Chapter Text
If you had a nickel for every time you woke up alone and lost in a forest, you’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it is weird that it’s happened twice.
The dress – sage green tulle, small sparkling gems, completely sodden – is a first. It’s pretty. Not your first choice in clothing, but it is the sort of thing that probably would have turned your head if you saw it while walking by. Maybe if you were ten again and had the time to frolic around the yard and field behind your house… but you’re sixteen, and you’ve barely got any time to spare.
Monster hunting… saving the world… finding a boyfriend for your older sister… they’re very consuming hobbies. Not the sort of thing you’d want to wear a dress for.
You prop yourself on your elbows in an attempt to get a better look around, but quickly realise this is a mistake. The trees start spinning, trunks merging into each other as the thickets of bushes around you become one solid, moving mass. Head feeling like it’s suddenly made of stone, you drop back down to the ground and curl into a fetal position. Your stomach gurgles.
Whoever did this to you – whatever did this to you – is going to rue the day they were born. When you find them, you’re going to make their life a living hell. Anytime they take a shower, they’ll get blasted with a hose of icy water first, always. And every day, for the rest of their life, they’re going to stub their toe; never at the same time, or on the same furniture, but it’ll happen, and it’ll catch them by surprise (and pain) every time. When they microwave yesterday’s leftovers, the middle will always be cold.
You’re going to make them regret their very existence.
…once you manage to sort yourself out, first.
Groaning, you slowly push yourself to your knees, eyes tightly screwed shut. You hold the position and keep still until you’re about 80% sure that the contents of your stomach is going to stay in your stomach. The last thing you want is to ruin the this very nice dress with the stench of whatever you’d eaten last.
When the queasy feeling subsides and you’re no longer in danger of spilling bile all over your front, you open your eyes and take a good look around.
As it turns out, potentially throwing up over yourself is the least of your worries.
0000
The air tastes weird. A thick, misty fog rolls slowly in every direction. Every surface is splattered in gelatinous slime, secreted from the continuous web of tendrils that lie along the forest floor and climb up the tree trunks like forest vines.
The bush thickets that you thought were bush thickets are not, in fact, bush thickets. They’re plants… sure, plants. You could call them that, if plants were made from flesh.
Curious (and very disgusted), you touch one “leaf”, ghosting the tips of your fingers over its surface. It has the same texture as the inside of your mouth; wet and membranous. Black veins spread out like the patterns on a regular leaf, and that’s about as familiar as it gets. You hastily reel your hand back when the plant pulses with warmth.
All these clues lead you to the obvious conclusion that you are not in Black Hills Forest, Maryland. You don’t even think you’re on Earth.
You might have guessed Hell, but you know what Hell looks like. You’ve seen it in your visions, looking down into a cup of Coke, sometimes a Dr. Pepper. Soda has a proclivity towards chaos and suffering; it’s the same way that chicken soup loves to show you visions of death.
This is not Hell. You’re not sure what it is. Something not right, something you need answers for.
Answers that you aren’t going to find in this random-ass forest.
0000
You walk until the floor beneath your feet changes from dirt into paved asphalt. The road extends left and right of you, the forest line crowding around the edge. If your eyes hadn’t been working, and your ears didn’t pick up on the crunch of leaves and the squelch of sticky goo under your shoes, you wouldn’t have even known you were in a forest, let alone outside.
It’s quiet, but not in the peaceful sort of way that nature often is. It’s quiet because it’s completely and totally devoid of all life.
There are no squirrels climbing the trees, or birds chirping in the loose canopy. The bugs do not exist, and even the air is bereft of a slow-moving wind, the leaves and branches are still and silent.
You’re the only living and breathing thing in this forest. Even the trees are a sham – you’d touched one briefly, laying your palm to rest against the scaly bark in a spot without any suspicious goo, and had tentatively seeped your magic into.
You found nothing.
The tree was dead, and so was the next, and the one after that, and even now, a few miles later, you carefully press a hand against a trunk, a tree closer to the road than all the rest, and your magic bounces back empty-handed.
Your heart sinks.
This is… worrying.
Clearly, there’s a lot of things to worry about – you’re lack of recollection to how you got here and the hours, maybe even days, before it; the mysterious dress you’re wearing, still soaked to the bone; the disturbing and gross fleshy growths throughout the forest – but this, you can’t help but think, is the most worrying.
Whole forests don’t just die. They can get sick, sure, or fall under evil influence, enough to the point that you can practically taste the dark magic handing in the air. But they never die.
And, worse yet, you couldn’t even tell. Not until you had gotten up and personal, sinking a little bit of yourself into it.
If you were any other witch, you’d probably doubt your abilities. You’ve met a lot of witches, many of them idiots. But you’re not just any other witch. You’re you. No matter how far you go, if it’s one state down or across the entire country, a part of you is always in Black Hills, just as there’s always a part of Black Hills in you.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Yes, it does. You hear it. You feel it. You are not there and you are there.
So. The issue isn’t you; you know this.
The forest is wrong.
It has to be the tendrils. You look at them more closely and decide they’re less like gross, alien tentacles, and more like an infestation of roots. Infected. Unwanted. Unnatural. You wonder if they’re the reason the forest is dead. Like the roots of a plant that absorb water from the surrounding dirt, they’ve absorbed the energy – the life – out of the forest.
There’s not a lot that you’re afraid of. Pain, Hell, your sister’s casserole…
You reluctantly add this to the list. It might be a good idea to stay away from them. You’ve already touched the trees and the fleshy plants enough as it is.
Unsure of where you are and where you’re going, you decide on going left. If you’re lucky, you’ll come across a town soon enough. There’s an abundance of those in America. Once you sort that out, you’ll be able to figure it all out form there.
With a weary sigh, you head onwards, resigning yourself to a hopefully not too long walk. You get the feeling hitchhiking is not an option.
0000
Welcome to Hawkins
You’re not sure where or what a Hawkins is, but you don’t feel very welcomed.
If you thought it would get better after reaching the town – it doesn’t. The closer you get, winding down the long road that takes you from the outskirts of the small town into the loosely populated old-school suburbia, and from there into the denser neighbourhood and eventually the town center, you come to a couple of realisations.
One. Hawkins is empty. Deserted.
You stop in the middle of the road and turn around slowly. Your eyes scan every detail, inching across every weathered brick, peeling plaster, and broken debris littered on the ground. It’s deathly still. You don’t see anybody, and you don’t expect to see anybody either. The buildings look infected – the awful roots from the forest are sprawled across almost every available surface and weeping a suspicious black liquid.
It looks like blood. You feel diseased just looking at it. If there’s anybody out there, you doubt they’re nearby. It’s totally unliveable.
This doesn’t bode well for you.
Two. Whatever thing the roots are sprouting out of – and it’s a thing, it’s always a thing, there is no doubt in your mind that whatever this is, is something more than just a flimsy, overgrown plant – originates in Hawkins.
Thickets of flesh bushes become more populous. The roots are more abundant; where they’d been spacious in the forest, you see almost whole walls entangled in them. They pile on top of each other that they probably reach your mid-shin, maybe even knee height. Large webs of membrane span from roof to roof and roof to lamppost, a mockery of electricity cables.
You can’t pinpoint where they start. You don’t want to. That would mean delving deeper into town, possibly into buildings, and that–…
…
Yeah. You’re not that curious. You can live another day without getting to the bottom of things.
Three. You’re here for the long haul.
The town’s abandoned, so it’s not like there’s anybody that you could ask, well, hey, mind telling me what the fuck is wrong with this place? Or, you wouldn’t happen to know how I got here, do you? And how do I leave?
Your memory is lacking. It’s lacking to the point that you can’t even tell what’s missing. You rack your brain and come up empty. It’s frustrating. Like you’re trying to recall a word that you’ve forgotten, but it slips through your fingers like sand.
What did you do yesterday? You don’t know. You don’t even know what yesterday was. There isn’t a single point where you can say yes, this is what I did last, one moment I was here, one moment I was there, and suddenly I’m waking up in some random forest with no fucking clue how I got there.
Hopelessness stirs in your chest. Your cheeks go hot. You try not to get angry – you really do. Angry is for stupid people. Angry interferes and makes dumb decisions. It’s impatient and gets you nowhere.
But this is bullshit. Total and utter bullshit. What do you do? What can you do?
You’re alone, lost, your dress is wet and it’s freezing, the air is getting staler by the minute, pieces of you are missing, you’re not even sure if you’re in the same world, let alone plane of existence…
One of these things is something you can fix. At least you’ve got that.
Hunching in, you bring your palms up to your mouth, blowing air to warm them up a little. This sort of thing is party trick magic. You learn it when you’re six to impress the other little losers just how cool and smart you are.
(not that there was anyone else to impress – just your sisters, and they were the ones teaching you all of this, so there wasn’t much room to impress)
Rubbing your palms and tugging on your magic – it’s like a muscle, a little magic muscle inside of your soul – you envision a flame. Yellow, warmth, cackling in your hands.
You exhale slowly. Open your eyes.
And stare blankly at your empty palms.
…
It’s okay. It’s a fluke. Guess you just didn’t want it hard enough…
(doubt plants itself less like a see and more like a fully-fledged greenhouse sapling)
You wring your eyes shut and try again. Heat, radiating from your palms, the flickering fire, something to brighten up the dreary, cold night.
You open your eyes.
Dread settles heavily in your stomach. A pit forms in your throat.
You’ve said it before and you’ll say it again, as you stare down with dawning horror at your bare hands: something is wrong.
Something more than just this world.
0000
It wails in the distance.
Somewhere out of sight, far behind you and deep into the neck of the woods you had left, a tear forms in the fabric of space and time. You feel it in your knees, elbows, and spine, a shudder running through the hollow of your bones.
It whispers.
Help.