A Forest of Blackened Trees

Peter Pan is dead…

…only worse. He’s imprisoned within the Sea of Eternal Woe. Untouchable and unreachable, not even the gods have the power to bring him back to the realm of the living. To save him, we need answers, and Neverland is the only place to get them.

But we’re not alone.

Everything remains as dead as it was the day I first laid eyes on it, and the handful of survivors are desperate and starving. Only this time, they aren't monsters. They’re people. And they hold me responsible for their suffering.

Any attempt at peace turns to all-out war, and once again, I’m at its center. Long-buried secrets rise from the grave, and the more we learn, the less I understand. What is clear is that to save Neverland, we need Peter. And if he doesn’t die in that Sea?

I’ll happily kill him myself.

Tiger Lily

I always felt Shimmer’s presence strongest near the southern shore. It wasn’t where he was buried—we laid him to rest in the village graveyard among the other fairies—but it was where he’d died.

Mother said I needed to stop going there. Doing so only fueled the storm cloud that hung over my head since the day I lost him, and only widened the emptiness eating a hole through my chest. I promised her I wouldn’t, but there would have been no fooling her even if she couldn’t literally see the cloud. Aura-readers like her always knew such things, which was why Bright Eyes had started coming to me directly every time Father needed more medicine. Daydream moss favored the humid conditions near the shores, giving me the perfect excuse to visit, and I began anticipating what my sister’s fingers were about to sign even before they formed the shapes. With her help, sneaking out of the village had become easy. Too easy, which probably meant that even the dogs had given up trying to keep me contained.

Good. Better for all of us this way. I would be far more willing to accept that their way of dealing with the fairies’ loss was by pretending they never existed if only they could accept that this was mine.

Having at last reached my destination, I fought to steady my ragged breaths and fluttering heart before setting my sights on a small and otherwise unassuming hawthorn tree. There had never been any need to mark it; not with what happened here so irrevocably seared into my memory. It was near a cliffside that sloped into the nearby beach, perched proudly and sporting fresh white blooms. Kneeling at the tree’s base, I touched my fingertips to the precise spot where Shimmer had laid when his light went out, flinching when a painful jolt shot up my arm and down my spine. I had known it was coming, but didn’t bother to brace myself for it, because it wasn’t just any pain. It was his pain, and as his bonded, it was my duty to feel it in death just as it had been in life.

My voice cracked when I regained control of my trembling lips enough to speak. “Hey, Shim. How have you been?”

Nothing but the roar of distant waves answered me. I expected nothing less, but kept talking anyway.

“Me first? All right, but it’s just been more of the same old shit. Mother worries too much, mostly about me. Bright Eyes is her usual giggly self, but I can’t help but wonder for how long. Father’s pain has only gotten worse. He’s taking twice as much daydream moss as he was at the beginning of his illness, and it makes him sleep a lot. It’s also not enough. He tries to hide his grimaces and thinks we don’t notice, and maybe Bright Eyes doesn’t, but Mother and I certainly do.” I paused to switch positions and turned so my back rested against the hawthorn’s trunk. I was careful both not to disturb Shimmer’s death site or loosen my grip on my bow, and kept my gaze fixated on the surrounding forest. Neverland’s curse may have broken weeks ago, but the monsters certainly hadn’t gone anywhere. “I’m worried about him, and he’s not the only one who’s sick. A third of the village is symptomatic now. A third.”

We called it the black haze. Though it had afflicted my people since before I was born, we still didn’t know what caused it or how it spread, because it had predated even the curse. The disease brought on terrible headaches which only progressed with time, and though the black haze wasn’t deadly in itself, the severity of the symptoms had caused nearly a dozen of our villagers to take their own lives. I’ve been told the pain gets so intense it feels as if an arrow is splitting the forehead. Daydream moss is the only remedy which brings any semblance of relief, but there comes a point where it isn’t enough.

Father had reached that point.

I’d held my tears back for as long as I could, but the stress of the past few weeks combined with my grief were more than enough to yank them from me. A gentle warmth settled over my shoulders as I silently sobbed—Shimmer's spirit, no doubt—and it made me want to scream my frustrations one by one into the still-decaying forest.

Our chief was in pain and I couldn’t help him. Our forest was dying and I was powerless to stop it. Our fairies were dead, and nothing could bring them back.