A Forest of Blackened Trees: I. the gallows

Wendy celebrates her seventeenth birthday... by witnessing a hanging.

This chapter is being shared pre-publication. It, and all subsequent chapters, are both unedited and subject to change in the final publication. Please note the POV changes, as there are four different voices in this book: Wendy, Cedric (Captain Hook), Peter Pan, and Tiger Lily.

Content warnings for A Forest of Blackened Trees include language, violence, explicit sexual content, and mentions of gender dysphoria and suicide. This book was written and is intended for a mature adult audience.

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Wendy

The screams of dead men rang in my ears.

It was the third hanging today. Like the two that had come before, this corpse was already being taken down to make room for yet another. Tremors wracked the body in short bursts and bruising had begun to spread across the ghostly white flesh of the man’s broken neck, but he was without a doubt dead, and one of the lucky ones, too. It was instant. He hadn’t felt any pain beyond the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. The audible snap of his severed spinal cord, the only sound to slice cleanly through the shrieks rattling around in my head, hadn’t summoned so much as a flinch from me. Months ago, it might have, but death had become much like monsters in that neither scared me anymore.

Only one thing did, and it was for that reason alone that I drug myself from the depths of Neverland and back to Afterport’s main square to watch the hangings that were becoming frighteningly frequent. Braving the town’s overall chaos, not to mention the crowds and their inevitable whispers and stares was always difficult, but I needed to make certain that… No.

Digging my fingernails into my palms until I nearly broke skin, I shoved my worst fears aside. They hadn’t come true—not today, at least—so there was no use entertaining them, not even for a moment. Now I could turn my focus to my other fears and problems, and the list was endless. Elvira and her increasingly unpredictable behavior, the fact that Tink still hadn’t fully recovered her strength even after all this time, and of course, Peter. It had been nearly ten months since he’d been trapped in the Sea of Eternal Woe, and though I’d searched and scoured everywhere I could think of for answers, I still didn’t have the slightest inkling how to help him—or if I even could.

A wetness brushed my palm, yanking me back to the present. Caught by surprise, I jerked away before my mind caught up, but it was just Arktos sensing my unease. Without taking my eyes from the gallows, I gave the dog a reassuring scratch behind the ears, but didn’t otherwise move. As uncomfortable as we both were, we wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon. Neverland was where we belonged and resided, but the forest occupying the other half of this island had become far more stifling than freeing as of late. Visiting the shitty port town I’d called home for the majority of my life wasn’t without its own traumas, but currently, the choice between witnessing two more men meet their unforgiving end and returning to that still-decaying forest was one I didn’t have to think twice about. All that awaited me back in Neverland were Elvira and Tink, both of whom I’d rather claw out my eyes than be around, and dozens of Nightstalkers that refused to stay out of my head no matter how many times I told them to shut the fuck up.

Besides, it was my birthday, and I deserved to spend it how I damn well pleased.