than pained, as if she couldn’t quite believe someone had actually done something so brutal to her.

The man let go of her antler.

Shady crumpled. She hit the gray grass and her blood spread outward from her throat in a slow, steady tide. Where the red liquid reached the boundary of the grayscale bubble, it changed, gained colors. Gray became purple. Deep, vivid, alien purple, pooling at the edge of color and monochrome like a bruise forming at the seam of two realities.

My heart stopped.