The screech that tore through the air didn’t sound human.

  It didn’t sound like an animal, either, not like anything that had ever lived.

  It was high and jagged, a sound that skinned its way into the bones, making the air itself seem to vibrate and recoil.

  Wendy’s breath hitched. Her heart slammed against her ribs.

  Something stirred in the mist, shifting at the island’s fractured edge, where the stone crumbled away in jagged shards, as if the land itself had been slowly devoured. The rock was worn and splintered, the breaks deep and uneven, as though some unseen force had been gnawing at it for centuries, grinding it down to nothing.

  The mist licked over the cliffs, curling in long, searching tendrils that flexed and coiled with unnatural precision. The movement was too measured, too deliberate, expanding and contracting in slow pulses, like the steady breath of something vast and unseen. No wind guided the fog. It moved with its own intent.

  The island stretched before her, barren and wrong, a husk of stone jutting from the mist, stripped of anything living. The ground beneath her feet was cracked and unstable, its surface fractured into uneven slabs that tilted at impossible angles. Spires of blackened rock thrust upward like broken bones, sharp and twisted, as if the land had once been reshaped by great hands and then left unfinished, abandoned to crumble. From them hung lanterns, rusted, corroded things swinging from chains, their blue flames flickering without heat. The light wasn’t warm. It wasn’t even real. It bent shadows in unnatural ways, stretching them where they shouldn’t be, making the space around them twist.

  And then there was the spire.

  A towering slab of black stone loomed over the island, rising fifty feet into the storm-churned sky. Its surface was fractured and splintered, deep cracks running through its core like veins of ruin. The upper third of the structure jutted forward at a dangerous angle, as though poised to tumble at any moment, yet it never did. It defied its own collapse, standing against all reason, a silent sentinel over the desolation.

  But the most unnatural thing was not its sheer size or its impossible balance.

  The pieces that had broken away had never fallen.

  Massive shards of stone hovered in midair, their jagged edges frozen in place, wrapped in swirling halos of dust and loose gravel. They circled the tower like debris caught in an unseen tide, fragments of a ruin that refused to finish breaking. The air around them trembled, charged with something unseen, something that held the wreckage aloft, as if even gravity itself hesitated to claim them. A deep, crawling dread settled into Wendy’s ribs.

  This place was wrong.

  And so were the things coming for them.

  Wendy felt them before she saw them.

  The mist thickened, congealing into something damp and cloying, the air growing dense and sodden, pressing into her skin, seeping into her ribs like it was trying to settle inside her. A sound slithered through the silence—low and grating, the rasp of something sharp scraping against stone.

  Then another.

  And another.

  It was getting closer.

  Pan was already in motion.

  He pivoted sharply, his golden eyes flashing in the eerie blue torchlight, and seized her wrist.

  "Come on, Darling," he said, far too cheerful for someone about to be eaten alive. "Let’s not stick around to meet the neighbors."

  Then, without warning, he yanked her forward—hard.

  So hard that her feet left the ground.

  Wendy shrieked, a startled, breathless sound as she was yanked off her feet, her body suddenly weightless—

  Before she could react, Pan caught her, sweeping her effortlessly into his arms, holding her like they were in some twisted fairytale.

  Her arms instinctively wrapped around his neck, her breath catching—

  Pan laughed, delighted. "Oh, I like that sound," he teased, grinning down at her. "Do it again?"

  "Put me—!" Wendy started, half-sputtering, half-mortified—

  Something lunged.

  From the mist—a shape, too tall, too thin, its fingers splitting apart like the legs of an insect, its mouth a gaping slit of blackened teeth.

  Pan dropped her legs.

  Wendy barely had a second to react before he snatched her wrists, yanking them up above her head—

  Then he spun her.

  The world flipped.

  A second squeal tore from Wendy’s throat as she twisted over his shoulders, her body flipping effortlessly—

  And suddenly, she was on his back, clutching him tightly, her legs wrapped around his waist before she even processed what had happened.

  His hand caught her thigh, securing her tightly against him. His other hand wrapped around her arms where they clung to his neck.

  "Much better," he said, pleased, his voice still light—but his grip was iron.

  Wendy clamped her legs tighter, her breath coming in short gasps, her whole body still reeling from the sudden shift—

  Then Pan moved.

  And the world blurred.

  The creatures lunged, snapping, screeching, their too-long limbs slamming into the stone, claws raking the air where Pan had been a second before—

  But he wasn’t there anymore.

  He twisted, rolling under one’s outstretched fingers, his grip on Wendy’s legs and arms holding her perfectly in place as if she weighed nothing.

  Another beast dropped from above, its jagged mouth yawning wide—

  Pan spun—a perfect, fluid motion—ducking beneath it at the last possible second.

  Wendy’s stomach flipped, her vision tilting wildly, her heartbeat hammering.

  The creatures kept coming—from the mist, from the cliffs, from the very edges of reality—but Pan was faster.

  He pivoted, twisted, dropped, jumped, his feet barely touching the ground before he was moving again, always just out of reach, always one step ahead of the snapping jaws and grasping hands.

  He wasn’t just running.

  He was dancing.

  There was a reckless joy in the way he moved, a wild, unhinged delight, like he wasn’t escaping at all—like he was playing.

  "Still with me, Darling?" he teased, leaping effortlessly onto a jutting ledge, catching himself midair and kicking off again, gaining height with every move.

  Wendy squeezed her arms tighter around his neck, her breath too ragged to form words.

  Pan only laughed.

  The spire loomed ahead.

  It tilted dangerously, its broken pieces floating, surrounded by swirling dust, orbiting like shattered planets around a dead sun.

  Pan angled toward it.

  Wendy’s instincts screamed no.

  They ran straight for the spire.

  Pan didn’t slow.

  His grip tightened around Wendy’s legs, anchoring her in place as he vaulted forward, his momentum carrying them toward the floating stones orbiting the tower.

  Wendy sucked in a breath, her heart hammering as the ground vanished beneath them.

  For one awful moment, there was nothing.

  Pan’s feet kissed the edge of a hovering rock, his landing so impossibly light that the stone didn’t even tremble beneath his weight.

  Before Wendy could even process the drop, he was jumping again.

  Another stone. Another impossible landing.

  Each leap was longer than the last, the spaces between the floating stones growing wider, stretching into gaps no human should have been able to cross.

  But Pan wasn’t human.

  He moved effortlessly, his landings feather-light, his balance unshakable.

  Below them, the creatures shrieked in frustration.

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  They scrambled to follow, but they couldn’t jump.

  Wendy’s gaze snapped downward, her stomach knotting as she watched them gnash and claw at the rocks, their too-long limbs twitching, spasming, but unable to leave the ground.

  Then she saw it.

  They weren’t just creatures.

  They were part of the mist.

  Each one had a cord of fog, an umbilical of vapor, stretching from the base of their skulls or spines, trailing back into the churning, living haze below.

  It writhed and pulsed, as if the mist itself was breathing them, as if they had never truly left it at all.

  They weren’t separate from the fog.

  They were the fog.

  And now, as Pan climbed higher, they were being dragged back into it.

  One of the creatures snarled, its faceless maw peeling open as it lunged, stretching as far as its mist-tether would allow, but it was already too far gone.

  The fog reeled it back in, pulling it down, consuming it like a wave swallowing a stone.

  One by one, the creatures vanished, their shrieks dissolving into the endless churn of mist below.

  Pan landed on the final stone, his breathing even, his grin wider than ever, and with one last effortless push, he alighted atop the tilted peak of the spire.

  For the first time, he stopped moving.

  For the first time, Wendy could see.

  Wendy’s breath caught in her throat.

  The mist stretched forever, but not in the way an ocean did—not flat, not still. It coiled and curved, rolling in endless shifting currents, forming tunnels and cliffs, spiraling into the vast void beyond.

  It wasn’t just below them.

  It was above them.

  The fog rose hundreds, thousands of feet, carving arches and hollows, swallowing whole islands that clung to the walls of the vast mist-choked expanse.

  Some islands were distant, nothing more than faint silhouettes in the haze.

  One was directly above them.

  Not hanging.

  Not falling.

  Just existing—an island perched upside down, as if gravity had chosen to ignore it completely.

  And then—

  Wendy’s breath stuttered as she looked beyond it.

  Far, far away—

  The mist curved up.

  Not like a wave.

  Like a horizon.

  It stretched into the distance, winding into a massive twisted ring, curling behind the stars, above them, below them, looping around the void until it came back down on the other side.

  A ring of mist, wrapped around infinity.

  Pan’s voice cut through the silence, smug and triumphant.

  "Behold the Soul Deep."

  Wendy couldn’t speak.

  Couldn’t breathe.

  Couldn’t comprehend the sheer wrongness of it all.

  Pan tilted his head, considering her reaction. Before she could gather a single thought, he pirouetted on his heel, and swan-dived off the spire.

  Wendy screamed.

  The fear came crashing back, the fear of the mist, the horror of what it had done, what it almost did, what it still might do. The wind ripped at her hair, her voice lost to the drop, her arms tightening around his neck in blind terror.

  Pan just laughed.

  Laughed like a child.

  At the last possible second, he snapped his head up. The fall leveled out, his body tilting parallel to the mist’s surface, his feet barely skimming the fog, trailing through it just enough to send swirls spinning up behind them.

  The mist churned in his wake, curling in luminous spirals as he raced forward, Wendy still clinging to him, her heart pounding out of her chest.

  Pan let out a whoop of delight, twisting through the air, leaving a trail of silver mist ribbons spinning behind them.

  And never stopped laughing.

  The air still trembled from the force of their flight, the mist swirling behind them in ghostly tendrils as Pan finally angled downward, his body cutting through the air with effortless ease.

  Wendy barely registered the change in direction, her arms still locked around his neck, her pulse hammering in her ears. She had stopped screaming a while ago, her throat raw, her body exhausted, but she could still hear Pan laughing, breathless and exhilarated, like the chaos, the near-death, the impossible chasm of reality splitting beneath them was all just a game.

  One of the islands loomed into view.

  Apprehension settled on Wendy’s chest.

  It rose from the mist abruptly, a jagged slab of blackened earth, its edges splintered like something had chewed away at it over time. The ground was bare, no grass, no life, just cracked stone and patches of cold, gray dirt.

  And the trees, they lined the island like a skeletal barrier, dead and twisted, their blackened limbs clawing at the sky. Some stood at unnatural angles, their roots half-exposed, gnarled like the fingers of something buried alive.

  Between them, half-swallowed by creeping fog, gravestones jutted from the earth. Some tilted, others lay shattered, the names long worn away, erased by time and something else.

  Something that did not belong to time at all.

  Wendy’s breath hitched.

  Pan didn’t slow.

  If anything, he sped up.

  He angled toward the heart of the island, where a colossal dead tree loomed, its bark split and blackened, its top snapped clean off like a broken spine.

  It was ancient—wrongly ancient—and despite the way it leaned, despite the gaping hole in its center, it still stood.

  It should have fallen.

  It hadn’t.

  Pan soared up the trunk to the break, his arms tightening around Wendy just as they crested and dove into the hollowed core.

  The descent into the tree had felt like a plunge into another world. The darkness had swallowed them whole, the wind rushing past Wendy’s ears as Pan took them deeper, deeper, deeper.

  And then—

  Light.

  Soft and golden, flickering like candle flames, illuminating the impossible.

  Pan’s home wasn’t just a room.

  It was a house.

  No—a mansion.

  The walls stretched high, paneled in smooth, seamless wood, polished and warm, as though the hollow trunk had grown into a home rather than been carved into one. Wooden staircases twisted upward, curling around support beams like the roots of some inverted tree, leading to balconies and corridors that stretched into unseen depths.

  Doors of every shape and size lined the halls, some pristine, some mismatched, like they had been plucked from different times, different places.

  And nothing matched.

  The furniture—lavish and strange—was a patchwork of styles and eras, collected on whims rather than purpose. A heavy Victorian armchair sat next to a low, woven hammock. An ornate, gold-trimmed mirror hung beside a battered wooden dresser.

  Tapestries and curtains of thick fabric framed doorways at random, their designs clashing violently—patterns of silk brocade draped over something that looked hand-woven, the colors never quite belonging together.

  A long hallway stretched beyond the main living space, splitting off into rooms Wendy couldn’t see.

  This was no den of a wild boy.

  This was a hoard.

  A collection.

  A kingdom built from stolen pieces of a world that didn’t fit together.

  And it was clean.

  Not spotless, not perfect—but maintained. The wooden floors gleamed under the candlelight. The fabric, despite its mismatched colors, was well-kept, well-worn but without holes or fraying edges. The tables, though cluttered, were free of dust.

  There was care here.

  Care in the wrong places.

  Wendy sat frozen, her legs folded beneath her where she had collapsed to the floor, her mind struggling to reconcile what she had seen outside—the death, the ruin, the terror—with this.

  With a home.

  Pan exhaled, stretching his arms over his head like he had just woken from a nap. Then, with a careless hop, he leapt—not like a human, not like anything bound by gravity—and drifted weightlessly toward one of the hammocks strung between the twisted beams of his den. He landed with impossible grace, the motion slow and deliberate, his body settling into the fabric like a cat stretching into a sunbeam. The hammock barely swayed.

  A pleased sigh slipped from his lips as he let one arm dangle over the edge, twisting idly in the air. His golden eyes flickered toward Wendy, glinting like embers behind his lashes.

  The rage hit before the grief.

  Something inside Wendy snapped.

  It wasn’t a slow, simmering thing. It was instant. Violent. A crack of thunder in her chest.

  The rage hit before the grief.

  "Fun?"

  The word scraped up her throat, raw and trembling.

  Pan’s brows lifted. Amusement flickered at the edges of his smirk, lazy and unbothered, as if she were a particularly interesting storm cloud, nothing more.

  "Obviously," he said.

  That was it.

  That was the last straw.

  Wendy lunged.

  Her body moved before thought could catch up, before her exhaustion, her injuries, her terror could stop her. She threw herself at him, hands outstretched, meaning to grab, to shove, to claw at him, to knock him from that stupid, weightless perch.

  Pan barely moved.

  Didn’t even flinch.

  Her hands met his chest—solid, unyielding, impossibly warm. She shoved with everything she had left.

  The hammock twisted, swayed the slightest fraction.

  But Pan stayed where he was.

  Still lounging, still half-lidded and grinning, his golden gaze gleaming down at her like she was a child throwing a tantrum.

  The mocking amusement in his face only made it worse.

  "You think this is fun?!" she shrieked, voice breaking like splintering glass.

  Pan tilted his head, expression unchanged, watching her unravel.

  Another shove.

  Nothing.

  A fist. Weak. Desperate. Shaking.

  It hit his chest, hard enough to sting her knuckles, but he didn’t react. Didn’t acknowledge the impact at all.

  "You dragged me here!" she shouted, breath coming faster, hotter, clawing up her throat like fire. "You took me from my home! From my family!"

  Pan exhaled through his nose as if the words bored him. "Dragged is such a strong word—"

  "Shut up!"

  Her voice cracked, as she screamed.

  Her whole body shook.

  She hit him again, her hands curling into fists, pounding against his chest in quick, useless bursts.

  "I was supposed to have a future!" she choked out. "I was supposed to go to school, I was supposed to be normal—"

  Her fists slowed.

  Weak. Trembling.

  "And now I’m here," she gasped, each word heavier than the last, each breath harder to take. "And I’ve been running, and I’ve been choking, and I don’t even know what’s real anymore!"

  Pan simply watched her, his grin still there, still too sharp, too knowing.

  She tried to hit him again, but the strength was gone.

  Her fingers only curled into the fabric of his shirt—grasping, clutching, holding onto him as an anchor.

  Her breath hitched.

  And suddenly, the rage collapsed beneath something heavier.

  Something colder.

  Something breaking.

  She swayed.

  Her knees buckled.

  And before she could catch herself, she collapsed to the floor.

  The wooden planks felt solid beneath her hands, so real beneath her shaking fingers. Her breath came uneven, ragged, each inhale getting caught halfway, turning to something else, something smaller…

  A sob.

  She bit down on it, hard, trying to swallow it back.

  She couldn’t.

  Then came another.

  And another.

  And then she wasn’t holding anything back anymore.

  Her shoulders shook.

  Her fingers curled into the floor like they could claw into something real, something stable, something that wasn’t this.

  And then she was crying.

  Not quiet tears.

  Not pretty, graceful grief.

  But ugly, raw sobs that tore through her, that burned her throat, that made her chest convulse like something inside her was coming apart, unraveling at the seams.

  Too much.

  Too much fear.

  Too much rage.

  Too much grief for a life she might never get back.

  She gasped, coughed, curled in on herself, but it didn’t stop.

  It wouldn’t stop.

  The sobs kept coming, kept shaking her apart, kept wracking through her until she had nothing left.

  Nothing.

  There was nothing left.

  And Pan—

  Pan just let her cry.

  He didn’t offer comfort.

  Didn’t kneel right away.

  Didn’t say a word.

  He just waited.

  Waited until the storm of sorrow had ripped her apart.

  Until the gasping sobs had turned to trembling breaths.

  Until she was too exhausted to fight anymore.

  Finally, he moved.

  The hammock creaked as he slipped out of it, slow and deliberate, his footsteps barely making a sound as he crouched in front of her.

  His presence was warm, too close, filling her space, settling like something inevitable.

  A hand brushed her shoulder. Light. Easy. Casual.

  For a split second—just a split second—she thought he was going to say something kind.

  Something gentle.

  Something that would make this all less horrible.

  Instead…

  "You’re not the first to break, you know."

  His voice was soft.

  Too soft.

  "It’s always the same," he continued. "You fight, you scream, you try to make sense of things that don’t care about your rules."

  His fingers pressed lightly into her shoulder.

  Warm. Steady.

  Anchoring her in all the wrong ways.

  "And then," he murmured, "you realize the truth."

  Wendy swallowed hard.

  Her voice barely scraped past her lips.

  "What truth?"

  Pan smiled.

  "You were never going back."

  Her breath caught.

  And for the first time, the weight of those words crashed through her—

  And she knew.

  He wasn’t just talking about Neverworld.

  He wasn’t just talking about this nightmare.

  He was talking about before.

  Before all of this.

  Before the ship, before the mist, before the monsters.

  He was talking about her.

  About how she had been planning not going home during school breaks.

  About how the thought of returning to that quiet, stifling house had filled her with more dread than any nightmare.

  About how, deep down, she had already let go of that place.

  She had just never admitted it.

  Not to herself.

  Not to anyone.

  Either Pan had been watching her for a very long time.

  Or, he was already inside her head.

  Her skin crawled.

  Pan’s golden eyes gleamed, watching the realization click into place.

  His grin widened.

  He leaned in, voice just above a whisper.

  "You’re not the first, Darling," he murmured, "and you won’t be the last."