@mckapo
1st Excerpt:
Pulling ever so slightly so as not to tear the entire wing from the small fairy’s back, Pan ground his teeth against the shriek of pain that rattled his eardrums. Pushing past the sudden appearance of his small amount of empathy, Pan pulled again, half of the thin effervescent wing now hanging limply off the fairy. The skin on her back started to swell and small red droplets oozed out of the wound, but Pan was more focused on the fairy’s small face, and the black tar-like tear that squeezed itself out of the corner of her bright blue eye.
Catching is before it slid to the ground, Pan gazed at it feverishly, so incredibly impatient. But first, Pan settled his gaze on the diminutive fairy, just about the length of his palm, whose shoulders were shaking with silent sobs of pain. He leaned forward and gently blew on the fairy, watching as her wing knitted itself back together with a small golden light. It fizzled out when the job was done. The fairy glanced up at Pan, gaze hardened with hatred, yet full of misguided love and worship, and kissed his fingertip, before flying back into the dense forest, fighting against the gusty winds that was Pan’s current mood.
He did hate inflicting pain on the small fairies, who he’d taken an almost instant liking to when he’d first been cursed to this island, but he’d found that fairy tears of pain were the most powerful, and the most intoxicating, and so it was a necessary evil.
Placing the tear on the tip of his tongue, Pan leaned back on the sand of the beach, watching the large dark gray storm clouds thin out until they were small wisps in an otherwise clear blue sky. He took a deep breath, the wind dying down, the waves beating against the shore calming to a standstill. Calm, everything was now calm.
How long had Neverland been in a state of grief? A state of anger? Days? Weeks? Possibly months. Time moved so differently on this island, that Pan usually forgot how long it had been since he’d been placed on this miserable island. It could have been yesterday, or five hundred years ago; there was no way to tell. No constellations in the sky to give him any point of reference, just the stars of the souls, and that told him nothing.
A gurgle of water made Pan sit up, brushing sand off his clothes. Besides him, no one else dared lounge about the beach shores, for fear of the creatures that lurked beneath the clear water that surrounded Neverland. The souls roamed Skull Rock, the Lost Boys stayed inland, even Hook had his crew scale cliffs when they docked rather than chance a dock on the beach. It made for easy pickings.
Mermaids as imagined on Earth did not exist, at least not in the beautiful lovely way they were often portrayed. They were instead, horrifying and terrible, and Pan admired their ruthlessness and cunning.
Out of the water rose such a creature, masses of tangled seaweed sprouting from her head, large webbed ears that flattened against her head to hear the singings of her sisters, her hands were smooth and sharp, their webbings disappearing as she snaked onto the sand. Her mouth was small, petite, and when she grinned at Pan, two rows of sharp carnivorous teeth flashed at him. The eyes of the mermaids were what intrigued Pan the most, besides the splitting of the fin to come onto dry land for mere moments of course, as they were incredibly large and doe-like, giving the mermaid a sense of child-like innocence. Before they pulled their victims into the depths of the sea, tearing their flesh from their body, the limbs from their sockets, watching their victim die from drowning or the torture, who could guess, but they liked to witness them die slow painful deaths. With Lost Boys or souls, or even the humans from Hook’s crew, the mermaids had cravings.
“Poppy,” Pan inclined his head to the mermaid, as her fin separated into two legs, complete with scales and barnacles. Not the prettiest site. Poppy hissed at the pain, crawling up next to Pan, her legs still wobbly.
“I found one of your souls,” Poppy smiled, her rows of teeth flashing again, and this time, Peter caught the remnants of a corporeal soul’s cloth gown stuck in the back of her teeth. “Naughty little thing, they seem to have found a way past your defenses. Or perhaps that Captain friend of yours has found a way to release them.” Pan groaned inwardly. Those stupid stupid souls…
Neverland had always been the place where souls that were neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ were sent until their fates could be decided upon by the powers that be, but it wasn’t such a friendly place. Pan wondered what it would have been like before he had been sent there; possibly much more nefarious and disturbing. He’d created a base for all souls to stay, at Skull’s Rock, where they were bound by his magic until their Judgment came in. That had been much easier than searching all over the wretched island for a soul that had gotten itself stuck in a sand pit or found its way to the edges of the shoreline. If they could just do what he had told them to do, he wouldn’t have to renew that barrier every goddamned decade.
“I told you I pick the souls for you and your sisters,” Pan snarled, pooling a teaspoon of freshwater into his now cupped hands from the Cannibal Cove Pool of Madness. He flung it at Poppy and she writhed in pain, every droplet that landed on her burning into her salty scale covered skin, bubbles forming and popping, oozing with golden liquid. “You do not have free reign here.”
“It is not my fault if you fail to do your duty,” Poppy spat, wiping at the blood that leaked from her mouth. “And the souls you pick for us are old and weak. We want fresh souls, maybe even one of those wraiths you keep locked up in the fairy tree.”
Pan balled up his fists and stood, gripping Poppy by the ends of her seaweed hair. It was slimy and covered in algae. He stalked towards the edge of the water and threw Poppy back to the shoreline. The moment she hit the saltwater her wounds closed and her feet fused together, once again a gnarled looking fin. “I’ll have your souls in a fortnight. Do not touch any others until that time, or you will be answering to me.”
Poppy stared at him, a sly smile on her dark green face. Of course, Pan had no actual power over the mermaids, but he knew they saw him as a threat, as someone with a mind like their own. Though, if he crossed into Mermaid’s Cove, he knew he could just as easily be ripped to shreds like the other unfortunate souls that had done so before. “Is it your time to visit the world once again?
We are agreed, Pan. I will tell my sisters.” Poppy’s head slowly disappeared under the water, her fin splashing at the surface before she was gone from sight.
“Pan! Those fucking souls are out again!”
Frowning, Pan turned back to the forest outline, where his first in command, Tamaerean, hollered out to him.
2nd Excerpt (god, what a weird word):
“Are you here to take me home?” The soul looked at him, and Pan swallowed against the raising lump in his throat. He shouldn’t have felt anything for these souls, they were hopeless, they had no afterlife, they’d been forgotten. But, nevertheless, it still left a bad taste in his mouth when he nodded solemnly and held out his hand to the old man.
He nodded, a peaceful look on his face before his touched his wispy hand to Pan’s and was gone, condensed into a small ball of light. Looking upward, Pan looked for his star, an extremely small, very dim star that blinked faintly with an ever-dying light. Whatever afterlife he would have gone to had he not been forgotten, it didn’t matter anymore; he was now fated to curb the mermaid’s vicious hunger. Pan placed the soul carefully into the a leather bag he had slung over his back before he’d left for Hangman’s Tree. There were five other souls resting in the bag, ones he’d collected a few days ago, anticipating the demand for more souls.
If ever he felt hatred for his own self, it was in these moments, lying to forgotten souls that had only been waiting and hoping for years, delivering them to the mermaids, to be devoured to offer a small amount protection to the others. Pursing his lips, Pan drifted in the rising wind towards Mermaid Cove. He had just minutes before the Neverland Sun set beneath the horizon, and then he would be pulled to Earth, whether or not he wanted to go. Which he did; he loved Earth, he had loved it since the Auktross had sprouted from the ground eons ago. But he knew that he would never belong there again, he was bound to Neverland by more than just exile, and though it had taken years before the revelation had finally settled in, he had accepted it, his feelings about it be damned.
“You come with gifts I presume,” Poppy’s bubbling voice interrupted Pan’s reverie. He slowly let himself drop, settling on the small island the mermaids liked to clamber upon in hopes of getting the golden clams that liked to nest atop it. Poppy, and five other disinterested mermaids, stared at him as he reached into his leather pouch. At once the other mermaids attentions were fastened on the soul, licking their lips and laughter akin to the sound of grating rocks against each other rang out.
Before he handed the souls over, Pan imbued each with a bit of earth magic, magic of love and health, magic he hadn’t performed since he’d been the Guardian of the Auktross, but he’d found that when he did so, the souls he collected for the mermaids burned a little brighter, and he felt a sense of peace wash over him. It was his ritual, and gave him hope, hope that was likely false and only served to give him peace of mind, that the souls felt nothing, and they were already gone by the time they were devoured.
“Fresher,” Poppy mused, taking a deep inhale of a soul before passing the others to her sisters. “This will be enough for us… for awhile. I am waiting to taste one of those wraiths, dear Pan, so please think of me while you are gone.” She smiled, her grotesque, horrifying smile that Pan found somewhat endearing, before plunging back into the depths of the sea.
As soon as they were gone, Pan felt the pull in his chest, the tugging. He closed his eyes and felt the air around him still, cold trickling up his fingers, his hands.
He found it extremely disconcerting traveling through his own soul to get to Earth, which was why he closed his eyes for every visit since the first time it had happened. There were things he did not want to see, did not want to revisit, and the fact that Cass and Tam saw his entire being every time they traveled with him… he felt vulnerable and weak, but asking them to close their eyes to the inner workings of his very self seemed weaker. Let them think he couldn’t care less what they saw of him.
He hadn’t always been connected to Neverland the way he was now; his star had once stood right next to the Second Star to the Right, but over time, and many lessons learned, they had finally merged when Pan had accepted that this was fate; he was to forever be the overseer of souls that were not good enough, not bad enough, not important enough.
