Chapter Text
Steve had grown up by the forest, had played in it, even when most of the kids had been too scared to. Scared of the forest or of their parents. His parents hadn’t tried to warn him of it particularly hard, or much. They didn’t care for it. And the forest itself had never really frightened him, neither before nor after he’d heard the stories. It had welcomed him, after all.
He understood why people might be scared of it, of course, he knew well how easy it would be to get lost, and how dangerous that could be, but he had never managed to sympathize. None of the ‘scare people away' things were for him. They were for strangers, for intruders, for anyone and anything that couldn’t or wouldn’t play the game. And, what the inhabitants did was often terrible and frightening, but he was used to parts of it, and he was good at getting them to like him. They didn’t turn it against him.
Steve changed over the years, as all mortals did, growing from a little boy to a bigger boy to a young man. It was faster than some of the Forest Folk were used to, faster and more nebulous. He was a young man, but he was also a teenager, a boy, sometimes considered as an adult, sometimes considered as a child.
He learned a lot of things in the village, a lot of things from the stories, even as he went back out into the forest, as they said one should not. As much as he had grown up by the forest, grown up playing in it, he had also grown up in the village, listening to its stories, knowing the people, learning with the other children.
It wasn’t a big village by any means, small and quiet, for the most part. All of the children knew each other vaguely, by name, or by face. It meant it was very noticeable when there were new people, not that it happened often, especially because it didn’t happen often.
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Max was not happy about moving, even less so than she had been about her mother remarrying. She’d had her whole life back home, all of her friends. The person she was belonged in the city by the sea, not in this little village in the forest. Her home was on the edge of the sea, not by the forest, not by a river. And this forest wasn’t like any she’d seen before.
Then the people she was going to live with, now. The man her mother had married, who she’d never liked, and disliked even more for having spent time with. His son, mean and angry and hurting people, the teenager who had. Hurt. Her. Friend. Max was not excited for her new living arrangement.
She hadn’t been interested in making friends even before they arrived and she met the people there, and meeting them did not help. Everyone else knew something about each other, had already decided who they were hanging out with, what they did together. She was the new kid, and one of the first new people in years. There had been so many people where she’d grown up, so many that she couldn’t have known all of them if she tried, and here everyone seemed to have an idea of what kind of person everyone was, what they did, who they were with. It was strange to her. And she was strange to them, new, exciting.
Strange to It, too. New and unfamiliar.