Sunny

“I don’t understand… is… is death… not a thing here?” I stammered out. 

Shady made ponderous clicking noises. Then, she picked up a far-too brightly technicolor amber pebble containing a fat ladybug inside it, tossed it into the air, and caught it. “Maybe?”

“Maybe?!”

“S’ definitely weird, n’ stuff. No incarnator here.” She tossed the pebble again. “Yet… I died and am somehow… alive at the fae ring. So maybe…” She caught the pebble and squinted at it. “Maybe death works differently in Neverland? Or maybe the fae circle brought me back ‘cus how we set it up? Or maybe my bracelet did it?”

“Maybe you’re just too darn stubborn to stay dead,” I voiced, as my heart continued its attempts to escape out of my aching chest.

“Also a valid explanation. Smile, ma little champy, for your awesome-ness liege is fine.” She grinned with sharp teeth. “Also gimme mah bracelet back. I’m feeling kinda off without it.”

I handed her the hexagonal black bracelet and she snapped it back onto her wrist.

There was no scar on her throat. Her arm looked normal, no longer a horrific chewed-off wrist stump. She was whole and as bossy as ever.

I lunged forward and hugged her extra-hard, the bark dress cracking between us.

“Oi, Ashy, you’re squishing my bark-couture-”

“SHUT UP AND LET ME HUG YOU!” I shouted, my vision blurring from the flood of tears.

She fell silent as her dark, lanky arms circled my back. Her skull-chin hooked over my shoulder. 

“M’ sorry I scared you, Ashikins,” she let out. “I didn’t expect to die today.”

“Don’t ever do it again!”

“Can’t promise ‘dat. Local pirates are clearly mega rude. Baldie caught me couching behind a ruby-berry-bush while I was distracted with our awesome game of hide n’ seek. The gray-ness bubble ‘roun him turned off my powahs n’ skills and I couldn’t do nothin’ against him. Feh.”

“No more hide and seek in Neverland. We stay together and watch our backs. Constant vigilance.” I squeezed her harder. “We’ve been treating Neverland as a peaceful, happy place for years now, and clearly it isn’t one.”

“Yeah. Guess there are real baddies in Neverland.” She squeezed back. “With stabby swords. On other islands out thar in the Cloud Sea.”

I relaxed slightly in the cosy embrace of my death-proof best friend. The fae circle mushrooms pulsed with blue-silver light from below, mossy ground slightly wet beneath my knees. The distant rumble of the inward-warping forest had stopped. 

“Uhmmm. What was that?” I asked Shady. 

“What?”

“The… freaky blackness that came out of you that pulled the forest into itself?”

“Wendigos don’t die nicely,” she said. “We… let out the awfulness we snack on outta the voidy abyss. The more magical a place is, the more badness comes out faster.”

“You’ve got a black hole of… badness inside you? I wouldn’t have ever guessed.”

“We all do.” Shady rolled her eyes at me. “Every Omnid boy and girl turns inside out when they die, spewing a terrible, endless mess.”

Death, apparently, was merely an inconvenience in Neverland. A reset button. A brief commercial break between episodes of a children’s adventure. 

“Ashy?”

“What.”

“Your huggery is making my bark skirt fall off.”

”…”

“Ashy.” Shady released me slowly.

“Fine.” I pulled back. Parts of the bark outfit were indeed surrendering to gravity. She rapidly readjusted them, making a face.

“We should probably go tell Grandpa about the gray pirate,” I said, wiping my face on my sleeve.

“Maybe,” she replied without much commitment. “Mmmm, actually, no. I don’t want mah crazy auntie to know where we’ve been. Bleh. This bark is hekkin’ itchy in places.”

I glanced at her bracelet. Each tiny, jet black plate caught the Neverland sun and threw it back in fractured rainbows.

“What IS this magic bracelet, Shady?”

“S’ called a Lazarus bracelet. Great Granny Acony gave it to me when I was… sooper small. Said to never take it off.” She frowned. “Unless I die. Then chew it off and get it to the oldest kobold or Wendigo adult ASAP.”

“Your great granny gave you a… come-back-from-death bracelet?”

“She gave me a lot of stuff. Most of it was cool, some was weird. One time she gave me a rock and said it was a ‘compressed philosophical argument.’ Turned out to be a regular rock. Maybe she was testing if I could tell the diff’ between a magical rock and a regular one. She loves testing peeps. ‘Specially me. I’m like her fav peep to troll with unexpected tests. One time she ordered a thousand kobolds to catch me to… tie me into a pretzel. Had a bigly chase through the Citadel town. Barely got away via the Deep.”

“This one’s definitely special if it brought you back so quickly,” I said.

“Yeah.” Shady stared at it. “It do be.”

“Wait,” I said. “The awfulness from your death radiates endlessly?”

“Yeeeees,” Shady made an even more bothered face.

“Won’t that make a mess of our nice island? What’s going to happen to Shadashia’s citizens if the grabby void reaches them?”

“Uhhhh…” Shady’s black feathers splayed out like a porcupine, ears tilting back. “They will die horribly.”

“What?!”

“Yeah,” the little princess said. “When one of us… dies a Corpse Seeker contains the body so it doesn’t make a messy mess Astral Fountain.”

“We don’t have one of those on Shadashia.”

“Yeeee.”

“Shady!”

“I KNOW, I know! Lemme think!”

She paced across the mushroom ring, bark-dress creaking, claws leaving little divots in the moss.

“Okay. Okay. Diagnose. Assess.” She bit her lower lip. “Plan-a-plan.”

“Can we stop the fountain?”

“I… don’t know. It might run out of evil-juice… maybe. Or not. I don’t really know. It’s different on every world. The more magic there is, the worse the fountain gets.”

“Shady.”

“Whut.”

“We have to check on our friends.”

“Ugh, do we?”

“YES WE DO!”

“Ughhhhhh.” She flopped dramatically onto the moss, making a dark starfish. “Fine. Fine fine fine. But first… I wanna see how bad it be from… far away. ‘Cus touching that stuff is like insta-death.”

She pointed at a large tree at the edge of the fae ring, a pine we’d named Tallsy at the start of this Summer because Shady insisted every bigly thing on Shadashia deserved a name.

“You flyin’, me climbin’. Race ya.”

“I…” I let out.

She was already sprinting across the moss, claws chewing up Tallsy’s bark. I sighed, focused on a happy memory and jumped up, caterpillar flying dust igniting with orange sparks across my skin.

Shady scrambled up the trunk in quick bounds, looking like a black spider, star-tipped antlers catching and demolishing pine needles. I rose past her, past the crown of the tree, into the open air above Shadashia.

The island spread out below us.

Shadashia was roughly heart-shaped, floating in the Cloud Sea on a base of dangling roots and waterfalls that fell into the clouds below.

When my head broke above the treeline, I forgot to breathe.

The living sun-baby sat, as always, at the eastern horizon where Neverland’s eternal late-afternoon pooled into gold. Round, rosy-cheeked, eyes half-closed blinding flares, body wrapped in a toga of braided storm clouds that produced endless rains somewhere far, far away. 

In our daily excursions to Neverland, each of which lasted weeks, the sun baby had never once paid attention to us. Not when Shady and I rode giant moths across the valley. Not when we jumped off the sideways trees splashing into Mermaid Cove. Not even when we accidentally set Toadville on fire with a magnifying glass.

Now, one absolutely batshit cyclopean, glowing, golden arm hung across half the sky.

The limb was extended from somewhere inside the storm-cloud-toga. It stretched all the way across the Cloud Sea toward Shadashia. The hand at the end of it was the size of a house. Fingers the length of redwoods, each one shining from within opened wide.

Directly below the gold, glowing palm, a horrid, unnatural black wound scorched in the middle of the Sullimoth forest. Trees bent inward toward a single point, their trunks arcing in directions trees didn’t naturally arc. The ground dipped into a bowl of caved earth about a hundred paces across, the center featuring… burning, flailing darkness.

My stomach lurched. From above, it looked exactly like a meteorite crater. Except the meteor was still there, spewing out dark, two-dimensional tentacle-flames.

I could barely believe what I saw.

Sunny, named by us as such when we first saw the living sun, had moved for the first time in years and was… doing something to the Shady-death-crater.

Thin threads of blackness rose from the wound in the world, stretched upward, and poured into Sunny’s gargantuan palm. 

Below me, I heard Shady reach the top of Tallsy with a huff.

“Shades,” I called softly, worried that speaking too loud might draw the suddenly active sun-being attention to us. “Look.”

“Oh shit,” she whispered, swaying at the tip of the pine.

“Is Sunny… cleaning up your fountain thing?” I whisper-hissed back, floating closer to her.

“Looks like it,” she let out. “Welp, that’s one problem solved, I suppose.”

It took me another moment to notice that a second golden arm was moving away from Shadashia, folding back into the storm-cloud-robes like a cat’s tail drawing in. The first hand kept working, unhurried and thorough, gathering up every last strand of inverted badness into itself.

Sunny’s eyes stayed unnervingly half-closed and blank.

A cosmic being was mending the world below us, and its expression showed no interest, no satisfaction, no annoyance. Only the soft gaze of a sleepy child looking at nothing in particular.

“Is he… mad at us?” I whispered.

Shady tilted her skull-head, making little green needles rain down from her feathery mane. She squinted back at the colossal sun-baby.

“Hard to tell.”

“Shady, there’s a crater. A crater… we caused.”

“Nu-huh, Baldie caused it,” Shady stated. “I’m an innocent wendoggo. I didn’t do nothin’. I’m the victim here. Also, can’t read the room when the room has no mouth.”

Sunny indeed had no mouth on his round face.

“He is looking right through us.” I whispered. 

“He’s always looking nowhere. Maybe that’s the ‘gotta do chores’ face. Your grandmaw has that face when she does the dishes.”

“Sunny is cosmically doing the dishes?”

“Maybe. Deff’ doesn’t look mad. S’like askin’ if a clock is mad at you.” She wobbled beside me, claws gripping pine tip. “Could be judgin’ us. Could be… cleanin’ up. Could be sayin’ hi. Sunny’s always been kinda…”

“Kinda what?”

“Inscrutable.”

“That’s a big word for you.”

“Zexxy used it once about some annoying Legate. I liked how it sounded.”

A tendril of black, thicker than the others, resisted. It coiled around Sunny’s pinky finger and tried to pull it toward the meadow. The golden hand rotated once, as gentle as an adult wrapping spaghetti on a fork, and the resistance broke. The strand went slack and was pulled into the spool in the center of the palm.

“I… think Sunny’s the one that brought me back from the dead.” Shady stated.

“You think?”

“Yes.” She sniffed herself. “I smell… less like me and more like fresh Neverland-ness.”

“Are you gonna thank him?”

“Hrm? How do you thank a sky-baby? Bake a cake the size of a stadium?”

“You could wave?” I suggested.

Shady, lifted one dark hand and waved.

Sunny did not wave back. The great arm simply continued its patient spooling, the second arm finished tucking itself into the curtain of distant storms.

“Rude,” Shady muttered.

“Shady.”

“What, I waved nice!”

“Please do not insult the giant cosmic baby that just resurrected you.”

“Don’t think he cares. We’re too smol and he’s too large. Do you ever hear ants insulting you?”

“No.”

“There you go then.”

We watched a little longer. The last strand of void-badness lifted free of the ruined meadow. Sunny drew it in, the great hand retracting at the same unhurried pace, sleeves of layered cloud rippling as the arm vanished. The eastern horizon smoothed itself back into its familiar golden glow. Wind stirred the treetops below us. A distant bird or a bug made a three-note, musical whistle.

The bent trees around the crater groaned softly and began, very gradually, to unbend.

Neverland went back to being peaceful and seemingly carefree.

“He fixed it,” I breathed. “He pulled all the badness out.”

“Yep.”

“Uhm. Shady.”

“Mm?”

“If Sunny reincarnated you… will he reincarnate the pirate too?”

The silver eyes snapped to me. The feathers splayed again.

“Fffff…”

“Will he?”

“Uhhhh. Dunno. Maybe? I’m not a freakin’ expert on baby-sun biz.”