Undeath

Every nerve in my body screamed at me to move. To run out there. To grab a stick, a rock, to throw my whole small stupid body at the bald man and bite and scratch and kick until he went away. I was the Champion of Neverland. I was Peter Pan. I could fly!

I could fight anyone and win. I had beaten the Caterpillar King in a riddle contest and negotiated a peace treaty between the Moth Parliament and the Mermaid Collective and I was brave, I was… I was…

The back of my mind held me still.

The Architect, the quiet, clever planner, the one Shady had taught me to craft behind the front-mind’s noise to fairly defeat her at checkers rotated the situation against itself.

The Architect locked my muscles rigid against the impulse, observed the grayscale bubble and the things inside it. The way the colorless grass barely swayed inside it. The way Shady’s strength failed her. The way the black sword seemed to drink her blood.

Anti-magic. The bubble was an anti-magic field of some sort! It had to be.

Everything inside it looked reduced, flattened. Shady’s Phase-shift, her superhuman strength, her blade-claws, her telepathy, all of it was clearly useless inside the gray.

Physically, I was seven years old, mentally… somewhat older, around ten or eleven since clocks never ran forward and neither of us aged during the many months we spend on our island together during each trip.

A move made with anger would end with two dead kids instead of one.

The Architect-me made plans, coordinating the Champion’s hands like an orchestra conductor.

My hand went to my pocket. The pouch was there, tied shut with a shoelace. Inside, the dust glowed faintly amber through the leather. Caterpillar dust. Their “Chrysalis powder”. The gift from the Caterpillar Council after we helped them relocate their nursery away from the Whipping Woods pinecone fire line this week.

The pinecone chucking whip-trees were clearly not the worst thing in Neverland.

“Three pinches,” the eldest caterpillar had told me, his fat green body curled around a hookah made from a hollowed, giant acorn. “Three pinches and you’ll fly like the first thought of morning. Five to seven pinches and you’ll turn into a butterfly. Never do five. I hate butterflies. Pretentious winged idiots. You’ll probably become a moth with your dark hair and white skin, though… which is even worse.”

I silently untied the pouch.

Shady was on the ground. She was still alive, moving slightly, hands clutching her throat, legs twitching.

Three pinches. I dusted myself, head to toe, and felt the weight leave my body, my hair floating upward.

The bald man was now crouched over Shady, one knee on the gray grass, examining her face the way a mad scientist studies a specimen. He hadn’t noticed me. He had no reason to. I was a human child in the bushes, a magicless creature, invisible and silent.

The Architect calculated line of sight and trajectory angles. 

The bubble had a boundary. Inside it, magic died. Outside, Neverland rules applied. The cliff edge was around twenty paces behind the bald dastardly pirate, where the meadow ended and the world dropped away into the cloud-sea below the floating island Shady and I named “Shadashia”.

The fall was long, possibly endless.

The caterpillar dust was Neverland magic, bound to my body, existing outside the grayscale until I entered it. I wouldn’t need magic inside the bubble. I would need… momentum. All of it.

I jumped.

The dust flashed, melting into my skin and I thought of happy memories and rose, silent, arcing above the treeline in a wide curve. The wind of Neverland’s undying autumn carried me, leaves spiraling in my wake. Below, the bald man remained fixated on Shady, reaching for something in his plain satchel. He exhumed a crystal vial filled with gray fluid.

“The truth potion will make you speak of the gate,” he stated coldly, uncorking the vial and pouring it down on Shady’s bleeding neck.

I curved my arc, adjusting with arms spread. The Champion wanted to scream a battle cry. The Architect kept my jaw clamped.

There would be no warning, no announcement, no dramatic declarations of justice. Only my weight, pointed in the right direction.

I tucked my knees, angled my descent, and dropped out of the sky at full acceleration.

The grayscale boundary hit me like plunging into ice water. Color drained from my skin and clothes in a flash. The caterpillar dust stopped making me weightless instantly, its amber glow snuffed, and gravity reclaimed me with a vicious yank.

I had roughly half a second of momentum left.

Small feet wrapped in sneakers connected with the bald man’s right shoulder blade. Hard rubber soles that Grandpa Archie had bought from the Sears catalog because “children need proper arch support.”

Proper arch support transferred fifty five pounds of airborne me into a single concentrated kick.

The man pitched forward with a yelp, head turning to glare at me. His arms flailed, the black blade spinning from his grip, skittering across the grass. He stumbled one step, two, his heel catching on the lip of the cliff edge.

For a second or two, he hung there. Arms windmilling. Gray eyes finding mine for the first and only time. They expressed surprise, maybe. Or irritation. The annoyance of being undone by a child.

Then the cliff won.

He tipped forward and plummeted into the cloud-sea with a howl, robes fluttering, gray body shrinking away. 

The grass at my feet once again turned extra-vibrant emerald. The trees became bright with autumn oranges.

The black sword lay in the grass like a poisoned snake. I kicked it over the cliff edge too, not wanting to touch it. Good riddance to evil pirate mojo.

I ran to Shady.

She was on her back. The white dress was soaked through, purple-violet from collar to hem. Her small hands were pressed against her throat, dark fingers slick, and the blood kept coming, pulsing between her claws in slow, thick waves. Silver eyes found me, wide and glassy. The star-freckles darkened and winked away one by one.

“Ashy,” she gurgled out. Bubbles of violet formed and popped at the edges of the wound. “Ashy, m’okay, m’okay, listen…”

“You are definitely… NOT okay!” I dropped to my knees beside her, hands hovering uselessly over the gash. The cut was deep. Deep enough that I could see dark, violet-red muscle and torn veins beneath. The blood wasn’t slowing. “Shady! Shady, stay awake, I’ll get the caterpillars, maybe they have healing dust or something, I’ll…”

“Bracelet.” She coughed. Purple flecked her lips. “Ashy. My bracelet. You… you gotta take it. Take it to Archie. D-don… don’t touch my blood, it’s poison. Deadliest poison for anyone ever when it blooms… Going to b… bloom soon. I ccc-can fff-eel it coming. That blade did ssss… something. Fucked up my insides bad. So bad. S-sliced through magic. Heart isn’t moving, the cut isn’t healing… going to m-melt… it hurts… damn.”

“What are you TALKING about?” Tears were blurring my vision, hot and furious, streaming down my face and dripping onto her dress. “You need a doctor! A healer… moth! Something!”

“Will not die,” she wheezed. Her right hand left her throat, slick with violet, and pawed the ground weakly. Shady’s fingers were never weak. She could bend steel pipes and juggle boulders and once she ripped a tree stump out of the ground because it was ‘in the way of our picnic blanket.’ “I… will not truly die, Ashy. I… I will come back. P-promise. My family have… an… incarnator. Take. The… bracelet.”

“You’re LYING, people don’t come back from… from…”

“M’ not people.” A horrible, violet-soaked smile. More violet bubbles all over. “M’ a Frontenachii Pri… Primaborn Princess. Princesses don’t die. S’in the rules.”

I didn’t believe her. How could I? She was bleeding out in front of me, alien blood turning the grass deep, sparkly purple, eyes dimming, voice getting smaller. She was dying. My best friend was dying in a meadow of golden and ruby grass under the living face-sun of Neverland and I couldn’t do anything ‘cus I was only seven years old and…

Then, she looked at me VERY sternly and… I believed her. 

At least the Architect part of me did. If Shady promised it with that extra-serious look, then that’s how it would be. Panic was unproductive.

Her left arm rose, shaking. 

Her jaws opened, rows of sharp teeth suddenly looking way too big for her small face and she bit down on her own forearm. The crack of bone was truly horrid. She bit through fur and skin and muscle with a single clench, severing tendons, grinding through the ulna.

A scream tore out of her, choked and gargled through the blood in her throat. She wrenched her head sideways and the arm separated just above the wrist, ragged, brutal, a self-inflicted amputation performed by a child on herself.

She tore a black bracelet off her severed arm and licked it clean of her blood. She threw it at me. “Here.”

It was a band of hexagonal black plates interlocking like honeycomb.

“TAKE IT,” Shady screamed through the blood, violet tears streaming from her dimming eyes. “TAKE IT TO ARCHIE. HE’LL KNOW. HE’LL KNOW WHAT IT IS. GO. GO GO GO!”

I grabbed the bracelet. My fingers slipped on the hexagons, fumbling it slightly.

“Shady, I can’t leave you here!”

“GO! Run ASHY! Run before I turn inside out! M-my ss-soul’s in… the… bracelet.”

Her eyes closed and then she stilled.

I stared at her for a few seconds, unable to move from the spot I occupied.

Shady’s body suddenly began to warp and boil.

It started at the wound on her throat. The violet blood darkened, turning black, then blacker, a void spreading outward from the gash. Her skin rippled. Bubbles formed beneath the fur, swelling and popping, releasing wisps of dancing shadows. Her remaining arm twisted at an angle arms shouldn’t achieve, bones cracking audibly, fingers elongating, becoming longer, sharper… horribly wrong.

I scrambled backward, bracelet clutched to my chest.

Tentacles of pure darkness detonated from Shady’s small body, lashing outward in every direction. They weren’t tentacles exactly. They were… folds. The space around her was folding, creasing, collapsing inward like origami made of liquid nightmares. Trees bent toward her. Grass and little pebbles ripped from the earth and spiraled into the growing, flailing void. The golden autumn light warped, stretched, broke apart into prismatic fragments sucked toward the center of the collapse.

A sound accompanied the Shady-black hole. 

Low and vast, deeper than possible, vibrating my insides, like a whale cry turned inside out, amplified times a million. 

I ran, taking off, the caterpillar flying dust accelerating me through the trees and into the sky.

Guess I didn’t even need happy thoughts to fly.

Behind me, the meadow groaned. The sound chased me, getting louder, the ground weeping, trees cracking and falling and being swallowed by the nightmarish fold.

I flew through the Whipping Woods. Above the Caterpillar Council chamber. Past the Mermaid Cove. The entire eastern quadrant of Neverland felt like it was caving in, trees bending below me, reality origami-ing into a singularity centered on one dead seven-year-old Wendigo girl.

The fae circle was suddenly ahead. The ring of pale mushrooms and luminous stones on the hill below the Rainbow Bridge. 

The Door out.

I landed with a crash, gasping, lungs burning, legs and arms jelly, face streaked with tears and snot and ran down the mossy rocks.

The mushrooms glowed faintly. The air inside the circle shimmered with a familiar half-there, half-gone quality of a gate between two places.

And… sitting in the center of the circle, cross-legged, scowling, picking bark off a half-dead tree and carefully pressing it against her body like fitting pieces of armor, was Shady.

Her little antlers flickered with blue and violet stars, the feathered mane tangled and wild, and she was assembling… a dress from strips of bark, leaves, and the stringy inner fibers of a cedar branch. She’d managed to cover roughly forty percent of herself with the improvised outfit. 

She looked up at me. Silver, irate eyes. Star-freckled cheeks. Four limbs, all attached, no throat wound, no monstrous void-tentacles.

“Sup,” she said flatly.

I stared at her.

“You… you…”

“Died? Yep. I did.” She sniffed herself, wrinkling her nose. “How long was I gone?”

“Twenty minutes? Maybe?” My voice cracked. “You… you freaking DIED, Shady! The evil, bald pirate cut your throat and you… made me take your bracelet and then you EXPLODED and the entire forest meadow collapsed into itself and there were void TENTACLES and-”

“Tentacles? Ewwness.” She adjusted the bark-dress. “S’this thing stay on if I stand up, d’you think?”

“ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ASKING ABOUT YOUR OUTFIT RIGHT NOW?”

“Uhh… yeah? Am basically naked due to dress loss, Ashy. Them’s the priorities. Can’t look unpresentable in front of my cute Champion.”

My legs gave out and I slumped down in the mushroom ring, the adrenaline crash hitting me like a bus packed full of passenger-emotions. My hands shook. My eyes burned from tears. Everything in me wanted to grab her and never let go and also yell at her until my voice gave out.

“You… came back,” I said, panting.

“Told ya, I would.” She stood up. The bark dress held, mostly. One panel flapped open on the left side. She slapped it back up with her tail. “Princesses don’t get to die.”