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“C’mon, Kris! Let’s go play!”
She can’t help but flinch at the sound of that merry voice, filled with such boundless happiness. Shifting slightly, Kristen manoeuvres her body around in the tiny alcove she’s tucked herself away into. At the young age of eight, Kristen’s still small enough that she can squeeze her body into the dip of the tree, curling up into a ball and hugging her limbs close.
It’s the closest thing to comfort that she can get in this forest, to hold herself close. If she closes her eyes and sinks into her own mind, maybe she can trick herself into believing she’s back in her home with her mom and her dad and her little brothers — curled up in her bed, warm and cosy and safe.
But she’s not back home anymore. She hasn’t been for a while.
Raising her head, Kristen catches sight of a young wood elf, who beams at her brightly as she slows from a sprint to a walk. Figueroth is a bundle of energy, constantly so happy every time Kristen sees her. She’s not the only one, because everyone else has adapted to living here in their own ways, Riz and Fabian and Gorgug and Adaine, but Figueroth’s the happiest of all six of them.
Kristen, in contrast, is the saddest.
She doesn’t like it here. And yeah, maybe sometimes she lets Figueroth pull her out of her hidey-hole and bring her to where the others are — your friends, the thing that has taken up space in her head says, his voice like the rumbling of a thunderstorm — and she’ll indulge for a bit, play along with them in their forest games of hide-and-seek and tag, but—
Kristen doesn’t belong here.
She doesn’t belong here at all.
You do, that voice tells her, insistent and pressing. She hates it, struggles against it, suffocating and all-consuming in her mind. The six of you belong here, for all of you are mine.
Except she’s not. She doesn’t know the name of the person who’s taken up space in her head, but Kristen knows she belongs to Helio, that she was His chosen, meant to grow up as His cleric and help guide the Helioic faith. But she hasn’t heard Helio’s voice in a long while, hasn't felt His presence. What was once the constant sensation of warm sunlight against her skin and the faint scent of corn in the wind has since been replaced by the cool mist of the forest and the wet scent of bark and moss.
Every time Kristen tries to reach out to Him, another voice answers. So she’s stopped trying. She isn’t sure whether things are better or worse that way.
Right now, Figueroth beams at her. “Everyone’s waiting, Kris,” she tells her, her eyes shining, starry and bright. She reaches out, grabs Kristen’s wrist, and Kristen is helpless as Figueroth starts tugging her out from the safety of the tree. “C’mon, already!”
“You don’t need me to be there,” she protests, though she’s not really able to fight Figueroth’s hold. The wood elf is scarily persistent, and her physical strength matches the strength of her enthusiasm — which is a lot. “I keep telling you, you can start without me.”
Figueroth frowns. “But we want you there,” she protests. She reaches out, intertwining their fingers together, palms pressed close. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Friends. What a loaded word. But Kristen can’t deny it. She likes these people, these other kids her age. She just wishes they weren’t all trapped in a forest together.
The scariest part about all this isn’t really the being trapped part. Kristen thought that was the worst part when she was first brought here. One moment, she was in bed, closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep; the next, she had awoken in a grass-filled clearing, the shadows of ancient trees looming over her small form.
No, the scariest part is how everyone has gotten used to it. Figueroth was first, and then Riz. Adaine eased into it soon enough. Fabian eventually did as well. And then finally Gorgug — Guggy, as Kristen has taken to calling him, coming up with the nickname while they tried to sleep together one time — had given in too.
“It’s not that bad, Kris,” he had told her, all while she stared at him, feeling some awful betrayal. He had shifted, slightly nervous. “It’s— we’re being cared for here, and it’s nice.”
She doesn’t want to give in to that niceness. She doesn’t want to let the sweet promises and happy times and that voice in her head lull her into compliance.
Kristen just wants to leave.
(She wishes she knew why they were brought here — the six of them, with scattered backgrounds and scattered fates, united for some unknown reason. Why them? Why the six of them?
But Kristen lacks the answers — that in another world, they had entered the forest much older, teenagers instead of children. Kristen had reached out for that voice that now speaks in her head, had died in the process of trying to embrace it, and in the wake of potential destruction, the Nightmare King had looked into the flow of time, unknotted and unravelled it, remade it such that they never could have raised a finger against him to begin with.)
“Hey… um, Kris?”
She blinks. Figueroth studies her with concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry you’re feeling sad,” she tells her earnestly, so earnestly it makes Kristen’s chest hurt. “But isn’t it better to be sad with friends instead of by yourself?”
Go, child, the voice in her head tells her. Tired as she is, Kristen can only concede.
“Okay,” she whispers.
“I’ll come play with you guys.”